One of the most frequent questions I get when speaking about my book is the MSG question. My talk is about L-glutamate, the taste of umami and veal stock (it makes a little more sense if you’ve read the book) and, before I get to the punchline, I’m inevitably interrupted by someone insisting that MSG…

My article on the Blue Brain project is now online*: It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them. “The column has been built and it runs,” Markram…

I know I just wrote an article on the power of expectations, but this is ridiculous: In a series of studies in the 1970s and ’80s, psychologists at the University of Washington put more than 300 students into a study room outfitted like a bar with mirrors, music and a stretch of polished pine. The…

The Times has an interesting profile of Johan Santana, perhaps the most effective pitcher in baseball. What’s interesting about Santana is that his secret isn’t a 98 mph fastball or some wicked new breaking ball. Rather, he strikes out batters because he denies batters the perceptual cues they rely on when making batting decisions: Whether…