The UA College of Science is launching its spring lecture series, focusing on the mind and the brain, tomorrow night. The talks start at 7 p.m. at UA’s Centennial Hall.
Lynn Nadel, a Regents’ Professor in Psychology, will discuss “Building Brains, Making Minds”:
What does the brain do? The ancients thought it was a radiator, cooling the blood. Modern views see it as an activator, using inputs from the environment in combination with prior knowledge to generate behaviors (walking, talking, eating and drinking) and mental states (feelings, desires and beliefs). Recently the idea has emerged that the brain acts as a predictor, using inputs and stored knowledge to generate models of the world, and of the consequences of possible actions we and others might pursue. These models can predict what will happen in the next minute, hour or decade, and allow us to behave in the most adaptive way.
This article appears in Feb 18-24, 2010.
Other than Senior Editor Jim Nintzel, people don’t get much coverage of UA science activity by local media, but with this one you gotta say Jim Nintzel has finally earned a bathroom break by being less Mars-centric and presenting other stuff. Good behavior should be rewarded.
And the bad:
Over at the Arizona Daily Star you find Phil Villareal’s
Record-setting Great Dane set to do Tucson proud on ‘Oprah’
http://www.azstarnet.com/news/local/articl…
Red Star, I thank you for the props, although I’m actually just a senior writer these days (and occasional top commenter).
Those Mars photos are just so beautiful that I feel compelled to share them with the world, even if it seems a bit obsessive at times.