Archives
It’s on the tip of my tongue…
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/03/Tip-of-the-Tongue.mp3[/podcast] How often has this happened to you? “So I was talking to...to...oh, you know, that guy, the one in the head office, big hair, bad teeth, only listens to Perry Como records...geez, why can’t I remember his name? It’s on the tip of my tongue!” It’s a common phenomenon, and it’s not just people's names. Sometimes you can’t think of the name of a place, or a food, or a car, or...just about anything. You can feel that the information is in your head, but you can’t shape it into a word. It may be a well-known phenomenon, but it isn’t well-understood. However, new research may have shed a little light on the mechanism involved. One leading explanation for tip-of-the-tongue torment is that when ...To sleep, perchance to dream
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/11/Dreaming.mp3[/podcast] Why do we dream? You’d think we’d know by now. Everyone dreams, and people have been fascinated by dreams throughout recorded history. But scientifically, their origin and importance remain uncertain. Do they serve some vital psychological or physiological function? Or are they just meaningless accidents of our brain’s wiring? A few years ago, Finnish psychologist Antti Revonsuo theorized that dreams evolved as a way to rehearse threatening situations. Silvio Scarone of the Universita degli Studi de Milano in Milan, Italy, explains it this way: “The environment in which the human brain evolved included frequent dangerous events that posed threats to human reproduction. These would have been a serious selection pressure on ancestral human populations and would have fully activated ...The thrill of the chase
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/09/The-Thrill-of-the-Chase.mp3[/podcast] I had a hard time getting started on this column. See, as I was calling up the items I’d starred in Google Reader as possible topics, I thought it wouldn’t hurt to do a quick search for new reviews of my latest novel. And then I thought, well, as long as I’m online, maybe I’ll just skim through some blogs...and maybe check Facebook...and... Well, you get the idea. Fact is, you’re lucky to be getting this column at all. Which is ironic, because my jumping-off point is an article from Slate, written by Emily Yoffe, titled “Seeking: How the brain hard-wires us to love Google, Twitter, and texting. And why that’s dangerous.” There’s no doubt that the seeking out of information ...Insight into the theory of mind
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/07/Theory-of-Mind.mp3[/podcast] This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention, but in addition to writing nonfiction, I also write fiction—specifically, science fiction and fantasy. Now, the writing of fiction is a very odd thing, in that it involves the making up of characters: people who don’t really exist, but for whom the illusion of existence is created by the words the author puts on the page. Quite often, these people are very different from the author. I recently interviewed renowned Canadian science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer for FreeLance, the magazine of the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild. The main character in his latest book, Wake, is a blind teenage girl, Caitlin Decter. Now, although Sawyer can draw on some experience at ...Talk to the right ear
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/06/Talk-to-the-right-ear.mp3[/podcast] If someone approaches you from your left side and makes a request, are you more or less likely to grant that request than if he approaches you from your right side? If you’re thinking, “What kind of a stupid question is that?”, and you think it would be an equally stupid question no matter which ear it was spoken into, then you probably haven’t heard of something called the “natural expression of hemispheric asymmetries,” and more specifically something called “the right-ear advantage.” Basically, it boils down to this: scientists have known for a long time that humans have a preference for listening to verbal input with their right ears. Not only that, if they hear something with both ears, they’ll pay more attention ...Are cognitive shortcuts making us fat?
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/06/Cognitive-Shortcuts-to-Obesity.mp3[/podcast] When we think about how we make decisions, we tend to imagine that we consider the facts of a situation carefully and logically, in a straightforward, step-by-step manner. But that process is, indeed, imaginary. The truth is that our brains prefer to do as little actual thinking as possible. They like shortcuts—and sometimes those shortcuts can get us into trouble. Take, for instance, what psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania call "Unit Bias," which, they say, “causes people to ignore vital, obvious information in their decision-making process, points to a fundamental flaw in the modern, evolved mind, and may also play a role in the American population's 30 years of weight gain.” The researchers conducted several studies with college-age participants. In one, the ...Reverse-engineering the brain
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/05/blue-brain.mp3[/podcast] Ah, the human brain. Seat of consciousness, miracle of creation or evolution (discuss amongst yourselves), able to jump to tall conclusions in a single bound, so incredibly complex that we’ll never be able to understand how it works. Um, not so fast. A year and a half ago, scientists at the Blue Brain Project in Switzerland announced they had successfully created an extremely detailed—down to the molecular level—model of the neurocortical column of a two-week-old rat...and that was just Phase 1 of their ambitious research effort aimed at nothing less than reverse-engineering the mammalian brain and recreating it in a computer. The neurocortical column (NCC) is the basic unit of the neocortex, which in mammals is responsible for higher brain functions ...Why sunlight in your eyes can make you sneeze
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/04/photic-sneezing.mp3[/podcast] “Sunshine on my shoulders makes me happy,” the late John Denver sang. “Sunlight in my eyes can make me cry.” Lovely lyrics. But as a kid, I thought it would have made more sense for Denver to sing, “Sunlight in my eyes can make me sneeze.” Because for somewhere between one in 10 and one in three people, sunlight has exactly that effect. It’s called “photic sneezing,” and it’s nothing new: Aristotle wondered about it in the 4th century BC (although he thought it was brought on by heat, not light). But millennia later, we still don’t know exactly why it happens, as New Scientist writer Richard Webb recently discovered. The usual explanation for regular sneezing is that it serves to ...Science shows musicians really ARE more sensitive
[podcast]http://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/04/sensitive-musicians.mp3[/podcast] Musicians have a reputation for being sensitive types, finely tuned to the emotions of those around them. In fact, it’s become a bit of a cliché in movies (with the possible exception of the many late drummers of Spinal Tap). Normally, after a beginning like that, I’d go on to write that science has now proven the cliché wrong--but in this case, quite the opposite is true. Researchers at Northwestern University have found that the more years of musical experience musicians possess, and the earlier the age at which they began studying music, the better their nervous systems are at interpreting the emotional content of sound. The study was led by doctoral student Dana Strait, who conducts her research in the Auditory Neuroscience ...The fad cycle
Here’s a fearless prediction for 2009: sometime, somewhere, something is going to become a hot new fad.It’s a cycle as old as...well, as old as me, anyway, and I suspect a good deal older. Since I was a teenager in the 1970s, I think in terms of Rubik Cubes, platform shoes, bell-bottoms and mood rings.Today I’m so far out of it, pop-culture wise, I’d hesitate to even mention a 2008 fad for fear it’s already last-year’s thing. (Although, since this column appears on New Year’s Eve, I guess you could say any 2008 fad is last-year’s thing.)Perhaps you have fallen for a fad yourself, once in a while. I would say that I never ...
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Terra Insegura
Finalist for the 2010 Prix Aurora Award for Best Novel in English
Marseguro, a water world far from Earth, is home to a colony of humans and the Selkies, a water-dwelling race created from modified human DNA. For seventy years the colony has lived in peace. Then Earth discovers Marseguro, and a strike force is sent to eradicate this “abomination.” But Marseguro has created a genetically tailored plague to use against Earth’s Holy Warriors. With the enemy defeated, the people of Marseguro feel they are safe. But Chris Keating, the traitor who signaled Marseguro’s location to the Holy Warriors, has fled to Earth, unknowingly carrying the deadly plague within him. The people of Marseguro feel they must send a ship to Earth with a life-saving vaccine. Only time will tell what awaits them when they reach their destination.
Marseguro
Winner of the 2009 Prix Aurora Award for Best Long-Form Work in English
Water world Marseguro is home to the Selkies, a water-dwelling race created from human DNA. When an unmodified human seeks revenge on a Selkie by activating a distress beacon taken from the remains of the original colony ship, a strikeforce is sent from Earth to eradicate the genetic abomination. Yet Marseguro will not prove as easy to conquer as the Earth force anticipates…
Lost in Translation
Kathryn was a human empath whose world and life had been destroyed when the alien S’sinn slaughtered her parents before her very eyes. Jarrikk was a young S’sinn, an unproven warrior who’d seen his flight mates slaughtered by the humans who’d sought to colonize his world.
As humans and S’sinn found themselves on the brink of war, these two Translators had to work together to find a common ground and avert catastrophe. But whether their Translators’ oath and training could overcome the enemies leagued against them was very much in doubt…
Archives
Historic Walks of Regina and Moose Jaw
Ten walks to points of historic and architectural interest in the cities of Regina and Moose Jaw (eight walks for Regina, two for Moose Jaw).
Disease-Hunting Scientist
The true stories of six real disease hunters. Epidemiologists travel the world trying to keep us safe from deadly diseases—from high-tech labs in Canada to remote villages in Africa. Learn how these “disease detectives” are coming up with new ways to fight disease, and find out if you have what it takes to become an epidemiologist, too!
The Bounty Mutiny
The Bounty was a British ship visiting Tahiti in 1789 when some of the crew overthrew the captain, William Bligh, and set him adrift in a tiny boat with sailors loyal to him. The mutiny resulted in a number of trials–both of the men who mutinied and of Bligh for losing command of his ship. These fascinating events have been the source for numerous Hollywood movies, most recently The Bounty. The Bounty Mutiny: From the Court Case to the Movie explores the famous case and the movies it inspired.
