Thoughts of the day re the brain and identity

Here's what's got me thinking as I write through today. Video experiments--more fun ones, less serious--will continue, but since I'm going to be away tomorrow, probably not until next week.

From WWD, one designer's thought about closing shop amidst a recession:

In New Scientist, re what the brain does when we're not consciously processing information:

Randy Buckner, a former colleague of Raichle's now at Harvard, agrees. To him the evidence paints a picture of a brain system involved in the quintessential acts of daydreaming: mulling over past experiences and speculating about the future (New Scientist, 24 March 2007, p 36). "We're very good at imagining possible worlds and thinking about them," says Bucker. "This may be the brain network that helps us to do that."

Fossil evidence of a positive correlation between evolving women's hip size and brain size:

To accommodate big-brained babies, humans must have developed larger and wider birth canals over time, but with few pelvic fossils, researchers had little idea when these changes began. The Busidima pelvis shows that a wide birth canal was already in place 1.2 million years ago. It underscores the importance of developing large brains in early human evolution, Simpson says.

"The most successful individuals in these populations will have positive selection for brains and larger pelvises," he says. "Brain size is driving the whole system here."

New speech recognition software reads brainwaves: