magine life without expressing your views. Your country joins the EU. Your country exits the EU. Your children severely, potentially criminally, misbehave and do so publicly. You meet myriad governmental heads, some of whom intrigue you, others who leave you indifferent, and inevitably some who you abhor. And now imagine that you say and show nothing of your feelings....
I continue to be wowed by NeuroMOOC students so much so that I have changed both my teaching goals and the actions that I take to achieve those goals. This is not a new sentiment as I have written previously about several NeuroMOOCers in the past: Sabeen Mahmud, Anish Garikipati, Francisca Martínez Traub, Diana Keat, and Felipe Sales Nogueira Anorim Canedo. Yet, I […]
I have tried and tried, over and over, to write a post relating how teaching Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life on Coursera has changed my life. Every time that I have thought of sitting down to summarize my experience in writing, I quickly become overwhelmed by my feelings of deep gratitude for this journey that NeuroMOOCers and […]
I was devastated when my friend and colleague, Sheharyar Hasnain, emailed me to tell me that Sabeen Mahmud had been assassinated in Karachi as she and her mother were going home from her bookstore/café/salon. As of the latest updates, Sabeen’s mother is in critical condition. I am an unlikely person – an Americam Jew – to be touched personally by the […]
Let’s talk about our memory experiment. There were many features of memory that were of interest when I designed this experiment and I will touch on all of them. But this is a long, actually very long post. So, I will start with the points that I think are the most interesting. The most interesting of all is that, when push comes to shove, we preferentially […]
Last week, a report was published in PlosOne that analyzes the walking gait of siblings from rural Turkey that walk on all fours. [Big thanks to my friend Bing Shaw for alerting me to this via the WaPo.] Walking on all fours is so unusual among human adults that the affected siblings from the Ulas family have received a great […]
Francisca Martínez Traub, a student in the 2014 session of the NeuroMOOC that I teach, emailed me to ask if I had heard of the work of Brazilian neuroscientist, Suzana Herculano-Houzel. I had not. The student wrote that Dr Herculano-Houzel was interested in collecting data on the total number of cells in the brain and what proportion of those cells are […]
I spoke with Dr Marie McNeely of People Behind the Science about my path to science, my laboratory work and well, I don’t know how else to put this: about me. I really enjoyed talking with Marie and found her outside-the-box questions to be entertaining. These questions made me think of events that I have not thought of for a […]
When I was first approached to teach a massively open on-line course or MOOC, I had never heard of the acronym and was only dimly aware in a vague way of Coursera and edX. Now, roughly 9 months later, I am finishing week 1 of my (really ours – doesn’t happen without an amazing team) very own MOOC: Understanding the […]
This morning I read about a new potential treatment for hearing loss, one that could be very exciting. Marlon Aguilar, the incredibly talented sound engineer for our MOOC, sent me the link to a news story, reporting a test of a minimally invasive treatment for hearing loss. Currently we “treat” most hearing loss by providing hearing aids which does not […]
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The brain is sooooo cool! 