Phantom Limbs and Medical Science on Public Radio

From the website at Radio Lab

Radio Lab

Warning: this section gets gorey. We'll start off with fatality, trauma, and bear attack. Neurologists Robert Sapolsky and Antonio Damasio weigh in on 19th century philosopher William James, and his theory of emotion (and of bears), which says “emotion is a slave to physiology.”

Then we'll look at sensations of feeling that hang on long after the physiology goes away. Radio Lab takes a field trip to the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology (a collection of medical oddities), and finds a photograph of the severed feet of Civil War soldiers (pictured, on the right.). Photo courtesy of the National Museum of Health and Medicine, Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C., CP 1043.

And then we'll speed back into the present-day to see brain doctor V.S. Ramachandran solve the case of a painful phantom limb. Pain relief by but mere smoke and mirrors.


Audio Link

Feynman--Most Important Sentence in Science to Pass On

From Lectures On Physics by Richard Feynman
Feynman, Leighton, Sands

If, in some cataclysm, all scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms--little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into on another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.