Monday, May 18, 2009

Why Your Brain Is Like Kevin Bacon

In case you were wondering.


From a Live Science article today:

"Researchers also checked children's brains for "small-world" organization, another organizational quality present in adult brains. This is the same idea as the game 'six degrees of Kevin Bacon,' which connects any actor or actress to Kevin Bacon in six movies or less through their co-stars.

In this case, the 'co-stars' are nodes in the brain.

'It's the idea of a large network that lets you connect one node with another in a relatively short number of steps via special nodes,' Fair says. 'Like Kevin Bacon, these special nodes have many connections to other nodes, allowing them to help shorten the amount of steps that have to be taken when connecting nodes.'"

4 comments:

Eric Shonkwiler said...

Alternatives to this post:

"Your brain is fighting giant worms."
"Your brain just gotta cut loose, footloose."

Hilary said...

Sure, everybody wants those little node shortcuts. Nobody wants to take the node less traveled...

Lynnea said...

I'm imagining a node army of tiny little Kevin Bacons running around in my head and it's scaring me.

Clowncar said...

I was praying this post would kick up a Tremors reference. Thanks, Eric! I was even gonna follow up with a Tremors clip from youtube but, incredibly, there are none. I smell conspiracy.

Yuk, yuk, chortle, chortle, Hil. I node you would come up with some clever word play.

"A node army of tiny little Kevin Bacons running around in my head" is quite the sobering image, Maggie. Yikes. I make wake up screaming.