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The 41-year-old patient used his imagination to make his character take a walk and chat to another virtual person on the popular Second Life website.

The patient, who has suffered paralysis for more than 30 years, can barely bend his fingers due to a progressive muscle disease so cannot use a mouse or keyboard in the traditional way.

In the experiment, he wore headgear with three electrodes monitoring brain waves related to his hands and legs. Even though he cannot move his legs, he imagined that his character was walking.

He was then able to have a conversation with the other character using an attached microphone, said the researchers at Japan's Keio University.

Entranced, perhaps, by those infamous hypothetical trains, many educators in recent years have incorporated more and more examples from the real world to teach abstract concepts. The idea is that making math more relevant makes it easier to learn.

That idea may be wrong, if researchers at Ohio State University are correct. An experiment by the researchers suggests that it might be better to let the apples, oranges and locomotives stay in the real world and, in the classroom, to focus on abstract equations, in this case 40 (t + 1) = 400 - 50t, where t is the travel time in hours of the second train. (The answer is below.)

Dr. Kaminski and her colleagues Vladimir M. Sloutsky and Andrew F. Heckler did something relatively rare in education research: they performed a randomized, controlled experiment. Their results appear in Friday's issue of the journal Science.

Though the experiment tested college students, the researchers suggested that their findings might also be true for math education in elementary through high school, the subject of decades of debates about the best teaching methods.

In the experiment, the college students learned a simple but unfamiliar mathematical system, essentially a set of rules. Some learned the system through purely abstract symbols, and others learned it through concrete examples like combining liquids in measuring cups and tennis balls in a container.

Then the students were tested on a different situation -- what they were told was a children's game -- that used the same math. "We told students you can use the knowledge you just acquired to figure out these rules of the game," Dr. Kaminski said.

(Ted Leibowitz, owner and D.J. of BAGeL Radio, an indie-rock Web station he runs from a spare room in his apartment in San Francisco. Photo by Peter DaSilva for The New York Times)

?Everybody?s on the Internet all day,? said Vibegrrl, whose real name is Lara Dua. ?It would be just kind of not smart if we weren?t making that part of what we do.? Interaction with listeners used to be ?very limited,? she added. Now, though, ?I?m chatting and blogging and doing research and answering phones all at the same time.?

After ceding ground (and potential advertising dollars) for years to an army of autonomous Internet radio stations, some of which are run from basements and spare bedrooms, the nation?s biggest broadcasters are now marching online, determined to corral the next generation of listeners. The result may be a showdown to define the future of the medium.

Confronted by a slow erosion of listeners who are turning to iPods, podcasts and other sources for entertainment, the radio corporations are trying to merge their over-the-air music and D.J. chatter with the Web, adding online streams of their broadcasts and features already found on many independent Web-based stations. These include live chat rooms, blogs and MySpace-style social networking features.

Late last month, CBS said it had paid $280 million to acquire Last FM (last.fm), a popular Web radio service where listeners can customize stations based on their personal taste, and also explore other users? playlists. And Clear Channel, the biggest radio corporation, with a stable of more than 800 stations, has built miniature social networks into the Web sites of Hot 99.5 (hot995.com) and 7 other pop-music stations in major markets in the latest step in an ambitious digital initiative.

All of this comes at an inopportune moment for small, Internet-based radio stations, which are facing a sharp increase in the royalties they must pay to record labels (and artists) for playing their music. The online stations had previously paid a percentage of their revenue for music streamed to United States listeners, ? in effect ensuring that their costs would not exceed whatever sales they received. But a federal panel, the Copyright Royalty Board, has set new rates effective July 15 that alter that structure so the Internet radio stations are charged a fee each time a user listens to a song.

Mr. Bhagat explained that some set-top boxes, which had been sitting in warehouses for months in advance of a government-mandated change to digital television, had proved a weak match for the heat and humidity of Mumbai. ?Sometimes we have teething problems,? he said.

Growing pains like these are common throughout India?s booming television industry. Deregulation and new technology have combined to produce an explosion of new offerings. Before the early 1990s, a single government broadcaster provided a handful of channels. Now a crowded field of domestic and global media companies, including the News Corporation, Sony Entertainment and Walt Disney, offer hundreds of channels.

Indian films, especially the flashy musicals and dramas of Bollywood, have grabbed plenty of attention in the West. But the country?s lesser-known television business is more than twice as big, with an estimated $3.4 billion in revenue in 2005, according to PricewaterhouseCoopers. It is also starting to exert greater cultural influence.

Television ownership is growing fast here, and it has plenty more room to expand. There are roughly 105 million homes with televisions in India, up from 88 million in 2000. The current number of television households is about the same as in the United States, though for India that amounts to only about half of the country?s households, compared with 98 percent in the United States.

Advertising spending on Indian television increased by 21 percent a year, on average, from 1995 to 2005, when it reached $1.6 billion, according to ZenithOptimedia, which tracks advertising globally. Double-digit growth rates are expected to continue for years.

Such numbers are very tempting to companies like the News Corporation, Disney, Time Warner and Viacom, which are losing viewers and advertisers in their core Western markets. (In addition to the domestic market, Indian television is also delivered via satellite and cable to the global South Asian diaspora.)

The pace of change in India is supercharged because the country is catching up to, and in some cases leapfrogging, developments that took decades to play out elsewhere. ?Everything that happened in the rest of the world in 10 years, is happening here in two years,? said Vikram Kaushik, the chief executive of Tata Sky, a satellite-TV company that is jointly owned by the News Corporation and the Tata Group, the Indian industrial conglomerate.

That dream, which may not be too far off, puts the insula in the spotlight. What is the insula and how could it possibly exert such profound effects on human behavior?

• According to neuroscientists who study it, the insula is a long-neglected brain region that has emerged as crucial to understanding what it feels like to be human.
• They say it is the wellspring of social emotions, things like lust and disgust, pride and humiliation, guilt and atonement. It helps give rise to moral intuition, empathy and the capacity to respond emotionally to music.
• Its anatomy and evolution shed light on the profound differences between humans and other animals.

Of course, so much about the brain remains to be discovered that the insula?s role may be a minor character in the play of the human mind. It is just now coming on stage.

The activity of the insula in so many areas is something of a puzzle. ?People have had a hard time conceptualizing what the insula does,? said Dr. Martin Paulus, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego.

If it does everything, what exactly is it that it does?

For example, the insula ?lights up? in brain scans when people crave drugs, feel pain, anticipate pain, empathize with others, listen to jokes, see disgust on someone?s face, are shunned in a social settings, listen to music, decide not to buy an item, see someone cheat and decide to punish them, and determine degrees of preference while eating chocolate.

Damage to the insula can lead to apathy, loss of libido and an inability to tell fresh food from rotten.

The bottom line, according to Dr. Paulus and others, is that mind and body are integrated in the insula. It provides unprecedented insight into the anatomy of human emotions.

Of course, like every important brain structure, the insula ? there are actually two, one on each side of the brain ? does not act alone. It is part of multiple circuits.

The insula itself is a sort of receiving zone that reads the physiological state of the entire body and then generates subjective feelings that can bring about actions, like eating, that keep the body in a state of internal balance. Information from the insula is relayed to other brain structures that appear to be involved in decision making, especially the anterior cingulate and prefrontal cortices.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in Britain plan to announce today that they are starting a joint research program in Web science.

Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the Web's basic software, is leading the program. An Oxford-educated Englishman, Mr. Berners-Lee is a senior researcher at M.I.T., a professor at the University of Southampton and the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, an Internet standards-setting organization.

Web science, the researchers say, has social and engineering dimensions. It extends well beyond traditional computer science, they say, to include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the Web. And Web science, they add, shifts the center of gravity in engineering research from how a single computer works to how huge decentralized Web systems work.

"The Web isn't about what you can do with computers," Mr. Berners-Lee said. "It's people and, yes, they are connected by computers. But computer science, as the study of what happens in a computer, doesn't tell you about what happens on the Web."

The Web science program is an academic effort, but corporate technology executives and computer scientists said the research could greatly influence Web-based businesses. They pointed in particular to research by Mr. Berners-Lee and others to build more "intelligence" into the Web moving toward what is known as the Semantic Web as an area of study that could yield a big payoff.

Web science represents "a pretty big next step in the evolution of information," said Eric E. Schmidt, the chief executive of Google, who is a computer scientist. This kind of research, Mr. Schmidt added, is "likely to have a lot of influence on the next generation of researchers, scientists and, most importantly, the next generation of entrepreneurs who will build new companies from this."

Union Minister and Chandni Chowk MP Kapil Sibal, who presented a live demonstration of a pilot project conducted in the Walled City along with a presentation, said that this technology will make use of satellite images and map urban structures in the city.

"The images supplemented with videos, photos and field surveys will then help us keep a check on every new construction in the city," he said.