Science News

Map designer Aris Venetikidis is fascinated by the maps we draw in our minds as we move around a city -- less like street maps, more like schematics or wiring diagrams, abstract images of relationships between places. How can we learn from these mental maps to make better real ones? As a test case, he remakes the notorious Dublin bus map. (Filmed at TEDxDublin)

No tangles! The human brain's connections turn out to be a an orderly 3D grid structure with no diagonals. 2D sheets of parallel fibers cross at right angles -- " like the warp and weft of a fabric." The first pictures from the most powerful brain scanner of its kind reveal an "astonishingly simple architecture." This diffusion spectrum image of a whole human brain came from the new Connectom scanner, part of the NIH's Human Connectome Project. See full story at http://www.nimh.nih.gov/science-news/2012/brain-wiring-a-no-brainer.shtml *This video has NO audio.*

The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves,” writes Betsy Sparrow, a psychologist at Columbia University, in a paper published earlier this year in Science. Sparrow argues, based on a series of experiments with human subjects, that if we think data will be available on the internet, we feel freer to forget it. Instead of remembering information, we remember how to find it. In the age of the search engine, the contents of our brains are becoming more abstract, like maps, swept clean of the crumbs of detail that make up the world.

Merritt Ruhlen, a lecturer in Anthropology at Stanford, and his longtime collaborator Murray Gell-Mann, a founder and Distinguished Professor of the Santa Fe Institute, have mapped the evolution of word order in a paper titled "The Origin and Evolution of Word Order," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).