Word: shaped
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Watching infants piece life together, seeing their senses, emotions and motor skills take shape, is a source of mystery and endless fascination--at least to parents and developmental psychologists. We can decode their signals of distress or read a million messages into their first smile. But how much do we really know about what's going on behind those wide, innocent eyes? How much of their understanding of and response to the world comes preloaded at birth? How much is built from scratch by experience? Such are the questions being explored at Babylab. Though the facility is just 18 months...
...this unusual case last September was just the latest shock from a bracing new field, the science of consciousness. Questions once confined to theological speculations and late-night dorm-room bull sessions are now at the forefront of cognitive neuroscience. With some problems, a modicum of consensus has taken shape. With others, the puzzlement is so deep that they may never be resolved. Some of our deepest convictions about what it means to be human have been shaken...
...dreamless sleep; smaller, faster, spikier ones correspond to being awake and alert. These waves are not like the useless hum from a noisy appliance but may allow consciousness to do its job in the brain. They may bind the activity in far-flung regions (one for color, another for shape, a third for motion) into a coherent conscious experience, a bit like radio transmitters and receivers tuned to the same frequency. Sure enough, when two patterns compete for awareness in a binocular-rivalry display, the neurons representing the eye that is "winning" the competition oscillate in synchrony, while the ones...
...Marion Weiss and Michael Manfredi, who designed the Olympic Sculpture Park for the Seattle Art Museum, have made their peace with that. "We thought the trains were amazing," says Weiss. "We wanted the park's pathways to slalom down and capture the energy of those trains." So the Z-shaped pathway that Weiss and Manfredi came up with is intended to praise the forces that shape Seattle, not to bury them. The team's $65 million park isn't just a respite from the city and its environs but a summation of them, an abbreviation for the place...
...phrenology, which divided the brain into dozens of personality organs to which the skull was said to conform. Learn to read those bony bumps, and you could know the mind within. The artificial--and, ultimately, racist--field of craniometry made similar claims, relying on the overall size and shape of the skull to try to determine intelligence and moral capacity...