Stephen Pinker has an essay in The New Republic called simply What The Fuck? (no, I will not censor the word). It’s a brilliant deconstruction of cursing and profanity throughout history, a primer on the neuroscience of swearing, and explains why we have such a visceral reaction to some words. It even clarified why the word “fuck” can be used in so many ways.

According to this study, high-altitude climbing can cause brain damage. This is not good news for those who wish to climb Everest naked.

Though the expedition suffered no major mishaps and none of the 12 professional climbers suffered any obvious signs of high-altitude illness, only one of the 13 climbers returned with a normal brain scan. The brain scans showed that all but one climber suffered cortical atrophy and enlargement of the Virchow-Robin spaces. These are spaces surrounding brain blood vessels that drain brain fluid and communicate with the lymph system. Widening of these VR spaces is seen in the elderly, but rarely in young people. The amateur climber’s brain had also suffered subcortical lesions in the frontal lobes.

Seed magazine recently held an essay contest on the topic of scientific literacy. You should read the winning entries.

From the winner:

Students must be convinced that changing one’s mind in light of the evidence is not weakness: Changing one’s mind is the essence of intellectual growth. By forcing students into evidence-based debates with one another, this mode of interaction, like any other, can become habitual. After being consistently challenged by their peers, most students eventually see that attempts to free themselves from facts are a hollow, and fundamentally precarious, form of “freedom.”

And from the taker of second place:

Understanding that our scientific knowledge is “only” a model is the key to true scientific literacy.
Scientific literacy requires an understanding that science is only a model. We have to be able to jettison our models when our critical thinking leads us to that conclusion.

UK cognitive scientists studying reading have discovered the mechanics behind how our eyes read a written page.

The team’s results demonstrated that both eyes lock on to the same letter 53% of the time; for 39% of the time they see different letters with uncrossed eyes; and for 8% of the time the eyes are crossing to focus on different letters.

Mind Hacks has some videos of MRI machines gone bad. Behold the power of human ingenuity.

So, if exercise increases neurogenesis, how do you explain the social stereotype of the nerd?

Whenever a man denounces the mind, it is because his goal is of a nature the mind would not permit him to confess.

Atlas Shrugged, p. 739

I just listened to the best RadioLab episode I’ve ever heard. It’s about Memory and Forgetting, and is a real tear-jerker.

Sorry for the long delay in posts. Finals will do that to the tired, undergraduate mind. Just came across this illusion contest over at NeuralCorrelate.com. The illusions listed are the top ten in their contest. Some are small modifications on old classics, while some are quite novel.

ABC Radio National is at it again, this time with a two-part series involving blindness and the brain. It discusses how blind people visualize their surroundings and features interviews someone blinded by an industrial accident, people who are congenitally blind but still possess something of a visiospacial sketchpad, and those who were blind from birth but had their sight restored through surgery. It’s a fascinating series and at times becomes very personal and emotional during interviews where the subject describes their inner goings-on. Part one is here and part two is here. I give a lot of blogspace to this program, but it is one of the few that consistently surprises me.