Category: Brains and minds
The beauty of spatial cognition was long lost on me. But lately I've found nothing, other than my children's antics and my wife's voice, so absorbing. At its most basic, spatial cognition simply refers to the neural mechanisms by which we understand and navigate space: How we learn routes, extrapolate maps, orient ourselves when lost. These mechanisms are fascinating in their own right. But they are made trebly absorbing by the many suggestions that the mechanisms that we use for finding our way around underlie our broader, more abstract powers of memory, cognition, and even emotion -- that we navigate life, in short, much as a rat does a maze.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 4:54 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Nota Bene
There's more news -- unflattering to the company -- about Eli Lilly's, um, selective release of data about its antipsychotic drug: Lilly is trying to squash the full release (aka "the leak" or "unauthorized publication") of some internal memos that allegedly document its attempt to cover up Zyprexa's. dangerous side effects. But as Jake at Pure Pedantry outlines, the attempt -- which itself hardly looks good -- will likely fail, partly because many of of the documents have already been posted on web servers outside the U.S. and thus out of reach of U.S. courts.
This is the latest of several horrifically damning scandals in the drug industry, and it seems to embody and dramatize almost every flaw, foible, folly, and fuck-up that is costing the drug industry its credibility, and quite a few patients their lives.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 10:42 AM • •
Category:
The wattle bird, one of several Australian species that have been myteriously dying around the town of Esperance. _______________________________________________________________________________ As a former Texan, I took special notice last week when I heard Austin officials temporarily closed the downtown after finding several dozen birds of different species dead there. They never figured out what killed them; poison was the best bet. Now comes the story of thousands of birds, again of many species, dying in Australia: Birds fall from sky over town By Amanda O'Brien The Australian January 10, 2007 01:00am THOUSANDS of birds have fallen from the skies over...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 8:56 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Nota Bene
Among the responses to my previous post, "Why we're suckers for war talk", was a comment accusing me of "the error of assuming from start to finish that Bush's decision to go to war was in fact wrong." Well, people still argue about whether evolution or climate change are real, so why not argue over this? I suppose it's open to debate. Maybe I should leave that to history, rather to my own lyin' eyes.
Then again, maybe not. Instead, let's call a spade a spade; let us, please, set and keep the record straight.
Bush's war in Iraq was, is, and will remain a mistake, wrong in its premises, motives, rationales, and execution.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 3:37 PM • 3 Comments •
Category: Nota Bene
I'm not a reagular reader of Foreign Policy magazine, but thank goodness I check in regularly at The Thinking Meat Project, which draws attention to a fascinating piece by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahnemnn on on how common "error biases" in our thinking make us vulnerable to the strident certainty of hawkish arguments. The article explains why leaders (and the rest of us presumably) often fall for arguments that advocate "forceful action" when something more thoughtful is called for. This is not a cutesy essay by some trendy thinker; it's is a careful piece of work by Princeton economist Daniel...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 10:55 PM • 4 Comments •
Author and journalist 
