cortex | January 4, 2010I loved Avatar. Sure, I chuckled at the schmaltzy dialogue and found the neon color scheme a little garish and could have done without all the pantheistic moralism...But the movie was still mesmerizing. For 150 minutes, I vanished into the screen, utterly absorbed in the stereoscopic world unfolding before me. I was lost in Pandora, transfixed by a perfectly predictable melodrama.
The modernist critic Clement Greenberg argued that art should be evaluated on its adherence to the "specificity of the medium". Painting, for instance, is defined by its abstract flatness, which meant that artists…
cortex | January 3, 2010In the Boston Globe Ideas section, Kevin Lewis highlights a new paper on "the restraint bias," or the dangers of overestimating self-control:
One way to enhance self-control is to avoid tempting situations. The irony, according to a recent study, is that people who think they have more self-control allow themselves to get into more tempting situations and, as a result, are more likely to give in to temptation. For example, students who were made to feel fatigued were less confident in their ability to control fatigue and were less willing to put off studying for exams. Smokers who were led to…
cortex | December 28, 2009Apologies for the light blogging: I'm enjoying a little vacation from my computer. But here is a recent little article about willpower in the WSJ:
Willpower, like a bicep, can only exert itself so long before it gives out; it's an extremely limited mental resource.
Given its limitations, New Year's resolutions are exactly the wrong way to change our behavior. It makes no sense to try to quit smoking and lose weight at the same time, or to clean the apartment and give up wine in the same month. Instead, we should respect the feebleness of self-control, and spread our resolutions out over the…
cortex | December 22, 2009My latest Wired article is now online and on the newsstands. It's about the messiness of experimental science, the blind-spots created by knowledge, Thorstein Veblen, European Jews and the background static created by the Big Bang.
cortex | December 17, 2009Earlier this week, I wondered if all of our new knowledge about the brain, which is too often presented in a lazy causal fashion - if x lights up, then we do y - might undermine our sense of self and self-control. I've since riffled through the literature and found some interesting and suggestive answers.
The first study was done by Kathleen Vohs and Jonathan Schooler. The experiment itself was simple: a group of undergraduates was given two excerpts from Francis Crick's The Astonishing Hypothesis. The first excerpt espoused a fiercely deterministic and reductionist view of the brain:
You,…
cortex | December 15, 2009James Surowiecki has the smartest take I've read on the Woods sex scandal:
Woods's appeal was based, ultimately, not on his physical abilities but on his mental toughness, his extraordinary capacity for focus and discipline. He was the man who always made the key putt, who never cracked under pressure. That's why Gatorade, introducing a new drink with his face on the label, called the drink Tiger Focus. And it's why the most powerful Nike ad about him is the one in which his father, in a voice-over, says, "I'd say, 'Tiger, I promise you that you'll never meet another person as mentally tough…
cortex | December 15, 2009The always fascinating Ed Yong, over at Not Exactly Rocket Science, highlights a recent study on testosterone, aggression and the placebo effect.
If ever a hormone was the subject of clichés and stereotypes, it is testosterone. In pop culture, it has become synonymous with masculinity, although women are subject to its influence too. Injections of testosterone can make lab rats more aggressive, and this link is widely applied to humans. The media portrays "testosterone-charged" people as sex-crazed and financially flippant and the apparent link with violence is so pervasive that the use of…
cortex | December 14, 2009I recently learned that many professional graduate schools - law schools, business schools, even medical schools - continue to provide "test accommodations" to students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, or ADHD. These accommodations usually take the form of extra time on the exam, when time is a crucial resource.
Of course, it's not just grad schools who are struggling with the question of how to treat students with ADHD. Princeton is currently embroiled in a lawsuit:
A learning-disabled freshman suing Princeton University for refusing to allow her extra time to take exams was…
cortex | December 10, 2009The latest McSweeney's production is a marvel. It's in the form of a daily newspaper - The San Francisco Panorama - and is yet another reminder that the newspaper remains an essential literary form, a potent mixture of breaking news and obscure stories. (If your local indie bookstore stocks the Panorama, be sure to buy a copy.) I was fortunate enough to write for the Panorama Magazine on the cognitive benefits of travel, which I've pasted in below.
It's 4:15 in the morning, and my alarm clock has just stolen away a lovely dream. My eyes are open but my pupils are still closed, so all I see…
cortex | December 8, 2009In the latest Mind Matters, Adam Waytz (an old college friend, co-author of my favorite book on basketball, The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, and now a post-doc at Harvard) writes about a fascinating new paper by PJ Henry on social status and aggression. If you've read Gladwell's excellent Outliers, then you're probably familiar with the work of Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen. They argued, in an influential series of papers, that landscapes more conducive to herding were more likely to have a "culture of honor," which led to increased violence. Here's Waytz:
The story goes that…
cortex | December 7, 2009I found this minor anecdote, from Peter Baker's authoritative NY Times article on Obama's decision-making process for Afghanistan, to be quite fascinating:
On Oct. 9, Mr. Obama and his team reviewed General McChrystal's troop proposals for the first time. Some in the White House were surprised by the numbers, assuming there would be a middle ground between 10,000 and 40,000.
"Why wasn't there a 25 number?" one senior administration official asked in an interview. He then answered his own question: "It would have been too tempting."
General McChrystal, it turns out, is a shrewd student of…
cortex | December 3, 2009Jon Stewart on the stolen Climategate emails:
I have two responses to the release of these admittedly unflattering emails. Firstly, they shed virtually no light on the actual climate science. Tyler Cowen says it best:
I see science, including climate science, as very much a decentralized process, based on the collective efforts of thousands of researchers. The evidence for our current understanding of climate change also comes from a wide variety of disciplines, including chemistry, meteorology, oceanography, geography, tree ring studies, ice sheet studies, and a good body of theory, which…
cortex | December 3, 2009The WSJ reports that the Fed is considering getting serious about popping financial bubbles:
Not so long ago, Federal Reserve officials were confident they knew what to do when they saw bubbles building in prices of stocks, houses or other assets: Nothing.
Now, as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke faces a confirmation hearing Thursday on a second four-year term, he and others at the central bank are rethinking the hands-off approach they've followed over the past decade. On the heels of a burst housing-and-credit bubble, Mr. Bernanke now calls financial booms "perhaps the most difficult problem for…
cortex | December 1, 2009A new paper by Paola Giuliano, an economist at UCLA, and Antonio Spilimbergo, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, looks at how severe recessions, depressions and other "macroeconomic shocks" influence the political beliefs of young adults. Here's the abstract:
Do generations growing up during recessions have different socio-economic beliefs than generations growing up in good times? We study the relationship between recessions and beliefs by matching macroeconomic shocks during early adulthood with self-reported answers from the General Social Survey. Using time and regional…
cortex | November 30, 2009There was no sentence in How We Decide that I regretted more than this one, which was first written in the fall of 2007, when Vince Young was the starting quarterback for the Tennessee Titans:
Vince Young ended up excelling in the pros.
I was discussing the statistical disconnect between a QB's score on the Wonderlic intelligence test - an abbreviated version of the IQ test - and their performance in the pros. The league requires that every player in the draft take the Wonderlic. The test is twelve minutes long and consists of 50 questions, which get progressively harder as the test goes…
cortex | November 23, 2009Via Vaughan Bell, comes this wonderful essay by Tom Stafford on confabulation and creativity:
In those patients with frontal damage who do confabulate, however, the brain injury makes them rely on their internal memories--their thoughts and wishes--rather than true memories. This is of course dysfunctional, but it is also creative in some of the ways that make improvisation so funny: producing an odd mix of the mundane and impossible. When a patient who claims to be 20 years old is asked why she looks about 50, she replies that she was pushed into a ditch by her brothers and landed on her…
cortex | November 22, 2009Last week, a team of computer scientists led by Dharmendra S. Modha announced what sounded like an impressive breakthrough for neuroscience-inspired computing:
Using Dawn Blue Gene / P supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab with 147,456 processors and 144 TB of main memory, we achieved a simulation with 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. This is equivalent to 1,000 cognitive computing chips each with 1 million neurons and 10 billion synapses, and exceeds the scale of cat cerebral cortex. The simulation ran 100 to 1,000 times slower than real-time…
cortex | November 20, 2009I've got a review of Stanislas Dehaene's new book, Reading in the Brain, over at the Barnes and Noble Review:
Right now, your mind is performing an astonishing feat. Photons are bouncing off these black squiggles and lines -- the letters in this sentence -- and colliding with a thin wall of flesh at the back of your eyeball. The photons contain just enough energy to activate sensory neurons, each of which is responsible for a particular plot of visual space on the page. The end result is that, as you stare at the letters, they become more than mere marks on a page. You've begun to read.…
cortex | November 19, 2009Saks and Barneys and the rest of those luxury retailers have discovered that nothing destroys a luxury brand like a sale:
All around Saks Fifth Avenue, merchandise is sold out. The $2,520 Marni shearling vest? Gone. The $5,295 Brioni leather bomber jacket? Only one left. The $1,995 over-the-knee Christian Louboutin boots?
The $1,995 over-the-knee Christian Louboutin boots at Saks have sold out, unless you can wear the only pair left -- a size 11. "All gone, except for this," said Nick Passerelli, a Saks employee, dangling a size 11 boot from his fingers.
After a brutal year in which the…
cortex | November 17, 2009Bill Belichick has never been the most popular coach in the NFL, but his Sunday night decision to go for it on 4th and 2 on his own 28 with two minutes remaining in the fourth quarter has even his fans crying foul. I bring up this football decision not because I'm interested in a debate - as a Pats fan, the last five minutes of that game were excruciating - but because I think it illustrates the difficulty of making rational decisions, even when the evidence supports the call.
I've blogged about the research of UC Berkeley economist David Romer before, but his basic thesis, based on an…