The life-cycle of the sea squirt is unique and instructive. As a free-swimming larva it has a three-hundred cell nervous system with sensors, a spinal cord, and an organ of balance which helps it find a suitable location for reproduction. Upon finding such a location, it lodges itself into the sand and proceeds to most… Continue reading In the beginning…
Category: Neuroscience
Death by Dashboards
Due to the glacial pace of evolutionary adaptation in many if not most ways, the genome could be considered a lagging indicator. It is tuned to invariants of a bygone regime - the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). Life would probably be not as robust and diversified if it had to solely rely on a… Continue reading Death by Dashboards
Plastic Brains
To qualify as a licensed London taxi driver, trainees require comprehensive training and testing that typically takes three to four years. Drivers need to commit to memory and learn the mishmashed layout of approximately 25,000 streets, the location of thousands of landmarks, and the quickest way to navigate between any points in the city. In… Continue reading Plastic Brains
(Mis)matched
The 300,000 year old history of our species is one of migrations made possible by our biological and cultural adaptations. From their East African cradle, homo sapiens now occupy every longitude and latitude of the world. As a generalist species with a penchant for story-telling, socializing, teaching, learning, technology, and engineering, we have transformed our… Continue reading (Mis)matched
The Study of Others
As fundamentally social primates living in and dependent on exceptionally large and heterogeneous groups, other humans are among the most important features of the environment for humans. For humans, having the capacity to infer the intentions, goals, and feelings of others is essential for the Darwinian goals of survival and reproduction. In fact, the networked… Continue reading The Study of Others
The Study of Self
Cover: Strangers to Ourselves The philosopher Karl Jaspers introduced the concept of the Axial Age to describe convergent movements in thought that occurred across the Old World from the Greco-Roman to the Indian and Chinese. This period from approximately 8th century to the 3rd century BCE was the documented birth of the study of self.… Continue reading The Study of Self
Great Expectations
Visual illusions (see below) provide unique insights into the generative aspects of perceptions and the gaps between perception and reality. They not only illustrate the disproportionate impact our learned and innate knowledge of the world - our priors - have on our perceptions, but also that perception is not a direct reflection of the world… Continue reading Great Expectations
Feelings Felt
We learn early in our education about the five senses - visual, auditory, gustatory, tactile, and olfactory. This processing of information from the “external environment” is termed exteroception. Intermittently, salient sights, sounds, tastes, smells, or touches enter our awareness but for the most part exteroception happens subconsciously. However, the brain not only monitors the external… Continue reading Feelings Felt
😴💤
The 20th-century evolutionary biologist, Theodosius Dobzhansky, said, “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.” From the perspective of evolution and its twin fitness functions of survival and reproduction, sleep is a seemingly difficult phenomenon to make sense of and explain. When we are asleep, we cannot gather food, socialize, find a… Continue reading 😴💤
Carrots & Sticks
In my last essay, I not only described the historical underpinnings of the model of homo economicus but also described it as a foundational element of modern economic theory. Homo economicus is the smallest unit of analysis in economic theory and is characterized as a solitary agent, calculating in his utility, solely driven by competition,… Continue reading Carrots & Sticks
The Map is not the Territory
It is hard to even fathom let alone comprehend the size, scale, and complexity of the universe. It takes light 91 billion years to traverse the diameter of the observable universe. That is approximately six times longer than the age of the universe itself. Similarly, the amount of information in the world vastly overwhelms the… Continue reading The Map is not the Territory
The Suitcase of Empathy
Marvin Minsky called words that carry a variety of meanings "suitcase words." Empathy is such a word. Over the last ten years, research into empathy has exploded. The number of research papers in psychological journals, on the topic, has increased dramatically and popular interest in the concept matches what is found in these journals. A… Continue reading The Suitcase of Empathy
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