From New Scientist, a look at how chaos drives the brain. Insect colonies offer insight into the mysterious conversations of neurons, illuminating how billions of individual brain cells work in concert to make a single decision. Understanding human thought processes puts a different spin on everything from global financial meltdowns to fighter pilot errors. Did an ice age boost human brain size? Your brain faces an enormous challenge: what is the best story that can be constructed about the outside world? Your brain on the Internet: What does the ubiquitous availability of digital text mean for the human brain as it processes ever-increasingly amounts of information? The Joys of Brain Scrubbing: The advantages of memory deletion in a collectively omniscient world. Your brain in drive: What happens when an older driver takes the wheel — and what we all can learn from it. A review of The Philosophical Baby: What Children's Minds Tell Us About Truth, Love and the Meaning of Life by Alison Gopnik (and more and more and more and more and more and more). Stunning discoveries about how babies and children develop can help answer questions about deeply human concepts such as morality, identity and consciousness. Dan and Chip Heath on why your gut is more ethical than your brain.
