This week’s Feedback column (that I write) in New Scientist magazine has four segments. Here are bits of each of them: Time for a nap — Brainy people get to dream a little more than not-quite-so-brainy people, correlationally speaking, if their brains and genomes accord with the findings of researchers from the University of the Republic in Uruguay, University […]
Just a few years after dead salmon helped neuroscientists analyze data more carefully, other dead salmon are helping other scientists better understand how trees grow. The neuroscience salmon figured in the Ig Nobel Prize-winning study “Neural correlates of interspecies perspective taking in the post-mortem Atlantic Salmon: An argument for multiple comparisons correction,” Craig M. Bennett, Abigail […]
Researchers in Sweden and Australia published a new study exploring how the length of males’ genitalia affects the size of females’ brains. Anyone who reads the study discovers that it’s about a species of tiny fish; and the effect, if it happens, occurs over the span of many generations, possibly not so much with individual females […]
Scholars have wondered whether (and in some cases, assumed that) success in schools comes largely from the good genes a person inherits. A new study of scholars and their genes provides evidence that YES, IT DOES, sort of, a little bit, maybe. The study is powerful — its authors tell us exactly how powerful. The study is “Genome-wide association study […]
Dr. Anne Beate Reinertsen PhD is associate professor and post-doctoral research fellow in the Department of Education at Nord-Trøndelag University College, Norway. The professor welcomes you to her brain. She offers you this explanation in her paper entitled : ‘Welcome to My Brain’ (in: Qualitative Inquiry, July 12, 2013) “This is about developing recursive, intrinsic, […]
Ig Nobel Prize winner Frans de Waal published an essay about “The Brains of the Animal Kingdom“, in the Wall Street Journal. It begins: Who is smarter: a person or an ape? Well, it depends on the task. Consider Ayumu, a young male chimpanzee at Kyoto University who, in a 2007 study, put human memory to […]
Writing in the New York Times Book Review, Chris Chabris, who together with Dan Simons was awarded the 2004 Ig Nobel Prize in psychology (for their experiment in which people did not notice a gorilla) explores some recent books about how well the brain makes decisions. In particular Professor Chabris appreciates the work of the 2011 Ig Nobel medicine prize winners: Is the […]
Noble Prizewinner François Jacob outlined a quandary in a 1977 lecture at the University of California : “Although our brain represents the main adaptive feature of our species, what it is adapted to is not clear at all.” This quandary remains, to this day, unresolved. But attempts to answer it have been made – by, […]
Scientists have uncovered evidence for an inbuilt “sat-nav” system in the brains of London taxi drivers. So writes the BBC in a recent report about the research of Hugo Spiers from University College London, who presented his results at this week’s BA Science Festival. Earlier studies had shown that taxi drivers have a larger hippocampus […]