smells like

Tamily Weissman, Jeff Lichtman, and Joshua Sanes (2007). Image taken from a transgenic “Brainbow” mouse that enables neuroscientists to distinguish between neighboring, densely packed neurons by illuminating them in different colors. This photomicrograph shows a few of the many neurons that are found in the neocortex.

Image via "Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century," by Carl Schoonover; Published by Abrams, featured on Book Bench, the New Yorker blog


Made me think of the kaleidoscope that is Klimt:

Gustav Klimt, The Pear Tree (1903)

wither I wander

Our thoughts are shackled by the familiar. The brain is a neural tangle of near infinite possibility, which means that it spends a lot of time and energy choosing what not to notice. As a result, creativity is traded away for efficiency; we think in literal prose, not symbolist poetry.

A bit of distance, however, helps loosen the chains of cognition, making it easier to see something new in the old; the mundane is grasped from a slightly more abstract perspective. As T. S. Eliot wrote in the Four Quartets: "We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."

(...)

We travel because we need to, because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything.

Tremendous good read from Jonah Lehrer on why travel is good for the brain.

Also appears in the latest McSweeney's Reader. Found via the AFAR blog.

daydream believer

we feel pain and pleasure
we yearn

and in order to find out how
to minimize pain

and maximize pleasure

we think

Found in The 20 W sleep-walkers by Ladislav Kováč1 of Comenius University, Bratislava, Slovakia in the current issue of EMBO Reports.

Also found in Kováč1's piece, as directly quoted:

• The energy output of the resting adult human body is equal to the power of a 100 W electrical light bulb.


• The brain alone consumes 20% of the body's chemical energy, even though it accounts for only 2% of the body's mass. Metaphorically speaking, we all have a 20 W light bulb burning in our head, even when we lie still in complete darkness doing physically nothing.


• The brain as a whole shows no difference in the energy budget between ‘resting’ and ‘busy’ states.


• The brain guzzles up—per unit weight—as much energy as the heart muscle, about 16 times more energy than the skeletal muscle at rest, or as much as the leg muscles during a marathon race.

And:

When the brain receives no signals from the environment, a considerable part of its energy is used in daydreaming: the human mind may be spending as much as half of its wakeful time daydreaming (Klinger, 1990). This comprises not only the creation of fanciful stories similar to those we dream during the night, but also the rehashing of all possible and impossible alternatives of the past, present and future activities.

This interior universe of daydreaming creates a continuous series of fictional rewards and punishments, which steadily builds up the unique and idiosyncratic personality of every human individual by conditioning. This may explain our capability to work for years on our career, tenaciously, with self-restraint and self-denial, as if we were motivated by the mirage of an ultimate reward.

Apparently, it is not the latter in the remote future, but our present fancies of it that provide immediate, positive rewards and function to reinforce our deeds.

leavening

The arts are not frosting but baking soda.

Author Michael S. Gazzaniga cited by Daniel Levitan in the Sunday New York Times' book review of Gazzaniga's Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique.

self-portrait as alien

When they start thin slicing the head with those MRIs, things start to get really weird, really fast.

self-portrait as embryo

From an MRI I had taken a loooooooooooong time ago when they were looking for something that, fortunately, I didn't have. Everything turned up fine on the scans, so I called the lab and asked if I could have the film of my brain.

The guy on the other end of the line paused. No one's ever asked for that before. And then: Yeah. Sure. I guess.

'Cause why wouldn't you want an xray of your own brain if you knew that one existed?

Just now starting to mess around with it. More images might come of this. Or not.

cool yer brain

Because a "cooler brain is a clearer brain."

Turns out yawning works too »


As reported in Insights: Big Yawn, Cooler Brain? Researchers Say Yes in today's New York Times.

Pith helmet courtesy of Hammacher Schlemmer »