Mindframe

F rom the time of your birth, your parents were bombarding you with messaging. Everything from "Eat your peas" to "Listen up, young lady, this better be the last time you convince your little brother to climb into a laundry basket and then kick that basket down the stairs." (Don't worry, I survived.) Messaging is the very essence of being a parent. And that external messaging is a partial key to who you grow up to be. But what about the internal messaging: how does that happen? The mass of 200 million interwoven fibers linking your brain's left and right hemisphere is known as your corpus callosum. This high speed communication bridge ensures the two hemispheres work in sync with each other, connecting parts that handle vision, hearing, spacial reasoning, and thought. So in the case of severe epilepsy, when doctors decide to sever the corpus callosum to keep the epilepsy isolated in one hemisphere, you'd think this would spell doom for the patient...

When this holiday season is over and you've exhausted your patience, credit card, and yule spirit, here's something to ponder while you attempt to surgically remove tangles of lights from the prickly brown death trap that's become your Christmas tree. Question: Lots of little computers woven together in ever-changing patterns, connecting and reconnecting, sharing information at lightning speed--quick, what are we talking about? That's too easy, you say, the answer is the internet.  Or, if you've been reading this website for a while and you're a smart aleck, the Victorian telegraph system . Or, if you've got good pattern recognition and you're familiar with the premise of this blog, the human brain as revealed to us through neuroscience. It's not a perfect analogy but it's been on my mind since reading this month's Discovery Magazine. Carl Zimmer, award-winning biology writer and author of The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evol...

I t's settled: the very best hot chocolate in the world comes from the Starbucks just outside of Xian, China. A bold statement? Yes, but I have done my research. This week I was in Seattle, the birthplace of the American coffee scene, and found myself in the so-called original Starbucks. I say "so-called" because claims like this are tricky business, as I learned while visiting the Terracota soldiers in China last week with my good friend Nelson.  As you tour Xian, sooner or later you're bound to run into the "original well digger", who legend has it, stumbled onto the historical site while trying to scrape a meager existence off the hardscrabble land. Nowadays, this revered man of the soil is happy to charge you five dollars to take your picture with him. But if you should miss the opportunity, fear not: there is another original well digger waiting for you around the corner, and so on, like some cosmic stream of unending original diggers. Which of...

In 1974, local farmers in Xian, China, set out to dig a well. Instead, they discovered what many consider to be the eighth wonder of the world.   To understand the origin of the Terracotta Army, we’ll need to step back into ancient history for a moment.    Some 2000 years ago, the emperor of China was a man (or a god, depending who you asked) named Qin. Like most of us, he seems to have felt some anxiety about his own mortality. Unlike most of us, his solution was to have himself buried with an army of 6000 life-sized terracotta soldiers to defend him in the afterlife. It took 720,000 workers 37 years to pull off this remarkable feat.  Qin began the project when he was 15 years old. He died in his early fifties.  What was it about the wiring in his brain that possessed Qin to strap his people with this arduous and audacious task?   It’s hard to say; every single person's brain is wired up differently.  When neurosurgeons operate on...

When General George Armstrong Custer made the ill-fated decision to charge his 700 troops into the heart of the Lakota Nation on June 25 th 1876, it represented a pretty steep learning curve for the General—steep and deadly.   Neuroscientists know that extreme events that end in failure will create memories that tend to stick with us. Since your brain is built to keep you alive, it recruits your hippocampus and amygdala to remember those moments that put you at risk in the hope that you will recognize the same pattern and avoid it in the future. That is, of course, if you manage to live through the situation the first time around.   Each of us can witness a whole host of these events. Car crashes, break ups, bad weekends in Vegas—you get the idea.  Your brain makes those kinds of memories available to you at all times, unlike your misplaced hotel room key or the new password for your Amazon account. A moth, on the other hand, does not seem to have the benefi...

How do I know Thanksgiving is over? I simply look out the back window of my home to witness the brilliant array of Christmas lights. To be fair, my neighbor's lights have been up for quite a while. It appears that he starts his lighting festivities earlier every year, which means at some point in the future his Christmas lights will actually usher in the Christmas of the following year. Lights tend to grab our attention. And there is a reason for this, according to John Medina, the author of Brain Rules.  Our brains are predisposed to pay attention to things that jump out at us. In fact. the brain, the amygdala in particular, follows a pretty basic checklist upon observing anything new or out of the ordinary.    Medina says the amygdala processes emotionally charged events and uses dopamine as a kind of chemical post-it note to aid in making sure the event is remembered (I don’t know which came first--the Post-it note or the amygdala. I suspect the Post-it note; 3...

The problem with you––and by you, I mean me––is that our brains are built on a 40,000 year old platform. Let's not forget, evolution is a slow process. We haven't had any significant brain upgrade since our ancient ancestors started sprucing up their cave walls with paintings of local fauna. We may marvel at our technological advancements, but despite our ability to hurl metal objects and ideas through space, we are basically cave dwellers dressed in modern garb. In fact, the technology we all enjoy (most of the time) was the work of only a few individuals. Who among us, if teleported back 40,000 years could reproduce an iPhone, a cylinder lock, or even a porcelain toilet? You get the idea. Imagine a stunning technological advancement, one that almost seems like magic. It's a method of communication that allows us to share ideas like never before. Suddenly, news can cross an ocean before you cross the street. You can read about the results of a battle in Europe as th...

So imagine it’s 1826 and you want to know what the weather will be doing tomorrow. You really have one choice: pull out your trusty Farmer’s Almanac and get down to business. The Almanac is still around today. As Sandy Duncan, managing editor, says, “The formula we use dates back to 1818. It is a mathematical and astronomical formula that takes sunspot activity, tidal action of the moon and position of the planets into consideration. The complete formula is known only by our weather prognosticator: Caleb Weatherbee." Sounds pretty cool. There’s only one problem: analysis shows that its accuracy falls in the 50/50 range. That is to say, garden variety coin toss territory. So, would I be better off checking in with the National Weather Service? In short: yes. Meteorology has come a long way since 1818. No longer must we rely on the whims of a man named Caleb. Now we can pull up software that feeds past weather results, current temperature, wind and precipitation patterns ...

When was the last time you had a three-foot tamping rod blow through your prefrontal cortex, taking with it about a half teacupful of brain matter? If your name is Phineas Gage, it was 164 years and 53 days ago, and it happened at 4:30 in the afternoon while you were setting explosives for the Burlington railroad in Vermont. Miraculously, in defiance of Victorian medical science and common sense, Gage lived. His personality, however, was forever altered. This is one of the most cited neuroscience cases out there because it tells us a few key things about the nature of the prefrontal cortex, that processing center in your skull just above your eyebrows. The prefrontal cortex does a lot of cool stuff. It is, among other things, home to your willpower. Neuroscientists frequently say we have one brain and two minds. By this they mean we have a processing center for emotions, the part of the brain that reaches for the glazed donut, and another mind, the part of the brain that reminds...

Our brains are programmed not to lose. It's called loss aversion, and it makes sense. If our ancient ancestors lost even a meager food cache, that could mean the difference between life and death. This vestigial neural code is still with us today, even though nowadays, grocery stores are chock full of vitamins in the shape of cartoon characters and nutrition-dense produce like rutabaga. This turnip/cabbage hybrid is a staple at Best family Thanksgivings, over the loud protest of my daughter and editor Jessica, who continues to claim that it tastes like it's been cooked in a dirty sweat sock. (Editor's note: Because it does.) Loss aversion is not just reserved for food. It shows up all over the place. Las Vegas casinos rely on it to keep gamblers going. Customers don't want to walk away from the slots with less than they started, so they continue to gamble, and in the process pretty much insure they will, that's right, lose more money. It's an irony that s...