cortex | March 16, 2010Here's a moral scenario:
A man is sitting near the side of the road when he sees a truck speeding along. It is headed towards a group of five men, who do not hear or see it, and if nothing appears in the road, it will certainly hit and kill them. Across the road is another man sitting in front of his house. If the man who is sitting by the road calls out to the man by his house and says 'come here,' the man will walk into the road in the path of the truck, be killed, and stop it from continuing on toward the five, saving them. If the man sitting by the road says nothing, the truck will travel…
cortex | March 15, 2010It sounds like President Obama and his communications staff are getting to know the research of Paul Slovic:
After weeks of making his case for the legislation in broad strokes -- including two similar rallies last week in Philadelphia and St. Charles, Mo. -- Mr. Obama used Monday's appearance to pivot to the personal, as he recounted the story of the cleaning woman, Natoma Canfield -- a health care drama that could not have been better scripted for his purposes if he had written it himself.
Ms. Canfield, of nearby Medina, wrote Mr. Obama at the end of December to say that she had been…
cortex | March 15, 2010Now that the social web is maturing - the platforms have been winnowed down to a select few (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) - some interesting commonalities are emerging. The one shared feature that I'm most interested in is also a little disturbing: the tendency of the social software to quantify our social life. Facebook doesn't just let us connect with our friends: it counts our friends. Twitter doesn't just allow us to aggregate a stream of chatter: it measures our social reach. LinkedIn has too many damn hierarchies to count. Even the staid blog is all about the metrics, from page…
cortex | March 10, 2010In response to my post on the effects of mood on cognition, which also referenced the possibilities of self-medicating ourselves into the ideal mood, Andrew Sullivan offered up the following anecdote:
I was talking with a fine artist the other day and he was telling me how blocked he was on a piece, and how he then smoked some pot and everything came together.
It unleashed what he wanted to express, by suppressing the analytic portion of his mind that was inhibiting him. I know this is the bleeding obvious to anyone who has a brain and an ounce of human experience but it is a truth we are…
cortex | March 9, 2010In recent years, it's become clear that much of our individual behavior depends on the dynamics of our social network. It doesn't matter if we're talking about obesity or happiness: they all flow through other people, like a virus or a meme. Last year, I profiled James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis in Wired, who have conducted several fascinating studies that demonstrate the power of social networks:
There's something strange about watching life unfold as a social network. It's easy to forget that every link is a human relationship and every circle a waistline. The messy melodrama of life--…
cortex | March 8, 2010One of the hazards of writing a book on decision-making is getting questions about decisions that are far beyond the purview of science (or, at the very least, way beyond my pay grade). Here, for instance, is a question that often arrives in my inbox, or gets shouted out during talks:
"How should we make decisions about whom to marry? If the brain is so smart, why do half of all marriages end in divorce?"
Needless to say, there is no simple answer to this question. (And if I had a half-way decent answer, I'd be writing a book on marriage.) But I've been recently been reading some interesting…
cortex | March 5, 2010I thought it's worth addressing this article one last time. Dr. Ronald Pies (professor of psychiatry at SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse) has written three eloquent and extremely critical blog posts about the article and the analytic-rumination hypothesis. Here's his latest riposte:
Writer Jonah Lehrer caused quite a stir with his recent article in the New York Times Magazine, with the unfortunate title, "Depression's Upside." I have a detailed rejoinder to this misleading article posted on the Psychcentral website. The fault is not entirely Mr. Lehrer's however; his sources…
cortex | March 4, 2010The ultimatum game is a simple experiment with profound implications. The game goes like this: one person (the proposer) is given ten dollars and told to share it with another person (the responder). The proposer can divide the money however they like, but if the responder rejects the offer then both players end up with nothing.
When economists first started playing this game in the early 1980s, they assumed that this elementary exchange would always generate the same outcome. The proposer would offer the responder approximately $1â¯a minimal amountâ¯and the responder would accept it. After…
cortex | March 3, 2010One of the interesting subplots of this new research on the intellectual benefits of sadness - it seems to bolster our attention and make us more analytical - is that it helps illuminate the intertwined relationship of mood and cognition. For decades, we saw the mind as an information processing machine; the brain was just a bloody computer with lipid bi-layer microchips. The problem with this metaphor is that machines don't have feelings, which led us to overlook the role of feelings in shaping how we think.
Here's an experiment I described in the depression article:
Last year Forgas…
cortex | March 2, 2010I've received a few emails along this line:
"How does this new theory about depression enhancing problem-solving relate to all the studies that have shown cognitive deficits in people with depression?"
That's a really good question. I tried to address this issue quickly in the article - I referenced the fact that the "cognitive deficits disappear when test subjects are first distracted from their depression and thus better able to focus on the exercise" - but I think it's worth spending a little more time on the scientific literature. The key point here is that the deficits are "unstable,"…
cortex | March 1, 2010First of all, thank you to everyone who took the time to write and comment on my recent article on depression. I really appreciated all the insightful emails and I'm trying to respond to every one. In the meantime, I wanted to address some important criticisms of the analytic-rumination hypothesis and of my article, which were raised by an academic psychiatrist. I've reproduced his criticisms, and my replies, below:
First, you write "depression is everywhere, as inescapable as the common cold". No, this is flatly wrong. Major depression is estimated by an absurdly broad range of…
cortex | February 28, 2010I'm a terrible sleeper, which is perhaps why I got invited to contribute to a NY Times group blog on "insomnia, sleep and the nocturnal life". Here is my first contribution, which focuses on the work of Dan Wegner:
My insomnia always begins with me falling asleep. I've been reading the same paragraph for the last five minutes -- the text is suddenly impossibly dense -- and I can feel the book getting heavier and heavier in my hands. Gravity is tugging on my eyelids.
And then, just as my mind turns itself off, I twitch awake. I'm filled with disappointment. I was so close to a night of sweet…
cortex | February 26, 2010I've got an article on the upside of depression in the latest New York Times Magazine. If you'd like to learn more about this controversial theory, I'd suggest reading the original paper, "The Bright Side of Being Blue: Depression as an adaptation for analyzing complex problems," by Paul Andrews and Andy Thomson. Here's my lede:
The Victorians had many names for depression, and Charles Darwin used them all. There were his "fits" brought on by "excitements," "flurries" leading to an "uncomfortable palpitation of the heart" and "air fatigues" that triggered his "head symptoms." In one…
cortex | February 25, 2010Sarcasm is a cognitive challenge. In order to get the sarcastic sentiment, we can't simply decode the utterance, or decipher the literal meaning of the sentence. Instead, we have to understand the meaning of the words in their larger social context. For example, if it's a beautiful day outside - the sun is shining, etc - and somebody states "What a nice day!," there is no sarcasm; the sentence makes perfect sense. However, if the same statement is uttered on a rainy day, then there is a clear contradiction, which leads to an interpretation of sarcasm. (We typically exaggerate the expression…
cortex | February 22, 2010In my recent WSJ article on age and creativity, I didn't have space to discuss the fascinating research of David Galenson, an economist at the University of Chicago who brings together a vast array of evidence to better understand the nature of creative production over time. Galenson divides creators into two distinct categories: conceptual innovators and experimental innovators. In general, conceptual innovators make sudden and radical breakthroughs by formulating new ideas, often at an early age. In contrast, experimental innovators work by trial and error, and typically require decades of…
cortex | February 22, 2010A few weeks ago, I got an email wondering why people sometimes "break into uncontrollable laughter or smiling when faced with terrible situations, like death or illness." Where does this perverse emotional reaction come from? Why do we smile at the most inappropriate times?
I looked into the peer-reviewed literature and didn't find much. While there have been some interesting fMRI studies of our comedic circuits, I don't think that references to the left posterior temporal gyrus explain very much.* Our anatomy is always interesting, but localizing the laughter reflex won't tell us why we…
cortex | February 19, 2010I've got a new article in the Wall Street Journal on the complex relationship between age and scientific creativity:
When James Watson was 24 years old, he spent more time thinking about women than work, according to his memoir "Genes, Girls and Gamow." His hair was unkempt and his letters home were full of references to "wine-soaked lunches." But when Mr. Watson wasn't chasing after girls, he was hard at work in his Cambridge lab, trying to puzzle out the structure of DNA. In 1953, when Mr. Watson was only 25, he co-wrote one of the most important scientific papers of all time.
Scientific…
cortex | February 18, 2010I've been reading a number of papers on the "science" of consciousness - I'll let the quotes express my skepticism - and I thought this clever metaphor from Francis Crick and Christof Koch, in their influential 2003 Nature review, was revealing. They compare the competition among our sensations to a democratic election, in which all those fleeting stimuli must fight for our limited attentional resources:
It may help to make a crude political analogy. The primaries and the early events in an election would correspond roughly to the preliminary unconscious processing. The winning coalition…
cortex | February 15, 2010Mark Bittman wonders if soda is the new tobacco, and explores the possibility of a tax on sugary, carbonated beverages:
A tax on soda was one option considered to help pay for health care reform (the Joint Committee on Taxation calculated that a 3-cent tax on each 12-ounce sugared soda would raise $51.6 billion over a decade), and President Obama told Men's Health magazine last fall that such a tax is "an idea that we should be exploring. There's no doubt that our kids drink way too much soda."
But with all the junk food and U.F.O.'s (unidentifiable food-like objects) out there, why soda? Why…
cortex | February 15, 2010In the latest New York Review of Books, Charles Petersen has an interesting and even-handed analysis of Facebook and social networking:
What many find most enticing about Facebook is the steady stream of updates from "friends," new and old, which sociologists refer to as "ambient awareness." This is not a new phenomenon: everyone from our Cro-Magnon ancestors to Jane Austen has known how it feels to be surrounded by the constant chatter of other people. Facebook's continuing attraction comes from its ability to reduce the Internet's worldwide chatter to the size of a college, or a village, or…