cortex | August 10, 2007Jon Stewart, interviewing Tal Ben-Shahar, who teaches a positive psychology class at Harvard:
"I was a psychology major, so I know a lot of it is bullshit."
Watch the video here.
cortex | August 10, 2007So the financial markets are all upset. Stocks began the morning with another steep slide. The media, of course, is covering the growing liquidity crisis in excruciating detail, spending lots of hours and column inches analyzing the latest rumors and sentiments on Wall Street. But here's my advice: ignore everything. Don't read the business page. Turn off the television. Go read a novel.
In the late 1980's, the Harvard psychologist Paul Andreassen conducted a simple experiment on MIT business students. First, he let the students select a portfolio of stock investments. Then he divided the…
cortex | August 9, 2007The shit is hitting the fan: all those sub-prime mortgages given out so recklessly over the past two years are getting their interest rates re-adjusted. And that, of course, is when the foreclosures begin.
By most measures, sub-prime loans are a bad idea. Look, for example, at the popular 2/28 loan, which consists of a low, fixed-interest rate for the first two years and a much higher, adjustable rate for the next twenty-eight. Most people taking out a 2/28 loan can't afford the higher interest rates that will hit later on. It's not unusual for interest payments on a 2/28 loan to double…
cortex | August 9, 2007Here's your feel-good story of the day. (It feels even better if you're a fan of The Wire. And if you're not a fan of The Wire, then you've made a very big mistake.) The story is a helpful reminder that it's never too late to change your life: the mind is a gloriously plastic thing.
Donnie Andrews was a stickup man with a .44 Magnum who robbed drug dealers and was sentenced to life in prison for murdering one of them.
Fran Boyd was a heroin addict who shoplifted to get from fix to fix, passing her stupors in the shooting gallery and stash house that once was her middle-class home.
Now they…
cortex | August 8, 2007As the author of a book that's equally divided between descriptions of neuroscience and descriptions of art, I've spent far too much time pondering the organization of book stores. How should books be classified? Is my book a "science" book, or does it belong in the neglected "Criticism and Essays" section? Personally, I've always been drawn to the books that elude neat categorization. For example, one of my weirder hobbies is checking to see where bookstores put William James. I've seen him shelved in any number of sections, from "Science" to "Philosophy" to "Essays" to "Mysticism".
Which…
cortex | August 7, 2007It turns out that moving to the sun belt will help you live longer. Here's the NBER abstract:
We estimate that the number of annual deaths attributable to cold temperature is 27,940 or 1.3% of total deaths in the US. This effect is even larger in low income areas. Because the U.S. population has been moving from cold Northeastern states to the warmer Southwestern states, our findings have implications for understanding the causes of long-term increases in life expectancy. We calculate that every year, 5,400 deaths are delayed by changes in exposure to cold temperature induced by mobility.…
cortex | August 7, 2007Addiction factoid of the Day:
Psychiatrist Lee Robins found that almost half of American soldiers used heroin or opium while in Vietnam, but rather fewer were actually addicted, and almost 90 percent of those kicked the habit upon returning to the United States.
The reality of addiction is that it's rarely quite as universal or one-dimensional as those frightening government ads would have you believe. One hit of heroin won't turn you into a heroin addict, and one puff of a cigarette won't make you an addicted smoker. Thanks to the pioneering research of Saul Shiffman, science now has a much…
cortex | August 7, 2007History tends to make even the most unlikely revolutions seem inevitable. Looking backwards to the 18th century, it's easy to conclude that the Industrial Revolution was bound to happen, that the forward march of modernity was predestined.
But what this fatalistic view of history overlooks is just how unlikely it is that a nomadic band of hunter-gatherers would one day settle in big cities, develop some startling new technologies, and escape the Malthusian trap. Starting in the 18th century, a few select human populations (such as Great Britain) managed to increase their economic…
cortex | August 6, 2007Thanks for your patience while I was on vacation. If I wasn't so jet-lagged, I'd probably feel really relaxed. (I'm currently in that circadian netherworld that not even caffeine can fix.)
Hopefully, I'll get around to blogging about the books I read while away. But for now, let me just say that I enjoyed my break from the internet. I think we underestimate the cognitive toll of being online all day. At first, I experienced the usual symptoms of withdrawal: there was the vague unease of disconnection, of being severed from this infinitude of information. But then I realized that I didn't…
cortex | July 27, 2007A note to my readers: I'll be on vacation for the next week, so please pardon the sporadic posting.
Thanks, Jonah
cortex | July 24, 2007Simon Baron-Cohen, of mindblindness fame, uses autism to examine the psychology of dishonesty. He concludes that the central reason people with autism are so honest (and so vulnerable to liars) is that they have difficulty developing a theory of mind for other people.
And then there are people with autism. Their neurological condition leads not only to difficulties socializing and chatting but also to difficulties recognizing when someone might be deceiving them or understanding how to deceive others. Many children with autism are perplexed by why someone would even want to deceive others, or…
cortex | July 24, 2007This truth thing is difficult:
In 1977, Steven Weinberg, then two years shy of the Nobel Prize in Physics, decided to do a little of what some theorists call "ambulance chasing."
He heard a rumor, while spending a year at Stanford, that collisions at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory were spitting out weird triplets of particles known as muons, which are sort of fat electrons. Dr. Weinberg canceled reservations at a lodge in Yosemite National Park to spend the weekend with his colleague Benjamin Lee, trying to concoct a theory to explain the trimuons.
But the only theory he and Dr.…
cortex | July 23, 2007Are bonobos really such peaceful beatniks? Is is true that they like to make love, not war? The truth is that nobody really knows. Ian Parker has a fascinating profile of the species, and our attempts to learn about the species, in the latest New Yorker:
This pop image of the bonobo--equal parts dolphin, Dalai Lama, and Warren Beatty--has flourished largely in the absence of the animal itself, which was recognized as a species less than a century ago. Two hundred or so bonobos are kept in captivity around the world; but, despite being one of just four species of great ape, along with…
cortex | July 23, 2007A truly depressing analysis of the justice system (Times $elect):
Brandon L. Garrett, a law professor at the University of Virginia, has, for the first time, systematically examined the 200 cases, in which innocent people served an average of 12 years in prison. In each case, of course, the evidence used to convict them was at least flawed and often false -- yet juries, trial judges and appellate courts failed to notice.
"A few types of unreliable trial evidence predictably supported wrongful convictions," Professor Garrett concluded in his study, "Judging Innocence," to be published in The…
cortex | July 20, 2007It's British Open season, which means that it's time to relive all the great golf chokes of recent years. No other course seems to cause golfers to crack under pressure quite like Carnoustie. (The most famous choke being Jean Van de Velde's collapse on the 18th hole in 1999.)
Why do golfers choke? The answer reveals some important elements of skill learning and the unconscious brain. Look, for example, at putting on the golf green. When people are first learning how to play golf, they are given straightforward advice about putting. They are told to take their time, concentrate, and carefully…
cortex | July 19, 2007Ramesh Ponnuru, of the National Review, says this:
What renders atheism incompatible with a coherent account of morality, when it is incompatible, is physicalism (or what is sometimes described as reductive materialism). If it is true that the universe consists entirely and without remainder of particles and energy, then all human action must be within the domain of caused events, free will does not exist, and moral reasoning is futile if not illusory (as are other kinds of reasoning).
Will Wilkinson offers up an astute reply:
This is a stupefyingly widespread view that flows from an…
cortex | July 19, 2007Some crimes are beyond the pale of comprehension. This is one of those:
After dark on June 18, the police say, as many as 10 armed assailants repeatedly raped a Haitian immigrant in her apartment at Dunbar Village and then went further, forcing her to perform oral sex on her 12-year-old son. They took cellphone pictures of their acts. They burned the woman's skin and the boy's eyes with cleaning fluid, forced them to lie naked together in the bathtub, hit them with a broom and a gun and threatened to set them on fire.
Neighbors did not respond to her screams, and no one called the police. The…
cortex | July 17, 2007This is just sad:
Harrah's New Orleans, the largest casino in the city, is on pace for its best year ever: gambling revenue is up 13.6 percent through the first five months of 2007 compared with the same period in 2005, pre-Katrina.
The casinos in this region are generating more revenue -- from significantly fewer players -- in large part because of the extra money that many area residents have in their pockets and fewer alternatives on where to spend it, casino executives and others in the region say.
I sometimes wonder if, one day, we'll view casinos as we currently view cigarettes: a…