What We Are Reading Today: The Spike

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Updated 22 February 2023
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What We Are Reading Today: The Spike

Author: Mark Humphries 

We see the last cookie in the box and think, can I take that? We reach a hand out.

In the 2.1 seconds that this impulse travels through our brain, billions of neurons communicate with one another, sending blips of voltage through our sensory and motor regions. Neuroscientists call these blips “spikes.”

Spikes enable us to do everything: talk, eat, run, see, plan, and decide.

In “The Spike,” Mark Humphries takes readers on the epic journey of a spike through a single, brief reaction. In vivid language, Humphries tells the story of what happens in our brain, what we know about spikes, and what we still have left to understand about them.


What We Are Reading Today: ‘Silence So Deep It Rings’ by Laura Mcphee

Updated 27 January 2026
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What We Are Reading Today: ‘Silence So Deep It Rings’ by Laura Mcphee

Spanning almost all of Nevada and Utah and portions of California, Idaho, Oregon, and Wyoming, the sparsely populated regions of the Great Basin and the Basin and Range Province have stories to tell—stories intimate and vast, familial, historical, and geological.

In “Silence So Deep It Rings,” renowned landscape photographer Laura McPhee challenges the tradition of 19th-century survey photography, capturing the sheer beauty and depth of the West while conveying what has since occurred on the surface of the land.