Now Is The Time…  By Carl Zimmer | July 12, 2008 1:33 pm
Writing about the brain is one of the Black-Diamond challenges
of science writing. We all think we know what’s going in our
heads, and yet the cells and neurotransmitters and signal
patterns don’t fit comfortably into our everyday metaphors.
Linguist Mark Liberman at Language Log regularly writes
devastating posts about how lousy a job journalists sometimes do
writing about neuroscience news–especially when the research
touches on our pat assumptions and stereotypes. (”See, women
really do think differently…” etc.)  I’ve written a lot about
the brain in the past (including a book about the dawn of
neurology), but now I’m setting out to write a column every
month for Discover about our gray matter. The first one is now
online: it’s about how we perceive time. The first thing I had
to do was throw out the metaphor of the clock, because it just
doesn’t do a good job of capturing our brains’ beautiful
strategies for gauging the flow of now into yesterday.