Seed Media Group

August 31, 2007

Smaller Engines

Category: Culture

The new Honda Accord comes out next month and, like virtually every new car, it boasts a bigger frame and bigger engine than last year's model. So I thought it might be worth revisiting some of the earlier generation Accords....

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Solving the Subprime Mess

Category: Neuroscience

A few weeks ago, I put up a post on the neuroscience of subprime mortgages. A significant percentage of subprime loans get customers by advertising low introductory teaser rates, which trick the brain into making an irrational decision. In essence,...

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Baseball and Dopamine

Category: Neuroscience

Christopher Vrountas, of Andover, sent in a very astute letter to the Boston Globe in response to my recent article on dopamine and gambling: I read Jonah Lehrer's article "Your brain on gambling" (Ideas, Aug. 19), about how gambling hijacks...

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August 30, 2007

Contradictions

Category: Culture

Two examples of blinkered thinking: 1. Jeff Lewis, the incredibly entertaining lunatic at the center of Flipping Out, the real-estate reality television show on Bravo, fires his psychic because she wasn't doing a good job of predicting the future. So...

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The Psychology of Hotness

Category: Culture

Here's Megan McArdle on our self-perceptions of attractiveness: A late night conversation last night brought me to the inescapable conclusion that neither I, nor anyone else, is as hot as they think they are. You hate photographs of yourself, don't...

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August 29, 2007

Fixing Ourselves

Category: Neuroscience

Ten years ago, neuroscientists were bullish about pharmaceuticals. It sometimes seemed as if every tenured professor was starting his own drug company or consulting for someone else's drug company. But virtually none of those drugs have come to market, at...

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I Love Paper

Category: Culture

Last week, we discussed the differences between reading text printed on dead trees (paper) and reading on a computer screen. I confessed that I'm wedded to my laser printer, since I can only edit when I've got the tactile page...

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August 28, 2007

Vick and Animal Cruelty

Category: Culture

For me, the most depressing aspect of the Michael Vick dog-fighting case is that I can't draw a bright moral line between his acts of sadism and the publicly acceptable forms of animal cruelty that we all support in the...

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August 27, 2007

Is Deep Blue Human?

Category: Culture

Daniel Dennett, in the latest Technology Review, argues that there's no meaningful difference between the chess cognition of Deep Blue and that of Gary Kasparov. Both are functionalist machines, employing mental shortcuts to settle on an optimal strategy: The best...

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August 24, 2007

Cigarettes and Poetry

Category: Neuroscience

The Best Cigarette, a poem by Billy Collins: Don't forget that cigarette addiction seems to be modulated by the insula, a brain area that secretes aversive emotions. Earlier this year, a team of scientists at the University of Iowa found...

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The Perverse Hippocampus

Category: Neuroscience

Our mind has a sick sense of humor. It turns out that as we lose our memory, and sink into the darkness of dementia, the last memories to disappear are the memories we spent our lives trying to repress. So...

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August 23, 2007

The Self and the Body

Category: Neuroscience

Here's a very cool experiment: Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences -- the sensation of drifting outside of one's own body -- in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the...

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Peer Review

Category:

You often hear scientists and philosophers of science talk about the peer-review process as if it's some epistemological magic trick, as if it automatically sifts through the mass of submitted articles and finds The Truth. Of course, if you've ever...

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Before the Internet

Category: Culture

There were phone phreaks.

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August 22, 2007

Silas Weir Mitchell

Category: Neuroscience

How the Battle of Gettysburg led to the discovery of phantom limbs.

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Metabolic Theory

Category: Culture

A few months ago, when I was writing an article on cities and metabolic theory for the latest issue of Seed, I spent several frustrating hours trying to explain the underlying logic of metabolic theory. For those who don't know,...

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August 21, 2007

Editing on Paper

Category: Culture

I'm one of those writers who can't edit on a computer. After I write something, I'm always forced to print it out on dead trees, so that I can fix my sentences. When I try to edit on the computer,...

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Girls Are Better Behaved

Category: Culture

Two economists have studied the effects "of classroom gender composition on scholastic achievements of boys and girls in Israeli primary, middle, and high schools." They wanted to know if having a disproportionate number of one gender in the classroom influences...

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August 20, 2007

Low-Tech Fuel Efficiency

Category: Culture

This is the car I covet: And I don't just want the new variant of the Volvo C30 because it's oh so cute: Called the C30 Efficiency, this special car will sip diesel fuel at the rate of 4.5L per...

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Dopamine and Slot Machines

Category: Culture

Pardon the self-promotion, but I've got an article in yesterday's Boston Globe on neuroscience and gambling: The growth of the gambling industry has been accompanied by a large amount of new scientific research explaining the effects of gambling on the...

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Memory and Journalism

Category: Neuroscience

A great series on Gary Lynch.

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August 18, 2007

Genetic Discrimination in the U.S. Military

Category: Culture

This seems like a pretty terrible policy: Eric Miller's career as an Army Ranger wasn't ended by a battlefield wound, but his DNA. Lurking in his genes was a mutation that made him vulnerable to uncontrolled tumor growth. After suffering...

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August 17, 2007

The Neuroscience of Market Bubbles

Category: Neuroscience

Given the recent bursting of the housing bubble (let's hope, at least, that we've hit rock bottom), Kevin Drum raises an interesting issue: Bubbles come along with some frequency these days, always with some shiny new reason for bankers to...

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August 16, 2007

Emotional Music

Category: Culture

Here's a cool new music site. The premise of the site, musicovery.com, is simple: you pick a mood (somewhere between the poles of "energetic," "dark," "calm," or "positive"), select a few musical genres and a favorite decade, and then the...

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August 15, 2007

The Flynn Effect

Category: Culture

Tyler Cowen summarizes a few of the more surprising aspects of the Flynn effect, which refers to the phenomenon of rising scores on mental ability tests (like the IQ test) from one generation to the next: 1. Non-verbal IQ has...

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Diversity and Darwin

Category: Culture

The Boston Globe recently had an interesting article on some possible downsides of societal diversity, which have been uncomfortably quantified by Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard. Putnam has found that: ...the greater the diversity in a community, the...

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August 14, 2007

Reality is Fake?

Category: Culture

I had the pleasure of studying philosophy with Nick Bostrom while at Oxford. He's a great teacher, but, unlike John Tierney, I'm not persuaded by his latest conjecture: Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it...

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McDonald's and Mere Exposure

Category: Culture

Little kids love McDonald's: Hamburgers, french fries, chicken nuggets, and even milk and carrots all taste better to children if they think they came from McDonald's, a small study suggests. In taste tests with 63 children ages 3 to 5,...

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August 13, 2007

Lesch-Nyhan

Category: Culture

There is wonderful, disturbing, and extremely graphic article in last week's New Yorker (not online) about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a mysterious disorder characterized by excessive amounts of uric acid and a dangerous tendency to injure oneself. In its bleakest incarnation, Lesch-Nyhan...

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August 10, 2007

The Daily Show on Psychology

Category: Culture

Jon Stewart, interviewing Tal Ben-Shahar, who teaches a positive psychology class at Harvard: "I was a psychology major, so I know a lot of it is bullshit." Watch the video here....

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Don't Read the Business Page

Category: Culture

So the financial markets are all upset. Stocks began the morning with another steep slide. The media, of course, is covering the growing liquidity crisis in excruciating detail, spending lots of hours and column inches analyzing the latest rumors and...

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August 9, 2007

The Psychology of Subprime Mortgages

Category:

Why so many people take out such bad loans.

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Optimism

Category: Culture

Here's your feel-good story of the day. (It feels even better if you're a fan of The Wire. And if you're not a fan of The Wire, then you've made a very big mistake.) The story is a helpful reminder...

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August 8, 2007

Bookshelves and the Demarcation Problem

Category: Culture

As the author of a book that's equally divided between descriptions of neuroscience and descriptions of art, I've spent far too much time pondering the organization of book stores. How should books be classified? Is my book a "science" book,...

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August 7, 2007

Move South, Live Longer

Category: Culture

It turns out that moving to the sun belt will help you live longer. Here's the NBER abstract: We estimate that the number of annual deaths attributable to cold temperature is 27,940 or 1.3% of total deaths in the US....

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Addiction

Category: Culture

Addiction factoid of the Day: Psychiatrist Lee Robins found that almost half of American soldiers used heroin or opium while in Vietnam, but rather fewer were actually addicted, and almost 90 percent of those kicked the habit upon returning to...

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The Evolution of Affluence

Category: Culture

History tends to make even the most unlikely revolutions seem inevitable. Looking backwards to the 18th century, it's easy to conclude that the Industrial Revolution was bound to happen, that the forward march of modernity was predestined. But what this...

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August 6, 2007

Internet and Information Overload

Category: Culture

The human brain craves information and stimulation, and the internet lets us sate our craving. But is there such a thing as too much?

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