Category: Brains and minds
The beauty of spatial cognition was long lost on me. But lately I've found nothing, other than my children's antics and my wife's voice, so absorbing. At its most basic, spatial cognition simply refers to the neural mechanisms by which we understand and navigate space: How we learn routes, extrapolate maps, orient ourselves when lost. These mechanisms are fascinating in their own right. But they are made trebly absorbing by the many suggestions that the mechanisms that we use for finding our way around underlie our broader, more abstract powers of memory, cognition, and even emotion -- that we navigate life, in short, much as a rat does a maze.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 7:54 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Science policy
There's more news -- unflattering to the company -- about Eli Lilly's, um, selective release of data about its antipsychotic drug: Lilly is trying to squash the full release (aka "the leak" or "unauthorized publication") of some internal memos that allegedly document its attempt to cover up Zyprexa's. dangerous side effects. But as Jake at Pure Pedantry outlines, the attempt -- which itself hardly looks good -- will likely fail, partly because many of of the documents have already been posted on web servers outside the U.S. and thus out of reach of U.S. courts.
This is the latest of several horrifically damning scandals in the drug industry, and it seems to embody and dramatize almost every flaw, foible, folly, and fuck-up that is costing the drug industry its credibility, and quite a few patients their lives.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 1:42 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The wattle bird, one of several Australian species that have been myteriously dying around the town of Esperance. _______________________________________________________________________________...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 11:56 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Nota Bene
Among the responses to my previous post, "Why we're suckers for war talk", was a comment accusing me of "the error of assuming from start to finish that Bush's decision to go to war was in fact wrong." Well, people still argue about whether evolution or climate change are real, so why not argue over this? I suppose it's open to debate. Maybe I should leave that to history, rather to my own lyin' eyes.
Then again, maybe not. Instead, let's call a spade a spade; let us, please, set and keep the record straight.
Bush's war in Iraq was, is, and will remain a mistake, wrong in its premises, motives, rationales, and execution.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 6:37 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture of science
I'm not a reagular reader of Foreign Policy magazine, but thank goodness I check in regularly at The Thinking...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 1:55 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I write on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications. (Find 
