Culture:
In the latest New Yorker, the always fascinating and fair Jerome Groopman* has an article on the recent Science paper documenting neural activity in vegetative patients: For four months, Kate Bainbridge had not spoken or responded to her family or...
Posted on October 8, 2007 10:34 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It's not easy to re-educate our sense of taste. Britain is learning that the hard way: Two years ago, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver expressed horror at the Turkey Twizzlers being served in Britain's school cafeterias and equated many school lunches...
Posted on October 4, 2007 2:18 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Over at the MIT Tech Review website, neuroscientist Ed Boyden argues for brain augmentation: It's arguably time for a discipline to emerge around the idea of human augmentation. At the MIT Media Lab, we are beginning to search for principles...
Posted on October 1, 2007 9:24 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In light of Mahmoud Ahmadenijad's recent comment about there being no gay people in Iran, Matthew Yglesias links to this really interesting article about homosexuals in Saudi Arabia: What seems more startling, at least from a Western perspective, is that...
Posted on September 28, 2007 12:19 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Fear isn't our most rational feeling; the amygdala is an inherently inscrutable bit of brain. Tyler Cowen makes a good point about how the irrationality of fear manifests itself with global warming: I believe, for instance, that ocean acidification will,...
Posted on September 26, 2007 7:25 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Here's Drake Bennett: In a set of experiments carried out in 2005 by the economists Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely, of MIT, and On Amir, a marketing expert at the University of California at San Diego, subjects were given a...
Posted on September 25, 2007 12:26 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Can you engineer a yawn to become perfectly contagious? A number of studies found that a medley of ordinary yawns on video played to a classroom for five minutes would induce a responsive yawn in 55 percent of the audience....
Posted on September 25, 2007 10:17 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
1) Away, by Amy Bloom. The prose is perfect. It's the best written new novel you'll read this year, and that's saying something, since Ian McEwan also came out with a new novel. Another interesting thing about the book is...
Posted on September 24, 2007 9:27 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Loss aversion is so easy to understand - it can be explained using a coin flip in ten seconds - and yet it manages to explain so many anomalies of modern life*, from the 4th down habits of football coaches...
Posted on September 24, 2007 9:14 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Like many Patriots fans, I've been suffering from an acute case of cognitive dissonance ever since I learned about Bill Belichick's taping habits. On the one hand, I know cheating is wrong. On the other hand, winning sure feels good....
Posted on September 21, 2007 5:27 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Context is everything: Sana Klaric and husband Adnan, who used the names "Sweetie" and "Prince of Joy" in an online chatroom, spent hours telling each other about their marriage troubles, Metro.co.uk reported. The truth emerged when the two turned up...
Posted on September 21, 2007 12:18 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Alan Greenspan seems to have discovered the irrationality of human nature. In his recent appearance on the Daily Show, he lamented the stubborn persistence of financial bubbles, from junk bonds to dot-com stocks to real estate. (For a thorough history...
Posted on September 21, 2007 10:08 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've said it before and I'll say it again: the vast majority of hybrid cars aren't worth the surcharge. You'd get much better mileage with a smaller engine, especially if it was a clean diesel. What worries me about hybrids...
Posted on September 20, 2007 10:40 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
So it's the High Holy Day season again - the pious two weeks in the Jewish calendar connecting Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur - and that means that many American Jews are going to shul. For most of these religious...
Posted on September 20, 2007 9:57 AM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There's a really wonderful article by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker this week, excerpted from his forthcoming Musicophilia. I've got a profile of Sacks in the next issue of Seed (hitting newsstands soon), which was a real thrill to...
Posted on September 19, 2007 8:08 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Do the arts serve a purpose in a scientific world?
Posted on September 18, 2007 11:17 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of the more fascinating bits of research I couldn't cram into my recent article on the bird brain concerned some work out Erich Jarvis' lab. In 2004, Jarvis and colleagues found that songbirds have a nearly identical version of...
Posted on September 18, 2007 10:20 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One day, your iPod will be made out of biological flesh. Just kidding. In general, I'm a pretty staunch skeptic of The Singularity, but I've got to admit that experiments like this are pretty rad: A team in Silver's HMS...
Posted on September 17, 2007 1:23 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've always thought someone could make a great television show by featuring some of the more bizarre and enlightening neurological syndromes that afflict the human brain. What is it like, for example, to not have an amygdala, or OFC, or...
Posted on September 17, 2007 8:56 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've got an article in yesterday's Boston Globe on the acute intelligence of birds, which is a by-product of their sociality: There is a growing scientific recognition of the genius of birds. Scientists are now studying various birds to explore...
Posted on September 17, 2007 7:52 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Gary Taubes has a pretty damning takedown of modern epidemiology at the Times Magazine: In the case of H.R.T. [Hormone Replacement Therapy], as with most issues of diet, lifestyle and disease, the hypotheses begin their transformation into public-health recommendations only...
Posted on September 16, 2007 8:14 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There was something sad yet slightly poignant about watching President Bush's speech on Iraq last night. I thought Andrew Sullivan got the atmospherics exactly right: He seemed almost broken to me. His voice raspy, his eyes watery, his affect exhausted,...
Posted on September 14, 2007 9:15 AM • •
What Kanye West can teach us about the neuroscience of music.
Posted on September 13, 2007 10:58 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My vestibular system is totally confused: See James Fallows for the explanation. Movies like this make me glad that pilots rely on gyroscopes to guide them through the clouds....
Posted on September 12, 2007 1:23 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Just a quick note on the liberal/conservative psychological study that everyone is talking about. (Dave Munger has a thorough write-up here.) Color me dubious. My own bias is to distrust any experiment that tries to collapse extremely complex cognitive categories...
Posted on September 12, 2007 10:50 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Boy, was Descartes wrong. His philosophy of duality divided our being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was...
Posted on September 12, 2007 6:46 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There are so many stupid studies of the gendered brain that it's easy to conclude that good research into psychological sex differences is impossible. But that would be a mistake. I think one of most interesting recent investigations into the...
Posted on September 10, 2007 11:25 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Yawning is famously contagious. Except that is, if you're autistic. Here's Mindhacks: The study showed that children with autism were far less likely to yawn in response to watching others do the same. Often, autistic social difficulties are put down...
Posted on September 7, 2007 3:38 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
From Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz: Sooner of later, everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these...
Posted on September 7, 2007 1:19 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
In my post on warm milk and sleepiness - the dairy acts like a placebo - a commenter made an astute point: what does "placebo" mean in that context? If you have developed the pathways that insist on Warm Milk...
Posted on September 7, 2007 10:44 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
From Tyler Cowen: 1. In Danish data, if a CEO's child dies, the value of that CEO's company falls by one-fifth in the following two years. 2. If a CEO's wife dies, the value of that CEO's company falls by...
Posted on September 6, 2007 11:05 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Is it bad if your favorite philosophy comes in aphorism form? This is why I've always enjoyed Wittgenstein: his writing has the density of plutonium, since it's just pre-digested quotes. I can read it without having to remember what anomalous...
Posted on September 6, 2007 10:57 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Chemistry gets short shrift. Theoretical physics and neuroscience and molecular biology get all the sexy press, while chemistry departments slowly wither away. In many respects, this is just because chemistry has been so successful: there don't seem to be any...
Posted on September 6, 2007 10:24 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
So tax breaks for philanthropy increase inequality: For every three dollars they give away, the federal government typically gives up a dollar or more in tax revenue, because of the charitable tax deduction and by not collecting estate taxes. [snip]...
Posted on September 6, 2007 10:10 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
One of the innate limitations of every intelligence test is that the test is forced to conflate the measurable aspects of intelligence with a general definition of intelligence. What can't be quantified is ignored. And what can be easily quantified...
Posted on September 5, 2007 11:05 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My own experience tells me that a glass of warm milk is a potent sedative. All it takes is a few ounces of heated dairy before my eye lids start getting real heavy. It turns out, though, that warm milk...
Posted on September 5, 2007 9:55 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I'm a big fan of Mad Men, the new HBOesque drama about 1960's advertising executives on AMC. It's basically an extended melodrama about why the Ike years actually sucked, and neatly punctures that lame American nostalgia for the "simpler" times...
Posted on September 4, 2007 7:10 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Saw Bill and Hillary today. I'll spare you my political commentary, except for two brief observations: 1) Hillary's biggest applause line came when she declared that, once she's President, she'll "listen to what scientists say and stop being so anti-science"....
Posted on September 2, 2007 4:56 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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....
Posted on August 31, 2007 12:42 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 30, 2007 5:18 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 30, 2007 10:02 AM • 32 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 29, 2007 9:53 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 28, 2007 9:20 AM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 27, 2007 8:08 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There were phone phreaks.
Read on »
Posted on August 23, 2007 10:31 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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,...
Posted on August 22, 2007 9:23 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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,...
Posted on August 21, 2007 3:21 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 21, 2007 11:30 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 20, 2007 2:47 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 20, 2007 10:35 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 18, 2007 11:39 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 16, 2007 11:50 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 15, 2007 11:31 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 15, 2007 10:56 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 14, 2007 10:52 AM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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,...
Posted on August 14, 2007 10:05 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 13, 2007 10:49 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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....
Posted on August 10, 2007 8:06 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 10, 2007 10:17 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 9, 2007 9:48 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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,...
Posted on August 8, 2007 11:11 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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....
Posted on August 7, 2007 1:19 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 7, 2007 10:10 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 7, 2007 9:45 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The human brain craves information and stimulation, and the internet lets us sate our craving. But is there such a thing as too much?
Posted on August 6, 2007 11:17 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Simon Baron-Cohen, of mindblindness fame, uses autism to examine the psychology of dishonesty. He concludes that the central reason people with autism are so honest (and so vulnerable to liars) is that they have difficulty developing a theory of mind...
Posted on July 24, 2007 2:26 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This truth thing is difficult: In 1977, Steven Weinberg, then two years shy of the Nobel Prize in Physics, decided to do a little of what some theorists call "ambulance chasing." He heard a rumor, while spending a year at...
Posted on July 24, 2007 9:28 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Are bonobos really such peaceful beatniks? Is is true that they like to make love, not war? The truth is that nobody really knows. Ian Parker has a fascinating profile of the species, and our attempts to learn about the...
Posted on July 23, 2007 4:30 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
False convictions are a by-product of our psychology
Posted on July 23, 2007 10:14 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
This is the coolest study of movement since Muybridge....
Posted on July 20, 2007 12:57 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Why athletes choke.
Posted on July 20, 2007 10:17 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Ramesh Ponnuru, of the National Review, says this: What renders atheism incompatible with a coherent account of morality, when it is incompatible, is physicalism (or what is sometimes described as reductive materialism). If it is true that the universe consists...
Posted on July 19, 2007 10:42 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Some crimes are beyond the pale of comprehension. This is one of those: After dark on June 18, the police say, as many as 10 armed assailants repeatedly raped a Haitian immigrant in her apartment at Dunbar Village and then...
Posted on July 19, 2007 10:19 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Via Language Log...
Posted on July 18, 2007 12:25 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It's a brilliant new approach to treating the traumatized minds of war veterans: having them care for rescued and abused parrots. By developing a bond of trust with a bird, the PTSD patients slowly recover their faith in humanity. Listen...
Posted on July 16, 2007 2:40 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Is this a living missing link? Scientists in the Congo have found a band of primates that seem to engage in some very sophisticated hunts. The Guardian reports: Deep in the Congolese jungle is a band of apes that, according...
Posted on July 16, 2007 10:23 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
