Mindframe

Lance Armstrong is a cheater. For some, it was a shocking revelation. For the French cycling world, it was a classic I-told-you-so moment. (Or rather, a " Je te l'avais dit " moment--thank you, Yahoo! Answers.) Armstrong said in his quest for victory he really didn't think about what he was putting into his body. What's interesting is how well blood doping (replacing your existing blood with super oxygenated blood)  and the other drugs worked. For that matter the same can be said of steroid use by professional baseball players like Mark McQuire and Sammy Sosa. Good players already, the steroids made them home run gods in a sport had never seen records fall like matchsticks before. In a very real sense, our fallen sports heroes have shown us that you are what you eat. Alter the chemicals in the body and brain and you win the Tour de France seven times, or set new home run records. But even if you're never discovered and humiliated before a scandal-hung...

One day, back when my son was in the crawling phase, he honed in my wife's grandmother's antique comb and brush set. I found him delightedly motoring around the living room floor clutching the fragile comb in one hand and brush in the other. Recognizing that taking these away would launch him into tears, I devised a plan.  I picked up his favorite ball, got down on my hands and knees and presented him with the new option. I figured he'd undoubtedly chose the ball and surrender one item of his current booty. Then I simply had to find one more toy, repeat the process and I would come away with both heirlooms, tear-free, allowing general happiness and world peace to ensue. Clever, right? However. My son, when confronted with this third choice, looked at his left hand holding the comb, glanced down at his right hand, which held the antique brush, and then leaned forward and opened his mouth, making it clear where I should deposit his favorite ball. Like...

So somehow you find yourself stuck in the Mall of America, mannequins staring vacantly at you from all sides, dressed in the latest fashions, which like fruit flies, reach their full life cycle in less than 30 days. Quick, what do you do? Of course: you duck into a Cinnabon, enticed by the sweet nectar of cinnamon and sugar wafting through the air, seductively calling your name. (Your first name in this case; Cinnabon marketers are that clever.) Normally, you resist temptation, but not this time--no, this time you find the buttery warm pastry gliding over your lips and hitting your taste buds faster then a Nolan Ryan fast ball. You see, Cinnabon knows how your brain works. In particular, they know that all outside information is delivered to your  brain through your five senses. And they know that smell is the only sense that doesn't go through any kind of filtering process. It is our most primitive and powerful sense. And so it is no surprise the marketing geniuses at Ci...

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...