cortex | July 21, 2010NOTE: This blog has moved. The Frontal Cortex is now over here.
I've got some exciting news: Starting today, the Frontal Cortex will be moving over to the Wired website. Needless to say, the move comes with the usual mixture of emotions, as I've greatly enjoyed my four years as part of the Scienceblogs community. It's been an honor to share this space with such a fine collection of scientists and writers. I'm sad to be leaving. (I should note, by the way, that this move was planned long before Pepsi, etc.) However, I'm really thrilled to be joining the blog network of the publication that I…
cortex | July 20, 2010Over at Gizmodo, Joel Johnson makes a convincing argument for adding random strangers to your twitter feed:
I realized most of my Twitter friends are like me: white dorks. So I picked out my new friend and started to pay attention.
She's a Christian, but isn't afraid of sex. She seems to have some problems trusting men, but she's not afraid of them, either. She's very proud of her fiscal responsibility. She looks lovely in her faux modeling shots, although I am surprised how much her style aligns with what I consider mall fashion when she's a grown woman in her twenties. Her home is Detroit…
cortex | July 19, 2010I've got a new article in the latest Wired on the science of stress, as seen through the prism of Robert Sapolsky. The article isn't online yet (read it on the iPad!), but here are the opening paragraphs:
Baboons are nasty, brutish and short. They have a long muzzle and sharp fangs designed to inflict deadly injury. Their bodies are covered in thick, olive-colored fur, except on their buttocks, which are hairless. The species is defined by its social habits: The primates live in troops, or small groupings of several dozen individuals. These troops have a strict hierarchy, and each animal is…
cortex | July 14, 2010Over at Sciam's Mind Matters, Melody Dye has a great post on the surprising advantages of thinking like a baby. At first glance, this might seem like a ridiculous conjecture: A baby, after all, is missing most of the capabilities that define the human mind, such as language and the ability to reason or focus. Rene Descartes argued that the young child was entirely bound by sensation, hopelessly trapped in the confusing rush of the here and now. A newborn, in this sense, is just a lump of need, a bundle of reflexes that can only eat and cry. To think like a baby is to not think at all.
And yet…
cortex | July 13, 2010Joe Keohane has a fascinating summary of our political biases in the Boston Globe Ideas section this weekend. It's probably not surprising that voters aren't rational agents, but it's always a little depressing to realize just how irrational we are. (And it's worth pointing out that this irrationality applies to both sides of the political spectrum.) We cling to mistaken beliefs and ignore salient facts. We cherry-pick our information and vote for people based on an inexplicable stew of superficial hunches, stubborn ideologies and cultural trends. From the perspective of the human brain, it's…
cortex | July 12, 2010We can't help but talk to ourselves. At any given moment, there's a running commentary unfolding in our stream of consciousness, an incessant soliloquy of observations, questions and opinions. But what's the best way to structure all this introspective chatter? What kind of words should we whisper to ourselves? And does all this self-talk even matter?
These are the fascinating questions asked in a new paper led by Ibrahim Senay and Dolores Albarracin, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and published in Psychological Science. The experiment was straightforward. Fifty three…
cortex | July 9, 2010There's an absolutely fascinating new paper by scientists at Ohio State University in the latest Cell. In short, the paper demonstrates that mice living in an enriched environments - those spaces filled with toys, running wheels and social interactions - are less likely to get tumors, and better able to fight off the tumors if they appear.
The experiment itself was simple. A large group of mice were injected with melanoma cells. After six weeks, the mice living in enriched environments had tumors that were approximately 75 percent smaller than mice raised in standard lab cages. Furthermore,…
cortex | July 8, 2010There's been lots of chatter about Pepsi lately, so I thought I'd run with the theme. I don't have much to add to the media commentary - I'm just sad to see some of my favorite bloggers leave this space - but I've got plenty to say about soft drinks. And little of it will please Pepsi.
The first thing is that a soda tax is a great idea. Here's a compelling chart from a recent report published by US Department of Agriculutre's Economic Research Service (via Yglesias):
Some of these calories, of course, will be shifted to other categories of food - we'll drink less Pepsi, but we'll consume…
cortex | July 7, 2010There's a fascinating article in the latest Vanity Fair (not online) about the prevalence of LSD (aka lysergic acid diethylamide) among movie stars in 1950s Hollywood:
Aldous Huxley was one of the first in Los Angeles to take LSD and was soon joined by others, including the writer Anais Nin. The screenwriter Charles Brackett discovered "infinitely more pleasure" from music on LSD than he had ever before, and the director Sidney Lumet tried it under the supervision of a former chief of psychiatry for the U.S. Navy. Lumet says his three sessions were "wonderful," especially the one where he…
cortex | July 1, 2010Brendan Koerner has a really fantastic article in the latest Wired on Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). It's a fascinating exploration of the organization, from its hallucinogen inspired birth (Bill Wilson was tripping on belladonna when he found God in a hospital room) to the difficulty of accurately measuring the effectiveness of AA:
The group's "cure rate" has been estimated at anywhere from 75 percent to 5 percent, extremes that seem far-fetched. Even the most widely cited (and carefully conducted) studies are often marred by obvious flaws. A 1999 meta-analysis of 21 existing studies, for…
cortex | June 29, 2010Ever since Pac Man, video games have obeyed a few basic principles: A player sits down in front of a screen and presses a few buttons with his or her thumbs. Perhaps there's a joystick involved, or maybe the index finger has to do some work, too. But the body is essentially still. The only moving parts are the eyes and the fingers.
The Wii changed everything. Unlike every other game console, the Wii controller isn't built around a confusing alphabet of buttons. Instead, Nintendo uses some nifty bluetooth technology to translate our body movements directly onto the screen. When we swing our…
cortex | June 28, 2010The intelligence test is badly named. The main problem is that we should be talking about intelligence tests in plural, so that the IQ test is merely one of the many measures we use to assess our innate mental skills.
Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of Howard Gardner, Robert Sternberg and others, the IQ test remains the singular test of individual cognitive ability. The mysterious entity that it measures - g, for general intelligence factor - is still seen as the dominant variable in determining the intellectual performance of our brain. (G was first coined, in 1904, by the…
cortex | June 24, 2010I was a stuttering child. Whenever I got the slightest bit nervous, I had an annoying tendency to run out of air on vowel sounds, so that beginning a phrase with "A" or "eee" or "I" was all but impossible. I would choke and sputter, my eyes blinking in mad frustration. This minor affliction led me to become extremely self-aware of my speech. Before I said anything out loud, I would consider the breathy weight of the words, and mentally rehearse all those linguistic speed bumps and stop signs. If the phonetics seemed too dangerous, the sentence would be rewritten in my head, edited down to the…
cortex | June 22, 2010I have a complicated relationship with my GPS unit. On the one hand, it rarely works. Here's what happened the last time I turned it on. First, there was a five minute delay while it searched for the satellite signal. Then, it couldn't find the street I was searching for. Then, it found the street but lost the satellite signal. Then, it regained the signal but sent me in the wrong direction. And then, after I'd already gotten accurate directions off my phone, the GPS unit finally decided that it knew where I was going. In other words, the device sucks.
But here's the funny part: I still use…
cortex | June 21, 2010Clive Thompson has a wonderful article in the NY Times Magazine on Watson, the supercomputer programmed to excel at Jeopardy. Thompson delves into the clever heuristics used to generate singular answers to ambiguous questions. (Watson relies on massive amounts of parallel processing, so that "he" is running thousands of Google searches simultaneously.) While Watson's performance is certainly impressive, I thought the most interesting part of the story involved the failings of the machine. It's easy to rhapsodize about the ever escalating speed of microchips, but it turns out that Watson is…
cortex | June 18, 2010Over at the Barnes and Noble Review, I have a short review of Cognitive Surplus, the new book by Clay Shirky:
Cognitive Surplus, the new book by internet guru Clay Shirky, begins with a brilliant analogy. He starts with a description of London in the 1720s, when the city was in the midst of a gin binge. A flood of new arrivals from the countryside meant the metropolis was crowded, filthy, and violent. As a result, people sought out the anesthesia of alcohol as they tried to collectively forget the early days of the Industrial Revolution.
For Shirky, the gin craze of 18th-century London is an…
cortex | June 15, 2010Sam Tanenhaus has an interesting essay on the relationship between age and literary genius, which was prompted by the new New Yorker fiction issue, featuring a list of 20 accomplished writers under the age of 40. Tanenhaus argues that the purpose of the list - "to offer a focused look at the talent sprouting and blooming around us" - neglected to mention one crucial fact, which is that many of these writers have probably already composed their best work:
The emphasis on futurity misses an essential truth about fiction writers: They often compose their best and most lasting work when they are…
cortex | June 14, 2010The Yale psychologist Paul Bloom has written an excellent new book, How Pleasure Works, that I had the pleasure of blurbing. The book elegantly refutes the idea that our pleasures are mere sensations, or that our delight can be neatly reduced into some ingredient list of superficial perceptions. Instead, Bloom emphasizes the importance of essentialism, which is the instinctive belief that everything in the world has an underlying reality, or true nature, or essence.
We are all natural essentialists. Frank Keil, a psychologist at Yale, has done some interesting work that captures this…
cortex | June 10, 2010I'd like to tell you a story about a routine of modern life that is really bad for your brain. Everybody performs this activity - sometimes multiple times a day! - and yet we rarely realize the consequences. In 2008, scientists at the University of Michigan did a very clever study illuminating how this activity led to dramatic decreases in working memory, self-control, visual attention and positive affect. Other studies have demonstrated that people who are less exposed to this activity show enhanced brain function. They are better able to focus and even recover more quickly in hospitals.…
cortex | June 8, 2010I recently had a short article in Wired on the danger of getting too enthralled with our empirical tools, which leads us to neglect everything that our tools can't explain:
A typical experiment in functional magnetic resonance imaging goes like this: A subject is slid into a claustrophobia-inducing tube, the core of a machine the size of a delivery truck. The person is told to lie perfectly still and perform some task -- look at a screen, say, or make a decision. Noisy superconducting magnets whir. The contraption analyzes the magnetic properties of blood to determine the amount of oxygen…