James' World 2

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Sometimes, one of my psychotherapy clients will be late. “The tube got stuck; I do apologize.” If it happens once, I don’t treat it as significant. But some clients are perpetually late – perhaps just five or 10 minutes, but always – and out of breath when they get to the door. Then I am curious about what is behind their pattern of lateness, what it means, and what purpose it serves.

There are probably as many reasons for unpunctuality as there are habitually late people. Sometimes it seems unfathomable, but not always. One client remembered that his mother always spent so long in the bathroom that she made him late for school. She told him that it didn’t matter, and early people are uptight anyway. In his unconscious, being on time for things had got mixed up with being disloyal to his mother and therefore bad. Once he had found this narrative, he lost his compulsion for lateness.

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Photo by Willie B. Thomas / Getty Images.

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In late 2019, paleontologists reported finding the fossil of a flattened turtle shell that “was possibly trodden on” by a dinosaur, whose footprints spanned the rock layer directly above. The rare discovery of correlated fossils potentially traces two bygone species to the same time and place. “It’s only by doing that that we’re able to reconstruct ancient ecosystems,” one paleontologist told The New York Times.

The approach parallels the way cosmologists go about inferring the history of the universe. Like fossils, astronomical objects are not randomly strewn throughout space. Rather, spatial correlations between the positions of objects such as galaxies tell a detailed story of the ancient past. “Paleontologists infer the existence of dinosaurs to give a rational accounting of strange patterns of bones,” said Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist and cosmologist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. “We look at patterns in space today, and we infer a cosmological history in order to explain them.”

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If you ask her husband, Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett has just written the first neuroscience beach read. But Dr. Barrett considers her new book, Seven and a Half Lessons About the Brain, more of a choose-your-own-adventure, a chance to distill her favorite dinner party stories about the mind—from how our big gray blobs evolved to the myth of the “lizard brain”—into a witty and information-packed page-turner.

“At a time where science is under attack in some political circles, I wanted to show people that it can be useful and interesting. Science may not be a perfect endeavor, but it’s still the best way we have for learning about ourselves and the world.”

That’s part of why she challenged herself to turn her typical scientific writing—“extremely technical, filled with gazillions of references”—into a series of essays that reflect a more conversational approach.

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The brain

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Score one for the human brain. In a 2018 study, computer scientists found that artificial intelligence systems fail a vision test a child could accomplish with ease.

“It’s a clever and important study that reminds us that ‘deep learning’ isn’t really that deep,” said Gary Marcus, a neuroscientist at New York University who was not affiliated with the work.

The result takes place in the field of computer vision, where artificial intelligence systems attempt to detect and categorize objects. They might try to find all the pedestrians in a street scene, or just distinguish a bird from a bicycle (which is a notoriously difficult task). The stakes are high: As computers take over critical tasks like automated surveillance and autonomous driving, we’ll want their visual processing to be at least as good as the human eyes they’re replacing.

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