Jonah Lehrer, editor at large of Seed Magazine, announced today that his book “Proust Was A Neuroscientist” is now shipping. I’m excited about the book and pre-ordered it quite a while ago. I’m a big fan of Proust and have always loved reading interpretations of his dense, hyper-natural understanding of the sensory world. Both Clifford Pickover and Robert Anton Wilson have speculated in the past about his connection to the sciences and consciousness. On top of the book being about an exceptionally interesting subject, Seed Magazine has been such a joy to read since I subscribed last year and there is no doubt in my mind that Jonah is one of the reasons why this is true.
A comment about the book made almost 6 months ago by the man himself:
… my title is quite literal. I argue that Proust (and Whitman, Cezanne, Woolf, etc.) anticipated the facts of modern neuroscience. Their art expresses truths about the human mind - real, tangible, truths - that science is only now rediscovering. As you can probably guess, Proust was very prescient when it came to the neuroscience of memory.
I’ll post a review after I receive and read my copy, but you should all go out and buy the book today:
The fact that cannabis is the most widely used illicit drug has motivated a great deal of research aimed at understanding how it produces its psychoactive effects. Here I use the term psychoactive to describe the mild euphoria, altered perceptions, sense of relaxation, and sociability that often, but not always, accompany recreational cannabis use. Despite the difficulties inherent in working with lipophilic cannabinoids such as Δ9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), which is the primary psychoactive component of cannabis, our understanding of the mechanism of action of these compounds at the cellular level has increased dramatically over the past 20 years. However, a complete understanding of how cannabis elicits its psychoactive effects would include an appreciation of its actions at the cellular and network level as well as an identification of the neural circuits perturbed. The cannabinoid field has now matured to the point where investigators can begin to relate the cellular mechanisms of THC action to the behavioral effects of cannabis.
THC research has been seriously inhibited by its legal status and while I don’t personally believe it will become legal in the US anytime soon, more research needs to be done. I think there is a possibility that more research may lead to some interesting findings and perhaps a new perspectives on what we classify as illegal, addictive, and unhealthy compounds.
Nature has posted a series of videos and articles on the evolution of language over time. It begins by explaining the story of Babel, the biblical explanation of the different languages of the world.
As a language evolves, grammatical rules emerge and exceptions die out. Lieberman et al. have calculated the rate at which a language grows more regular, based on 1,200 years of English usage. Of 177 irregular verbs, 79 became regular in the last millennium. And the trend follows a simple rule: a verb’s half-life scales as the square root of its frequency. Irregular verbs that are 100 times as rare regularize 10 times faster. The emergence of a rule (such as adding –ed for the past tense) spells death for exceptional forms.
I read a very interesting article in the New Yorker today regarding people in vegetative states. There tends to be slightly more interaction with the outside world by a person in a vegetative state than a person with a coma. Often their eyes will be open and may move around.
From the article:
For four months, Bainbridge had not spoken or responded to her family or her doctors, although her eyes were often open and roving. (A person in a coma appears to be asleep and is unaware of even painful stimulation; a person in a vegetative state has periods of wakefulness but shows no awareness of her environment and does not make purposeful movements.) Owen placed Bainbridge in a PET scanner, a machine that records changes in metabolism and blood flow in the brain, and, on a screen in front of her, projected photographs of faces belonging to members of her family, as well as digitally distorted images, in which the faces were unrecognizable. Whenever pictures of Bainbridge’s family flashed on the screen, an area of her brain called the fusiform gyrus, which neuroscientists had identified as playing a central role in face recognition, lit up on the scan. “We were stunned,” Owen told me. “The fusiform-gyrus activation in her brain was not simply similar to normal; it was exactly the same as normal volunteers’.”
These types of articles always really interest me because they provide a degree of insight into the neurobiological basis of consciousness. Does the inability to interact with the world in a conventional manner an indicator of a lack of consciousness? If so, what does the facial recognition of loved ones and therefore some ability to recall memories indicate? We have much to learn about the human brain and people in these different states of consciousness.
Neurophilosophy has posted an article and video regarding tool-use in wild crows being caught on video for the first time.
An excerpt from the article and the video:
For example, one of the crows observed in the study used at least 3 different tools while foraging for food in loose substrate on the ground. The tool was transported from one site to another, and discarded briefly while the crow used its beak. Use of the tool was then resumed.
This film shows the crows making tools from what appears to a dry, grass-like stem. Prior to this study, crows had never been seen using this material for tool-making.
This video is pretty phenomenal in what it is exhibiting. I imagine we will begin seeing proof of many other animals’ tool-use, along with other heretofore unknown habits.
Jonah Lehrer, editor at large of Seed Magazine, announced today that his book “Proust Was A Neuroscientist” is now shipping. I’m excited about the book and pre-ordered it quite a while ago. I’m a big fan of Proust and have always loved reading interpretations of his dense, hyper-natural understanding of the sensory world. Both Clifford Pickover and Robert Anton Wilson have speculated in the past about his connection to the sciences and consciousness. On top of the book being about an exceptionally interesting subject, Seed Magazine has been such a joy to read since I subscribed last year and there is no doubt in my mind that Jonah is one of the reasons why this is true.