cortex | August 27, 2009Drake Bennett has an interesting and nuanced article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on money and happiness. To make a long story short, money can buy us some happiness, but only if we spend our money properly. Instead of buying things, we should buy memories:
A few researchers are looking again at whether happiness can be bought, and they are discovering that quite possibly it can - it's just that some strategies are a lot better than others. Taking a friend to lunch, it turns out, makes us happier than buying a new outfit. Splurging on a vacation makes us happy in a way that splurging on…
cortex | August 26, 2009Why do people buy insurance? On the one hand, the act of purchasing insurance is an utterly rational act, dependent on the uniquely human ability to ponder counterfactuals in the distant future. What if my a fire destroyed my house? What if my new car got totaled? What if I get cancer and require expensive medical treatments? We take this cognitive skill for granted, but it's actually profoundly rare.
And yet, the desire to purchase insurance is also influenced by deeply irrational forces, and the peculiar ways in which our emotions help us assess risks. The passionate nature of risk - and…
cortex | August 25, 2009I won't waste too many words trying to explain this stunning video, which is by Will Hoffman and the folks at Radio Lab. At first glance, it's a mere collection of ordinary moments - a falling teardrop, an escaped balloon, a dive into a pool - but I think it's also evidence that the things we see everyday, when carefully framed, can ache with ignored beauty:
cortex | August 24, 2009In the LA Times, Megan Daum has an interesting reflection on the late comedy director John Hughes, and his eccentric cinematic representations of adolescence:
If the brooding, solitary Andie played by Ringwald in "Pretty in Pink" were in high school in 2009, it's hard to imagine she wouldn't be a candidate for anti-depression therapy. Likewise, if "The Breakfast Club," which is about five teens serving time in Saturday detention, took place in a post-Prozac, post-Columbine America, Ally Sheedy's mostly mute, kleptomaniac misfit would have undoubtedly been medicated, and Anthony Michael Hall's…
cortex | August 24, 2009Mirror neurons are a classic illustration of a scientific idea that's so elegant and intriguing our theories get ahead of the facts. They're an anatomical quirk rumored to solve so many different cognitive problems that one almost has to be suspicious: how can the same relatively minor network of motor neurons be responsible for tool use, empathy, language and be a core feature of autism?
I'm not saying that mirror neurons don't have the potential to be an astonishingly cool cortical feature, especially when it comes to the intuitive understanding of physical actions. But I have yet to be…
cortex | August 21, 2009There's an excellent and thought-provoking column in the latest Nature, arguing that basic neuroscience research will be weaponized unless researchers are vigilant. It is, of course, a scary prospect to imagine: a fleet of biological and chemical weapons targeted at the brain, and benefiting from decades of research into the details of our cellular pathways:
In October 2002, Chechen rebel fighters held more than 750 people hostage at a Nord-Ost production in a theatre in Moscow. The siege was broken only after special military forces used what the Russian Health Minister, Yuri Shevchenko,…
cortex | August 20, 2009The Netflix Prize will soon be over: it sounds as if the team "Bellkor Pragmatic Chaos" will be granted the million dollar prize, awarded for improving Netflix's own algorithm by more than 10 percent. As a heavy Netflix user, I certainly appreciate the design of the website, which does a masterful job of framing my DVD options. Although Netflix has hundreds of thousands of DVD's, I rarely feel overwhelmed by the abundance, since I'm constantly being bombarded with suggestions. Did I just add Season 6 of the Sopranos to my queue? Perhaps I should try the Shield, since I also liked The Wire?…
cortex | August 19, 2009Alison Gopnik, a psychologist and philosopher at UC-Berkeley, has a wonderful op-ed over at the NY Times on the surprising intelligence of infants:
New studies demonstrate that babies and very young children know, observe, explore, imagine and learn more than we would ever have thought possible. In some ways, they are smarter than adults.
Three recent experiments show that even the youngest children have sophisticated and powerful learning abilities. Last year, Fei Xu and Vashti Garcia at the University of British Columbia proved that babies could understand probabilities. Eight-month-old…
cortex | August 18, 2009Natalie Angier has an excellent column on the self-defeating feedback loop triggered by chronic stress. According to a new paper, when mice are chronically stressed, they end up reverting to habit and routine, even though these same habits are what led to the chronic stress in the first place:
Reporting earlier this summer in the journal Science, Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal and his colleagues described experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines…
cortex | August 17, 2009One of my favorite aspects of the modern cognitive sciences (and a big part of the reason I can't stop writing about them) is the way they shed new light on old rituals. Why, for instance, are so many games for young children centered around impulse control? (Consider "Simon Says" or "Duck-Duck-Goose" - these activities are all about being primed for action but still finding a way to exercise restraint. You have to be ready to be the goose and run quickly around the circle, but chances are you're going to be a duck. If that's the case, then you have to sit still.) As I explained in this…
cortex | August 14, 2009I finally got the internet setup in my new apartment - I won't bore you with my customer service complaints - and I've never been so delighted to waste time on the web. At first, my information vacation was lovely, charming, an experiment in vintage living. It was like traveling back in time to 1994 - I'd wake up, buy an actual newspaper, and leisurely sip my coffee. No blogs, no twitter, no ESPN.com. I'm not going to lie and pretend that, once freed from the yoke of constant email updates, I suddenly found myself reading Tolstoy for hours on end - instead, I mostly watched more mediocre…
cortex | August 11, 2009Benedict Carey at the Times has an interesting article documenting the harrowing story of Adam Lepak, who has struggled with identity delusions since 2007, when he was involved in a serious motorcycle accident:
The diagnosis [given to Adam] was diffuse axonal injury. "The textbook definition is essentially a blow that shuts down the bundle of wires responsible for keeping us conscious," said Dr. Jonathan Fellus, a neurologist at Kessler Institute for Rehabilitation in West Orange, N.J., who has overseen Adam's gradual recovery. "It's as if the major highways have taken a hit, and now the…
cortex | August 11, 2009Sometimes, while working on a story one comes across a data set that's so interesting it just has to be shared. Unfortunately, it can't quite be shoehorned into the tight narrative of the article. That's why God invented the sidebar. My recent story on grit included a sidebar on some incredibly important work from the Perry Preschool, including an important new analysis of the data by James Heckman, et. al. which finds that preschool provides a crucial boost in "non-cognitive" skills.
In the 1960s, researchers began a study of 123 African-American children born into poverty. When the children…
cortex | August 7, 2009Apologies for the radio silence - I've been moving across the country, my life in a big metal box. I'm leaving Boston (sadly) and just arrived in Los Angeles, my old hometown and new home.
Whenever I first arrive in LA, I'm always struck by the same two thoughts: 1) it really is a beautiful city, especially around dusk when you make a left turn and all of a sudden you're heading into the chaparral of the Hollywood hills, glazed with pink light and softened by the haze of smog. I'm not one of those people who always talk about the "quality of light" but there is something about the light here…
cortex | August 3, 2009I had an article in Boston Globe Ideas section on the psychology of grit. For more on the subject, check out the incredibly interesting work of Angela Duckworth. You can also take the grit survey here.
It's the single most famous story of scientific discovery: in 1666, Isaac Newton was walking in his garden outside Cambridge, England - he was avoiding the city because of the plague - when he saw an apple fall from a tree. The fruit fell straight to the earth, as if tugged by an invisible force. (Subsequent versions of the story had the apple hitting Newton on the head.) This mundane…
cortex | August 1, 2009I'm a ketchup fiend. When I was a little kid, I was famous for squirting my plastic bottle of Heinz on everything, from spaghetti to vanilla ice cream. I've seen become slightly less disgusting - I no longer eat frozen dairy products with the condiment - but I still go through a disturbing number of ketchup packets when eating fast food. (French fries are a near perfect food, but they really are so much more delicious when coated in that sticky-sweet red sauce.)
So I was intrigued when Meg Favreau, in The Smart Set, wrote a short article about our lack of ketchup options, which is especially…
cortex | July 30, 2009The Neurocritic has a fascinating summary of a recent paper investigating different types of memory in marathon runners. Why marathoners? Because completing a 26.2 mile race is an insanely arduous exercise, and leads to the massive release of stress hormones such as cortisol. Here are the scientists:
Indeed, cortisol levels recorded 30 min after completion of a marathon rival those reported in military training and interrogation (Taylor et al., 2007), rape victims being treated acutely (Resnick, Yehuda, Pitman, & Foy, 1995), severe burn injury patients (Norbury, Herndon, Branski, Chinkes…
cortex | July 29, 2009Over at Mind Matters, there's a cool post by Fionnuala Butler and Cynthia Picketton on the benefits of watching television when lonely, which seems to provide the same sort of emotional relief as spending time with real people:
For decades, psychologists have been interested in understanding how individuals achieve and maintain social relationships in order to ward off social isolation and loneliness. The vast majority of this research has focused on relationships between real individuals interacting face-to-face. Recent research has widened this focus from real relationships to faux, "…
cortex | July 28, 2009Over at the Times, Benedict Carey has a fascinating article on the crucial importance of intuition on the battlefield, where soldiers are often forced to make decisions without knowing why, exactly, they are making them:
The United States military has spent billions on hardware, like signal jamming technology, to detect and destroy what the military calls improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.'s, the roadside bombs that have proved to be the greatest threat in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, where Sergeant Tierney is training soldiers to foil bomb attacks.
Still, high-tech gear, while helping…
cortex | July 27, 2009I've got an article in the Observer Sports Monthly on athletes and choking, which is adapted from my book:
We call such failures "choking", if only because a person frayed by pressure might as well not have oxygen. What makes choking so morbidly fascinating is that the performers are incapacitated by their own thoughts. Perry, for example, was so worried about not making a mistake on the 17th that he played a disastrous chip. His mind sabotaged itself.
Scientists have begun to uncover the causes of choking, diagnosing the particular mental differences that allow some people to succeed while…