Mr Wright observes: From time to time it is useful for sane men in an insane world to remind themselves of basic truths.The first truth is that truth is true. A statement that there is no truth, if true, is false. We know this truth is basic because without it, no question can be answered, not even the question of whether or not truth is true.Truth is a subtle and complex topic, but what we mean by the word can be said in a short sentence using words of one syllable: Truth is when one says ‘it is’, and it is as one says.The second conclusion springs immediately from the first. We know that truth is true because to say Read More ›

Clearly, the brain is not at all like a machine: A study of six adults who each had half of their brain removed or partially removed as children is helping us understand how they retain language and thinking skills. This radical surgery (hemispherectomy) is done when epileptic seizures have severely damaged one lobe of the brain. Sensory, motor, or language deficits sometimes follow but many patients retain normal functions with only half a brain… In fact, as the open-access paper reports, the six people with up to half their brain removed (see Figure 1 from the paper, right) had stronger connections than the six with whole brains. “Some people think and speak with only half a brain” at Mind Matters Read More ›

I haven’t had time to read this yet, but it sure looks interesting. A new paper came out across the pond discussing the thermodynamic efficiency of various cellular processes/computations. An interesting snippet from the abstract: Here we show that the computational efficiency of translation, defined as free energy expended per amino acid operation, outperforms the best supercomputers by several orders of magnitude, and is only about an order of magnitude worse than the Landauer bound. Of course, various scientists assure us that selectionism is a failed concept and that no biologist today takes it seriously, right? Oh wait, also from the abstract: This issue is interesting both from the perspective of how close life has come to maximally efficient computation Read More ›