Our brains are filled with billions of neurons. Neuroscientist Sebastian Seung explains how mapping out the connections between those neurons might be the key to understanding the basis of things like personality, memory, perception, ideas and mental illness.
http://www.npr.org/2012/02/29/147190092/the-man-working-to-reverse-engineer-your-brain
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, associate professor and director of the Information and Innovation Policy Research Center at National University of Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy discusses his new book Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.
From http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/2009/10/06/segments/142076
An interview with Dr. Terrence Sejnowski about theoretical and computational biology and neurobiology.
Guest: Terrence Sejnowski of the Salk Institute
http://futuresinbiotech.com/blog/2009/9/8/futures-in-biotech-46-towards-computers-that-think.html
’ve heard Andrew Hinton give various talks on the problem of context, but he never fails to help me dive deeper into the problem. Simply put, digital spaces lack physical context, and frequently do a very bad job of substituting a digital context for the physical. This problem might seem a bit abstract, until we realize just how important context is to human cognition. Andrew has a number of great examples of this, but the one that resonates with me is role of context in social cognition. We have relationships with our families, our friends, our peers, our co-workers, and more, and we modulate both how we express our selves and how we process information based on which context we’re in. Digital social spaces tend to collapse these contexts, connecting us with all of our social circles through one channel, allowing us to express ourselves in one way. This gets worse as when we introduce aggregation into the picture, because we not only collapse social context but also “object” context. In some way, we can work around the problem of context by segregating our interactions across tools. Aggregators take away even that modicum of control.
Andrew asked us how we’re going to start to understand the ramifications of this shift in context, and to start thinking about how we’re going to understand the problem. Is this a fundamental behavioral shift? Is it a problem to be solved? Or is it an opportunity to create new kinds of contexts?
If it comes to you easily, being able to read is easy to take for granted. But reading is an extraordinarily complex process, one that researchers are still working to understand fully. On today’s Please Explain we look at the science of reading. Dr. Sally E. Shaywitz and Dr. Bennett A. Shaywitz are professors in Learning Development at the Yale University School of Medicine and Co-Directors of the Yale Center for Learning.
Scott McCloud is both an accomplished comics creator and critic. His books of comics criticism, "Understanding Comics," "Reinventing Comics" and "Making Comics" are classics of the form, and are standard-issue in hip literature classes around the country. His newest book is a compilation of his 1980s superhero series Zot!. He talks with us about how to read comics and how he incorporated the influences of the comics of other cultures into his own work in the ’80s.
Albert Einstein died more than half a century ago, but there’s still a raging debate over what he thought about religion. He once said "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." In this hour of To the Best of Our Knowledge, what exactly did Einstein conclude about religion? We’ll hear from leading scientists and religious scholars, including Richard Dawkins, Steven Weinberg and Elaine Pagels, as well as Einstein biographer Walter Isaacson.
Steve Paulson speaks with Richard Dawkins, Elaine Pagels, and Einstein biographer Walter Isaacson. David Lindorff wrote about two physicists’ interest in mysticism and alchemy. David Leavitt tells the story of mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. Father Thomas Keating talks about God and the contemplative life.