I *think* the pictures on his book are his mom and dad as kids, with their parents. Our copy is checked out, and Amazon doesn't say specifically, but it looks to me like a white man with a little girl and a black mother and child (gender uncertain at the resolution I have). And they don't have "search inside" for this title!

I have to go rewatch House. My son called in the middle and I missed a lot of good stuff.

ION, it's snowing here. In April. Not unheard of, but I really wish it wouldn't.

Later, customers attested that they heard the coyote say, "Find your soul mate, Homer...."

Hearts Teppy.

Kat, I'm sorry your mom is being a teen on you. Bah.

I love that high school picture. HS! In Hawaii!

It's really darling. And, err. Wow. He's younger than my sister by almost a year.

Speaking of Sleestaks....

In Our Messy, Reptilian Brains

Just as the mouse brain is a lizard brain "with some extra stuff thrown on top," Linden writes, the human brain is essentially a mouse brain with extra toppings. That's how we wound up with two vision systems. In amphibians, signals from the eye are processed in a region called the midbrain, which, for instance, guides a frog's tongue to insects in midair and enables us to duck as an errant fastball bears down on us. Our kludgy brain retains this primitive visual structure even though most signals from the eye are processed in the visual cortex, a newer addition. If the latter is damaged, patients typically say they cannot see a thing. Yet if asked to reach for an object, many of them can grab it on the first try. And if asked to judge the emotional expression on a face, they get it right more often than chance would predict—especially if that expression is anger.

They're not lying about being unable to see. In such "blindsight," people who have lost what most of us think of as vision are seeing with the amphibian visual system. But because the midbrain is not connected to higher cognitive regions, they have no conscious awareness of an object's location or a face's expression. Consciously, the world looks inky black. But unconsciously, signals from the midbrain are merrily zipping along to the amygdala (which assesses emotion) and the motor cortex (which makes the arm reach out).

...

With modern parts atop old ones, the brain is like an iPod built around an eight-track cassette player. One reptilian legacy is that as our eyes sweep across the field of view, they make tiny jumps. At the points between where the eyes alight, what reaches the brain is blurry, so the visual cortex sees the neural equivalent of jump cuts. The brain nevertheless creates a coherent perception out of them, filling in the gaps of the jerky feed. What you see is continuous, smooth. But as often happens with kludges, the old components make their presence felt in newer systems, in this case taking a system that worked well in vision and enlisting it higher-order cognition. Determined to construct a seamless story from jumpy input, for instance, patients with amnesia will, when asked what they did yesterday, construct a story out of memory scraps.

I've mentioned this before, but I find stuff like this fascinating....

the human brain is essentially a mouse brain with extra toppings.

Mine must have whipped cream and chopped nuts today.

Brains are neato! No wonder zombies like 'em so much.

Ailleann needs this in a bad way.

kat, sorry your mom went all agnsty on you.

Fish link freaky.

Granted, I stayed up far too late last night, but today's people seem to be either so staggeringly stupid that I can't be bothered to mock them for it, or their requests are so incredibly labyrinthine that I can't freaking parse them. I'm only halfway down my coffee cup, and I'm already grabbing the monitor and growling, "ENGLISH, MOTHERFUCKER."

I'm making a bracelet that says, "What Would shrift Do?"

Kat, I'm sorry your mother doesn't know her place in the world is now adoring grandmother and not troubled teen. Also, David Quammen rocks. Song of the Dodo is one of my go-to books when I need to disappear for 1/2 an hour because I can pick it up, open it to any section and find that it's (still) interesting and well written.

The whole staff is grumpy because the U President often gives folks the afternoon off before a holiday break but it's now past noon and looks like we'll all just have to settle for our 5 day weekend.

The whole staff is grumpy because the U President often gives folks the afternoon off before a holiday break but it's now past noon and looks like we'll all just have to settle for our 5 day weekend.

Damn, and I thought my diamond shoes were pinchy today. I'm the one in our unit who has volunteered to _only_ take a four-day weekend. Yes, I know. Big damned hero. I'm guessing Tuesday will be a ghost town around here, so crazy like a coyote, really.