Word: spatial
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...they were defeated at least in part by a pathologist who carried off his brain in hopes of learning the secrets of his genius. Only recently Canadian researchers, probing those pickled remains, found that he had an unusually large inferior parietal lobe--a center of mathematical thought and spatial imagery--and shorter connections between the frontal and temporal lobes. More definitive insights, though, are emerging from old Einstein letters and papers. These are finally coming to light after years of resistance by executors eager to shield the great relativist's image...
Einstein was brilliant, of course, but he was also lucky. When he developed the general theory of relativity, he dealt with a world that had just three spatial dimensions plus time. As a result, he could use off-the-shelf mathematics to develop and solve his equations. M theorists can't: their science resides in an 11-dimensional world that is filled with weird objects called branes. Strings, in this nomenclature, are one-dimensional branes; membranes are two-dimensional branes. But there are also higher-dimensional branes that no one, including Witten, quite knows how to deal with. For these...
...Malkovich, in Keanu Reeves' encounter with that manic bullet in The Matrix. It's a kind of back formation from computer language, this narrative revolution manifesting itself in film. But it surely partakes of the new machine's ability to cast us adrift in ungrounded cyberspace, where all the spatial and temporal laws governing the representation of human reality will be revised, maybe repealed. It will extend to the other arts. It will reorder our perceptions more surely than Matisse and Stravinsky did, for a pixel--unlike paint, canvas or score paper--has no past to overturn, is radically innocent...
...expansiveness is divided into different sections, allowing a diner to digest (no pun intended) the immense space of the dining hall in manageable increments. As in Quincy, there is a rectangular central eating area that is flanked on both sides by more intimate commensal spaces. Rather than resolutely delineating spatial boundaries using flanks of columns as Quincy does, Mather separates the private side spaces from the main area with boundaries that are themselves dining spaces (alternating brick walls and tables), seamlessly moving from one dining space to another without the visual interruption of columns. On one side, this boundary separates...
...analysis of Einstein's brain by Canadian scientists, reported in the current Lancet, reveals that it has some distinctive physical characteristics after all. A portion of the brain that governs mathematical ability and spatial reasoning--two key ingredients to the sort of thinking Einstein did best--was significantly larger than average and may also have had more interconnections among its cells, which could have allowed them to work together more effectively. While the case is far from proven, says Dr. Francine Benes, director of the Structural Neuroscience Laboratory at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., "it's a fascinating discovery...