The second I close the hatch behind me, it occurs to me that I have watched far too many horror movies for this to end well. I’m in the basement of a building in South London where people shell out £45 to spend an hour in a sensory deprivation tank. The shiny white pod is […]
Mind/Brain
Comedian Jessica Kirson, as captured by the inimitable Brian Friedman My name is Ginny and I’m an adult pun-lover. When I hear a good one — Photons have mass? I didn’t even know they were Catholic! — I don’t roll my eyes or smirk. I double over laughing, like a 7-year-old. What is it exactly […]
In our centuries-old tradition of interviewing the Persons of LWON who are authors of newly-published books, here is our interview with Jessa about her new book, The Siesta and the Midnight Sun. Q: Your book is about, as you say, “the body clock as a biological universal, a foundation on which cultures lay their own rituals […]
Some of you, I suspect, have read in Time, Slate, NPR, Popular Science, Wired, or dozens of other news outlets that scientists have figured out how to read minds. I hate to always be the neuro–tech downer, but that claim is just false. Laughably false. That’s not to say that the study behind all of the commotion, published late […]
I wonder why. I wonder why. I wonder why I wonder. I wonder why I wonder why I wonder why I wonder! The poet: Richard P. Feynman. The occasion: an undergraduate philosophy term paper at MIT. A great work of poetry? Perhaps not. An example of profound thinking and the ability to render a complex […]
When William Gibson coined the term cyberspace in 1984 in the book Neuromancer, he described it as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators in every nation.” Decades later, Gibson declared that cyberspace was everting. Which is to say, entering the next phase of its evolution by creeping out of the virtual […]
I just wrote a story about robots whose brains are based on the neural networks of real creatures (mostly cats, rats and monkeys). Researchers put these ‘brains’ in an engineered body — sometimes real, sometimes virtual — equipped with sensors for light and sound and touch. Then they let them loose into the world — […]
I don’t know where you’re sitting right now, but do me a favor: zoom out to a space shuttle’s eye-view of your spot on the blue marble. Now spin the globe until you’re looking at exactly the opposite side. If you were here with me in London, our antipodal opposite would be (approximately) New Zealand. […]