Category: Books
Last month, when all the "Best Books of 2007" lists came out, several regulars on a science writers list-serve I'm on expressed chagrin that most of the most prominent lists held few science books. Even defining "science book" broadly, the New York Times Review Notable Books list contained just one science book ( How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman ) The Amazon Best 100 lists held somewhere between none and five, depending on how you defined science book.
...Best Of lists are great fodder for arguments, of course, and part of the ire in the science writers group was, naturally enough, that fewer of our books were on there.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 8:53 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Nota Bene
At Mind Matters , the expert-written blog I manage for Scientific American , I've posted a sort of round-up review of the material and papers we covered in that blog's first year.
...But with the end of both the calendar year and Mind Matters' first year it seems a good time to look a back and see where we have been since launching in January.
...Looking back requires memory, and by chance that's where we started, with a post by memory researcher James Knierim reviewing what likely will prove the most influential single discovery we covered, that of grid cells in the mouse entorhinal cortex -- a system of neurons that appear to help track location and create context for memories.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 9:02 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Books
Burton, a neurologist and novelist, looks at how and why certainty feels utterly the same whether we're right or woefully wrong about the thing we're so certain about. ... There are many books lately about fascinating neuroscience these days, but few are as fascinating as this one, which eloquently marshals a strong argument about something important on both personal and societal levels.
...Before he wrote the incomparable <em>The Once and Future King</em>, T.H.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 8:40 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Each December the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury has a gingerbread-house exhibit and competition. This year's was better than ever, with some amusing political entries. I'm not sure which I liked better - "Mission Accomplished," which tests the idea of whether a gingerbread house can be grim:
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Posted by David Dobbs at 7:18 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brains and minds
Gregory Quirk , a former post-doc in the lab of fear-research pioneer Joe LeDoux (whom I once profiled in Scientific American Mind , is lead author on a review of what we know about how fear learning is extinguished (a poor term; fears are not so much extinguished as replaced by stronger lessons about not fearing) and then revived. He and co-author Kevin Meuller also discuss the potential for drugs for fear and anxiety disorders (OCD, PTSD, etc.) that seem to involve dysfunctions in fear extinction.
...Like other forms of learning, extinction occurs in three phases: acquisition, consolidation, and retrieval, each of which depends on specific structures (amygdala, prefrontal cortex, hippocampus) and molecular mechanisms (receptors and signaling pathways).
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Posted by David Dobbs at 8:53 AM • 0 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 
