cortex | April 25, 2010I spent a fair amount of time hanging out with professional poker players while writing How We Decide. For the most part, these players have exquisite control over their facial expressions, so that those micro-muscles around the eyes and mouth rarely betrayed their inner thoughts. (The players reacted with the same look of unflappable boredom to a pair of aces and a hand with mismatched number cards.) But I was always amused by their insistence on wearing opaque sunglasses inside the dimly lit casino. What relevant information did they think their eyeballs would betray? (Most muttered…
cortex | April 23, 2010Ed Yong has a typically great post on a new Current Biology paper that investigates the link between dreaming and memory consolidation:
The last decade of research has clearly shown that sleep is one of the best aide memoires that we have. During this nightly time-out, our brain can rehearse information that it has picked up during the day and consolidate them into lasting memories. Wamsley's new study supports that idea but it also shows that dreaming while you nap can strengthen our memories even further.
She asked 99 volunteers to learn the layout of a complex virtual maze so that they…
cortex | April 22, 2010Prozac (aka fluoxetine) is one of the most successful drugs of all time. Since its introduction as an antidepressant more than 20 years ago, Prozac has been prescribed to more than 80 million people around the world. Currently, approximately one in ten Americans are on an anti-depressant, with the vast majority taking SSRI's like Prozac.
How does Prozac work? At first, the answer seemed simple: the drug is supposed to increase the brain's supply of serotonin, a neurotransmitter, by blocking its reuptake. This inspired an elegant theory, known as the chemical hypothesis: Sadness is simply a…
cortex | April 21, 2010Experience changes everything. That, at least, is the lesson of a new study of Navy SEALS led by scientists at UCSD. Their experiment was an investigation into the anatomy of emotional perception, or what happens inside the brain when we glimpse angry, fearful or happy faces.
The results were straightforward: Navy SEALS are exceptionally good at detecting angry faces. While the soldiers were slower than control subjects at processing happy or scared expressions, the elite troops excelled at seeing those feelings associated with threats and risk. Furthermore, they showed a slightly more…
cortex | April 19, 2010The lure of instant gratification is hard to resist: when we want something, we want it right now. Of course, maturity and reality demand that we learn to wait, that we postpone our pleasures until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. And so we stash money in our savings account, and forgo the SUV for the sake of climate change and don't eat the entire pint of ice cream. We resist the tug of immediate delight for the sake of even more delight in the future.
That, at least, is how we're supposed to behave. The problems arise with a mental process known as delay discounting, which refers to our…
cortex | April 15, 2010I'm pretty fascinated by this chart from the McKinsey Quarterly, which is a great demonstration of the optimism bias. The chart captures the earnings estimates of equity analysts for S&P 500 companies. The downward slope of these yellow lines is what happens when our hopeful projections meet dismal reality:
Needless to say, these estimates come from highly paid professionals, with access to vast amounts of data. (They're also making projections about the relatively near future.) Unfortunately, all that data is no match for a deep-seated bias, which leads us to accentuate the positive…
cortex | April 15, 2010A forthcoming paper by Michael Kraus and Dacher Keltner at UC-Berkeley investigates the correlation between "tactile communication" and success in the NBA. In essence, the paper demonstrates that "touchier" teams - and this includes everything from pats on the ass to high-fives - are also more likely to win. (The two touchiest teams during the 2008-2009 season were the Lakers and the Celtics, while the touchiest player was Kevin Garnett, followed by Chris Bosh.) Here's the abstract:
Tactile communication, or physical touch, promotes cooperation between people, communicates distinct emotions,…
cortex | April 13, 2010I've gotten a lot of emails from people about my recent WSJ article, which looked at the superstar effect, choking and performance anxiety. Most of the letters ask a similar question:
Can anything be done to prevent choking? Or are we destined to sabotage ourselves when it matters the most?
Let's begin with the bad news: choking, which I'll define as "performing below skill level due to performance related anxieties," is far more prevalent than most people assume. In recent years, choking has been shown to underlie everything from the achievement gap to the poor performance of girls on math…
cortex | April 12, 2010Everybody wants a creative child - in theory. The reality of creativity, however, is a little more complicated, as creative thoughts tend to emerge when we're distracted, daydreaming, disinhibited and not following the rules. In other words, the most imaginative kids are often the trouble-makers.
Eric Barker recently referred me to this interesting study, which looked at how elementary school teachers perceived creativity in their students. While the teachers said they wanted creative kids in their classroom, they actually didn't. In fact, when they were asked to rate their students on a…
cortex | April 8, 2010The 2010 NFL Draft is later this month, and there is already plenty of speculation about which QB will go first, and which DT is a better choice, and which teams will trade up for a higher draft pick. The stakes for the teams are huge, as a failed draft pick will not only waste millions of dollars in salary but will also come with a high opportunity cost. So there is a strong incentive to get the decision right, and to have a decision-making system that leads to the right personnel pick.
And yet, that hasn't happened. Instead, NFL teams remain tethered to useless metrics. Just look at the…
cortex | April 6, 2010There's a neat list of variables that reliably (at least reliably in the lab) increase certain forms of creativity. There is, for instance, the blue room effect, and the benefit of spatial distance, and the bonus of living abroad, and the perk of thinking like a 7-year old. Here's a new creative strategy:
Previous research has characterized insight as the product of internal processes, and has thus investigated the cognitive and motivational processes that immediately precede it. In this research, however, we investigate whether insight can be catalyzed by a cultural artifact, an external…
cortex | April 5, 2010Jon Mooallem had a really interesting article in the Times Magazine yesterday. It reviewed some recent research on animal "homosexuality," with an emphasis on scientists who argue that same-sex behavior is not a single adaptation or mutation, but rather reflects a panoply of different instincts, spandrels, and evolutionary accidents:
Something similar may be happening with what we perceive to be homosexual sex in an array of animal species: we may be grouping together a big grab bag of behaviors based on only a superficial similarity. Within the logic of each species, or group of species,…
cortex | April 4, 2010I've got a new essay in the WSJ about Tiger Woods, the hazards of playing against a superstar, and why we choke in high-pressure situations. The subplot of the piece is the positive feedback loop of success, or why winning in the past makes us more likely to win in the future. Every underdog, it turns out, has to rage against the natural insecurities of the mind (take note, Butler):
Competitors playing a match against Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest chess player of all time, often came down with a mysterious affliction known as "Fischer-fear." Even fellow grandmasters were vulnerable to…
cortex | April 2, 2010Let's begin with this recent experiment by neuroscientists at Rutgers, which demonstrated that general intelligence (at least in rodents) is mediated by improvements in selective attention. Here's the abstract:
In both humans and mice, the efficacy of working memory capacity and its related process, selective attention, are each strongly predictive of individuals' aggregate performance in cognitive test batteries. Because working memory is taxed during most cognitive tasks, the efficacy of working memory may have a causal influence on individuals' performance on tests of "intelligence".…
cortex | March 31, 2010My uncle describes Costco as the place "where you go broke saving money". That certainly describes my experience of the warehouse store - I walk in for some toilet paper and leave with a new television, a tub of cashews and a lifetime supply of chapstick. ABC News recently had an interesting profile of the retail company:
Costco's membership is largely made up of middle- and upper-middle class families and small business owners who pay $50 to $100 for annual memberships. So far this year, Costco has reported $386 million in revenues from membership fees alone.
Loyal customers are willing to…
cortex | March 30, 2010David Brooks, summarizing the current state of happiness research:
The daily activity most injurious to happiness is commuting. According to one study, being married produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year.
In other words, the best way to make yourself happy is to have a short commute and get married. I'm afraid science can't tell us very much about marriage so let's talk about commuting. A few years ago, the Swiss economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer announced the discovery of a new human foible, which they called "the commuters paradox". They found that, when…
cortex | March 29, 2010I've always been fascinated by tip-of-the-tongue moments. It's estimated that, on average, people have a tip-of-the-tongue moment at least once a week. Perhaps it occurs when you run into an old acquaintance whose name you can't remember, although you know that it begins with the letter "J." Or perhaps you struggle to recall the title of a recent movie, even though you can describe the plot in perfect detail.
What's interesting about this mental hiccup is that, even though the mind can't remember the information, it's convinced that it knows it, which is why we devote so many mental…
cortex | March 25, 2010Pablo Picasso once declared that "Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up."
The solution to Picasso's problem is startlingly simple, at least according to the psychologists Darya Zabelina and Michael Robinson of North Dakota State University: We just need to think like a little kid. In their recent paper, "Child's play: Facilitating the originality of creative output by a priming manipulation," the scientists took a large group of undergraduates and randomly assigned them to two different groups. The first group was given the following instructions:
"…
cortex | March 22, 2010Over the weekend, I had a little essay in the Times on some new research on why dream at night.
When I can't sleep, I think about what I'm missing. I glance over at my wife and watch her eyelids flutter. I listen to the steady rhythm of her breath. I wonder if she's dreaming and, if so, what story she's telling to herself to pass the time. (The mind is like a shark -- it can't ever stop swimming in thought.) And then my eyes return to the ceiling and I wonder what I would be dreaming about, if only I could fall asleep.
Why do we dream? As a chronic insomniac, I like to pretend that our…
cortex | March 17, 2010The world is a confusing place. Correlation looks like causation; the signal sounds like the noise; randomness is everywhere. This raises the obvious question: How does the human brain cope with such an epistemic mess? How do we deal with the helter-skelter of reality? One approach would be to ground all of our beliefs in modesty and uncertainty, to recognize that we know so little and understand even less.
Needless to say, that's not what we do. Instead of grappling with the problem of induction, we believe in God. Instead of applying Bayesian logic, we slip into rigid ideologies, which…