The Last Word On Nothing

On a journey into the Kenai Mountains of South Central Alaska between snow-swollen peaks and cornices curling above glaciers, we carried a satellite phone. I usually don’t take any form of outside communication into the wilderness, so this device was nagging on me.

For whatever reason I was fine with headlamps and ropes, various pieces of technology, but the phone felt like an intrusion. Ostensibly, it was for emergencies. John, one of the trip members, had a mother who’d been in a deteriorating state of dementia and was on the edge of death when he left for this trip. John said that her dementia had been in place for years and that he’d lost his mother long ago, but he needed to stay in touch.

I wondered what the analog of a satellite phone could possibly have been before we ever had technology like this, the last hollers though a mountain pass, a stack of rocks left for someone else to find hundreds or thousands of years later. What has the satellite phone done but lengthen our goodbyes? Continue reading →

It’s a Redux week here at LWON as we take a short summer break. It’s hot and it’s always a good time to think about dogs, as in this sweet post from last summer by Cameron Walker.

These are the dog days. Hot as a dog, lazy as a dog, wanting to curl up and take naps like a dog. Please, let us lie, sleeping like them, on these summer afternoons.

But the phrase didn’t originate from the habits of our earthly canine companions. Instead, it came from Sirius, the dog star. In July and early August, Sirius rises and sets with the sun. People once thought that the combined power of our daytime star and the brightest one in our night sky brought the full heat of summer.

Here below, our own dog star’s light has started to dim. We got him from a rescue group nearly six years ago. He’s a strange brew of Labrador and possibly Great Dane—100 pounds with an enormous head—and somewhere between eight and ten years old. We might be seeing the shine from Sirius, 8.7 light years away, from around the time he was born.

He was not born under a lucky star, it seems. Continue reading →

It’s a Redux week here at LWON as we take a short summer break. My holiday reading is Tales From Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience, by Michael S. Gazzaniga. It’s a memoir of the amazing discovery of split-brain phenomena in patients whose left and right brains have been separated. It put me in mind of this guest post by Sam Kean that ran on May 5, 2014. I think it might be my favorite guest post so far. Enjoy!

If neuroscientists could pick one idea to pack into a wormhole and expel to the outer reaches of the galaxy, there would be several worthy candidates. Some would probably pick the notion that you can “read” people’s tastes and preferences and even political ideologies on brain scans. Others might banish all talk of “neuroplasticity” and “mirror neurons.” Still others would rejoice to never hear another person ramble on about the “logical” left brain versus the “artistic” right brain, and how you can fulfill your creative potential only by thinking with both halves of your brain at once. Who knew!

All that said, backlashes can go too far sometimes. And in the last case especially, it’s a shame that hippie-dippy pseudopsychology has turned a lot of people off to the fascinating world of left brain/right brain differences. The two hemispheres really do have distinct talents, and while it’s easy to make too much of those differences, they do offer a fascinating peek at how the brain evolved and how it works in certain situations. Take the ability to read emotions on other people’s faces. Continue reading →