iNow

That's ridiculous. Ever heard of a neurotransmitter? I'd also appreciate it if you would share a source for that text which you copy/pasted. Not only is it the rules, not only is it just good personal policy, but I'd like to read the context in which the comments were made so as to better understand them. A sentence suggesting that some guy Hameroff is not convinced isn't good enough. Finally, those superconductors operating at higher temperatures that you mention... those are made out of materials which simply aren't present in the brain.

My "word salad to english" translator suggests that his response in post #33 can be summarized as a "No."

I think there's a basic flaw in your premise. Levels of neurotransmitters (like dopamine) fluctuation throughout the day, and depend greatly on what we're doing. There is no "one level," since the transmitters are responsive to what's happening in our environment. They could be very high, they could be very low... it really just depends. Now, sometimes there are people who have chronically low levels of NTs like dopamine, but they too will fluctuate throughout the day. I'm sure there's a range of some sort which is considered normal, but it will vary greatly from person to person, and also within the same person depending on what they are doing. As for testing levels of NTs in the system, there are many tests, often it's just a simple urine test.

Hey... you guys should check Snopes! I can't believe nobody has done that yet.

Yes, actually... I do. People believe in all sorts of "woo" that has no grounding in reality, because... well, because it's easier, and that's just sort of human nature. I mean, hell... Just look at religion. (Generalizing here) For practically every claim they make there is zero empirical support... no evidence whatsoever... not one iota... yet just look at how many vast numbers of people believe that without any doubts. I'm just saying, lots of people believe lots of things which are not reasonable or grounded in reality, so that's not a very good criterion for you to use when thinking that some field has any worth or merit. That's just it, though. For many of these things, there's not even smoke... Just people who think there's smoke. Try to keep that in mind as you move forward. Just FYI - That's an old urban myth, and is non-representative of reality. We actually use all of our brains. More on that here: http://faculty.washington.edu/chudler/tenper.html Enjoy.

Fair enough. So, those would be "plate boundary slidey zones." I'm really not too interested in this particular discussion to be perfectly honest. I find the blatant lack of regard for why we accept plate tectonics to both be rather appalling and annoying.

I fear that it's being way over dramatized, and that the producers of the film are taking too much rhetorical license... to the point where they may be putting in plot devices which are hardly historically accurate. Obviously, I won't know until I see it, but there was sure a lot of "woo" in the trailer. Also, it's called "Creation," which makes me think it's one huge misrepresentation of Darwins work by some religious group. Again, we'll have to wait and see.

It appears to me that you have read the map incorrectly, and the subduction zone surrounds the entire continent. See the jagged lines above where it says "Antarctic Plate." As an aside, it's called a "plate" because it's separated from the other areas and plates by these same subduction zones about which you're asking.

They're on google, of course. http://oregonstate.edu/~doverl/SMILEWTW08/Activity1_Under_Pressure/Under%20Pressure%20Global%20Subduction%20Zone%20Map.pdf

And teaching people inaccurate/wrong information makes it more challenging for them to correct those inaccuracies later in life. This is especially apparent with children. While I agree that we have to find ways to make information more accessible to people with limited knowledge, I disagree that teaching inaccurate/wrong information is a reasonable method to achieve that. We'll just have to disagree on this one. No worries.

I'm still struggling to understand where you're drawing this line in the sand. I completely agree with you that he concept of a second is an arbitrary duration which we humans have made up to measure time. I also agree that time is naturally occurring. The sticking point, though, is that the question related to our internal ability to... without external environmental cues... measure durations themselves... regardless of how we define said durations. As I understood the OP, the question was about "what in our biology allows us to accurately measure elapsed time." IINM, the question was not, "how do rats and people know what a second is, and is this innate." I quite agree with your point that the specific duration of "second" is learned. Where I disagree is that we "learn" the ability to internally track and measure elapsed time itself. I get the sense that we're closer on this than it appears, and this is a word choice issue more than anything else. If that's the case, then I sincerely apologize, as it was most definitely not my intention to misrepresent you or your position on this topic.

Again, I disagree. You sound like this: http://www.flascience.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/28.jpg Via

Sounds fun. Welcome back, man. One of the things that I REALLY love about this whole story is how it's turning our traditional American perceptions on their face... our perceptions about the Iranian people. For so many years so many of us have cast their people into tiny ideological boxes, painting them with broad brush strokes and completely missing the important details. Now, with what we're seeing from these young people, and the huge outpouring of passion coming from them, I think we're forced to challenge some of the narrow viewpoints about those people previously held by so many. These aren't some sort of zombies marching in lock step with their leaders... For me... This really puts a face on the Iranian people, and I certainly like what's looking back at me.

The question of "what sets it" is a challenging one, as it it's our biology itself which makes it possible... biology shaped from millions and millions of years of evolution. When asking "what sets it," you (although I'm sure unintentionally) implicitly imply a god-like watch winder. Obviously, there is no such thing. The ability to keep relatively accurate track of time is just simply a part of our biology, related to the functioning of our brain and the maintenance of our internal chemistry. Much of it has to do with circadian rhythms. Be sure to check out the wiki on that if you are not yet familiar. It's also sometimes referred to as the "human clock." Here's a story I just happened upon which suggests that this ability to accurately track time is related to the substantia nigra, which helps produce dopamine, and is located in the basal ganglia area of our brains: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_n7_v149/ai_18051349/ Musicians have no trouble monitoring a beat. Short-order cooks intuitively flip the burgers before they burn. In a step toward explaining such timing abilities, investigators have found areas in the human brain dedicated to keeping mental track of intervals ranging from seconds to a few hours. That finding has led another group of scientists to discover that people with Parkinson's disease have difficulty using this so-called interval clock. Animals possess a number of biological clocks, the most well known being the circadian clock, which establishes day-long patterns of behavior. The interval clock is less well understood, but researchers contend that the ability to monitor time intervals accurately is vital to learning and memory. For example, the salivating response of a dog to a meal bell depends on its brain's understanding that food will come a short time after a bell is rung. "Time comes into every aspect of an animal's daily life," says Alex Kacelnik of Oxford University in England, who studies interval timing in birds. The interval clock, unlike the circadian clock, is something that people can actively control. "It's much like a stopwatch. You can stop it and start it at will," says John Gibbon of Columbia University. Gibbon and other scientists presented the new findings on the interval clock at a session of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's annual meeting in Baltimore this week. By giving rats drugs that destroy selected areas of the brain, investigators at Duke University in Durham, N.C., recently discovered several brain regions involved in this clock. The investigators had trained the rats to recognize specific intervals of time by giving them food only when they pressed a lever after a certain period had passed, explains Warren Meck, who headed the research group. After the researchers damaged the substantia nigra, located in an area of the brain known as the basal ganglia, the rats could no longer judge time intervals. The substantia nigra contains brain cells that make the neurotransmitter dopamine. The researchers found they could largely restore the brain-damaged rats' ability to judge intervals by giving them l-dopa, a dopamine-stimulating drug used by Parkinson's patients. With functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a method that reveals the brain regions employed during a task, Meck and his colleagues have also studied college students as they judged time intervals. "The same circuits we measured in rats are selectively activated," Meck says. The work in both rats and humans suggests that the substantia nigra acts as a metronome, sending a steady stream of dopamine pulses to another brain region called the striatum. A third part of the brain, the frontal cortex, appears to complete the interval clock's neural circuit. <more at the link> Btw... I've noticed lately you showing a strong interest in neurobiology. It might be something to explore further as you continue in your studies. Cheers.

The earth will be fine. Humanity might not. What happens in the future depends largely on what we do today as a species.. a species which is increasing in population at an incredible rate. The earth will eventually find some sort of equilibrium, probably after a few hundred thousand years... but before that equilibrium is found there will likely be a great number of extinctions. The real question is whether or not one of those extinctions will include humanity, or if it's just going to be one ginormous mass extinction event. A lot of it depends on what we do... right now... and how quickly/profoundly we change our ways.

Right... and erm... how deep is the canyon if it took the gnome 4 seconds to find bottom?

Resources could be a bit of a challenge...

There have been many different studies, but the one about which I was thinking when I typed that was your second option... the food was only available after the proscribed waiting period... no cues or confounds in the surrounding environment to assist. They call it the "stopwatch mechanism" in most studies. I could probably find some of these studies with some digging, but in the meantime, here's a video which demonstrates something similar (although, in the context of how drugs impact our temporal perception). The entire video is pretty cool, but I'm directing you specifically to the discussion which begins at time point = 4:45. RjlpamhrId8 The video also illuminates this idea of our innate sense of time in humans, and how it's impacted by various hormones flowing through our system. Merged post follows: Consecutive posts mergedCameron - I don't know why I didn't think of this yesterday when you first asked. Google the term "biological stopwatch" and that should bring up some cool articles for you. Here's a search of that term on scholar: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1GGLQ_ENUS275&=&q=biological%20stopwatch&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=ws

I'm not sure I follow your point. If they don't have a natural sense of time, then how can they ever be successful counting down 12 measured seconds? Can you elaborate? They do learn, and they learn that after 12 seconds they get a quick nibble. However, what I'm saying is that the neurophysiology must preexist in order for them to ever successfully measure those 12 seconds and be reinforced by the nibble of food. The learning comes with performing a specific action after a specific duration. The learning does not relate to the ability to accurately count the seconds included in that duration.

Ah... a keyboard. How quaint. wzRziK-kZtQ

Animals (humans included) have a natural sense of time. There have been studies where rats press a lever after 12 seconds, and will get food, but not if they press it more than one second beyond or before that. There are studies with dogs and their sense of time... parrots... all sorts of stuff. There is some sort of biological clock we all have. I think that, instead of thinking about it as "time," it's more intuitive to think about it as "rhythm."

Wouldnt' that be CarpeElementumNovus?

This has already been covered neatly by swansont, but just to summarize: Water is a feedback, not a forcing. Water only stays in the atmosphere for about 10 days. Then we get this neat little thing I like to call "rain." CO2 stays in the atmosphere for centuries, and possibly even millenia. Since it stays there for so long, every single new bit of CO2 adds to what came before, like a giant pile of trash. Sure, a single piece of rubbish won't cause much trouble, but add it on top of a pile which has been building for 150 years... well, you get the point. As for the overall amount, that's irrelevant. You're suggesting that because CO2 makes up such a small overall percentage of our atmosphere that it couldn't possibly be the driver of our temperature trends. Well, I'll tell you what. How about you let me make the air in your bedroom 1% military grade toxic nerve gas. Then, when I'm explaining to your parents why you're dead, I'll just tell them it couldn't possibly have been the nerve gas because it comprised such a small percentage of the air. They should buy that, right? So, no need to apologize to me. You should apologize to yourself for the complete lack of respect you have for your own mind and the lack of discrimination you use about the information with which you litter it. As an aside, I always LOVE posts which state, "I haven't read the last several posts in this thread, but..." That's just Classic.

Yes, I know the study to which you refer. A challenge with that study is how they've defined the costs. Obviously, costs fluctuate, and part of what we're doing now in the US with the healthcare discussions is finding a way to reduce costs. Without getting too bogged down in the issue you've raised, I'll just say more simply what I should have the first time around. I see the action against tobacco to be tied into the dialogues regarding healthcare. It's sort of like we're trying to come at this thing from multiple angles to reduce costs of healthcare across the board (at least, in the short term ) wherever we can. The idea being... It's like a holistic approach to legislative action, or something.

My conjecture is that it has something to do with your heartbeat... phump bhump... phump bhump... one two... three four... five six... It provides a regular "metronome" of sorts.