Mindframe

You are not you. By that, I mean that the idea of Self -- the single arbitrator of decisions and sole captain of your wants and desires -- appears to be a construct of the brain. And part of that construct is the story that we tell ourselves about ourselves. Sometimes, it becomes clear that a person's personal narrative is pretty different from who they really are. Like your friend who claims to be an avid runner but perhaps hasn’t run in weeks, months or even years. Or your office mate who claims to be ‘easygoing’ and then spends coffee breaks rearranging all the swizzle sticks to point in the same direction, and sorting and stacking the sugar packets by date of manufacture. For some, the reality gap is a narrow one. For others, it's more like the Grand Canyon. And that's where things get interesting. When the gap gets big, the sheer energy necessary to maintain the canard can be stupefying. And perhaps hoping to protect our own myths from exposure, many cho...

On a nuts-and-bolts level, what's happening in your brain when you think? This is one of the hottest topics in neuroscience. Understanding it is considered the mother lode for many brain researchers. Although we have yet to completely unlock the mystery, we have begun to get a glimpse into the brain's architecture. The brain is composed of billions of neurons, which are essentially microscopic chemical connectors. Neurons operate similarly to the wiring in your home; they are switches that extend power to a whole host of electrical gadgetry. When excited, neurons send messages back and forth by temporarily hooking up with each other across minute gaps known as synapses. Into these synapses, the neuron attempting to communicate (presynaptic neuron) sends a message to the receiving neuron (postsynaptic neuron) by releasing a chemical called a neurotransmitter. The receiver neuron bridges the gap using proteins known as receptors, and grabs up the neurot...

How do we measure intelligence? The ancient Chinese had some of the first tests designed to evaluate a person's smarts: a game called tangram and another game called jiulianhuan . You can still play them today, if you're a fan of puzzles or humility. In 1905, Alfred Binet, Victor Henri and Theodore Simon needed a way to assess mental retardation in school children. They created their own system, the not-very-cleverly-named Binet-Simon test. This eventually morphed into the Intelligence Quotient test, more commonly known as the I.Q. test. It analyzes your applied knowledge of math, as well as verbal and spatial recognition skills. At the end of the test, you get a number between 1 and 200. This number tells us how smart you are, or so conventional wisdom went. Most of us hummed along happily with this notion until Howard Gardner showed up in 1983 with his ground-breaking book Frame of Mind . In his book, Gardner argued that the standard I.Q. test doesn't give u...

“Woman Saves Daughter's Life with Her own Feces”. That eye-grabbing headline graced the newspaper of the woman next to me on my flight from Minneapolis to New York earlier this week. I didn't have the chutzpah to read the whole thing over her shoulder, but I assume the article had to do with the bacterium known as Clostridium difficile, or C. diff. According to the staff at Mayo Clinic, C. diff "can cause symptoms ranging from diarrhea to life-threatening inflammation of the colon." Worse, "[i]n recent years, C. difficile infections have become more frequent, more severe and more difficult to treat." Interestingly, one of the successful treatments for eliminating C. diff is to transplant a fecal sample from a healthy individual into the patient's gut. The antibodies from the fecal matter then wipe out the C. diff bacterium. Hopefully, this was what the newspaper headline was getting at. Quick, when was the last time you thought about your dige...