Valentin's Blog

Happy New Year Everyone!

The Edge Foundation has just published its annual collection of the answers of distinguished scientists to its question of the year. This year the question is "What have you changed your Mind about? Why?". The Answers make for an interesting read, well suited to give you a couple of new ideas for the new year.

For example Dennet on 'Competition in the Brain' :

[...] Intelligent control of an animal's behavior is still a computational process, but the neurons are "selfish neurons," as Sebastian Seung has said, striving to maximize their intake of the different currencies of reward we have found in the brain. And what do neurons "buy" with their dopamine, their serotonin or oxytocin, etc.? Greater influence in the networks in which they participate.

Or Tor Norrestranders on 'Permanent Reincarnation':

[...] My body is not like a typical material object, a stable thing.  It is more like a flame, a river or an eddie. Matter is flowing through it all the time. The constituents are being replaced over and over again.

A chair or a table is stable because the atoms stay where they are. The stability of a river stems from the constant flow of water through it.

98 percent of the atoms in the body are replaced every year. 98 percent! Water molecules stays in your body for two weeks (and for an even shorter time in a hot climate), the atoms in your bones stays there for a few months. Some atoms stay for years. But almost not one single atom stay with you in your body from cradle to grave.

Physicist Richard Feynman said in 1955: "Last week's potatoes! They now can remember what was going on in your mind a year ago."

And Evolutionary Biologist Mark Pagel in 'We Differ More Than We Thought'

Flawed as the old ideas about race are, modern genomic studies reveal a surprising, compelling and different picture of human genetic diversity.  We are on average about 99.5% similar to each other genetically. This is a new figure, down from the previous estimate of 99.9%. To put what may seem like miniscule differences in perspective, we are somewhere around 98.5% similar, maybe more, to chimpanzees, our nearest evolutionary relatives.

And many many more, the entire list is here (you have to scroll down a bit)