Emerging Scholars Blog

InterVarsity's Emerging Scholars Network

neuroscience

Science Book Review: Being You – A New Science of Consciousness

(Cover art © Dutton)

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 it does, and so I found myself regularly wondering if his model accounts for the full breadth of perceptual experience. That is a testament both to how memorable Thomson’s accounts were and to how compelling Seth’s writing is that I believed his model probably could.
[Read more…] about Science Book Review: Being You – A New Science of Consciousness

Science Corner: The Real Aliens Were the Friends We Made Along the Way

While Mars gets lots of attention, we don’t want to neglect Jupiter and this lovely new high-res image. (Image processing by Tanya Oleksuik © CC NC SA of NASA/JPL-Caltech/SwRI/MSSS image)

I promised we’d take the occasional break from evolutionary biology and simulated quandaries to check in on other science headlines, and that time has come. I’m going to try a slightly different format, more of a news roundup than a ramble on a single story. The biggest story of course is the landing of the Perseverance Rover on Mars. Below, you can check out video from the landing and the first audio from Mars (these come directly from NASA; there were fake Mars videos going around social media last week).
[Read more…] about Science Corner: The Real Aliens Were the Friends We Made Along the Way

Science Corner: Bird-Brained Schematic

raven photo
Penny for your not-inconsiderable thoughts, Mr. Raven? (Photo by NatalieMaynor )

Popular idioms aside, birds can actually be quite intelligent, with some species demonstrating the ability to use tools and to develop complex social dynamics. This despite some substantial differences in the anatomy of bird brains compared to those of mammals, particularly humans. A recent set of publications revealed stronger similarities at the level of cellular organization and the way neurons are connected even without the same higher-level anatomical organization. More specifically, bird brains lack a cerebral cortex, an anatomical feature of mammal brains, but they do have pallium which were found to be wired like the cortex.
[Read more…] about Science Corner: Bird-Brained Schematic

Science Book Review: Unthinkable – An Extraordinary Journey through the World’s Strangest Brains

Cover art for Unthinkable by Helen Thomson
The “objects coming out of someone’s brain” genre of cover art is very popular for neuroscience books.(Image © HarperCollins)

Helen Thomson closes Unthinkable by describing it as “romantic science,” an approach that emphasizes human connection alongside data and clinical reports. The humans in question are not the practitioners of science but the subjects of its investigations. Thomson profiles nine people from all over the world whose subjective experiences of that world push the limits of our ability to communicate about them. She feels compelled to employ rich, high bandwidth personal accounts because an abstraction like “lycanthropy” needs to be grounded somewhere to be comprehensible.
[Read more…] about Science Book Review: Unthinkable – An Extraordinary Journey through the World’s Strangest Brains

Science Corner: The Prizes are in Bloom

Photo of bubble sitting on a ledge
Bubbles are the subject and inspiration for several of Karen Uhlenbeck’s contributions. (Photo by Myriams-Fotos)

Last fall I wrote about the Abel Prize ceremony because I was intrigued by the maze constructed for the occasion. I didn’t intend to cover every winner, but I thought that Karen Uhlenbeck becoming the first woman to receive the honor warranted attention. Her work laid the foundation for a whole new branch of mathematics–geometric analysis–and she also provided critical tools to mathematical physicists for working with the Yang-Mills equations, which are central to the Standard Model of particle physics. Beyond her mathematical contributions, she also mentored other women mathematicians and was involved in developing new programs for educators and mathematicians to train and collaborate.
[Read more…] about Science Corner: The Prizes are in Bloom