Brain & Behavior:
Over at Mind Matters, the expert blog I curate at Scientific American, we're currently featuring a really interesting article by On Amir on the cognitive cost of making decisions: For instance, it's long been recognized that strenuous cognitive tasks--such as...
Posted on July 23, 2008 10:31 AM • 4 Comments •
Look up charming in a dictionary and I'm pretty sure you'll see this video: Because we like to link everything to the brain over here at the Frontal Cortex, it's worth mentioning that the number four also represents the outer...
Posted on July 23, 2008 8:16 AM • 1 Comments •
This kid is a poster child for deliberate practice: Marc Yu, a 9-year-old piano prodigy from Pasadena, Calif., recently played at a benefit for victims of the earthquake in Sichuan, China. And he didn't play "Row, Row, Row Your Boat."...
Posted on July 22, 2008 10:16 AM • 11 Comments •
I've got an article in the latest New Yorker (not online) on the neuroscience of insight. I begin the article with the harrowing story of Wag Dodge and the Mann Gulch fire, before describing the research of Mark Jung Beeman,...
Posted on July 22, 2008 9:58 AM • 5 Comments •
David Carr, a media columnist for the New York Times, was addicted to crack for several years in the late 1980's. In the Times Magazine (and in his new book) he tells the story of his own investigation into his...
Posted on July 21, 2008 10:43 AM • 4 Comments •
Whenever I happen to watch some talking heads on a cable news channel - usually while stuck in an airport - I'm always impressed by how mistaken the basic premise of the conversation is. The pundits will waste lots of...
Posted on July 18, 2008 5:59 PM • 10 Comments •
One way to understand the collapse of the real estate bubble (and our current financial mess) is as a massive case of bad decision-making. The mistakes, of course, were made by many different people and organizations: the investment banks who...
Posted on July 17, 2008 10:49 AM • 26 Comments •
Steven Levitt writes about the difficulty of judging wine: On Tuesday afternoons we had wine tastings. I asked if I could be allowed the opportunity to conduct one of these wine tastings "blind" to see what we could learn from...
Posted on July 16, 2008 2:58 PM • 10 Comments •
I loved WALL-E. In my opinion, it's the best Pixar movie yet, and I was a huge fan of Ratatouille. While the movie has an obvious environmental subtext - we are destroying the earth with our love of disposable things...
Posted on July 14, 2008 11:10 AM • 7 Comments •
The latest Seed has a very interesting article on the complicated geometry underlying Western music, and the intuitive mathematical understanding demonstrated by composers: The shapes of the space of chords we have described also reveal deep connections between a wide...
Posted on July 11, 2008 10:17 AM • 8 Comments •
Nature has a really interesting article on the sheer difficulty (impossibility?) of finding the genetic underpinnings of mental illness: Finding genes involved in psychiatric conditions is proving to be particularly intractable because it is still unclear whether the various diagnoses...
Posted on July 10, 2008 11:56 AM • 7 Comments •
From the new experimental philosophy reader, edited by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols: It used to be commonplace that the discipline of philosophy was deeply concerned with questions about the human condition. Philosophers thought about human beings and how their...
Posted on July 10, 2008 10:53 AM • 6 Comments •
One of the biggest misconceptions of natural selection is that it mandates nastiness, that the pressure to survive and multiply requires a ruthless sort of amorality. In other words, we are all Hobbesian brutes, driven to survive by selfish genes....
Posted on July 9, 2008 10:17 AM • 2 Comments •
Some new evidence suggesting that children aren't such bundles of joy: Sociologists are discovering that children may not make parents happier and that childless adults, contrary to popular stereotypes, may often be more contented than people with kids. Parents "definitely...
Posted on July 8, 2008 3:51 PM • 26 Comments •
Adam Gopnik has a great New Yorker article (not online) on the genius and wickedness of G.K. Chesterton. Although he wrote some masterful books - my favorites are The Man Who Was Thursday and the Father Brown detective stories -...
Posted on July 8, 2008 1:47 PM • 4 Comments •
I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on the new science of depression: Prozac is one of the most successful drugs of all time. Since its introduction as an antidepressant more than 20 years ago, Prozac has...
Posted on July 6, 2008 6:56 PM • 18 Comments •
You know what makes me proud to be an American? The fact that the black presidential candidate with the funny African-Muslim name is leading in the polls against the white aviator war hero married to a beer heiress. And I'm...
Posted on July 4, 2008 11:33 AM • 11 Comments •
Zadie Smith, writing in The Believer, offers future novelists some advice: When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second -...
Posted on July 3, 2008 11:27 AM • 7 Comments •
The thrill I get from watching Michael Phelps swim is the same thrill I get from watching Tiger Woods put for birdie on the 18th hole or from reading 1930's Auden: the impossible isn't just made possible: these guys make...
Posted on July 2, 2008 1:56 PM • 3 Comments •
Another day, another sinking stock market. The Dow has officially entered bear territory, which is defined by a drop of 20 percent or more. Many variables are responsible for the financial malaise, from rising gas prices to a weakening job...
Posted on July 1, 2008 1:22 PM • 6 Comments •
Why the field remains so necessary
Posted on July 1, 2008 9:59 AM • 1 Comments •
Language is the stuff of thought. I'm reminded of this truism every time I sip a glass of wine and some pretentious snob (usually me) insists on saying something about the Chianti Classico smelling like cherries, or how the New...
Posted on June 27, 2008 12:15 PM • 3 Comments •
If William James were alive today, I'm pretty sure that he'd be an experimental philosopher. (He'd also be a cognitive psychologist, a public intellectual in the mold of Richard Rorty and a damn fine essayist, filling the back pages of...
Posted on June 25, 2008 10:46 AM • 15 Comments •
I was on the Takeaway last week talking about this study: We examined the role of serotonin transporter (5-HTT) and oxytocin receptor (OXTR) genes in explaining differences in sensitive parenting in a community sample of 159 Caucasian, middle-class mothers with...
Posted on June 24, 2008 10:47 AM • 6 Comments •
In a recent issue of Nature, Nikos Logothetis, director of the Max Plank Institute for Biological Cybernetics, wrote some surprisingly harsh sentences about the experimental limitations of fMRI. The piece is especially noteworthy because Logothetis has probably done more than...
Posted on June 24, 2008 9:59 AM • 3 Comments •
There are a few writers who manage to trigger a contradictory mixture of feelings in me: the joy of reading their prose is fused with the mild anguish of not having written their prose. It's one part status anxiety, a...
Posted on June 23, 2008 11:59 AM • 0 Comments •
From Rachel Herz's quite interesting The Scent of Desire: In one study that contrasted the trauma of being blinded or becoming anosmic [losing you sense of smell] after an accident, it was found that those who were blinded initially felt...
Posted on June 18, 2008 6:59 AM • 3 Comments •
Like so many golf fans, I'd never even thought about watching golf on television until Tiger Woods. I don't play the game and the images of all those manicured greens and hushed crowds always struck me as incredibly boring. Why...
Posted on June 17, 2008 11:14 AM • 11 Comments •
M. Night Shyamalan, the director of the vaguely anti-evolution (and thoroughly mediocre) film The Happening, uses the brain to discuss the limits of science: There's so much unexplained stuff. I don't quite understand the scientific explanation of the placebo effect....
Posted on June 16, 2008 10:24 AM • 14 Comments •
It happens to me every time: I tell myself that it's just a game, that these overpaid basketball superstars don't really have any loyalty to a particular team, place, city, etc., that I really shouldn't care about the outcome of...
Posted on June 13, 2008 11:11 AM • 13 Comments •
At first glance, it's hard to think of a more frivolous form of culture than the daily soap opera. It's pure and delicious escapism. And yet, at least in Brazil, soap operas have powerfully influenced family planning, according to a...
Posted on June 12, 2008 1:29 PM • 2 Comments •
Bookslut has a really interesting interview with Jeff Warren, author of The Head Trip: Q: It turns out sleep is more interesting than we usually expect -- and that it even has a history! What are some key misconceptions about...
Read on »
Posted on June 12, 2008 1:16 PM • 4 Comments •
In the latest Atlantic, John Staddon, a professor of psychology at Duke, has an article on the dangers of road signs and speed limits: The American system of traffic control, with its many signs and stops, and with its specific...
Posted on June 11, 2008 10:56 AM • 11 Comments •
A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on various explanations for home field advantage. One of the more interesting tidbits I learned was this: Professional teams, however, seem to be better adjusted to life on the road. (The chartered...
Posted on June 11, 2008 8:20 AM • 1 Comments •
David Brooks' column today is filled with some depressing financial facts: Between 1989 and 2001, credit-card debt nearly tripled, soaring from $238 billion to $692 billion. By last year, it was up to $937 billion, the report said. State governments...
Posted on June 10, 2008 10:23 AM • 15 Comments •
Given the weather on the Eastern seaboard - it's one of those hot, sultry days where you wait for a thunderstorm to purge the humidity from the air - I decided to do a quick literature search for the effects...
Posted on June 9, 2008 11:13 AM • 2 Comments •
Dave Munger has a great post on how fMRI images bias the brain. The researchers asked 156 students at Colorado State University to evaluate three different summaries of brain research. As you can probably guess (especially if you're familiar with...
Posted on June 7, 2008 12:43 PM • 7 Comments •
Humans are exquisitely social animals, and yet we're vulnerable to some pretty stunning flaws in social cognition. Unfortunately, most of these flaws are on full display during a presidential campaign. Consider the false rumor, which can influence our beliefs even...
Posted on June 6, 2008 10:59 AM • 5 Comments •
It's been recognized for a few years that drinking diet sodas can actually cause weight gain, since the phony sweetness of artificial sweeteners disrupts the "predictive relationship" between a sweet taste and caloric satisfaction. In other words, people drink a...
Posted on June 5, 2008 1:54 PM • 14 Comments •
Over at Neurophilosophy, Mo has an excellent summary of a drug in Phase II clinical trials that tries to treat depression by up-regulating neurogenesis. In other words, it wants to ease your sadness by giving you more new brain cells....
Posted on June 4, 2008 8:51 AM • 10 Comments •
Is your right parahippocampal gyrus feeling a little tired? Then maybe you should stop being such a sarcastic smart ass. It turns out that this obscure brain area, tucked deep inside the right hemisphere, is largely responsible for the detection...
Posted on June 3, 2008 10:25 AM • 6 Comments •
What psychological phenomenon do you believe in but cannot prove? I'd have to go with birth order. Having grown up with three siblings, I can't help but be convinced that my birth order (I'm the second oldest) has had a...
Posted on June 2, 2008 11:34 AM • 9 Comments •
I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on a phenomenon that's always fascinated me: the tip-of-the-tongue moment. Late in 1988, a 41-year-old Italian hardware clerk arrived in his doctor's office with a bizarre complaint. Although he could...
Posted on June 2, 2008 9:59 AM • 11 Comments •
Every science goes through several distinct phases. First, there is the dissection phase. The subject is broken apart into its simplest possible elements. (As Plato put it, "nature is cut at the joints, like a good butcher.") For neuroscience, this...
Posted on May 30, 2008 11:48 AM • 0 Comments •
The body control on this guy is utterly insane: While there have been some interesting studies of dance and the brain, most of this research focuses on the learning of motor movements. (Not surprisingly, expert dancers exhibit increased activity in...
Posted on May 27, 2008 9:59 AM • 5 Comments •
Last Sunday, I had an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on the underlying causes of home field advantage. The Celtics are an extreme example of a sporting phenomenon known as home-field advantage: teams playing on their home field,...
Posted on May 27, 2008 9:50 AM • 3 Comments •
Joan Acocella has an interesting article on the science of hangovers: Hangovers also have an emotional component. Kingsley Amis, who was, in his own words, one of the foremost drunks of his time, and who wrote three books on drinking,...
Posted on May 21, 2008 12:52 PM • 5 Comments •
Iceland, apparently, is the happiest country on earth: Highest birth rate in Europe + highest divorce rate + highest percentage of women working outside the home = the best country in the world in which to live. There has to...
Posted on May 21, 2008 12:33 PM • 6 Comments •
There's something a little scary to me about TMS. (I should note, though, that my fear is irrational: the technology is now extremely safe. Seizures are a very, very rare side-effect of TMS. Unless, that is, you already have a...
Posted on May 20, 2008 2:56 PM • 5 Comments •
Johann Hari decides to take Provigil (aka viagra for the brain) and reports back on the results: I sat down and took one 200mg tablet with a glass of water. Then I pottered about the flat for an hour, listening...
Posted on May 20, 2008 10:28 AM • 19 Comments •
The secret to winning in the NBA playoffs this year is to play on your own court: teams at home are 20-1. At first glance, this makes little sense. It's much easier to understand why football teams (the noise can...
Posted on May 15, 2008 11:43 AM • 10 Comments •
D.T. Max has an absolutely fascinating article in a recent New Yorker on the molecular gastronomist and chef Grant Achatz and his battle with tongue cancer. While Achatz's doctors initially insisted that he get his tongue surgically removed, the chef...
Posted on May 15, 2008 10:32 AM • 7 Comments •
One of the delicious ironies of memory is that, even when our recollections are utterly false, they still feel true. Consider this wonderful tale from the upcoming season of This American Life (I've loved the first two episodes, by the...
Posted on May 14, 2008 10:57 AM • 8 Comments •
I admire David Brooks for trying to expand the list of topics written about by Times columnists. (To be honest, I'm a little tired of reading about presidential politics.) His latest column, on "The Neural Buddhists," tries to interject modern...
Posted on May 14, 2008 10:45 AM • 18 Comments •
The tragedies are so vast they are incomprehensible: thousands are dead after a powerful earthquake in China while up to half a million people in Myanmar may die as a result of post-cyclone epidemics. How does the mind grapple with...
Posted on May 12, 2008 12:55 PM • 9 Comments •
Your Brain is Better
Posted on May 9, 2008 12:30 PM • 19 Comments •
Over at Mind Matters, my other site, we just posted a rather interesting article on the ways in which ordinary cell phones can alter your patterns of brain activity, and even interfere with sleep. Here's Doug Fields: Hospitals and airplanes...
Posted on May 7, 2008 9:14 AM • 11 Comments •
The Times recently had an article on the booming business of brain fitness: Decaying brains, or the fear thereof, have inspired a mini-industry of brain health products -- not just supplements like coenzyme Q10, ginseng and bacopa, but computer-based fitter-brain...
Posted on May 5, 2008 1:33 PM • 11 Comments •
It is, perhaps, the most nightmarish of neurological conditions: when the brain stem is selectively injured, a person can be perfectly self-aware and yet completely paralyzed, so that they lose control of virtually all voluntary muscles. The technical name of...
Posted on May 5, 2008 10:59 AM • 6 Comments •
Now that the boomers are entering their sixties, the problem of age-related cognitive decline is going to become a serious mental health issue. The aged brain often suffers from a bevy of symptoms, from memory loss to problems with concentration....
Posted on May 1, 2008 11:39 AM • 2 Comments •
The Times has an interesting review of two new books that discuss the oft cited link between mental illness and artistic creativity. It's all too easy to indulge in cliched overgeneralizations about the thin line separating madness and genius, but...
Posted on April 29, 2008 11:13 AM • 10 Comments •
You probably thought this post was going to be about how Meredith Grey (or perhaps McDreamy?) is a neuroscientist, or how Shonda Rhimes (the creator of Grey's Anatomy) anticipated some surprising discovery of modern neuroscience. Alas, I have no such...
Posted on April 28, 2008 12:49 PM • 7 Comments •
Razib calls my attention to this new Nature study on the genetic variation underlying the stress response. The researchers focused on neuropeptide Y, an endogenous anxiolytic (it's like an anti-anxiety drug naturally produced by the brain) which is released in...
Posted on April 25, 2008 9:57 AM • 5 Comments •
Crazy stuff, courtesy of John Tierney: The natural impulse to stop holding your breath (typically within 30 seconds or a minute) is not because of an oxygen shortage but because of the painful buildup of carbon dioxide. Mr. Blaine said...
Posted on April 22, 2008 9:53 AM • 4 Comments •
Speaking of the senses, it's always fascinating what happens when that sensory spigot is turned off, so that the cortex is suddenly filled with silence. Jad Abumrad, the co-host of Radio Lab (download their new season!), recently spent some time...
Posted on April 21, 2008 12:55 PM • 5 Comments •
In honor of National Poetry Month, which always struck me as a very bizarre month (is poetry less essential in the other eleven months of the year? And why April?), I thought I'd post a selection of some poetry on...
Posted on April 21, 2008 10:40 AM • 4 Comments •
Nicholas Kristof has an excellent column on rationalizing, partisan affiliation and the Clinton/Obama race: If you're a Democrat, your candidate won in Wednesday night's presidential debate -- that was obvious, and most neutral observers would recognize that. But the other...
Posted on April 17, 2008 1:56 PM • 14 Comments •
For more than 30 years, it has been a truism of social science that, once our basic needs are met, money doesn't buy happiness, or even upgrade despair. In one well-known survey, people on the Forbes 100 list of the...
Posted on April 16, 2008 10:29 AM • 9 Comments •
Over at Freakonomics, they invited several prominent thinkers to weigh in on a rather lofty question: How much progress have psychology and psychiatry really made? The answers are mostly interesting, with nearly everyone agreeing that the sciences of the mind...
Posted on April 15, 2008 9:31 AM • 4 Comments •
Raymond Tallis recently launched a broadside against the nascent field of neuroaesthetics, especially as applied to literature: A generation of academic literary critics has now arisen who invoke "neuroscience" to assist them in their work of explication, interpretation and appreciation....
Posted on April 14, 2008 10:12 AM • 6 Comments •
A great comment by Joel Kahn, who argues that we need a new science of human interaction, able to study what Durkheim referred to as "the conscience collective": Durkheim was obviously not the first to advance a notion of mind...
Posted on April 9, 2008 8:50 AM • 7 Comments •
There's no shortage of books on neurological patients with brain injuries, but Head Cases, the new book by Michael Paul Mason, is one of my recent favorites. (See here for the Times review.) Mason brings a unique perspective to the...
Posted on April 2, 2008 9:57 AM • 0 Comments •
This is from The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1: Q: I would like to ask about your having said that you were very timid about beginning to write stories. Borges: Yes, I was very timid because when I was young...
Posted on March 31, 2008 9:43 AM • 2 Comments •
Someone should really tell the NCAA tournament television commentators that "the hot hand" doesn't exist. I've gotten pretty tired of hearing these tired cliches about Texas going cold, or Stephen Curry catching fire yet again. Never has a cognitive illusion...
Posted on March 31, 2008 8:11 AM • 9 Comments •
I was raised in a kosher household, which meant that I grew up convinced that bacon, lobster, pepperoni pizza and cheeseburgers were the promised land of food. (I assumed the banning of trafe was part of God's punishment for Eve...
Posted on March 26, 2008 10:34 AM • 12 Comments •
I had no idea this many Americans were nocturnal: Twenty percent of American workers are night-shift workers, and the number is growing by about 3% per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the rest of society sleeps,...
Posted on March 25, 2008 10:11 AM • 5 Comments •
If you're into art, science and the brain, or enjoyed the recent MoMA show on design, then be sure to check out this Seed/MoMA/Parsons event on April 4th. The guest list is pretty fantastic, and includes everyone from Benoit Mandelbrot...
Posted on March 24, 2008 12:27 PM • 1 Comments •
Over at Mind Matters, the expert blog I curate at Scientific American, we've had some really good posts lately. The most recent post, by Maryanne Wolf (author of that other Proust book on neuroscience, Proust and the Squid), Mirit Barzillai...
Posted on March 20, 2008 3:35 PM • 4 Comments •
First, watch this: Then read the poem it inspired, which was written by one of my favorite poets, Wislawa Szymborska: The Experiment As a short subject before the main feature - in which the actors did their best to make...
Posted on March 19, 2008 5:12 PM • 6 Comments •
I guess I should make it clear that, contrary to the title of my talk, Kanye West isn't really a neuroscientist. (Conveying irony via the internet isn't easy. Although it's still amusing to imagine him, in full rapper regalia, doing...
Posted on March 19, 2008 12:23 PM • 11 Comments •
Kennedy Fraser had an illuminating profile of the novelist Pat Barker in a recent New Yorker (not online): Barker grew up with silent, wounded men. "And with talkative women, spinning stories," she said. "Stories with bits missing." She is a...
Posted on March 18, 2008 8:56 AM • 6 Comments •
A few weeks ago, John Lanchester wrote a thoughtful meditation on the intertwined nature of perception, smell and taste: A taste or a smell can pass you by, unremarked or nearly so, in large part because you don't have a...
Posted on March 17, 2008 11:45 AM • 2 Comments •
Evolutionary psychologist D
Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
