cortex | June 6, 2010I've got a review of The Shallows, a new book by Nicholas Carr on the internet and the brain, in the NY Times:
Socrates started what may have been the first technology scare. In the "Phaedrus," he lamented the invention of books, which "create forgetfulness" in the soul. Instead of remembering for themselves, Socrates warned, new readers were blindly trusting in "external written characters." The library was ruining the mind.
Needless to say, the printing press only made things worse. In the 17th century, Robert Burton complained, in "The Anatomy of Melancholy," of the "vast chaos and…
cortex | June 4, 2010Over at Slate, William Saletan has finished a wonderful series on the distortions and dishonesties of memory. Although our memories always feel true, they're extremely vulnerable to errant suggestions, clever manipulations and the old fashioned needs of storytelling. (The mind, it turns out, cares more about crafting a good narrative than staying close to the truth.) Needless to say, this research has profound implications for everything from eyewitness testimony to talk therapy.
After opening with a clever mass experiment - Slate doctored a few political photos, and then demonstrated that a…
cortex | June 3, 2010Jet lag is an annoyance of modern life for which our pleistocene brain is completely unprepared. This ability to zip around the globe, to trapeze from time zone to time zone, is an invention of the late 20th century. Unfortunately, the brain is an organ of routine, equipped with a stubborn circadian clock. We are wired to expect a 24 hour day, and when our day extends far beyond that, the result is a set of symptoms that remind us we are far from home.
The problem of jet lag is also an interesting case study of stress. Hans Selye, the great Canadian endocrinologist, defined stress as the…
cortex | June 1, 2010This oil spill sure is getting depressing. We've become extremely talented at hiding away the ill effects of our consumption decisions. We don't see the inhumane chicken farms behind our chicken McNuggets, or the Chinese factories that produce our shoes, or the offshore oil rigs that extract our oil from the center of the earth. The end result is that, when we're finally forced to confront the ugliness that makes our civilized life possible, we're shocked and appalled. My cheap ground beef comes from that feedlot? My gas station depends on that infrastructure?
The danger of this lifestyle is…
cortex | May 26, 2010In the last few months, the globalized world has endured two very different crises. First, there was the ash cloud over Europe, which paralyzed air travel for millions of passengers. Then, there is the leaking oil well in the Gulf of Mexico, which continues to spew somewhere between 5000 and 60,000 barrels of crude into the ocean every day.
While these disasters have nothing in common, our response has been plagued by the same fundamental problem. In both instances, officials settled on an early version of events - the ash cloud posed a severe danger to plane engines, and the oil well wasn't…
cortex | May 25, 2010The Allen Brain Atlas just launched their first set of gene expression maps in the adult human brain, based on microarray data from over 700 different anatomical locations. It promises to be an invaluable resource for scientists trying to figure out how a text of base pairs constructs the most complicated machine in the known universe. I wrote about the construction of the human brain atlas last year in Wired, if you'd like to learn more about how the map was made. Although these genetic maps are just a first draft - one researcher at the Allen Institute compared them to those 15th century…
cortex | May 25, 2010I've got a short feature on the Pixar creative process in the latest issue of Wired. This is one of those magazine spreads that really benefits from a glossy paper layout, so I'd recommend not following this hyperlink, and instead picking up the dead paper edition. (It's a really great issue.) As a huge fan of Pixar, it was a thrill getting to venture inside the studio, and meet with a few of the people who help make those wonderful films.* One of the lessons I took away from the Pixar process was the power of endless iterations, as the creative team slowly (very slowly) refines and revises…
cortex | May 24, 2010Benedict Carey summarizes a new UCLA study that documented the life of middle-class families, videotaping their dinners, conversations and leisure activities:
The U.C.L.A. project was an effort to capture a relatively new sociological species: the dual-earner, multiple-child, middle-class American household. The investigators have just finished working through the 1,540 hours of videotape, coding and categorizing every hug, every tantrum, every soul-draining search for a missing soccer cleat.
"This is the richest, most detailed, most complete database of middle-class family living in the…
cortex | May 18, 2010Mo over at Neurophilosophy has an excellent summary of a new paper on near misses and addictive gambling:
Henry Chase and Luke Clark of the Behavioural and Clinical Neuroscience Institute in Cambridge have previously found that the brain responds to near miss gambling outcomes in much the same way it does to as winning. In moderate gamblers, both types of outcome activate the reward circuitry, and although near miss events are experienced to be somewhat less rewarding than wins, they nevertheless increase the desire and motivation to gamble. For games involving skill, near misses indicate an…
cortex | May 17, 2010Since I've been traveling in a foreign country for the last week - I was sipping sugary tea all over Turkey - I thought this article, published last year in McSweeney's Panorama newspaper, was slightly relevant. If nothing else, it's my personal attempt to justify both the annoying burdens of travel (especially foreign travel) and the self-indulgence of an extended vacation. I'm linking to the version of the article that was reprinted in the Observer, since that's online:
It's 4.15 in the morning and my alarm clock has just stolen away a lovely dream. My eyes are open but my pupils are still…
cortex | May 13, 2010Reposted from last year:
Michael Posner and Brenda Patoine make a neuroscientific case for arts education. They argue that teaching kids to make art has lasting cognitive benefits:
If there were a surefire way to improve your brain, would you try it? Judging by the abundance of products, programs and pills that claim to offer "cognitive enhancement," many people are lining up for just such quick brain fixes. Recent research offers a possibility with much better, science-based support: that focused training in any of the arts--such as music, dance or theater--strengthens the brain's attention…
cortex | May 12, 2010Here's a post from last summer*:
I went jean shopping this weekend. Actually, I went to the mall to return a t-shirt but ended buying a pair of expensive denim pants. What happened? I made the mistake of entering the fitting room. And then the endowment effect hijacked my brain. Let me explain.
The endowment effect is a well studied by-product of loss aversion, which is the fact that losing something hurts a disproportionate amount. (In other words, a loss hurts more than a gain feels good.) First diagnosed by Richard Thaler and Daniel Kahneman, the endowment effect stipulates that once…
cortex | May 11, 2010Here's an old post from July 08:
The devious slogan for the New York State lottery is "All you need is a dollar and a dream." Such state lotteries are a regressive form of taxation, since the vast majority of lottery consumers are low-income. The statistics are bleak: Twenty percent of Americans are frequent players, spending about $60 billion a year. The spending is also starkly regressive, with lower income households being much more likely to play. A household with income under $13,000 spends, on average, $645 a year on lottery tickets, or about 9 percent of all income.
A new study by…
cortex | May 10, 2010I'm going to be away on vacation for the next week or so. I'll be putting up some old posts in the meantime.
Here's one from 2009 on "Boredom":
The great poet Joseph Brodsky, praising boredom:
A substantial part of what lies ahead of you is going to be claimed by boredom. The reason I'd like to talk to you about it today, on this lofty occasion, is that I believe no liberal arts college prepares you for that eventuality. Neither the humanities nor science offers courses in boredom . At best, they may acquaint you with the sensation by incurring it. But what is a casual contact to an incurable…
cortex | May 6, 2010I'm always fascinated by the ways in which societal issues impact the research program of modern neuroscience. (After all, the virtue of studying the brain is that it can be made relevant to just about anything, from the formation of financial bubbles to internet searches.) We're still living through the aftermath of the Great Recession, which was obviously caused by a number of factors. But one clear cause was the astonishing number of bad mortgages, many of which were in the subprime category. These mortgages were made possible by irresponsible speculation on Wall Street, but they also…
cortex | May 4, 2010Over at Slate, Daniel Engber has a fascinating (and thorough) investigation of why we root for the underdog. There are numerous factors at work, from the availability heuristic to our deep desire for equality. But I was most intrigued by this research, which tries to explain why we associate underdogs with virtuous characteristics, like effort and teamwork:
In one study, they [Nadav Goldschmied and Joseph Vandello] found that two-thirds of all voters in the 2004 presidential election described their preferred candidate as the "underdog." A follow-up four years later revealed that presidential…
cortex | May 3, 2010Gary Wolf has a fascinating and really well written article in the Times Magazine on the rise of the "quantified self," or all those people who rely on microsensors to measure discrete aspects of their lives, from walking speed to emotional mood:
Millions of us track ourselves all the time. We step on a scale and record our weight. We balance a checkbook. We count calories. But when the familiar pen-and-paper methods of self-analysis are enhanced by sensors that monitor our behavior automatically, the process of self-tracking becomes both more alluring and more meaningful. Automated sensors…
cortex | April 29, 2010Here's a new interesting new paper on the emotional deficits of the psychopathic brain, via sarcastic_f:
The understanding that other people's emotional states depend on the fulfilment of their intention is fundamentally important for responding adequately to others. Psychopathic patients show severe deficits in responding adequately to other people's emotion. The present study explored whether these impairments are associated with deficits in the ability to infer others' emotional states. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), identical cartoon stories, depicting a subject whose…
cortex | April 27, 2010The process of enculturation doesn't just afflict middle-aged scientists, struggling to appreciate a new anomaly. It's a problem for any collection of experts, from CIA analysts to Wall Street bankers. Let's stick with Wall Street, since Goldman Sachs is in the news. The question for senators and regulators is why some very smart people (and their very clever quantitative models) missed a financial bubble that, in retrospect, looks devastatingly obvious.
Let's begin with a classic experiment, led by Jerome Bruner and Leo Postman. A group of undergraduates was briefly shown a series of…
cortex | April 27, 2010I just discovered (via Tyler Cowen) a fascinating economics paper on the changing dynamics of scientific production over the 20th century. A few months ago, I wrote about the tangled relationship of age and innovation, and why different fields have different peak ages of creativity. In general, math, physics and poetry are for the young, while biology, history and the social sciences benefit from middle-age:
Interestingly, these differences in peak age appear to be cultural universals, with poets peaking before novelists in every major literary tradition, according to [Dean] Simonton's…