Word: grasping
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...everything from 60 Minutes to The Colbert Report--that it's easy to overlook the substance of the man. Schweitzer has a master's in soil science from Montana State University and spent seven years building irrigation projects in Saudi Arabia. He speaks fluent Arabic and has a sophisticated grasp of Middle Eastern politics and the history of oil. Last summer I watched Schweitzer deploy all this information--plus his familiarity with biology and chemistry, plus maps and charts and assorted biofuel samples--in a colloquial, anecdotal and entirely accessible 40-minute luncheon talk at the Lions Club of Helena...
...everything from 60 Minutes to The Colbert Report--that it's easy to overlook the substance of the man. Schweitzer has a master's in soil science from Montana State University and spent seven years building irrigation projects in Saudi Arabia. He speaks fluent Arabic and has a sophisticated grasp of Middle Eastern politics and the history of oil. Last summer I watched Schweitzer deploy all this information--plus his familiarity with biology and chemistry, plus maps and charts and assorted biofuel samples--in a colloquial, anecdotal and entirely accessible 40-minute luncheon talk at the Lions Club of Helena...
...ganglia and nuclei of the brain's gross anatomy--but "bigger" than the cells and molecules of the brain's physiology. We really should have bumped into it on the way down. Yet we have not. Like our own image in still water, however sharp, when we reach to grasp it, it just dissolves...
...Hard Problem is itself a quirk of our brains. The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains can't hold a hundred numbers in memory, can't visualize seven-dimensional space and perhaps can't intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the outside should give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This is where I place my bet, though I admit that the theory could be demolished when an unborn genius--a Darwin or Einstein of consciousness--comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that...
...that was before University of Parma neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues began publishing the eyebrow-raising results of experiments they had been conducting with macaques. The Italian scientists were monitoring the monkeys' brain activity--observing how neurons in the premotor cortex buzzed with activity as the animals grasped a piece of food--when something strange kept happening. The monkeys would be sitting still, doing nothing in particular, and one of the researchers would pick up some raisins or sunflower seeds in order to place them on a tray. At that point, the same neurons started buzzing again, in just...