Sciencing Recognizing

Описание: Among the delights of sciencing is recognizing. It’s the kind of mood boost you get when you watch a show like Jeopardy, see a clue and think “I know that! What is Cialis?” Or when you’re doing a crossword puzzle and see, “32 across, four letter adult beverage, rhymes with “cheer” and think, “I know that, beer!”

There's also the joy of getting it right. When formula and found the Top Quark they confirmed it's mass with 99.999 8% certainty

You can recognize the evolutionary advantage to an ape who can recognize a ripe, tasty fruit in a pile of green or spoiled ones. We didn’t descend from the ape who looked at the pile like, “I’ll try this brown, mushy apple with the yellow worms crawling out if it.”

We have a whole areas of our brains devoted to recognition. One visual processing area, the ventral stream, recognizes what things are. Ain’t it great to get that first glimpse of the Willis Tower when you’re flying home to Chicago? Another brain area, the dorsal stream, recognizes where the things are, their positions and directions. The dorsal stream is why you can look at an overthrown forward pass and, before it reaches the receiver, calculate, “No, he ain’t gonna get that one.”

It’s a hoot to see the veins of a leaf and recognize in it the shape of a lightning bolt, a river and a human vein. It cracks me up that with every breath I almost certainly inhale a few molecules that spent some time in Alexander the Great’s bladder. (inhale)

Sciencing my world also, on my good days, helps me recognize the limits of us poor old humans and our vulnerable little brains. Behavioral economists have shown that expensive fake drugs are clinically more effective than cheap fake drugs. Psychological scientists have shown you can spray a certain hormone up somebody’s nose and they’ll give away money. Scores of other studies point to the same conclusion, we’re just knuckleheads out here doing the best we can. The biologist Lewis Thomas puts it more eloquently, “the way evolution clocks time, we arrived on the scene only a moment ago, down from the trees puzzling over our opposing thumbs and wondering what on earth we're supposed to do with the flabbergasting gift of language and metaphor.”

Sez me to Dr. Thomas: Bro T, you want to figure out what to do with the thumb and language and metaphor and have fun? We all recognize the solution. Just science it!