At various times while reading Anil Seth's engaging and accessible Being You, I was reminded of the people in Helen Thomson's Unthinkable, the subject of a previous blog post. Thomson was documenting the distinct experiences of people whose perception of themselves and/or the world around them depart substantially from what is typical: people who think they are tigers or dead or who can have their orientation to the world flipped instantaneously. Seth is giving an account more generally of why perception works the way … [Read more...] about Science Book Review: Being You – A New Science of Consciousness
Science Corner: Magical Multiverse Thinking
I went to see Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness this weekend. (There are no spoilers ahead.) This was only my third trip to an indoor movie in 2 years. Part of my calculus was the fact that I'd be going to see my daughter in her first school musical later that evening. I obviously wasn't going to miss that. At the same time, if I were to get sick later, I wouldn't want that to retroactively cloud my memories of my daughter's performance. But with multiple activities in the same weekend, I add plausible … [Read more...] about Science Corner: Magical Multiverse Thinking
Science Corner: When Is a Bed Not a Bed?
Over the past two years, you've probably heard more about hospital bed availability than you may have expected to hear in your entire life. Tracking total hospital beds and ICU beds occupied has helped communities know when to increase mitigation to preserve those limited resources. With expanding SARS-CoV-2 immunity through vaccination and prior infection, we can hope to hear less about strained healthcare facilities; already we saw that the combination of immunity and a less severe strain in Omicron BA.1 meant less … [Read more...] about Science Corner: When Is a Bed Not a Bed?
Science Corner: When Normal Isn’t Normative
Although my public health training focused on infectious diseases, I care about a wide range of public health issues. My job cuts across domains, and also personally I want people to be comprehensively healthy and not merely free from contagions. So when I saw that health-improving and potentially life-saving interventions were being labeled as child abuse and used as the sole grounds for investigating parents, I was baffled and dismayed. I don't understand how providing treatments which have demonstrated health … [Read more...] about Science Corner: When Normal Isn’t Normative
Science Corner: Only They Know the Difference
Maybe you remember the old Far Side cartoon with two jellyfish outhouses featuring (apparently) identical icons on their doors, the caption reading "Only they know the difference." I was reminded of that strip reading this paper about two closely-related goby species. As the paper details, humans can face challenges differentiating them without genetic analysis. The most diagnostic visual difference only emerges once the fish reach a certain size, making the identity of smaller fish more ambiguous. Yet the genetic … [Read more...] about Science Corner: Only They Know the Difference