Word: graspings
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...bittersweet consolation of outgrowing your favorite children’s books is the chance to revisit them as adults with keener eyes. One of my own pet series of grade-school readers featured Amelia Bedelia, a bonneted and primly smocked English maid with a shaky grasp of her own native language. Much to the chagrin of her employers, Mr. and Mrs. Rogers, Amelia comically (and sometimes catastrophically) misinterprets their housekeeping instructions, thanks to her literalist approach to language...
...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...
...patients with depression or OCD, the conscious act of thinking about their thoughts in a particular way rearranged the brain. The discovery of neuroplasticity, in particular the power of the mind to change the brain, is still too new for scientists, let alone the rest of us, to grasp its full meaning. But even as it offers new therapies for illnesses of the mind, it promises something more fundamental: a new understanding of what it means to be human...
...understand their motives, and to appreciate that the separation anxiety that runs just beneath the surface of our interactions is very real on both sides. To a parent, seeing your child’s politics change while they’re away from home and out of your grasp has got to be agonizing. It’s a little more change, a little more distance. That can’t be easy to watch...