The first edition of the new neuroscience carnival Encephalon is now up at The Neurophilosopher’s Blog, here. There are several good posts, and I actually learned a bit from some of them.

I have to admit, though, that I’m particularly partial to this post from BrainTechSci. A sample:

It is hard not to notice the fact that an unusually high percentage of Nobel laureates, from Gerald Edelman to Francis Crick turn their attention to the problem of consciousness and formulate embarrassingly ridiculous theories of consciousness. Why is that?

Then there are people who are completely outside the field of neuroscience who propose ridiculous theories of consciousness. For example, Roger Penrose, a well-known mathematician who invented “twistor theory”, has been very vocal about his theory that consciousness is really a Bose-Einstein condensate in microtubules. Seriously, this is the peak of absurdity, but it’s hard to appreciate this unless you have a biological, and better yet, a neurobiological, background and understand what a Bose-Einstein condensate is.