cortex | July 24, 2009Henry Markram, the director of the Blue Brain project, recently delivered a talk at TED that's gotten lots of press coverage. (It was the lead story on the BBC for a few hours...) Not surprisingly, all the coverage focused on the same stunningly ambitious claim, which is Markram's assertion that an artificial brain is "ten years away". I haven't heard the talk, so I don't know the context for the remark, but I did spend a few days with Markram a few years ago. The first thing to note about Markram is that he's incredibly brilliant and persuasive. I might be skeptical about the singularity,…
cortex | July 23, 2009I've got a feature article in the latest Psychology Today on neuroaesthetics, the ambitious attempt to interpret art through the prism of neuroscience. Here's the beginning of the article:
Consider the flightless fluffs of brown otherwise known as herring gull chicks. When they're first born, these baby birds are entirely dependent on their mother for food. As a result, the chicks are born with a very powerful instinct: Whenever they see a bird beak, they frantically peck at it, begging for their favorite food: a regurgitated meal.
What's interesting is that this reflex can be manipulated.…
cortex | July 22, 2009Over at Mind Matters, we've just posted a very interesting article on creativity and distance, or why thinking something is farther away makes us more likely to solve difficult problems that require original answers:
According to the construal level theory (CLT) of psychological distance, anything that we do not experience as occurring now, here, and to ourselves falls into the "psychologically distant" category. It's also possible to induce a state of "psychological distance" simply by changing the way we think about a particular problem, such as attempting to take another person's…
cortex | July 21, 2009A few days ago, I had my first McGriddle. While I usually try to avoid McDonald's meat products - that's the benevolent influence of my wife, who rightly insists on eating humanely raised animal products - I was stuck in an airport and couldn't bear the idea of another yogurt parfait. The "standard" McGriddle consists of bacon, a brick of bright yellow egg and neon orange American cheese served between two small pancakes that have been injected with maple syrup (or some sort of maple simulacrum) so that they taste extremely sweet and yet aren't sticky to hold. The top of the griddle pancake…
cortex | July 17, 2009Over at Not Exactly Rocket Science, Ed Yong has a great summary of a new paper trying to figure out why information (at least in primates) can be just as rewarding as primal, biological rewards, such as calories and sex.
Ethan Bromberg-Martin and Okihide Hikosaka trained two thirsty rhesus monkeys to choose between two targets on a screen with a flick of their eyes; in return, they randomly received either a large drink or a small one after a few seconds. Their choice of target didn't affect which drink they received, but it did affect whether they got prior information about the size of…
cortex | July 15, 2009I've just begun Richard Holmes' latest work, The Age of Wonder, and it's as good as everyone says it is. The book is a history of late 18th century romantic science, filled with digressions into hot air balloons, Tahitian beaches and the "near suicidal" experiments of Humphry Davy.
One of the subplots of the book is the entanglement of science, religion and poetry. For these madcap empiricists, there was no clear line separating art from experiment, or God from nature.
Consider the career of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. (Holmes has already written two magisterial biographies of Coleridge.) The…
cortex | July 13, 2009In the latest edition of Publisher's Weekly, I have a short review of The Greatest Show on Earth, the forthcoming book from Richard Dawkins:
Richard Dawkins begins The Greatest Show on Earth with a short history of his writing career. He explains that all of his previous books have naïvely assumed "the fact of evolution," which meant that he never got around to laying "out the evidence that it [evolution] is true." This shouldn't be too surprising: science is an edifice of tested assumptions, and just as physicists must assume the truth of gravity before moving on to quantum mechanics, so do…
cortex | July 13, 2009I had a review of Colin Ellard's new book in the NY Times Book Review on Sunday:
Let's begin with a quick geography quiz: Which city is farther west, Los Angeles or Reno? If you're like most people, you carefully reasoned your way to the wrong answer. Because Los Angeles is on the coast, and Reno is in landlocked Nevada, you probably assumed that Los Angeles is farther west. It doesn't matter that you've stared at countless maps or taken a road trip across California -- the atlas that we keep in our head is reliably unreliable.
Colin Ellard, a behavorial neuroscientist at the University of…
cortex | July 10, 2009Over at The Big Money, Mark Gimein has a fascinating article on Swoopo.com. Gimein calls Swoopo "the crack cocaine of auction sites" and says it's "the evil bastard child of game theory and behavioral economics." The site works like this:
Consider the MacBook Pro that Swoopo sold on Sunday for that $35.86. Swoopo lists its suggested retail price at $1,799; judging by the specs, you can actually get a similar one online from Apple (AAPL) for $1,349, but let's not quibble. Either way, it's a heck of a discount. But now look at what the bidding fee does. For each "bid" the price of the computer…
cortex | July 9, 2009John Branch has an absolutely fascinating and beautifully told article in the Times today on Diane Van Deren, one of the premier ultra-runners in the world. Last year, she won the Yukon Arctic Ultra 300, which follows the treacherous trail of the Yukon sled dog race for hundreds of miles. (She was the first woman to ever complete the 430 mile version of the race.) This weekend she's participating in a race in Colorado that has a total elevation gain of 33,000 feet. But here's the neuroscientific twist: Diane is missing a chunk of her right temporal lobe, which makes it easier for her to…
cortex | July 8, 2009Why are schizophrenics three to four times more likely to smoke cigarettes than the general population? Over at Brainblogger, Dirk Hanson has a fascinating summary of a few recent papers that tried to understand this saga of self-medication. Nicotine, it turns out, can significantly reduce the sensory symptoms associated with the mental illness. And given that we're unlikely to untangle the genetic causes of schizophrenia anytime soon - the most recent genetic analyses demonstrated just how stunningly complex the illness is - the palliative effects of cigarettes are an important window into…
cortex | July 7, 2009It is now abundantly clear that the global economy remains mired in a dismal slump. Consumer confidence is still hurting; the unemployment is still rising; home prices are still falling. Despite the best efforts of Congress and the Treasury Department, nobody knows where the bottom is, or when it will arrive.
Obviously, there are no easy solutions. But it's worth considering how we got here if only to better understand how we might get out. One way to look at the current mess is as a collective breakdown of trust, which led (after the failure of Lehman Brothers, etc.) to frozen credit markets…
cortex | July 2, 2009What led to the birth of human civilization? How did a naked ape manage to invent complex cultural forms such as language and art? One possibility is that something happened inside the mind, that a cortical switch was flipped and homo sapiens was suddenly able to paint on cave walls. But that doesn't seem to be the case, as UCL anthropologist Ruth Mace explains in a recent Science article:
Traits such as the creation of abstract art, improvements in stone and other tools, long-distance "trading," and the manufacture of musical instruments mark the emergence of modern humans who behaved much…
cortex | July 1, 2009In the latest issue of In Character, UPenn psychologist Angela Duckworth criticizes the systematic attempt to improve self-esteem in children:
Q: Educators for some time now have put a premium on self-esteem. Schools strive to help kids develop self-esteem on the theory that other good things such as achievement will flow from increased self-esteem. Which is more important, self-discipline or self-esteem, for being successful as a student?
DUCKWORTH: Ah, how great to be asked this question! We did a study in which we followed kids for four years. We took their self-control ratings from…
cortex | July 1, 2009I've got a thing for things that are sweet and salty. Caramels with sea salt. French fries with plenty of ketchup. Peanut butter and strawberry jelly. Melon with prosciutto. Is there anything better to eat on a hot summer day than a ripe cantaloupe dressed with some cured meat, thinly sliced? I think not.
But why do sweet and salty sing so well together? Why do we add a pinch of salt to chocolate cake, or not fully taste the sweetness of a tomato until it's been sprinkled with sodium chloride? And why does bread without salt taste so bland?
The first thing to understand is how we perceive…
cortex | June 30, 2009It's been a hotly debated scientific question for decades: was Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak a genuine statistical outlier, or is it an expected statistical aberration, given the long history of major league baseball? I'd optimistically assumed, based on the work of Harvard physicist Ed Purcell (as cited by Stephen Jay Gould) that DiMaggio was the real deal. Here's Gould:
Purcell calculated that to make it likely (probability greater than 50 percent) that a run of even fifty games will occur once in the history of baseball up to now (and fifty-six is a lot more than fifty in this kind…
cortex | June 30, 2009Just a quick reminder to watch the season premiere of NOVA tonight on PBS. It features Oliver Sacks and a few of the patients described in Musicophilia, including Tony Cicoria, an orthopedic surgeon who became obsessed with classical piano after being struck by lightning. I found the show quite compelling - NOVA was kind enough to send me a preview DVD - so be sure to tune in. For me, the most affecting story was that of Matt Giordano, who suffers from a severe case of Tourette's syndrome. Matt is hard to watch, if only because his ordinary movements are constantly being interrupted by tics…
cortex | June 29, 2009In the latest Atlantic, Sandra Tsing Loh argues (with her usual panache) that the institution of marriage is passé, and that it's time to cast off the antiquated concept of eternal monogomy:
Sure, it [marriage] made sense to agrarian families before 1900, when to farm the land, one needed two spouses, grandparents, and a raft of children. But now that we have white-collar work and washing machines, and our life expectancy has shot from 47 to 77, isn't the idea of lifelong marriage obsolete?
This post isn't about whether Loh is right; I've only been married 9 months, so I'm not qualified to…
cortex | June 26, 2009If anybody happens to be in New Haven this evening, I'll be speaking about Proust, art, science, wine and Descartes with the psychologist Paul Bloom. It will be fun and it's free. The event starts at 5:30 and is at the Yale Center for British Art.
cortex | June 25, 2009It's a shame that we stop encouraging naps once the preschool years are over. After all, there's a growing body of scientific evidence that the afternoon siesta is an important mental tool, which enhances productivity, learning and memory. (It's really much more effective than a cup of coffee.) Here's the Times:
Have to solve a problem? Try taking a nap. But it has to be the right kind of nap -- one that includes rapid eye movement, or REM, sleep, the kind that includes dreams.
Researchers led by Sara C. Mednick, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego…