TV Review: Nova scienceNOW - Season 2, Episode 4

Sitting down to watch the fourth episode of the second season of Nova scienceNOW I'm mainly struck by one thought: why have they only put out four episodes nearly nine months into their second season? They show is incredibly accessible and fun to watch. It takes some difficult scientific ideas and concepts and makes them understandable without ever making the viewer feel as though the concepts have been dumbed down. This episode's four stories are on: sleep and memory, CERN's Large Hadron Collider, a concept known as emergence, and a profile on archeologist Julie Schablitsky.

During my freshman year in college, I spent hours playing multiplayer Descent. It got to the point where every time I closed my eyes I could see the ships and levels and bonuses and problems. Apparently that's totally normal, though the example used in the episode of Nova scienceNOW is Tetris. Scientists in different labs around the country are looking into why exactly we sleep, and many (building from experiments performed on insects, animals, and humans) have arrived at the conclusion that when we sleep our mind processes what happened during the day and learns from it.

This is to say that if you can't pass the fifth level on Tetris one day, go to sleep, and if you try again in the morning you very well may be able to (this strategy never led me to any victories in Descent, but maybe it will for you). One of the specific examples given in the episode is with rats going through a maze. These rats have wires going into their brain, so that their thoughts can be mapped out. After running a rat through a maze to find chocolate syrup several times in a day, the rat learns about the maze and certain synapses fire in a certain order in certain parts of the maze. When the rat sleeps, the synapses fire in the same order, the rat is thinking his way through the maze. And, apparently, his visual cortex is active too; he's seeing the maze again. It's a great way to lead off the episode, because sleep, and the lack thereof, is something with which we can all associate.

Article Author: Josh Lasser

Josh Lasser, formerly known as "TV and Film Guy," and complete with a Masters Degree in Critical Studies in said areas, gives his opinions on TV, Film, and Entertainment in general. All of which he does in a shameless attempt to try to get paid to do the exact same thing. …

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