For decades, we’ve known, through the work of Benjamin Libet and others, that neuronal activity to initiate neuromuscular activity precedes conscious thought. Now scientists are attempting to harness those brain signals and put them to work. In the Brain2Robot project, an international team of researchers has developed a robot control system that works […]
Dennis Overbye has an excellent summary of the mind-versus-matter debate in the first NYT Science Times of the new year.
If people freak at evolution, how much more will they freak if scientists and philosophers tell them they are nothing more than sophisticated meat machines, and is that conclusion now clearly warranted or is it premature?
–Michael […]
European researchers have developed “neuro-chips” in which living brain cells and silicon circuits are coupled together. According to author, Ker Than, in an article published in Live Science, “The achievement could one day enable the creation of sophisticated neural prostheses to treat neurological disorders or the development of organic computers that crunch numbers using living […]
Ian McEwan’s Saturday
This novel examines one day in the life of Henry Perowne, a prominent and successful London neurosurgeon. While driving his new Mercedes, Perowne collides with Baxter, a street thug and victim of Huntington’s chorea, whose condition makes him dangerously unpredictable: violent and sensitive by turns. Perowne can’t help diagnosing Baxter, even while Baxter […]
Bill Newsome, a neuroscientist at Stanford University in Palo Alto, CA, has spent the last twenty years studying how neurons encode information and how they use it to make decisions about the world.
But Newsome is obsessed with a lingering question: How does consciousness arise from brain function? He feels the best way to answer that […]
Neuroscience and brain imaging continue to appear almost daily in the mainstream press. Lately, the focus is on lie detection and other forensic applications for functional brain imaging. See, for example, Don’t Even Think About Lying in the January 2006 issue of Wired Magazine and Looking For The Lie in the New York Times Magazine […]
A Novel by Richard Dooling
Read Chapter One of Brain Storm
New York Times Notable Book of 1998
Amazon Hot 100 Bestseller
Review Excerpts
“Dooling’s new book is a brilliant concoction, flashing with comedic and intellectual energy . . . . an inspired piece of work, a caustically funny, antic diatribe with a tightly woven criminal intrigue at its narrational […]
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