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.

The Economist reports from this year’s AAAS meeting about a fascinating lecture delivered by the historian of science Lawrence Principe about his quest to figure out the real history of alchemy. Principe has done some impressive work to brush away the Whig history of modern chemistry and understand alchemy on its own terms.

Alchemy is saddled with such a bad reputation that many people don’t appreciate  how it played an important role in the birth of modern sciences, such as biochemistry and neurology.

Here’s part of a blog post I wrote in 2006 on this surprising link:

Jan Baptist van Helmont, a sixteenth-century Belgian alchemist, carried out a classic experiment on biological growth. He put a five pound willow sapling in a tube of 200 pounds of earth. For five years he gave the tree nothing but water, and then weighed both tree and earth. The tree had grown to 169 pounds, while the earth had lost a few ounces. “Hence one hundred and sixty-four pounds of wood, bark, and roots have come up from water alone,” he announced. Van Helmont believed that the willow was nothing more than transmuted water, given form by the willow’s inner soul.

I first came to appreciate the importance of alchemy in the rise of biochemistry while working on my book Soul Made Flesh, on the history of neurology. Thomas Willis, the first neurologist, started out as an alchemist, deeply influenced by Van Helmont. He came into contact with Robert Boyle through their shared interest in alchemy. And his first important work was a book that used alchemy to reinterpret physiology. Instead of the four humours, Willis saw body being made up of corpuscles of different sorts, borrowing concepts of Van Helmont and other alchemists. These corpuscles interacted with one another to produce changes, just as ferments made bread rise and grape juice turn to wine.

Willis later did groundbreaking work on the anatomy and function of the brain, which until his time had generally been considered a pretty useless organ. Willis envisioned the brain as an alembic, the distilling container of alchemy, in which some of the corpuscles of the blood were distilled into the animal spirits, which then flowed through the nerves. While some of Willis’s language and concepts are now hopelessly old-fashioned, he set the study of the brain–and thus the soul–on a new foundation.

The intersection of alchemy and biology is just further evidence that science does not advance by simply wiping the slate clean and starting completely from scratch. Some of the most dramatic revolutions were born within systems of thought that today seem hopelessly backwards. I wonder how twenty-ninth cenutry historians will look back at our own revolutions today. Who will be cast aside as the new alchemists?

I take a look at the science of facial recognition, and the puzzling ways it fails, in my column in the January-February issue:

Imagine that an eccentric psychologist accosts you. In his hand is a piece of paper with 20 pictures of roses. One of the pictures shows a rose in the flower bed you just passed, he says, and he asks you to pick its picture out from his lineup. The challenge would seem absurd—but if you were to change the roses to faces, nearly everyone could meet it.

Read the rest here….

You can catch me on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC on Wednesday 1/26 at around 11:45 am, talking about the natural history of smiles.

I’ll be appearing on The Takeaway Tuesday morning to talk about smiles. I’ll be on at some point between 6:20 and 6:40 am, and you can catch my segment again in the 8 am hour (EST). Soon after, it will be archived here.

I’ve got two stories in the New York Times tomorrow, at two ends of life’s scales.

In the cover story, I write about smiles. Faces have long fascinated me (see this Discover column on Darwin and Botox), and so I was intrigued to come across this recent paper focusing on smiles in particular. I talked to David Corcoran about the story for the first twelve minutes of the latest  Science Times podcast.

Elsewhere in the Science Times, I keep up with the creepiest form of life out there: infectious cancer. Two species–Tasmanian devils and dogs–have given rise to cancer cells that can hop from host to host. I wrote about Tasmanian devils in the Times, and about dogs here at the Loom. Now there’s news that the dog cancer (which I want to call Canis cancer after talking to the scientists who study it) rejuvenates itself from time to time by stealing its host’s mitochondria. This is a story that just keeps going and going…like the cancer themselves.

Another week, another snowpocalypse.

With a foot of snow looking like a sure thing tomorrow, the Guilford Free Library has rescheduled my upcoming talk to Monday, January 24.

As I mentioned yesterday, the talk is called, “Step Inside Your Brain.” I’ll be discussing some of the cooler nooks and crannies of our skulls, drawing partly on my new ebook, Brain Cuttings.

The talk is free, but you’re encouraged to reserve a spot. For more details, check out the library web site.

I’ll be on MSNBC at 3:30 pm EST on Tuesday (1/10 11) to talk about the future of our brains, based on this excerpt from Brain Cuttings. I’ll post the web archive once/if they put it online.

It’s always a pleasure to take a short stroll to my local library to talk science. That’s what I’ll be doing this Wednesday (1/12) at 7 pm, at the Guilford Free Library here in Guilford, CT. The talk is called, “Step Inside Your Brain.” I’ll be discussing some of the cooler nooks and crannies of our skulls, drawing partly on my new ebook, Brain Cuttings.

The talk is free, but you’re encouraged to reserve a spot. If the weather doesn’t play nice, the library will reschedule the talk for some time soon. For more details, check out the library web site. Here’s a pdf flyer for the talk.

Scientific American has pulled my article on the complexity of brain networks out in front of their paywall. Check it out!

Update: Ack! For some people, it seems to be behind a paywall. I’ll get it onto carlzimmer.com when I get a chance.

When it rains it pours. A bunch of stories I’ve been working on for a while have all surfaced over the past week. Here’s the very last…for now: my new Discover brain column. The topic is music. What is it? What is it for, if anything?

I’ve long been interested in music and the brain for some time, along with the study of the evolution of music. Over the summer, at a meeting called SciFoo, I got to hear an excellent talk by Aniruddh Patel of the Neuroscience Institute, which finally spurred me to write something. If my column piques your interest, Patel’s web site has lots more to read.

And if you haven’t met one of his favorite subjects, Snowball…well, here he is:

Scientific American is featuring an excerpt from Brain Cuttings, my new e-book about the frontiers of neuroscience. It’s an account of my wanderings through the science fiction world of the Singularity, pondering whether we’ll be uploading our brains someday to computers. The piece started out as an assignment for Playboy, which they published earlier this year; I then reworked the piece for the e-book. Check it out.

And if you have a subscription to Scientific American, please check out my feature in the January 2011 issue, called “100 Trillion Connections.” There, I expand on one of the key topics I discuss in my e-book excerpt: how the brain is a network of networks (of networks), and only by understanding their organization will we finally come to terms with the complexity of the mind.