The Loom » Brains

Animal Friendships: My cover story for Time magazine

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 15:42:33 +0000

I’ve got a story on the cover of the latest issue of Time. It’s about the evolutionary origins of friendship. For a number of scientists, friendship–in a deep sense of the word–is not limited to our own species. The fact that friendship may be a widespread biological phenomenon could help us better understand why it has such a positive effect on our own health.

If you’re interested in the scientific literature, the best way in–and the way I first started to get familiar with it–is this review in the latest issue of Annual Review of Psychology by Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth, two of the world’s leading primatologists.

One thing that I delve into in the story is the question of just how widespread animal friendship really is. We don’t know, in large part because scientists haven’t done that many long-term field studies on wild animals. When scientists do watch dolphins or baboons for decades, they can see some bonds between unrelated individuals that last for long stretches. (Yet another value that comes from slow-cooked science.) On the other hand, what may look like friendship may just be anthropomorphic ...

2011: A Letter from the Loom

Carl Zimmer — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 06:19:38 +0000

In 2011, the Loom reached its eighth birthday. Thanks to everyone who’s paid a visit or become a loyal reader in that time. With the year coming to a close, I spent a little time this week perusing the Loom’s archive, reflecting on the things that obsessed me during 2011.

More than many years, this one reminded me just how huge science is. Even if you limited yourself to the most important stories of this past year, there was just too much to keep up with. (Here’s Discover’s top 100 picks.) As a science writer, my focus is biology, but that didn’t ease my year-long case of head-spinning. The anchors that kept me from spinning away completely were the very small and the very complicated.

At the small end of the spectrum were, among other things, the bacteria that call us home. Like every year, 2011 saw outbreaks, such as the E. coli that sickened thousands in Germany. But now that we can read the genomes of these killers, as I noted in Newsweek, we can see how chillingly fast new pathogens can evolve.

But the good germs also ...

When Sight Shapes Sound (And Vice Versa)

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 05:27:31 +0000

We take in streams of information of radically different forms: photons through the eyes, textures through the skin, air vibrations through the ears, molecules through the nose. Marvelously, we manage to integrate all that information into a unified, coherent feel of the world. It turns out that as we draw in these different streams, we use information from one sense to shape what we take in from others. It’s an efficient way to make the most of our imperfect perceptions. But it also leaves us vulnerable to some remarkable illusions, like the one illustrated in this video.

In my latest column for Discover, I explore our powers of multi-sensory integration. Check it out.

Presenting a new ebook: More Brain Cuttings

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 15 Dec 2011 14:01:34 +0000

Last year I decided to play in the ebook sandbox. I brought together some of my favorite pieces about the brain in an anthology I entitled Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind. I teamed up with the publishers George Scott and Charles Nix, and we produced an ebook.

Along the way, we learned a lot. I recounted some of the lessons in this piece for the Atlantic, and others in this conversation with the writer Steve Silberman. Suffice to say, publishing ebooks is by no means a frictionless utopia for writers. Nevertheless it remains strangely addictive. Perhaps we writers get the same jolt of dopamine that readers get when they tap a glass screen and are rewarded with a new book.

It just so happens I now have some new material to keep fueling my addition. I’ve continued to write about the brain, and recently I selected another crop of favorites. This new ebook has made it down the digital assembly line, and is now available for $7.99: More Brain Cuttings: Further Exporations of the Mind (Amazon, Barnes & Noble).

You’ll find a range of subjects here. ...

Peace, war, and evolution: My profile of Steven Pinker in tomorrow’s New York Times

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 18:49:41 +0000

The New York Times has launched a series called Profiles in Science. When I was invited to join the undertaking, I proposed writing about the Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. I had run into Pinker at the World Science Festival in June, and he had told me about his next book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which was due out in the fall. In the 800+ page tome, Pinker argues that rates of human violence have been crashing for millennia, and he offers psychological explanations for the fall.

I’ve followed Pinker’s work since I first came across his 1994 book, The Language Instinct. In the wake of the book’s success, he quickly became a leading exponent of evolutionary psychology, coming out swinging against its critics such as Stephen Jay Gould. When Pinker described his book to me, I was intrigued. I wondered how someone who argued that human nature was shaped long ago by natural selection would end up arguing that human nature–or at least human experience–is now changing rapidly for the better. But there were other things I was wondering–how, for example, does a writer of massive books about human nature live inside the ...

Are we the teachable species?

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 15:14:07 +0000

We know that our species is unique, but it can be surprisingly hard to pinpoint what exactly makes us so. The fact that we have DNA is not much of a mark of distinction. Several million other species have it too. Hair sets us apart from plants and mushrooms and reptiles, but several thousand other mammals are hairy, too. Walking upright is certainly unusual, but it doesn’t sever us from the animal kingdom. Birds can walk on two legs, after all, and their dinosaur ancestors were walking bipedally 200 million years ago. Our own bipedalism–like much of the rest of our biology–has deep roots. Chimpanzees, whose ancestors diverged from our own some seven million years ago, can walk upright, at least for short distances.

If looking for human uniqueness on the outside is difficult, is it any easier to look on the inside–in particular, at our mental lives? There’s no doubt that our minds allow us to do things that even our great ape relatives cannot. For one thing, we can represent the world symbolically in our heads, and we can use words to communicate that symbolic thought to one another. ...

Scaling the Barrier: My new column on the brain

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 16:19:52 +0000

Our brains are protected by an invisible fortress wall, keeping it safe from many dangers. Unfortunately, it also keeps out a lot of the drugs that could help cure diseases of the brain. In this month’s column for Discover, I look at some of the newest strategies for scaling the wall. Check it out.

Image: Ken Lund, Flickr, via Creative Commons

Neanderthal Neuroscience

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 21:18:28 +0000

When the Society for Neuroscience gets together for their annual meeting each year, a city of scientists suddenly forms for a week. This year’s meeting has drawn 31,000 people to the Washington DC Convention Center. The subjects of their presentations range from brain scans of memories to the molecular details of disorders such as Parkinson’s and autism. This morning, a scientist named Svante Paabo delivered a talk. Its subject might make you think that he had stumbled into the wrong conference altogether. He delivered a lecture about Neanderthals.

Yet Paabo did not speak to an empty room. He stood before thousands of researchers in the main hall. His face was projected onto a dozen giant screens, as if he were opening for the Rolling Stones. When Paabo was done, the audience released a surging crest of applause. One neuroscientist I know, who was sitting somewhere in that huge room, sent me a one-word email as Paabo finished: “Amazing.”

You may well know about Paabo’s work. In August, Elizabeth Kolbert published a long profile in the New Yorker. But he’s been in the news for over fifteen years. Like many other ...

The “Language Gene” Turns Ten

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 19:18:07 +0000

Ten years ago this month, a team of University of Oxford scientists published a description of a family who struggled with words. By comparing their DNA, the scientists zeroed in for the first time on a gene associated with language, dubbed FOXP2. In my newest column in Discover, I look back at what scientists have learned over the past decade about how FOXP2 works, and what it tells us–or leaves us wondering–about how language evolved. Check it out.

Eye Versus Camera

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 14:09:43 +0000

Metaphors are essential to writing about science. Even scientists themselves use metaphors all the time, drawing from their familiar experiences to describe the unfamiliar. Building proteins is known as translation, for example, because the sequences of DNA and proteins are akin to words written in different languages. The cell has to translate one language into another using–another metaphor–the genetic code.

Metaphors can be powerful, but they can also trip us up if we mistake them for an equivalence. DNA isn’t really a human language, for example. In my latest column for Discover, I take a look at another tricky metaphor: the eye as camera. Some scientists are actually making that metaphor real, by building video cameras that can let blind people see. As I point out, however, eyes are not cameras, and the differences are fascinating. They’re also crucial to the future success in treating blindness with technology. Check it out.

The Verge of Human

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 14:49:00 +0000

If you were this man, you’d be smiling too.

The man is Lee Berger, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Witwatersrand in South Africa. He’s holding the skull of Australopithecus sediba, a 1.98 million year old relative of humans, otherwise known as a hominin. In April 2010 Berger and his colleagues first unveiled the fossil in the journal Science. As I wrote in Slate, Berger argued that A. sediba was the closest known cousin to our genus Homo. Hominins branched off from other apes about 7 million years ago, but aside from becoming bipedal, they were remarkably like other apes for about five million years. Among other things, they were short, had long arms, and had small brains. Berger and his colleagues saw in A. sediba what biologists often find in transitional forms–a mix of ancestral and newer traits. It has Homo-like hands, a projecting nose, and relatively long legs. It was intermediate in heigh between earlier hominins and the tall Homo. And it still had a small brain and long arms. (In August, Josh Fishman wrote a feature for National Geographic on A. sediba, complete with excellent ...

The Kindness of Strangers, Chimpanzee Edition

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 21:31:18 +0000

In tomorrow’s New York Times, I take a look at a new study on the generosity of chimpanzees. Check it out. (And also check out Ed Yong’s take at Not Exactly Rocket Science.)

[Image courtesy of Frans de Waal]

#Greenfieldism

Carl Zimmer — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 16:21:03 +0000

[If you can't see this post here, you can see it on Storify here.]

View “Greenfieldism” on Storify

How to feed your freakish brain: My new column for Discover

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 22:27:54 +0000

The human brain is, for want of a better word, ginormous. Sure, it’s only about as big as a cantaloupe, but it’s made of the hungriest cells in the human body. Keeping the brain supplied with energy is a huge challenge. In my new column in Discover, I describe how scientists have discovered some of the molecular tricks we’ve evolved to feed our neurological beast. Check it out.

Brain Cuttings Kindle: On mysterious sale for $3.99

Carl Zimmer — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 12:05:05 +0000

Amazon has put my ebook, Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind on sale for the gotta-get-it price of $3.99. If you want some information on the ebook, check out…

The Brain Cuttings page on my web site

A conversation with science writer Steve Silberman on Brain Cuttings and the future of science ebooks

A review by Vaughan Bell on his essential blog, Mind Hacks

And if the only information you need is “$3.99,” here’s where you can get a copy.

(PS–I have no idea why Amazon decided to put the ebook on sale, and have no idea how long the sale will last. So grab it now!)

Soul-Made-Flesh-A-Thon: A Sale to Clear Out the Brain

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 06 Jul 2011 19:38:39 +0000

Thanks to everyone who scooped up autographed copies of At the Water’s Edge (72 are out the door as of this writing, and 8 are left). My shelves are getting close to being purged of author’s copies–which is good, since those shelves are about to come crashing down for some home renovation.

To keep the momentum going, let me offer to you autographed copies of a book I wrote about the origin of neurology in the wild, woolly days of the scientific revolution: Soul Made Flesh. It’s a group biography of a seventeenth-century band of big thinkers who put the brain–which was considered by many to be little more than a lump of phlegm–at the center of our existence. At the hub of this circle of virtuosi was the English physician Thomas Wills, a man who’s wrongly sunk into oblivion. The story is rich with intrigue, warfare, religious strife, and gorey blood transfusions. (Here’s a page with more information about the book at my web site.)

Oliver Sacks switched on my orbitofrontal cortex with a happy glow when he had this to say about the book:

“Thomas Willis was ...

Dediscovery: My new essay for a new section of the New York Times

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 14:41:48 +0000

In the late 1800s, prominent astronomers declared that Mars was criss-crossed by canals–evidence, they declared, of an advanced civilization. But in the early 1900s, astronomers gazed through more powerful telescopes and discovered that the canals were mirages.

The astronomer Percival Lowell, who had become the leading champion of the canals, scoffed at the new findings He declared that the criticism came “solely from those who without experience find it hard to believe or from lack of suitable conditions find it impossible to see.”

Although the new evidence led many astronomers to abandon Lowell’s position, he never retracted his claim. It wasn’t until five decades after his death in 1916 that space probes finally went into orbit around Mars and sent back close-up pictures of a canal-free Red Planet.

I’ve always been fascinated by the way science casts aside bad ideas. For most of us, it’s easy to assume that science shakes them off quickly, but the truth is that it can take quite a while for the process to play out. Recently I was invited to contribute a piece to the new “Sunday Review” section of the New York Times, which ...

Fighting the Pain: My new column for Discover

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 13:24:09 +0000

Pain is a paradox. It feels like the most real, objective experience we can have, and yet it can be weirdly malleable. It’s better to think of pain, like memory or vision, not as a simple reflection of the world, but as a strategy we’ve evolved to stay alive. Thinking this way can help make sense of the awful experience of chronic pain, when this urgent signal refers to nothing except a brain caught in its own feedback loops. In my latest column for Discover, I take a look at the latest understanding of pain, and some promising research that uses these insights to search for a new, more rational pain-killer. Check it out.

[Image: Boy With A Rooster by Adriano Cecioni, 1868. Photo from Kate Eliot/Flickr via Creative Commons License]

The Symmetry of Sleep

Carl Zimmer — Sat, 28 May 2011 18:57:33 +0000

The World Science Festival is going to kick off on Wednesday in New York (I’ll be speaking Thursday on a panel, on telling the stories of science in print and online.) The festival organizers have been publishing a blog on some of the topics that will be explored next week. Riffing on the session on sleep, I’ve just contributed a piece on some wonderful recent research on what it means for us to be asleep and to be awake–and the surprising porous wall that divides the two states of mind. Check it out.

[Image: Wikipedia]

The Journey of the Neuron: My latest column for Discover

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 18 May 2011 13:35:22 +0000

Our neurons exist in a staggering vast network, with 100 billion cells forming some 100 trillion connections. And it’s up to these ordinary cells to form that network on their own, snaking across the brain or even across the body, in order to find the right target. In my latest column for Discover, I look at new research that reveals some of the elegantly simple tricks our nervous system uses to wire itself. Check it out.

Radio alert: Listen (or call in) tonight about Brain Cuttings

Carl Zimmer — Mon, 02 May 2011 16:23:51 +0000

Tonight at 6 pm EST I’ll be talking about my ebook, Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through The Mind. (Amazon / BN/ Mobipocket ). You can listen live to Your Health Connection on KSKA Public Radio, and even ask questions via phone or email.

Finding your inner time machine: My new column for Discover

Carl Zimmer — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 15:44:12 +0000

My latest Brain column is now online. I look at the science of time travel. We may not be able to transport ourselves physically into the future or the past as H.G. Wells imagined, but we can travel mentally. And it turns out that we use a lot of the same equipment to go in both directions. In fact, our ability to remember our past may have evolved because it helped us project ourselves into the future. Check it out.

[Image]

Tomorrow in Philadelphia: My Talk on the Birth of Our Brain-Centered Age

Carl Zimmer — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 19:20:31 +0000

Greetings, Loominaries of Philadelphia! I will be heading your way to give a talk tomorrow (Thursday) at the Center for Neuroscience & Society at the University of Pennsylvania.

My talk will be entitled, “Soul Made Flesh: The Origin of Our Brain-Centered World.” I’ll argue, as I did in the eponymous book, that as we grapple with the implications of twenty-first-century neuroscience, we’d do well to cast our minds back 350 years ago, when scientific revolutionaries first discovered that the brain was not a bowl of curds.

The details:

When: Thursday, April 07 2011, 4:00pm – 5:30pm
Location : Silverman Hall, Room 245A, University of Pennsylvania (3400 Chestnut St.)
Contact : info@neuroethics.upenn.edu

[Image: The frontispiece of "The Anatomy of the Brain," reproduced in Soul Made Flesh]

The Valley of the Teenagers: My new brain column for Discover

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 15:37:48 +0000

When you’re a teenager, it seems like nobody understands you. And once you’re finished being a teenager and get to observe them as an adult, you have to wonder what on Earth is going through their heads. In my new column for Discover, I gingerly step into the teenage mind, exploring what neuroscientists are learning about how their brains work. Teenagers may do things that seem crazy and/or stupid, but that doesn’t mean they themselves are crazy or stupid. The teen years turn out to be a unique phase of mental life, when we tally up the rewards and costs of our choices with a kind of math that you won’t find in the heads of children or grownups. Check it out.

World Science Festival TV: Another afternoon shot

Carl Zimmer — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 18:59:51 +0000

I really do have work to do. So I’m profoundly resentful (in the best way possible) that the World Science Festival has launched a video site called WSFtv. Here’s seven minutes of neuroscientist Giulio Tononi (subject of my recent New York Times profile) talking about his theory of consciousness. There is a lot more where that came from.