My So-Called Life
cortex | November 1, 2007For those who might be interested, I thought I'd post my book tour dates, since the tour officially kicks off today. Hope to see you there!
November 1, 7 PM, Gibson's Bookstore, Concord, NH
November 7, 7 PM, Barnes & Noble, 82nd Street and Broadway, NYC
November 8, 7:30 PM, Kepler's Books, Menlo Park, CA
November 10, 7 PM, Book Works, Del Mar, CA
November 12, 7 PM, Dutton's Bookstore, Brentwood, CA
November 13, 7:30 PM, Town Hall, Seattle
November 14, 7 PM, Harvard Bookstore, Cambridge, MA
December 8, 7 PM, Northshire Bookstore, Manchester, VT
cortex | March 16, 2007Apparently, Wilfrid Sellars came up with this "philosophical time-waster":
Identify three foods A, B, and C such that any two of these are complementary (taste good in combination) but the trio does not. So A and B must be complementary, B and C must be complementary, and A and C must be complementary, but A, B, and C must be foul when combined together.
I'm stumped. Tyler Cohen proposes Merlot, Coke and Chicken, but the idea of mixing Merlot and Coke seems pretty foul to me. Other options include sharp cheddar cheese, quince jelly and peanut butter, but I'm not too excited about eating a…
cortex | March 15, 2007In response to a recent post on spindle cells in which I referred to that neuronal cell type as a transmitter of social emotions, I received a very astute comment:
This doesn't as a statement make any sense "their antenna-like cell body is able to convey our social emotions across the entire brain". Neurons fire action potentials and the best they can conduct is patterns of firing or epsps/ipsps. They can't convey something as complex as 'social emotions'! That sounds like very sloppy thinking, even if they conduct something, some pattern, some information, to other brain regions its not '…
cortex | March 5, 2007I'll be away from my desk tomorrow, so I thought I'd keep you entertained with a video of me. (Forgive the shameless self-promotion.) In this short video, I'm discussing how Walt Whitman anticipated some truths of modern neuroscience. (I've written a whole book on this subject, which will come out this fall.) To be honest, I have yet to watch the video. I just find it too painfully embarrassing*. For those who just want the knowledge without suffering through my voice and nervous bodily tics, here's a short summary of the talk cribbed from my book:
Whitman was the first poet to write poems in…
cortex | February 28, 2007It's the latest bourgeois battle: a bunch of angry supermarket shoppers, led by Michael Pollan, are criticizing Whole Foods for not living up to their organic values. While the stores are filled with billboards extolling the virtues of small farms and local produce, Whole Foods gets most of its provisions from big agribusiness, albeit with an organic label. From the Times:
While many shoppers find the new stores exhilarating places to shop, the company also faces critics who feel it has strayed from its original vision. In angry postings on blogs, they charge that the store is not living up…
cortex | February 21, 2007Needless to say, this is ridiculous:
Settled in the well-groomed Los Angeles suburb of San Marino, Derek O'Gorman worked as an insurance broker. His wife, Mary Ann, took care of their two girls, both stellar students at top-ranked local schools. But in 2005, when the family visited a nearby private high school they expected the girls to attend, they came away disappointed. After an extensive search, the O'Gormans found the perfect fit: the Winsor School. Winsor, famed for its academic rigor and participatory classes, is also known for the academic success of its 420 students: About a third of…
cortex | February 2, 2007From Harold McGee's charming new blog:
Tomato lovers know that a sprinkling of salt enhances the flavor of even the best field-ripened specimen. Some recent news that bodes well for improved flavor in greenhouse tomatoes: you can enhance tomato flavor by salting the plant as the fruit grows! At the Institute of Vegetable Science in Freising, German scientists grew hydroponic tomatoes in a solution that was 0.1% sodium chloride, about one-thirtieth the salinity of seawater. The plants produced fruits with significantly higher levels of flavorful organic acids and sugars, and as much as a third…
cortex | October 18, 2006I'm probably breaking some obscure copyright law by simply mentioning this website. For those who don't know, allofmp3.com features ridiculously cheap mp3 files: a song usually costs a dime, not a dollar. The catch? They are a shady Russian company that uses a loophole in Russian law to not pay royalties. Whether or not to buy music from them is a continual test of my conscience, a daily moral dilemma. (Needless to say, my selfish impulses usually win. Sorry, iTunes.) But now the U.S. government is making Russia's admittance to the WTO dependent on allofmp3.com going out of business. If I was…
cortex | October 13, 2006While we are on the theme of consilience, here's a pretty perfect paragraph of prose that captures the kind of Third Culture I fantasize about. It's from Primo Levi's The Periodic Table:
Carbon is again among us, in a glass of milk. It is inserted in a very complex, long chain, yet such that almost all of its links are acceptable to the human body. It is swallowed, and since every living structure harbors a savage distrust toward every contribution of any material of living origin, the chain is meticulously broken apart and the fragments, one by one, are accepted or rejected. One, the one…
cortex | October 8, 2006As seen in the White Mountains of New Hampshire this weekend:
If you want to read a wonderful book about this expansive Northern Forest, read this one by our very own David Dobbs.
cortex | September 28, 2006Sorry for the absence. I was giving a talk in NYC, where I had the pleasure of meeting PZ, Chris Mooney and Lisa Randall. (I was talking about how Walt Whitman anticipated the neuroscience of today.) I also had the pleasure of spending time with my beautiful new niece (aka my sister's Mexican hairless):
cortex | September 18, 2006Is nothing sacred? I'm starting to wonder if nutrionists are the scientific version of fashion designers, and make sure to contradict their claims every few years or so, just to stay cutting edge. Anyways, I like breakfast. Noting gets me going like a nice bowl of sugary Cinnamon Life.
Whatever you do, don't skip breakfast.
Breakfast: It's the most important meal of the day.
Such pronouncements carry almost the aura of nutritional religion: carved in stone, not to be questioned. But a few nutritionists and scientists are questioning this conventional wisdom.
They're not challenging the…
cortex | September 11, 2006I have had the tragic privilege of living in New York during 9/11 and London during 7/7. The two events are, of course, incomparable, if only because the falling skyscrapers puncutated our lives without warning. I still vividly remember the first night of 9/11, when the stench of melted plastic seeped uptown, and the thousands of dead were still smoldering, and the skyline had been broken. There was still smoke in the air, and the sick smell of it had taken care of my hunger. We knew that everything had changed.
We were right. History pivoted with the hi-jacked planes. The wars that began on…
cortex | September 4, 2006Bill Simmons is right:
I'd put Season 1 of "The Wire" against anything. The first three seasons of "The Sopranos." Seasons 1 or 2 of "24." The first seasons of "NYPD Blue," "ER" or "Miami Vice." You name it. I have never seen a show like it. Season 2 wasn't as good (if Season 1 was an A-plus-plus-plus, then Season 2 was a B-plus), and we're just about to dive into Season 3, so I don't have an opinion on that yet. Everyone seems to agree that they outdid themselves with Season 4 and that it's a legitimate masterpiece. Just know that you can absolutely start watching Season 4 without having…
cortex | September 4, 2006It was the final exam of my freshman year. I was taking Intro to Psych, and I had just pulled an all-nighter. After a few minutes, I began to notice some odd paper shuffling off to my left. The kid next to me was carelessly using a small cheat sheet, dense with definitions written in 8 point font. I was infuriated. For one thing, the test was curved, so a perfect score hurt everyone. I was also pissed that the cheater would never get caught. We were taking the test in a huge lecture hall, and the grad students monitoring the exam were a distant blur at the front of the class. I briefly…
cortex | August 21, 2006I'll be on vacation for the next ten days, and probably won't have much time to blog.
In the meantime, I thought I'd leave everyone with a few random quotes. Even though these jingles have embedded themselves in my brain, I don't really pretend to understand any of them. Your thoughts, as always, are much appreciated.
"To say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is not to say that we have discovered that, out there, there is no truth."
-Richard Rorty
"The psychology which explains everything/explains nothing"
-Marianne Moore
"The final belief is to…
cortex | July 25, 2006Scienceblogs is abuzz with discussion over the difficulty of melding family life and an academic career in science. Having worked for several years as a tech in an ambitious neuroscience lab, I'm amazed that post-docs even contemplate a family life. Most post-docs and grad-students I knew worked 60 hours a week (or more) for piss-poor wages. They came in on the weekend, and would often find themselves in the lab at odd hours of the night, feeding cultured neurons or Aplysia spawn or monitoring some other experimental variable that doesn't have to sleep.
I now realize that today's post-docs…
cortex | June 23, 2006Considering that I've eaten my fair share of British beef (I lived in England for a few years, and had a soft spot for the hamburgers at my local gastropub), this study was not welcome news. Here is the NY Times nut graf:The long lives that some former cannibals enjoy before succumbing to a brain-wasting disease suggest that many more humans will eventually die of mad cow disease, scientists said Thursday.
The scientists arrived at their unsettling conclusion by studying the Fore tribe, who used to honor their dead by butchering them, eating their flesh, and smearing themselves with their…