A guide to getting it done — Self-publishing gives you complete creative control. In return, you have to do ALL THE WORK. What exactly does that look like? Read on to get an overview of the process: Editing, Design, Identifiers, Distribution, and Marketing. I wrote my first book as part of the Writing Cooperative’s recent finish your…

Decision making, with and without consciousness — These images reveal the structures of plants. A talented plant cell biologist from Charles University in Prague has taken optical cross sections of these plants using a confocal microscope, then colorized the resulting image files to create works of art. You can view them in more detail here. Plants are…

Emotion plays a powerful role in information seeking and problem solving — I had the privilege of listening to a talk by Jacqueline Gottlieb at the (virtual) UC Davis Exploring the Mind speaker series last Friday. …

Arnold Lobel’s stories about Frog and Toad portray an endearing friendship between two individuals you might think would be incompatible. Reading them, I can’t help but to question what kind of friend I am. I will reveal my answer below, but first, what kind of friend are you? …

Outstanding professional science writers and editors share their wisdom — I arrived in the dry, oxygen poor environment of Santa Fe sleep deprived and uncertain what to expect. That first night we sat in a circle as the instructors and 52 students took turns introducing ourselves. It took a long time. The room was warm and I felt loopy. I…

An area ripe for study — In “Neuroscience Can Model Consciousness,” Jussi Jylkkä and Henry Railo asserted that consciousness has causal effects. I have been thinking about that a lot since. What are the purported causal effects of consciousness, and how might we measure them? Many studies of consciousness are focused on the mechanisms that generate…

In “The Diverse Mechanisms of Sensory Experience,” I described how each of our senses is encoded in the brain as organized mental maps of sensory space. The story doesn’t end there. For us to make sense of the world, our brain must integrate sensory inputs into a coherent whole. …

Show your lungs some love in the time of COVID-19 — A month ago I had major surgery. In the weeks leading up to it I had panic attack level anxiety. Thanks to a recent post by Ben L. Callif, I found relief with Wim Hof breathing. Now that I have recovered I find myself in a new world. People everywhere…