It was my Uncle Bill‘s funeral yesterday and I know this steps outside the bounds of my usual postings but I felt I wanted to share something, and hopefully why will become clearer to me as I write. Uncle Bill was a wonderfully warm part of my childhood. He was always looking for the humour […]
Archives for June 2008
Trevor Speaking on Radio 4
It’s always fun to be involved in a broadcast, and to do so from the famous Radio 4/World Service studios was a particular thrill. The knocking noise you hear every now and again is me tapping a cast I was wearing at the time on the table while I tried to think of what to […]
Wait til you see the whites of their eyes
One of the differences that exist between humans and the other apes is the distinctive white around our pupils; apes tend to be much less differentiated. Researchers wondered if it conveyed a communication advantage to us to be able to see eye movement more clearly. In a clever experiment they got apes to watch a […]
Mirroring People
I think Mirror Neurons are one of the most exciting and important discoveries in neuroscience, and I have a feeling they could turn out to be the fundamental building blocks of consciousness itself. Marco Iacaboni has been involved in this area of research since they were first discovered and fascinatingly details the discoveries since and […]
Kluge
This book’s subtitle is ‘The haphazard construction of the human mind’, and the author builds his case brilliantly well. In the first few pages he demolishes the idea of Intelligent Design by his simple demonstration that our brain is anything but designed intelligently. The word Kluge is an engineering term for a makeshift solution – […]
Emotions Revealed
Paul Ekman is probably the world’s leading researcher into emotions and their relationship to expression. It was he who discovered that all humans non-verbally express seven basic emotions using the same facial muscles; they’re hard-wired in our brain, not taught culturally. What he has to say in this area is interesting enough, but his findings […]
Fake it so you can make it (or, why Chelsea should hire me)
If you’re reading this then it’s likely that you’ve got an interest in the science of the mind/body connection. An interesting thing you may have noticed, and it might be because of the way the term is constructed, is that most attention is paid to how the mind affects our body. Whole books are devoted […]