cortex | October 13, 2009Over at Mind Matters, Chadrick Lane reviews a fascinating experiment that revealed the rewarding properties of information, regardless of whether or not the information actually led to more rewards:
In the experimental design, monkeys were placed in front of a computer screen and were trained to perform a saccade task, in which they learned to direct their gaze at specific areas. The monkeys were first given the option of choosing between one of two colored targets. One of these targets would give the monkey advance information about its future reward. The advance information came in the form…
cortex | October 12, 2009Over at the BPS Research Digest, a number of researchers respond to a very interesting question: "What's one nagging thing you still don't understand about yourself?" All of the replies are intriguing, but my favorites answers concerned the limitations of self-knowledge. Here, for instance, is David Buss:
One nagging thing that I still don't understand about myself is why I often succumb to well-documented psychological biases, even though I'm acutely aware of these biases. One example is my failure at affective forecasting, such as believing that I will be happy for a long time after some…
cortex | October 6, 2009The closing of Gourmet magazine is a sad event. I won't just miss the lush pictures and Paris travel tips - what I'll really miss is the food journalism, from DFW on the suffering of lobsters to Daniel Zwerdling on the tragic life of an industrial chicken. I hope other magazines can fill the void, because our food supply is messed up.
But this blog post isn't just another lament for the glossy. I had a short essay scheduled to run in the January issue of Gourmet on the pleasures of home cooking. Since that issue will no longer see the light of day, I thought I'd reproduce the essay below. (…
cortex | October 6, 2009A new study reveals that all those unappetizing calorie counts on New York City menus - do you really want to know how much sugar is in a Frappuccino? Or that an Olive Garden breadstick contains hundreds of calories? - don't lead to more responsible food decisions. Here's the Times:
The study, by several professors at New York University and Yale, tracked customers at four fast-food chains -- McDonald's, Wendy's, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken -- in poor neighborhoods of New York City where there are high rates of obesity.
It found that about half the customers noticed the calorie…
cortex | October 5, 2009An interesting new study looks at how being able to count your own heartbeats - the most elemental form of biofeedback - correlates with better decision-making, at least when playing the Iowa Gambling Task. Here's Kevin Lewis in the Boston Globe Ideas section:
A team of psychologists in Germany asked people to count their own heartbeats (without taking a pulse) and then asked them to play a computer gambling game, which required choosing repeatedly among four card decks that yielded different returns. People who were more accurate at counting their own heartbeats picked more cards from the…
cortex | October 1, 2009I've written before about the powerful mental benefits of communing with nature - it leads to more self-control, increased working memory, lower levels of stress and better moods - but a new study by psychologists at the University of Rochester find that being exposed to wildlife also makes us more compassionate. Nature might be red in tooth and claw, but even a glimpse of greenery can make us behave in kinder, gentler ways.
The study consisted of several experiments with 370 different subjects. In each experiment, people were exposed to either natural settings (pristine lakes, wooded…
cortex | September 30, 2009Over at Mind Matters, we've got a wonderful new column on the cognitive benefits of falling in love by Nira Liberman and Oren Shapira. It turns out that serious romance - but not short-sighted lust - leads us to think in a more abstract manner, attuned to the subtle connections that we often overlook. (Of course, sometimes it's important to ignore these remote associations, which can be a distraction.) The end result is that subjects cued to contemplate love are significantly better at solving insight puzzles, while subjects primed with thoughts of lust excel at logic puzzles:
Love has…
cortex | September 29, 2009Yesterday was Yom Kippur, the Jewish holiday of atonement. It's traditional to fast on Yom Kippur for all the usual religious reasons - not eating is a way to elevate the spirit and purify the mind (or so says the Talmud). It makes the sacred day feel a little less ordinary.
I have to confess: I'm a terrible faster. When I don't eat, my thoughts don't become more ethereal and holy - they become fixated on calories, so that the only thing I can listen to is the impatient gurgling of my stomach. (My belly drowns out the sermon.) I get cranky and tired and squander hours daydreaming about ice…
cortex | September 28, 2009In my essay on social networks and research of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, I describe a few of the striking medical effects produced by social networks:
By studying Framingham as an interconnected network rather than a mass of individuals, Christakis and Fowler made a remarkable discovery: Obesity spread like a virus. Weight gain had a stunning infection rate. If one person became obese, the likelihood that his friend would follow suit increased by 171 percent. (This means that the network is far more predictive of obesity than the presence of genes associated with the condition.)
A…
cortex | September 23, 2009Over at GQ, the excellent Paul Tough* profiles Gregg Gillis, the madcap mixer behind Girl Talk. For those of you who aren't cool enough to know - and I'm only cool enough because my younger sister is cool enough - Girl Talk is a mash-up artist par excellence. He's taken the concept of sampling - the act of borrowing a splice of a song - to its logical extreme, so that his own songs are nothing but a collage of different snippets. Here's Tough dissecting the ingredients of a recent Girl Talk track:
Coming out of his [Gregg Gillis] laptop was an old Wu-Tang Clan song, Raekwon the Chef chanting…
cortex | September 21, 2009I finally got around to reading Paul Krugman's takedown of modern economics, which is a lucid dissection of his own field. His core argument is that economists made the old Keatsian error, mistaking a beautiful theory for the truth:
As I see it, the economics profession went astray because economists, as a group, mistook beauty, clad in impressive-looking mathematics, for truth. Until the Great Depression, most economists clung to a vision of capitalism as a perfect or nearly perfect system. That vision wasn't sustainable in the face of mass unemployment, but as memories of the Depression…
cortex | September 21, 2009There's a fascinating article in the NY Times Magazine by Sara Corbett on the publication of Jung's infamous Red Book, in which he attempted (often in vain) to map the infinite labyrinth of his unconscious:
Some people feel that nobody should read the book, and some feel that everybody should read it. The truth is, nobody really knows. Most of what has been said about the book -- what it is, what it means -- is the product of guesswork, because from the time it was begun in 1914 in a smallish town in Switzerland, it seems that only about two dozen people have managed to read or even have much…
cortex | September 17, 2009There's one other angle to the social network story that I wasn't able to mention in my Wired essay. Right now, retail companies are investing a pretty penny in consumer preference algorithms, that AI software which suggests books to buy on Amazon, and DVD's to rent on Netflix, and songs to purchase on iTunes. The assumption is that human preferences are predictable - if you like Bob Dylan, you'll probably like Astral Weeks; if you like How We Decide, you might like Predictably Irrational; if you like The Wire, you might like Homicide, or The Shield.
These algorithms have their limitations,…
cortex | September 15, 2009Clearly, what the world needs is another blogger weighing in on the Kanye West/Taylor Swift controversy. But I have no interest in castigating Kanye - I don't pick my music based on the politesse of the artists. Instead, what struck me about this peculiar celebrity moment was the fact that I really enjoy both Kanye and Taylor and their immaculate pop confections. In the last few months, my brain has been infected by the melodic memes of "Fifteen" and "Heartless", "Tim McGraw" and "The Glory".
So far, so obvious - I enjoy (with a touch of snobbish guilt) Top 40 radio. But here's the…
cortex | September 13, 2009I've got a new essay on social networks and the research of Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler in the latest issue of Wired:
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--all the failed diets and fading friendships--becomes a sterile cartoon.
But that's exactly the point. All that drama obscures a profound truth about human society. By studying Framingham as an interconnected network rather than a mass of individuals, Christakis and Fowler made a…
cortex | September 11, 2009The human brain, it turns out, is even more efficient than previous estimates:
Fifty-seven years ago, Nobel laureates Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley came up with a model to calculate the power behind electrochemical currents in neurons--a great step forward in understanding how the brain worked and how it divvied up resources. The only problem was that their subject was not a person, or even a rodent, but a giant squid. Today, researchers announced that they have found a more accurate model for mammal brains, which elevates some of their transactions to three times more efficient than that of…
cortex | September 10, 2009Given recent discussions on this blog on the neuroscience of marijuana, I thought this brand new paper on stress and the cannabinoid receptor was extremely interesting. The Israeli scientists demonstrated that microinjecting an agonist of the CB1 receptor (a primary binding site of THC, the active ingredient in pot) significantly reduced the elevation of stress hormones in response to scary stressors. They researchers argue that their evidence "supports a wide therapeutic application for cannabinoids in the treatment of conditions associated with the inappropriate retention of aversive…
cortex | September 9, 2009What happens when a memory disappears? Once upon a time, I could actually recall the details of organic chemistry. But then I took the class final and promptly forgot every piece of information related to the chemical properties of the carbon atom. This raises the obvious question: What does it mean to forget? Do we actually delete our memories, like an unwanted computer file expunged from the hard drive? Or does the memory always remain, a persistent neuronal ensemble that we just forget how to find?
A new paper in Neuron by scientists at UC-Irvine and Princeton suggests the latter…
cortex | September 8, 2009In the latest issue of Outside Magazine, I profile Clay Marzo, a rising star on the pro surfing circuit. In December 2007, Clay was diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism. What's so intriguing about Clay's story is that his Asperger's isn't a hindrance or handicap. Instead, it's a crucial part of his success, allowing Clay to focus, for hours at a time, on nothing but the physics of waves and the mechanics of surfing:
Clay Marzo has been waiting all morning for waves. He's standing with his surfboard next to a NO TRESPASSING sign on the edge of a pineapple field, looking…
cortex | August 31, 2009I'll be filling in for Andrew Sullivan this week, so most of my blogging will be over there. I'll try to cross-post some of the meatier posts, like this one:
The LA Times profiles the normalization of pot:
After decades of bubbling up around the edges of so-called civilized society, marijuana seems to be marching mainstream at a fairly rapid pace. At least in urban areas such as Los Angeles, cannabis culture is coming out of the closet.
At fashion-insider parties, joints are passed nearly as freely as hors d'oeuvres. Traces of the acrid smoke waft from restaurant patios, car windows and…