cortex | April 21, 2009I've got a new article in the latest issue of Wired, guest-edited by J.J. Abrams. It's quite an excellent issue, I think, although I'm still utterly befuddled by the hidden puzzles on the glossy pages. My article is an investigation of what stage magicians can teach us about the human mind and the frailties of perception:
For Teller (that's his full legal name), magic is more than entertainment. He wants his tricks to reveal the everyday fraud of perception so that people become aware of the tension between what is and what seems to be. Our brains don't see everything--the world is too big,…
cortex | April 20, 2009Virginia Heffernan, writing in the Times magazine, takes Bruce Sterling's SXSW talk about connectivity and poverty mainstream:
Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, proposed at the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin that the clearest symbol of poverty is dependence on "connections" like the Internet, Skype and texting. "Poor folk love their cellphones!" he said.
In his speech, Sterling seemed to affect Nietzschean disdain for regular people. If the goal was to provoke, it worked. To a crowd that typically prefers onward-and-upward news about technology, Sterling's was a sadistically…
cortex | April 20, 2009Robert Krulwich has a typically brilliant piece on Shakespeare, roses, gendered language and the latest version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Boroditsky proposes that because the word for "bridge" in German -- die brucke -- is a feminine noun, and the word for "bridge" in Spanish -- el puente -- is a masculine noun, native speakers unconsciously give nouns the characteristics of their grammatical gender.
"Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way?" she asks in a…
cortex | April 18, 2009Just a quick note to say that I'll be at the NYU Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute this coming Monday, at 6 PM, in conversation with Robert Lee Hotz. We'll be talking about science journalism, blogging, aha moments, the prefrontal cortex, etc. It's free and open to the public.
Note: Thanks to everyone who pointed out my mistake! The conversation begins at 6 PM, not 7 PM.
cortex | April 15, 2009I know the medium is the message, but does every message have to be about the medium? People on twitter love tweeting about twitter, just as people on facebook love writing about the facebook redesign. Sometimes, this navel gazing can get out of hand, which is what I think happened with a recent (and extremely interesting) PNAS paper on the neural substrate of admiration and compassion. The paper, by scientists at USC, has nothing to do with twitter or online social networks or even the internet, and yet that quickly became the main story. Before long, there were a flurry of posts with…
cortex | April 14, 2009Wired Science reports on a fascinating finding: schizophrenics have trouble seeing the hollow mask illusion, in which people perceive the concave inside of a mask as an actual face. The reason we're vulnerable to this illusion is that our expectations of what we'll see - we're used to seeing real faces - profoundly influence our actual sensations. Schizophrenics, however, seem to have trouble with modulating their perceptions, which might explain why they persistently believe in delusions and far-fetched conspiracy theories. (Interestingly, the only other group of people who don't see the…
cortex | April 13, 2009In the Boston Globe Ideas section, Drake Bennett has a typically excellent article on the logical fallacies underlying best-selling business books, such as In Search of Excellence or Good to Great :
While the particulars vary, the basic idea underlying the literature is the same: that the secrets of success can be divined by careful study of the institutional habits of the world's business all-stars - companies that set the standard for their industries, that thrive in tough times, companies that win the war for talent, companies that are built to last. In the imperturbable focus on core…
cortex | April 10, 2009Stress has been a hot topic lately. In the past week, we've looked at how chronic stress can trigger working memory deficits among the poor and lead, eventually, to severe depression. But there's hope, at least if you're a stressed out lab rat. (In theory, these findings should apply to humans, but there's always that nagging gap between theory and reality.) The work is led by Robert Sapolsky, the incredibly engaging and eloquent primatologist and writer.
The experimental strategy strategy is ingenious. The scientists begin by inserting "neuroprotectant" genes, such as estrogen, into a…
cortex | April 9, 2009Over at Mind Matters, I've got an interview with Judith Rich Harris, author of the influential and infamous The Nurture Assumption, which provocatively argued that parents aren't particularly important when it comes to determining the behavior of their children, at least outside of the home. Instead, Harris argued that the most important variable was the child's peer group. The Nurture Assumption has recently been reissued in an expanded version to celebrate its tenth anniversary.
LEHRER: Why do you think this is such a controversial idea? In other words, why are we so convinced that parents…
cortex | April 9, 2009Sometimes, the human brain can seem astonishingly ill-equipped for modern life. Our Pleistocene olfactory cortex craves glucose and lipids, which makes us vulnerable to high-fructose corn syrup and Egg McMuffins. We've got an impulsive set of emotions, which makes us think subprime mortgages are a good idea. And so on.
If I could only fix one design flaw, however, I'd focus on our stress response. We're stuck with a mind that reacts to the mundane mundane worries of modern life - a falling stock market, a troubled marriage, taking the SAT - with a powerful set of primal chemicals that, once…
cortex | April 8, 2009For the most part, basic neuroscience research has had zero influence on public policy. Knowing about the dopamine reward pathway and the substrate of addiction hasn't changed the War on Drugs. (Although it certainly should. At the very least, we should decriminalize marijuana.) Knowing about memory reconsolidation and the inherent dishonesty of recollection hasn't changed the way police deal with eyewitnesses or the way juries consider testimony. (Although it certainly should.) Knowing about the neural effects of credit cards hasn't changed credit card regulations. And so on.
But there has…
cortex | April 7, 2009There's a charming article by Hannah Seligson over at The Daily Beast on the "science" of when to get married. (I've put scare quotes around "science" only because it's not a science at all.) On the one hand, it's rather obvious that making romantic decisions isn't exactly a rational process. Charles Darwin, for instance, made up a spreadsheet of reasons why he should and shouldn't marry Emma Wedgewood.
In the "Marry" column, Darwin entered: "Home and someone to take care of house--Charms of music and female chit-chat. These things good for one's health. Forced to visit and receive relations…
cortex | April 3, 2009Here's a question:
Consider two individuals, Ann and Barbara, who graudated from the same college a year apart. Upon graduation, both took similar jobs with publishing firms. Ann started with a yearly salary of $30,000. During her first year on the job there was no inflation, and in her second year Ann recieved a 2% ($600) raise in salary. Barbara also started with a yearly salary of $30,000. During her first year on the job, there was 4% inflation, and in her second year Barbara received a 5% ($1500) raise in salary.
As they entered their second year on the job, who was doing better in…
cortex | April 2, 2009A new study has demonstrated, once again, that being poor is stressful, and that chronic stress is poison for the brain. Here's the paper:
The income-achievement gap is a formidable societal problem, but little is known about either neurocognitive or biological mechanisms that might account for income-related deficits in academic achievement. We show that childhood poverty is inversely related to working memory in young adults. Furthermore, this prospective relationship is mediated by elevated chronic stress during childhood.
The scientists measured stress by looking at the "allostatic load"…
cortex | April 1, 2009In the latest New Yorker, Rebecca Mead has a wonderful profile of two poets (Michael and Matthew Dickman) with starkly different poetic styles who happen to be identical twins.
Michael and Matthew share more than the same raw material; they share the same genetic material. Although there is a rich scientific literature on the subject of identical twins who have been separated at birth - their circumstances help to illuminate the competing influences of genetics and environment on the development of an individual's health and sensibility - the Dickman twins, who were raised together and have…
cortex | March 31, 2009An inspired metaphor for the inherent instability of the brain by Moshe Bar:
The fighter plane F-16 is the first aeroplane intentionally designed to have an aerodynamically unstable platform. This design was chosen to enhance the aircraft's manoeuvrability. Most aeroplanes are designed to be stable such that they strive to return to their original attitude following an interruption. While such stability is a desired property for a passenger aeroplane, for example, it opposes a pilot's effort to change headings rapidly and thus can degrade manoeuvring performance required for a fighter jet.…
cortex | March 30, 2009Wired has now put more photos from my article on the Allen Brain Atlas online. They're grotesquely gorgeous:
While the Allen Atlas of gene expression has already proven itself to be a valuable research tool, I think the project's most profound long-term impact will come from its methodological innovations. For the most part, modern science remains a field of artisans, of technicians and grad students doing experiments by hand. However, because the Allen Institute needed to generate such vast amounts of data, they realized that a different approach was required. And so they pioneered a high-…
cortex | March 30, 2009My short post on breast-feeding from a few days ago (inspired by this article by Hanna Rosin) has inspired a lot of dissenting email. Since comments are still disabled - I hope to have them back soon, though - I want to post a selection of the criticism. Just to reiterate and clarify: I don't want to minimize the slight but statistically significant benefits of breast-feeding. My simple point is that if breast-feeding is a burden to the mother, then those health benefits should be weighed against other variables, such as the psychological well-being of the mother. After all, the well-being of…
cortex | March 28, 2009A quick note: I'll be giving my stump speech at the Dartmouth Bookstore in Hanover, NH tomorrow (3/29) at 3 PM.
cortex | March 28, 2009In the latest Atlantic, Hanna Rosin has a very interesting article/manifesto that rails against the "cult of breast-feeding":
The medical literature [on breast-feeding] shows that breast-feeding is probably, maybe, a little better; but it is far from the stampede of evidence that Sears describes. More like tiny, unsure baby steps: two forward, two back, with much meandering and bumping into walls. A couple of studies will show fewer allergies, and then the next one will turn up no difference. Same with mother-infant bonding, IQ, leukemia, cholesterol, diabetes. Even where consensus is…