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...