What is the brain chemistry involved in reading a good book? What areas of the brain are stimulated? What chemicals experience an uptick? Is there a particular combination unique to reading for pleasure? [more inside]
posted by SaharaRose on Feb 17, 2009 - 10 answers

"A human is halfway in size between an atom and the known universe"... This is a paraphrased quote I have come across several times. I like it. Who said it first? How true is it in the most literal sense? And, finally, what errors arrive in postulating a universe, or an atom, which can be measured AT ALL from our singular, relativistic, perspective? [more inside]
posted by 0bvious on Feb 18, 2007 - 14 answers

What experiments have been carried out where animals perform better than us at particular cognitive tasks? [more inside]
posted by 0bvious on May 9, 2006 - 13 answers

Assume you had a list of different animal species, and you wanted to order it from most intelligent species to least. (1) What measure of intelligence would you use to compare different species--average number of neurons, for example, or ability to solve certain kinds of tests? Or something else entirely? (2) Can you give some examples of how some common farm, food, or pet animals might rank on the list? [more inside]
posted by yankeefog on Jan 25, 2006 - 17 answers