Word: rem
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Posner considers a slew of world-ending scenarios with REM-style enthusiasm. He reports one scientist’s estimate that there’s a 1 in 100,000 chance of an asteroid smashing earth in any given year and killing a billion people. Alternatively, Posner speculates, “superintelligent robots” might turn on their human creators and “kill us, put us in zoos, or enslave...
...Clark would buzz-saw transverse slices out of entire wood and plaster structures, giant incisions that would turn the buildings into a fascinating kind of site-specific sculpture. His work shook up the very idea of a building, a practice carried further by the generation of Deconstructivist architects like Rem Koolhaas, Peter Eisenman and Daniel Libeskind, who came to prominence in the '80s with work that radically rearranged building space and form...
...matter what the exterior looks like, the skyscraper can be a problematic building--isolated, aloof from its neighbors and boring inside, a pancake stack of identical floor plates with a lobby at the bottom and maybe a restaurant at the top. For years now, Rem Koolhaas, the oracular Dutch architect and urban theorist, has conducted an unrelenting rhetorical campaign against the skyscraper. "The promise it once held," he wrote recently, "has been negated by repetitive banality [and] carefully spaced isolation...
What McNaughton's recordings have shown is that many of the same neurons that fire during the daytime--say, when a rat is learning to navigate a maze--are reactivated during the REM stage of sleep. "Basically, the brain is reviewing its recently stored data," he says. Eventually the brain consolidates those patterns into permanent connections--or, as neuroscientists like to say, "neurons that fire together, wire together." Interestingly, says McNaughton, that process appears to happen not just during sleep but during restful states throughout the day as well...
...good. But what does it mean? Tononi speculates that instead of strengthening neural connections responsible for a given task, as appears to happen during the day or in REM sleep, slow-wave sleep actually indiscriminately weakens the connections among all nerves. The idea sounds counterintuitive, but it may simply be a matter of self-preservation. "Normally the brain takes up 20% of the energy of the entire body," Tononi explains. Most of that energy goes into sustaining the connecting points, or synapses, between neurons. The more you learn, the greater the number of synapses...