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Insight From Trouble in Recognizing Objects
The New York Times: Object agnosia is a rare disorder in which an individual cannot visually recognize objects. In the case of a patient known as SM, he mistook a harmonica for a cash register. Researchers from Carnegie Mellon and Princeton University studied SM’s brain and discovered that it was affected not only in the portion of the right hemisphere that had been damaged in a car accident, but also in his structurally intact left hemisphere. They performed functional M.R.I. brain scans on the patient and report their findings in the journal Neuron. The part of the brain where an image is processed, known as the lower visual cortex, was similar in SM and in normal test subjects.
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The Joy of a Sun Bath, a Snuggle, a Bite of Pâté
The New York Times: Two ring-tailed lemurs, perhaps a pair, perhaps just two guys out to catch a few rays, sit side by side tilted back as if in beach chairs, their white bellies exposed, knees apart, feet splayed to catch every last drop of the Madagascar sun. All they need are cigars to complete the picture. There’s a perfectly good evolutionary explanation for this posture. Scientists use the term “behavioral thermoregulation” to describe how an animal maintains a core body temperature. But as the animal behaviorist Jonathan Balcombe points out in his exuberant look at animal pleasure, “The Exultant Ark,” they are also clearly enjoying themselves. A scientist through and through, Dr.
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The Willful Blindness of Rupert Murdoch
The Huffington Post: After every institutional debacle, the arguments are the same: it was just a few bad apples. Nobody at the top is to blame. A few rogue, or over-zealous employees just went off piste. Then the full scale of the debacle emerges and another face-saving fiction emerges: no one could possibly have seen this coming. Both arguments were wrong in Abu Ghraib, at Enron, WorldCom, BP, Countrywide and Lehman Brothers and both are wrong today at News International. The phone hacking scandal, and the enormous price paid for it by News Corporation, isn't the unfortunate byproduct of a few naughty freelancers. Nor was it an unpredictable, unforeseeable event.
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Baby Blur: Infants’ Eyes Take Longer to Process Movement
LiveScience: Rapidly changing images may look like a blur to infants, according to a new study. Although babies can see the movement, they may not be able to identify the individual elements within a moving scene as well as an adult can. Babies' brains gradually develop the ability to use visual information to discover and process their world. Researchers found that the speed limit at which babies can recognize individual moment-to-moment changes is about half a second. That's about 10 times slower than for adults, who can recognize rapid, individual changes that occur 50 to 70 milliseconds or slower.
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J.K. Rowling’s characters turn up in medical literature, too
Los Angeles Times: For more than a decade, the phenomenally popular Harry Potter series has provided grist for medical studies on topics including genetics, social cognition and autism. PubMed, an online database of medical studies, lists 30 studies that invoke the young wizard. There's "Harry Potter and the Recessive Allele," "Harry Potter and the Structural Biologist's (Key)stone," and even "Harry Potter Casts a Spell on Accident-Prone Children." That last study found that children's emergency department visits decreased significantly when new Harry Potter books went on sale.
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Is Google Ruining Your Memory?
Wired: By now, you’ve probably heard about this smart study showing that Google is making you stupid, led by Betsy Sparrow at Columbia. The scientists demonstrated that the availability of the internet is changing the nature of what we remember, making us more likely to recall where the facts are rather than the facts themselves. Patricia Cohen of the Times summarizes the results: Dr. Sparrow and her collaborators, Daniel M. Wegner of Harvard and Jenny Liu of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, staged four different memory experiments. In one, participants typed 40 bits of trivia — for example, “an ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain” — into a computer.
