cortex | June 22, 2009I 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 people own something - they have an…
cortex | June 19, 2009I've gotten numerous emails about my recent post on animal rights - I called animal experimentation a "necessary evil" - but I think this note from a reader eloquently captures the ambivalence that many scientists feel:
I have a child with insulin-dependent diabetes. I am constantly aware that every single advance keeping her not only alive, but so healthy that others never notice her condition, rests on the shoulders of thousands upon thousands of creatures. These animals have suffered, and these animals feel pain as much as we; many are almost unbearably intelligent and are emotionally...…
cortex | June 19, 2009Here is the NY Times, describing the latest weight-loss fad:
Like almost every dieter in America, Wendy Bassett has used all sorts of weight-loss products. Nothing worked, she said, until she tried Sensa: granules she scatters on almost everything she eats, and which are supposed to make dieters less hungry by enhancing the smell and taste of food.
The maker of Sensa claims that its effectiveness is largely related to smell: the heightened scent and flavor of food that has been sprinkled with Sensa stimulate the olfactory bulb -- the organ that transmits smell from the nose to the brain -- to…
cortex | June 18, 2009I think one of the most important tests of behavioral economics will arrive in the next few years, as we attempt to persuade consumers to improve energy efficiency in the home. Just imagine if, instead of installing granite on every kitchen countertop, we'd instead spent that money on better window seals and insulation. Of course, if people were rational agents, we wouldn't need cleverly constructed "choice environments," since the vast majority of efficiency improvements pay for themselves with reduced energy bills within a few years. (According to Energy Star, buying more efficient…
cortex | June 17, 2009Yesterday was Bloomsday - the day Leopold Bloom wandered around Dublin - and so I drank a pint of Guiness and read some Joyce. Now that Ulysses is part of the modernist canon it's easy to forget what a radical shift in form and content the novel represented. (Even Virginia Woolf thought Joyce went too far: "I don't believe that his method, which is highly developed, means much more than cutting out the explanations and putting in the thoughts between dashes," she wrote.) Once upon a time, the mind was seen as a fundamentally coherent machine - our thoughts unfolded in logical chains, like a…
cortex | June 17, 2009There was a telling moment yesterday on the NYTimes.com website. It was just after 10:30 in the morning and the top of the site featured a breaking news article about the S&P 500 heading into higher territory. The article offered the usual litany of explanations, from better than expected news on housing starts to a surprising uptick in retail sales. But here's the catch: by the time I glanced at the article it was already obsolete, with the Dow and S&P down by a significant amount. A few hours later, a new article made its way to the top of the NYTimes site, explaining why the market…
cortex | June 16, 2009There's a new full-length podcast out from the world's finest science radio show. It's on "Stochasticity," which is a great word because 1) it sounds really fancy but is actually a rather simple idea 2) it's an essential concept when it comes to understanding lots of different stuff, from neural oscillations to quantum physics.
I make an appearance on the episode to help explain what was happening inside the mind of Ann Klinestiver, a high-school English teacher who developed a severe gambling addiction after taking a dopamine agonist. (I also tell this story in my book, but it's much better…
cortex | June 15, 2009Tom Vanderbilt has a fascinating article on the infrastructure of data centers, those server farms that make Google, Facebook and World of Warcraft possible. Every keystroke on the internet (including this one) relies on shuttling electrons back and forth in a remote air-conditioned industrial hangar. These are the highway ribbons of the future, the grid that's so essential we don't even notice it.
The article also mentions the energy costs required to run such server farms, which has real scientific implications. As size of data sets continues to rapidly increase, one significant hurdle is…
cortex | June 12, 2009The Lakers-Magic game last night was quite the thrill-ride: it's now the morning after, and my pulse has only begun to return to its resting rate. (Full disclosure: I'm a Lakers fan.) The game was played in Orlando and the big moment came when the Lakers' Derek Fisher nailed a three-pointer at the end of regulation. The loud Orlando crowd went totally silent; you could actually hear the collective intake of breath.
Why did this matter? Why was I suddenly (over)confident that the Lakers would win? Because home field advantage is a really big advantage (especially in the NBA) and it only takes…
cortex | June 11, 2009Mo, over at Neurophilosophy, has a fantastic summary of a new paper from scientists at the University of Toronto investigating the link between affective mood and visual perception. The basic moral is this: If you want to improve your peripheral vision, or become better at noticing seemingly extraneous details, then do something to make yourself happy:
Positive moods enhanced peripheral vision and increased the extent to which the brain encoded information in those parts of the visual field, to which the participants did not pay attention. Conversely, negative moods decreased the encoding of…
cortex | June 10, 2009A fascinating YouTube video, from the Sasquatch Music Festival:
This reminds me of the classic Milgram study on social conformity. (No, I'm not talking about that Milgram experiment.) In this study, Milgram had "confederates" stop on a busy city street and look upwards at the sky. He demonstrated that when one person was looking up, 40 percent of passerby also looked up, just in case something interesting was happening. (There was nothing to look at, just sky and buildings.) When two people were looking up, 60 of passerby looked up. When there were three people, the percentage jumped to 65…
cortex | June 10, 2009Here's a question I get quite a bit, which usually goes something like this:
Is ADHD (Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) real? Or is it a made-up diagnosis for misbehaving kids?
The short answer is that ADHD (and its precursor, ADD) are absolutely real disorders. They have real neurological underpinnings (including a large genetic component) and real, consistent symptoms. That, I think, is the current scientific consensus.
That said, there is far more controversy over many other pertinent ADHD questions, such as whether or not it's overdiagnosed (approximately 4 percent of show ADHD…
cortex | June 9, 2009What happens to the brain when we drink alcohol? In recent years, scientists have discovered that booze works by binding to and potentiating a specific GABA receptor subtype. (GABA is the main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the mammalian brain, which means it helps to regulate and quiet cellular activity.) While it remains unclear how, exactly, these chemical tweaks produce the psychological changes triggered by a beer or bourbon, a new study by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh (along with Jonathan Schooler, at UCSB) have found one intriguing new side-effect of alcohol: it makes…
cortex | June 5, 2009I'm answering a few questions from readers over at PRI's The World. They've just started a new science forum, which aims to provide a sorely needed international perspective on science issues. Check it out.
cortex | June 4, 2009Americans love alternatives. One of the benefits of modern capitalism, after all, is that we're free to consume products that perfectly match our preferences - if you want to wear skinny jeans with a Black Sabbath t-shirt, flip flops and a fedora (I saw such a person yesterday - he looked very satisfied with himself) then go right ahead. Gail Collins, while bemoaning the difficulty of reforming the college loan system, summarizes the American obsession with choice:
This is why my corner drugstore offers, by my last count, 103 different kinds of body moisturizers. These are not, of course, to…
cortex | June 3, 2009Daniel Engber has a very interesting series of articles over at Slate on Pepper the Dalmation and the use of stolen pets in biomedical research. In 1965, the theft of Pepper from a Pennsylvania farm - she ended up dying in a Bronx lab, sacrificed so that scientists could experiment with cardiac pacemakers - created a media sensation:
The dog-napping of Pepper marked the beginning of the end of canine experimentation. Outrage over her demise, and the theft and killings of other family pets, would soon turn public opinion--and federal law--against the use of dogs in biomedical research.…
cortex | June 2, 2009Over at Neurophilosphy, there's a wonderful post on "confabulatory hypermnesia," or severe false memory syndrome:
In the journal Cortex, researchers describe the case of a patient with severe memory loss who has a tendency to invent detailed and perfectly plausible false memories (confabulations) in response to questions to which most people would answer "I don't know", such as the one above. They have named this unusual condition confabulatory hypermnesia, and believe that theirs is the first study to document it.
For example, when asked about his brother's job, he told the researchers that…
cortex | May 29, 2009Apologies for the radio silence - I've been traveling and away from a reliable internet connection. (Taking a break from Google is one of the true pleasures of travel. I'm afraid, however, that it's an endangered pleasure, like train travel. I'm always impressed by all the places, from airplanes to remote beach hotels, that are now wireless.*)
David Brooks has an excellent column today on the emerging neuroscience of morality and the "useful falsehood" of the rational judge:
In reality, decisions are made by imperfect minds in ambiguous circumstances. It is incoherent to say that a judge…
cortex | May 22, 2009Over at the New Yorker website, I've answered a few questions from readers about the marshmallow task:
Do you think the future results of success would be different for a sample of kids born in the twenty-first century considering the decades of behavioral, economical changes in the society?
Hassan Patwary
San Jose, Calif.
I think it would be hard to replicate the marshmallow task now, if only because it's gotten much tougher to feed hundreds of preschoolers sugary snacks in the name of science. There are allergies, peculiar diets, and all sorts of food issues. So you'd have to find something…
cortex | May 20, 2009The Economist summarizes a new study looking at the link between living abroad and increased creativity:
Anecdotal evidence has long held that creativity in artists and writers can be associated with living in foreign parts. Rudyard Kipling, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Paul Gauguin, Samuel Beckett and others spent years dwelling abroad. Now a pair of psychologists has proved that there is indeed a link.
As they report in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, William Maddux of INSEAD, a business school in Fontainebleau, France, and Adam Galinsky, of the Kellogg School of…