There’s a feature article in Technology Review this month titled and subtitled thus: “The Mystery Behind Anesthesia: Mapping how our neural circuits change under the influence of anesthesia could shed light on one of neuroscience’s most perplexing riddles: consciousness.” Someday this kind of article won’t be written any more (fingers crossed!) But today it is, and passes for science writing. It shouldn’t.

“Why is Amy Chua so upsetting?” Someone asked me this over the holidays while thrusting towards me me a copy of Amy Chua’s most recent defense of Tiger Mothering in the Wall Street Journal….

Today the New York Times has an amazing video breakdown of what makes Roger Federer’s footwork such a powerful, if often overlooked, weapon in his arsenal. For fans of the technical breakdown of sports genius, this is for you. The accompanying article describes how this puts unusual pressure on his opponents, by essentially enlarging the [...]

When you hold a soccer ball in your hands, you can identify its left half as being the one under your left hand. But if you were to spin the ball around, the left half would still be under your left hand, even though the ball’s position had changed. This is because in and of [...]

In a sense that’s what worked about the photo. Obama could have been in any living room in America on any given Sunday. All that was missing was the chips and dip. We’ve all sat around with our friends, just like him, and we’ve all gazed up at the television, just like him. And we’ve all held our breaths as our team began its final play for all the marbles, just like him.

The list below is therefore a record only of what I found indispensable for the development of my own ideas. Therefore it will be useful primarily to readers who are either so interested in, repulsed by, or indifferent to my thoughts that they wish to replicate portions of my intellectual travels in an effort to see whether their own will or will not be led to similar conclusions.

The cardinal error of modern neuroscience – or more often, naive consumers of modern neuroscience – is its implicit belief that brain mapping will eventually allow it to identify the source of consciousness in the brain.

If you let your mind get caught in a loop of thinking, these girls will trigger a sort of philosophical optical illusion about the self. On the one hand, if their brains are indeed connected and sharing information, they have one – very unusual – brain. So using a neural definition of the self, that means they’re one person. But when you see them on video you experience them – as their mother does – as having two minds. Using a mental definition of self, that means they’re two selves. But then you realize these two selves have one brain… and back again you go to the beginning. And that’s the optical illusion. Depending on whether you define the self using minds or brains, you see a different number of people: One. Two. One. Two. The purpose of this illusion, which I submit should be called the “Neuroself Illusion,” is not to get you to choose one or two. Rather, it is to introduce you to the very real possibility that neuroscience does not support our four-hundred year-old Enlightenment assumption that each of us has a single self. Rather, neuroscience – mixed with simple logic – makes it increasingly likely that we will conclude the brain makes multiple selves or – if you think that idea makes no sense – no self at all. But either way we’re in for a cultural (but not a scientific!) paradigm shift. Because both conclusions rock western society’s core metaphysical assumption: that an individual self, in an individual body, is what we really are. Increasingly, the smart money says it ain’t.

When you hear an ambulance on a city street; when you can identify, after five minutes, the smartest – or most annoying – or least socially phobic – student in a college seminar; when you taste the excess salt in a bowl of soup; when you go to a party and cannot take your eyes off the lone celebrity; when a single baby, crying, ruins your transatlantic flight – when any of these things, and also many other things – even most other things – happen in your life, then you have come face to face with that demon of median-lovers everywhere: the right tail.

Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN announced today that chi-square tests, accelerated to the 99% of the speed of light and then smashed into one another, decompose into constituent F-tests and a previously unknown test they’ve named the SCiP. The collision also released 5 megatons of ANOVA.

I have spent the past few posts explaining that rational objects like aardvarks and zebras and medians don’t have any spatial location – which is to say that if they exist, they don’t exist in the material world. Now look: I know that almost none of us actually believe this.

Who actually said it?

On June 2, 2011 (while preparing the long-delayed second part of this series), I looked up “statistics” on Wikipedia. This is what I found: “Statistics is the science of the collection, organization, and interpretation of data.” Uh-oh, I thought. We’re four words in and they’ve called statistics a science. Worried, I clicked on the link to “science” in the hope that somehow they were using the term loosely. What I found….

Huffpo has a nice article on Diesseroth’s ongoing optogenetics work. Someday we’ll play the brain like a piano. Diesseroth had a nice 2010 article on optogenetics in Scientific American.  And he has a good Google Talk from 2008 if you want more in depth on this.