cortex | January 28, 2009Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan has a typically wonderful post on the "maternal impression" theory, which suggested that a psychological trauma inflicted on the pregnant mother would lead to profound defects in the unborn child. As Vaughan notes, this crude 19th century theory slowly faded away, as it became clear that birth defects had nothing to do with the mental state of the mother. But then, Vaughan says, the Soviet Union invaded Finland in 1939, and that all began to change.
The quickly assembled Finnish force was vastly outnumbered and ominously outgunned but, unlike their Soviet…
cortex | January 27, 2009John Updike died today. He was one of my favorite writers, although I didn't fall in love with his work until I lived for a few years outside of America. It was then that I first read the complete Rabbit series, from "Rabbit, Run" to "Rabbit Remembered" and became rather obsessed with his short stories. In the dank dark of an Oxford winter, I repeated one of my favorite Updike lines to myself several times a day: "America is a conspiracy to make you happy."
Perhaps more than any other writer, Updike's sentences have a way of getting stuck in my consciousness, so that I think of his words when…
cortex | January 26, 2009The NY Times reports on a fascinating new study showing that Obama's election has improved the test scores of African Americans, at least in this one very small study which has yet to undergo peer-review:
Now researchers have documented what they call an Obama effect, showing that a performance gap between African-Americans and whites on a 20-question test administered before Mr. Obama's nomination all but disappeared when the exam was administered after his acceptance speech and again after the presidential election.
The inspiring role model that Mr. Obama projected helped blacks overcome…
cortex | January 24, 2009I've got a short column in the Wall Street Journal today where I recommend five books on human irrationality. I wanted to work in a novel too, but I soon realized that every novel is about irrational people.
1. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
By Charles Mackay
1841
There is nothing modern about financial bubbles. In this classic work, Charles Mackay compiled an exhaustive list of the "schemes, projects and phantasies" that are a recurring theme of economic history. From the tulip mania of 17th-century Holland, in which 12 acres of valuable land were offered for a…
cortex | January 23, 2009So far, my favorite response to the annual Brockman challenge - this year, the question was "What will change everything?" - comes from the physicist Stuart Kauffman:
Reductionism has reigned as our dominant world view for 350 years in Western society. Physicist Steven Weinberg states that when the science shall have been done, all the explanatory arrows will point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry and ultimately to physics and the final theory.
I think he is wrong: the evolution of the biosphere, the economy, our human culture and perhaps…
cortex | January 22, 2009So the book is now shipping from Amazon, B&N, Powells, Borders, independent booksellers, etc. I thought I'd post an interview I conducted with myself a few months ago. (Once upon a time, I read these author Q&A's that are used for publicity purposes and thought that someone else was asking the questions. Now I know better. But feel free to put your harder questions in the comments.)
Q: Why did you want to write a book about decision-making?
A: It all began with Cheerios. I'm an incredibly indecisive person. There I was, aimlessly wandering the cereal aisle of the supermarket, trying…
cortex | January 22, 2009I know, I know, you're probably sick of me prattling on about metacognition. If so, then feel free to skip this post. I've got a new article in the latest Seed (it's a particularly good issue, I think, although it's not yet online) on the virtues and vices of thinking about thinking:
The game only has one rule, and it's a simple one: Don't think about white bears. You can think about anything else, but you can't think about that. Ready? Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and banish the animals from your head.
You just lost the game. Everyone loses the game. As Dostoevsky first observed, in…
cortex | January 21, 2009Science exists in a cultural context. When the culture changes - and American culture has just a celebrated a rather massive change - the science is sure to follow. It's a truism but it's still true: our experiments don't take place in a vacuum. Scientists are members of society, too.
Sometimes, these cultural influences are direct. When the Bush Administration stifled data on global warming, it was directly influencing (or attempting to influence) the scientific process. But such direct interactions are rare: most of the time the culture seeps in without anybody noticing. It doesn't so much…
cortex | January 19, 2009The brain is a careless beast. Mostly, I blame my carelessness on the limited capacity of working memory - it can hold seven discrete items, plus or minus two - which means that we're constantly forcing ideas to exit the stage of awareness. And so thoughts come and go, as we try to juggle the demands of the real world with the feeble processing powers of the mind. For instance, as I was packing for my latest work trip, I went into the bathroom to grab my toothbrush and toothpaste. I grabbed the toothbrush, opened up the drawer to get the toothpaste, but then I noticed all these other things…
cortex | January 17, 2009So I joined Twitter. I'm still not on Facebook, for intransigent reasons that I don't fully understand and can't begin to express. But consider Twitter my bold leap into the world of the social web. I guess what I enjoy about Twitter is the sheer banality of the tweets, which remind me of normal, intimate conversation. There's the occasional moment of wit or humor, but mostly what people write about is the weather, or their hair, or what they had for lunch, or how much they hate airport delays. It's as if people are constantly texting this universe of strangers about how they feel. What's…
cortex | January 17, 2009I've got an op-ed today in the LA Times on how Captain Sullenberger managed to stay calm in the face of terrifying circumstances:
We can all learn something from Capt. Chesley B. "Sully" Sullenberger III. After his US Airways plane lost power and the smell of smoke and jet fuel filled the cabin, he needed to make a decision. The air traffic controllers were instructing him to proceed to a small airport in Teterboro, N.J., which was less than 10 miles to the west. But could the plane make it that far? Or would it crash in the Bronx?
In recent years, neuroscientists have been able to see what…
cortex | January 15, 2009One of my recurring weaknesses as a writer is a reliance on the following two transitions:
"Consider the X"
and
Look, for instance, at the X
I use them all the time, even though I know they are lazy linguistic bridges, cheap transitions from idea to the next. Over at Language Log, Benjamin Zimmer has a wonderful history of the phrase. It turns out my laziness is actually an allusion to Luke:
This crutch for lazy (science) writers goes all the way back to the New Testament. Here are the famous lines of Luke 12:24 and 12:27 in the King James Version:
"Consider the ravens: for they neither sow…
cortex | January 15, 2009Here's James Surowiecki on the surprising link between easy credit and rampant fraud, as epitomized by the Madoff ponzi scheme:
Fraud is a boom-time crime because it feeds on the faith of investors, and during bubbles that faith is overflowing. So while robbing a bank seems to be a demand-driven crime, robbing bank shareholders is all about supply. In the classic work on investor hysteria, "Manias, Panics, and Crashes," the economist Charles Kindleberger wrote that during bubbles "the supply of corruption increases . . . much like the supply of credit." This is more than a simple analogy:…
cortex | January 14, 2009Here's the philosopher David Chalmers, arguing that it's time we expand our definition of the "mind":
"The key idea is that when bits of the environment are hooked up to your cognitive system in the right way, they are, in effect, part of the mind, part of the cognitive system. So, say I'm rearranging Scrabble tiles on a rack. This is very close to being analogous to the situation when I'm doing an anagram in my head. In one case the representations are out in the world, in the other case they're in here. We say doing an anagram on a rack ought be regarded as a cognitive process, a process of…
cortex | January 13, 2009Steven Pinker has a very lucid and engaging summary of personal genomics in the latest Times Magazine. Pinker got his exons sequenced and is optimistic that large-scale genetic testing will soon reveal the snippets of DNA underlying our preferences, predilections and peccadillos:
Dopamine is the molecular currency in several brain circuits associated with wanting, getting satisfaction and paying attention. The gene for one kind of dopamine receptor, DRD4, comes in several versions. Some of the variants (like the one I have) have been associated with "approach related" personality traits like…
cortex | January 12, 2009In yesterday's Washington Post, I reviewed The Art Instinct, a new book by Denis Dutton that uses evolutionary psychology to explain the odd human obsession with making art:
The list of cultural universals -- those features that recur in every human society, from remote rainforest tribes to modern America -- is surprisingly short. There's language, religion and a bunch of traits involving social structures, such as the reliance on leaders.
Denis Dutton, a New Zealand philosopher, would like to add one more item to this list: art. As he observes in his provocative new book, The Art Instinct,…
cortex | January 9, 2009Uwe Reinhardt, an economist at Princeton, has a thoughtful explanation of why macroeconomists were so blindsided by the economic downtown of 2008:
Fewer than a dozen prominent economists saw this economic train wreck coming -- and the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, an economist famous for his academic research on the Great Depression, was notably not among them. Alas, for the real world, the few who did warn us about the train wreck got no more respect from the rest of their colleagues or from decision-makers in business and government than prophets usually do.
How could the…
cortex | January 9, 2009In November 2007, I had a longish article in Best Life Magazine on the psychology of chronic back pain. Apparently, the version of the article on the Best Life website no longer works, and I regularly get emails from people asking to read the actual text. So in order to establish a future reference and permanent link, I'm going to post all 5000 words below the fold:
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF BACK PAIN
A growing cadre of doctors and scientists now believes that chronic back pain is a disease of the nervous system, not the spine. This breakthrough has opened the doors to new kinds of treatments that…
cortex | January 8, 2009You'd never know it from my recent article on the urban brain (and the cognitive benefits of nature) but I love walking in cities. In fact, a leisurely stroll in a metropolis is one of my favorite things to do. Sure, it might tire my prefrontal cortex a bit - there's just so much to see - but it's the pleasurable sort of tired, like the feeling you get after an hour in an art museum.
That said, I despise driving in cities. Whenever I'm forced to navigate rush hour traffic, I always return home in a dour mood. I feel stressed and vaguely tense, as if I've just survived some harrowing encounter…
cortex | January 8, 2009In the latest Seed, Steven Shapin has a great essay on the state of modern science. We take the current setup, in which science is a professional activity, shaped by peer-review journals and the priorities of funding institutions, for granted. But it was not always so. Once upon a time, scientists were curious amateurs:
Well into the 19th century, and even into the 20th, doing science was typically more of an avocation than a job. In the 17th century, the great chemist Robert Boyle not only financed his science out of his own deep pockets but also shared a common view that doing science as a…