Neuroscience:
An intriguing new hypothesis that seeks to explain all of the diverse psychological symptoms associated with autism. Here's the abstract: While significant advances have been made in identifying the neuronal structures and cells affected, a unifying theory that could explain...
Posted on October 25, 2007 5:06 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It's an audacious idea, and I didn't believe it was possible until I saw the video. But it really is possible to teach blind people to see using their tongue. By connecting a camera to an array of electrodes that...
Posted on October 16, 2007 9:41 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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,...
Posted on August 31, 2007 11:22 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 31, 2007 10:23 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 29, 2007 10:28 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 24, 2007 9:57 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 24, 2007 9:34 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 23, 2007 4:51 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
How the Battle of Gettysburg led to the discovery of phantom limbs.
Posted on August 22, 2007 9:49 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A great series on Gary Lynch.
Posted on August 20, 2007 10:25 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
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...
Posted on August 17, 2007 9:54 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
What casinos have in common with cigarettes.
Posted on July 17, 2007 10:21 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
David Dobbs has a wonderful article in the most recent Times Magazine on Williams syndrome, a development disorder that results in a bizarre mixture of cognitive strengths and deficits: Williams syndrome rises from a genetic accident during meiosis, when DNA's...
Posted on July 12, 2007 11:16 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Here's your depressing determinist paper for the day: Is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime? We answer this question within a model that features...
Posted on July 9, 2007 11:16 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Selective brain damage makes us more rational investors.
Posted on June 27, 2007 10:23 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Given recent inane comments about the immateriality of altruism by a certain neurosurgeon, I thought this recent article on the neural underpinnings of "pure altruism" might be of interest: You don't need to donate to charity to feel all warm...
Posted on June 15, 2007 11:40 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
And a Borges short story.
Posted on June 7, 2007 10:13 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The neural source of partisanship.
Posted on June 4, 2007 4:59 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
David Brooks uses neuroscience to criticize Al Gore's latest book: [Gore's argument] grows out of a bizarre view of human nature. Gore seems to have come up with a theory that the upper, logical mind sits on top of, and...
Posted on May 29, 2007 11:39 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It works. Dick Cheney shows how to do it: These are events [9/11] we can never forget. And they are scenes the enemy would like to see played out in this country over and over again, on a larger and...
Posted on May 27, 2007 2:51 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The importance of investing in pre-K education
Posted on May 25, 2007 10:24 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
From the March 31 issue of The Lancet: The ease of getting to sleep and staying asleep depends not only on previous wake time, but also on associations with the circadian rhythm of core temperature. Sleep is easiest to initiate...
Posted on May 22, 2007 9:55 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
David Leonhardt has an interesting column on the importance of using subtle environmental cues - Leonhardt calls them "nudges" - to encourage good decision-making. He begins with a fascinating anecdote about patients in hospital beds: For more than a decade,...
Read on »
Posted on May 16, 2007 2:16 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Score another one for unconscious processing, which is especially prevalent during sleep. A new study in PNAS suggests that, as people sleep, their brains are forming relational memories, which require "the flexible ability to generalize across existing stores of information"....
Posted on May 1, 2007 9:59 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section today on the cognitive revolution, and recent research demonstrating the relationship between cognition and emotion. Ever since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Cognitive psychology...
Posted on April 29, 2007 12:00 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Mike Penner, a sports writer for the LA Times, has decided to become a woman. He will return to the paper as Christine Daniels. He wrote a gripping personal reflection for the paper explaining his decision: Transsexualism is a complicated...
Posted on April 26, 2007 11:37 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Does football cause brain damage?
Posted on April 25, 2007 1:20 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Mother Theresa was right: "If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will."
Posted on April 13, 2007 10:33 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Does the brain have a type of memory dedicated just to people?
Posted on April 12, 2007 11:35 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Can neuroscience discover the cellular correlate of utility?
Posted on April 8, 2007 6:50 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Marginal utility can be measured. According to new research out of Wolfram Schultz's lab, poor people are much quicker learners than rich people when playing a Pavlovian paradigm for small amounts of money. (Poor people took about 12 trials to...
Posted on April 5, 2007 12:39 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Is the distinction between brain and behavior obsolete?
Posted on April 5, 2007 12:20 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Powerful people are more likely to treat other people unfairly.
Posted on April 4, 2007 10:44 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A recent study in The Archives of General Psychiatry suggests that 25 percent of all Americans diagnosed with depression are actually just dealing with the normal disappointments of life, like divorce or the loss of a job. Their sadness is...
Posted on April 3, 2007 4:10 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My unconscious knew what would happen before I did.
Posted on April 2, 2007 12:43 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Why we shouldn't trust our memories.
Posted on March 28, 2007 10:43 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Do banal terms like "executive control" or "top-down processing" hide a deeper mystery?
Posted on March 23, 2007 10:27 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
More evidence on the crucial importance of emotion when making moral decisions.
Posted on March 22, 2007 10:30 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Here are your disturbing prison facts for the day: Percentage of American adults held in either prison or mental institutions in 1953 and today, respectively: 0.67, 0.68 Percentage of these adults in 1953 who were in mental institutions: 75 Percentage...
Posted on March 21, 2007 10:58 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
t's hard to believe that just over fifty years ago psychology was in the firm grip of behaviorism.
Posted on March 20, 2007 12:36 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Descartes is turning over in his grave: the mind and body grow more intertwined by the day. It's becoming clear that maintaining a healthy mind into old age isn't simply a matter of keeping the brain active with card games...
Posted on March 19, 2007 12:49 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The 20th century was the American century, but we got progressively less happy as the years rolled along: The authors also find that over the last century, Americans, both men and women, have gotten steadily--and hugely--less happy. The difference in...
Posted on March 16, 2007 10:30 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Why bad theories of consciousness won't disappear.
Posted on March 15, 2007 11:43 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Mirror neurons get all the glory, but I think spindle cells just might be even cooler.
Posted on March 13, 2007 3:19 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
After Freud lost his scientific credibility, psychology became very dismissive of dreams. The leading scientific theory held that dreams consisted of mental detritus, the scraps and fragments of memories that your brain didn't want to remember. While Freud mined our...
Posted on March 9, 2007 10:49 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Why is there no neural correlate for the "truth"?
Posted on March 8, 2007 10:45 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Why spicy food tastes hot, and capsaicin evolved in chili peppers.
Posted on March 2, 2007 12:43 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Some people are really, really rich: Take Oracle's founder, Lawrence J. Ellison. Mr. Ellison's net worth last year was around $16 billion. And it will probably be much bigger when the list comes out in a few weeks. With $16...
Posted on March 1, 2007 12:49 PM • 46 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
David Brooks argues that our educational system is failing to educate our emotions.
Read on »
Posted on March 1, 2007 8:55 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My last post on David Brooks, conservatism and neuroscience inspired a spirited debate. I argued that the discoveries of modern neuroscience seem to support liberal public policies focused on reducing levels of inequality: While conservatives tend to regard poverty as...
Posted on February 23, 2007 10:09 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Jane Galt mocks liberal interpretations of behavioral economics: [This] also applies to behavioural economics, which the left seems to believe is a magical proof of the benevolence of government intervention, because after all, people are stupid, so they need the...
Posted on February 22, 2007 11:46 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Why humans display such a bias for certainty.
Read on »
Posted on February 20, 2007 9:19 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Does modern neuroscience confirm the conservative world view?
Posted on February 19, 2007 10:25 AM • 28 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Knowing about brain plasticity makes kids smarter.
Posted on February 16, 2007 10:36 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It's been one of the enduring mysteries of neurogenesis: where do all our new cells go? Do they plug themselves into the cortical network? Do they travel to the olfactory cortex? Or do they wither away and die, a vestigal...
Posted on February 16, 2007 10:19 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I have trouble remembering my own telephone number, so feats like this are totally incomprehensible: When he [Daniel Tammet] gets nervous, he said, he sometimes reverts to a coping strategy he employed as a child: he multiplies two over and...
Posted on February 15, 2007 9:55 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Why neuroscience isn't an infant.
Posted on February 12, 2007 9:26 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
What biological organ does this machine resemble? In leaping beyond the two- and four-core microprocessors that are being manufactured by Intel and its chief PC industry competitor, Advanced Micro Devices, Intel is following a design trend that is sweeping the...
Posted on February 12, 2007 9:10 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It's a fine line separating intelligence and insanity. According to a new study, the same gene that makes you smarter also makes you more likely to go crazy: Most people inherit a version of a gene that optimizes their brain's...
Posted on February 11, 2007 1:36 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It's just an n of 1, a small anecdote within a larger story, but it illuminates some of the perpetual controversies of the cognitive sciences, from the accuracy of the IQ test to the plasticity of the human mind. It...
Posted on February 9, 2007 10:49 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I couldn't sleep last night. As far as I can tell, there was no particular reason for my insomnia. I wasn't stressed, or anxious, or caffeinated, or sick. My mind was tired, but my brain just wasn't in the sleeping...
Posted on February 6, 2007 10:14 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Conscious awareness is difficult to measure. On the one hand, it's a private, subjective phenomenon that resists easy quantification. (Only I know what I am aware of.) On the other hand, neuroscience won't be able to understand many mental phenomena...
Posted on February 5, 2007 10:38 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It's a shocker: getting hit in the head by enormous men running at high speed is bad for your brain. The NY Times today has a riveting article chronicling the retirement travails of Ted Johnson, a former middle lineback for...
Posted on February 2, 2007 10:19 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The epic battle between video game consoles seems to have a clear winner: the Nintendo Wii. The Wii, which uses an innovative wireless controller to translate the players' motions onto the screen, has upset the order of the video game...
Posted on January 31, 2007 9:09 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Paul Krugman's analysis of Milton Friedman's intellectual legacy is one of the best articles I've read recently. Krugman not only paints a balanced portrait of Friedman's accomplishments - great economist, bad popularizer - but ably summarizes the rival tensions in...
Posted on January 29, 2007 9:51 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
It's an astonishingly robust finding: Smokers with damaged insulas were 136 times more likely to have their addictions erased than smokers with damage in other parts of their brains. What makes this paper so interesting is that it actually makes...
Posted on January 26, 2007 10:25 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Is the Hard Problem of consciousness solvable by science? Will we ever come up with a meaningful explanation as to how squirts of neurotransmitter and minor jolts of electricity create subjective experience? As far as I'm concerned, this is the...
Posted on January 24, 2007 1:38 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
For most of the 20th century, neuroscience treated our memories like inert packets of information. They were created through Pavlovian reinforcement, and then just shelved away in the brain, like dusty old books in a library. While this approach led...
Posted on January 23, 2007 10:33 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I'm always startled by the sheer variety of toothpastes being sold at my local drug store. It's a classic example of excessive choice: all those different products, most of which seem interchangeable, actually make me less likely to buy anything....
Posted on January 17, 2007 11:49 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
What is the neural correlate of the self? The easy answer is that nobody knows. We have yet to discover a neurological patient who has lost their sense of identity, but still retained their conscious sensations. Nevertheless, certain brain areas...
Posted on January 16, 2007 12:15 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
John Tierney inaugurates his new Science Times column with a charming mediation on a recent neuroeconomics paper published in Neuron: The economists teamed with psychologists at Stanford to turn an M.R.I. machine into a shopping mall. They gave each experimental...
Posted on January 16, 2007 10:46 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I've always thought that most reality television was nothing more than unethical psychological experiments in disguise. (What else could Temptation Island or Wife Swap possibly be?) But now ABC has taken this idea to its logical extreme. Last week, the...
Posted on January 8, 2007 10:25 AM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
There was a nice article in The Times on Sunday about the research of Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist at McGill (and former record producer) who studies the neural substrate of music: Observing 13 subjects who listened to classical music while...
Posted on January 2, 2007 10:54 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
My last post on neuroscience and free will generated lots of interesting comments. Please check them out. But I think a few readers misunderstood my ambition. It's easiest to begin by saying what I wasn't trying to do: I wasn't...
Posted on December 21, 2006 11:13 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
We all know about Proust and his madeleine. One whiff of that buttery cookie, shaped like a seashell, and Proust suddenly remembered his long forgotten childhood in Combray. Proust makes it clear that his sense of smell was the trigger...
Posted on December 21, 2006 10:09 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Economist believes that "modern neuroscience is eroding the idea of free will": In the late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he was due to be sentenced to prison...
Posted on December 20, 2006 11:17 AM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The purpose of dreaming is learning. While you are sleeping, your brain is digesting the day, deciding which new experiences to consolidate into long-term memory. That's the implication of Matthew Wilson's latest paper, which documented the neural activity in the...
Posted on December 19, 2006 10:47 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
What are the psychological effects of "doing time"? Do harsher prison conditions create harder criminals? These are the questions that the economists M. Keith Chen and Jesse Schapiro were determined to answer. Their conclusions are sobering: Some two million Americans...
Posted on December 13, 2006 10:22 AM •
Jonah Lehrer is an editor at large for Seed Magazine. His first book is Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Buy it here.
