Daily Archives: 24 Sep 00

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CogPrints: Cognitive Sciences EPrint Archive. “Welcome to CogPrints, an electronic archive for papers in any area of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Linguistics, and many areas of

Computer Science (e.g., artificial intelligence, robotics, vison, learning, speech, neural networks), Philosophy (e.g., mind,

language, knowledge, science, logic), Biology (e.g., ethology, behavioral ecology, sociobiology, behaviour genetics, evolutionary

theory), Medicine (e.g., Psychiatry, Neurology, human genetics, Imaging), Anthropology (e.g., primatology, cognitive ethnology,

archeology, paleontology), as well as any other portions of the physical, social and mathematical sciences that are pertinent to the

study of cognition.”

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I’ll take Manhattan. British writer Anthony Holden writes of the vibrancy of the New York literary scene that has him moving there to escape London’s stodginess.

It’s not just that Britain, viewed from a real

democracy, more than ever exudes its

lethal combination of self-satisfaction and

backward thinking: still dithering

xenophobically about Europe (for me, its

only hope of any future as even a

wannabe world power); keeping 92

hereditary peers, for pity’s sake, not to

mention that pantomime horse of a

monarchy; blowing a billion pounds’ worth

of schools and hospitals on that hollow,

doomed, vainglorious Dome; grumbling

nationalistically about immigrants when

they are the pulsating lifeblood of my

adopted homeland, its raison d’ tre . No,

for me, it’s also that the intellectual,

cultural and literary life of the Eastern

seaboard is (like the language) more alive,

more alert, much feistier than the primping

and preening of London’s cosy circle of

back-patting glitterati. Viewed from here

after a month back in Britain, the old

country seems more than ever like some

overgrown, nose-in-air, single-sex Pall

Mall club, whose pettifogging rules it is so

rejuvenating to escape. The Observer

This article ends with small blurbs on prominent “Brits who love the US” and “Yanks who love the UK.” Salman Rushdie has thumbed his nose at London’s narrowness in favor of the Manhattan high life as well, prompting a firestorm of British literary umbrage for his apparent lack of gratitude for the support and shelter he received in the face of the Islamic fatwa against him.

Several months ago, I blinked to an article about American artists visiting London bemoaning the stultification of the U. S. arts scene in comparison to the liveliness they found in London. Go figure.

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University of Maryland researchers create a new pathway for sight by ‘rewiring’ the brain in animal study. ‘By surgically “rewiring” the brains of newborn hamsters, researchers at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and the

University of Montreal have shown that they can create new brain circuits that take over the functions of damaged ones. The

researchers found that the hamsters could still see visual patterns even after key areas of the brain devoted to sight had been

removed. In some cases, the researchers demonstrated that the animals were using the hearing regions of the brain to see.

Although it is not yet possible to create new neural pathways in humans, the research raises the possibility that a similar

technique might one day be used to treat brain damage in people.’