cortex | March 26, 2009Nicholas Kristof has a great column today on Philip Tetlock and political experts, who turn out to be astonishingly bad at making accurate predictions:
The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, "Expert Political Judgment," is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts' forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.
The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses -- the…
cortex | March 26, 2009Over at Salon, there's a quite interesting interview with UC-Berkeley philosopher Alva Noe, author of Out of Our Heads. (I reviewed the book in the SF Chronicle last month.)
Q: Maybe I'm naive but it seems kind of obvious that the brain is the mechanism that -- in the context of a person's life and environment -- gives rise to consciousness. That's not to say it is the same as consciousness, but that it is the mechanism from which consciousness emerges.
Noe: The brain is necessary for consciousness. Of course! Just as an engine is necessary in a car. But an engine doesn't "give rise" to…
cortex | March 25, 2009Here's another common question I get at my book talks:
"Is there a difference between the male and female brain when it comes to decision-making? Are women really more intuitive? Which sex is the better decider?"
While there are certainly relevant differences between the male and female brain - that wash of sex hormones in the womb can have significant effects - I think it's important to begin by emphasizing the profound irrelevance of gender in most experimental studies of decision-making.
Let's begin with that perdurable cliche about female intuition. My own hunch is that women got…
cortex | March 24, 2009Here's Joseph Brodsky (via Kottke), praising boredom:
A substantial part of what lies ahead of you is going to be claimed by boredom. The reason I'd like to talk to you about it today, on this lofty occasion, is that I believe no liberal arts college prepares you for that eventuality. Neither the humanities nor science offers courses in boredom . At best, they may acquaint you with the sensation by incurring it. But what is a casual contact to an incurable malaise? The worst monotonous drone coming from a lectern or the most eye-splitting textbook written in turgid English is nothing in…
cortex | March 23, 2009I've got a new feature in Wired Magazine on the Allen Brain Institute and their heroic attempts to construct a gene expression map of the human brain. I was most impressed by the way the Institute has "industrialized" the scientific process, as it transforms the artisan model of lab benchwork - post docs playing with micropipettes - into a high-throughput model, in which massive robots execute most of the actual "science".
The article is now online, but the photographs are pretty stunning (in a gruesome sort of way), so be sure to pick up a copy of the magazine.
The human brain is…
cortex | March 23, 2009Brad Delong summarizes an important point when it comes to evaluating whether or not the latest plan to rescue banks from their own toxic assets is going to work. In this interesting post, he contrasts his own tepid support for the plan with Paul Krugman's pessimistic opposition:
I think the private-sector players in financial markets right now are highly risk averse--hence assets are undervalued from the perspective of a society or a government that is less risk averse. Paul judges that assets have low values beceuse they are unlikely to pay out much cash.
I think one way to evaluate these…
cortex | March 22, 2009In the NY Times Book Review, Steven Johnson has a very kind review of How We Decide:
Jonah Lehrer's engaging new book, "How We Decide," puts our decision-making skills under the microscope. At 27, Lehrer is something of a popular science prodigy, having already published, in 2007, "Proust Was a Neuroscientist," which argued that great artists anticipated the insights of modern brain science. "How We Decide" tilts more decisively in the thinking- person's self-help direction, promising not only to explain how we decide, but also to help us do it better.
[SNIP]
Explaining decision-making on the…
cortex | March 18, 2009Just a quick programming note: I'll be speaking at the National Academy of Sciences tomorrow evening, in Washington D.C. The event is free.
I also wanted to apologize to all those whose comments have been eaten by the spam filter in the last two days. Due to an attack of Viagra bots, I had to temporarily tighten the restrictions.
cortex | March 18, 2009I know, I know: everybody is sick of hearing about those AIG bonuses. But bear with me for one more blog post, because I think the swell of populist anger can actually illuminate something interesting about the human response to inequality.
Consider the ultimatum game, that simple economic task where one person (the proposer) is given ten dollars and told to share it with another person (the responder). The proposer can divide the money however they like, but if the responder rejects the offer then both players end up with nothing.
Classical economic theory makes two predictions about the…
cortex | March 17, 2009War is rapidly becoming a video game. Here, from the NY Times, is a fascinating behind the scenes look at the increasing reliance on drones by the US military:
The Guard members, along with Air Force crews at a base in the Nevada desert, are 7,000 to 8,000 miles away from the planes they are flying. Most of the crews sit at 1990s-style computer banks filled with screens, inside dimly lit trailers. Many fly missions in both Iraq and Afghanistan on the same day.
On a recent day, at 1:15 p.m. in Tucson -- 1:15 the next morning in Afghanistan -- a pilot and sensor operator were staring at gray-…
cortex | March 16, 2009David Dobbs has a really excellent and thought-provoking article on the diagnosis (and perhaps over-diagnosis) of post-traumatic stress disorder over at Sciam. The essential point is that it's extremely hard to define a normal psychological response to traumatic events. Are nightmares normal? Is it normal to experience bouts of anxiety or depression? Dobbs profiles several big name psychiatrists who think that PTSD has become too vague for its own good, and is creating a generation of patients who are trapped in a self-fulfilling vision, in which the diagnosis actually makes it harder for…
cortex | March 14, 2009This is disturbing stuff. According to the Stanford Center for Law and the Biosciences, No-Lie MRI has recently produced a report that's being offered as evidence in a California court.
The case is a child protection hearing being conducted in the juvenile court. In brief, and because the details of the case are sealed and of a sensitive nature, the issue is whether a minor has suffered sexual abuse at the hands of a custodial parent and should remain removed from the home. The parent has contracted No Lie MRI and apparently undergone a brain scan.
The defense plans to claim the fMRI-…
cortex | March 12, 2009A reader asks:
What's the hardest question you've gotten about the new book? Is there one you were totally unprepared to answer?
This is a slightly embarrassing confession, but one of the most difficult questions I've been asked is also one of the most obvious. It goes something like this:
"What practical knowledge have we gained by looking at decision-making in the brain that we didn't already have, either through introspection or behavioral studies?"
When I was first asked this question, I think I muttered something about the virtue of curiosity, breaking open the black box and fulfilling…
cortex | March 11, 2009A general assumption in the sports world is that athletes get better over time. Sprinters get faster, hitters hit more home runs, quarterbacks throw fewer interceptions, etc. And yet, there's one sports statistic that has refused to budge: the percentage of free-throws made in the NBA. Here's the NY Times, via Kottke:
The consistency of free-throw percentages stands out when contrasted with field-goal shooting over all. In men's college basketball, field-goal percentage was below 40 percent until 1960, then climbed steadily to 48.1 in 1984, still the highest on record. The long-range 3-point…
cortex | March 10, 2009Apologies, once again, for the blogging silence. I was busy in London, on tour for the UK version of the book, which is called "The Decisive Moment". (We got some great press, including being featured as "Book of the Week" by BBC Radio 4.)
Although book tours can, on occasion, be frustrating and grueling - I'm so sick of airport food that I don't even like Egg McMuffins anymore, and I'm getting to the point where I detest the sound of my own voice - one of the genuine highlights is getting to answer questions from your readers. As an author, there is nothing more exciting than learning which…
cortex | March 2, 2009In the Times Science section today, Natalie Angier discusses a fascinating-sounding new book, by the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. The book, "Mothers and Others," argues that humans evolved a powerful set of moral instincts - a set of instincts that far exceed those of our primate relatives - because we depend on others to help us rear our helpless infants:
As Dr. Hrdy argues in her latest book, "Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding," which will be published by Harvard University Press in April, human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for…
cortex | February 28, 2009First of all, a huge thank you to everyone who came to one of the events on my book tour, from Seattle to The Strand. Thank you for listening and for your questions. It's been such a deep pleasure to meet so many people interested in dopamine, Proust and Cheerios. Also, a sincere thank you to everyone who bought the book and helped put it on the New York Times Bestseller List.
On an entirely unrelated note, I've got a new review in the San Francisco Chronicle (long may it live!) on the philosopher Alva Noe's new book on consciousness. I really enjoyed the book, and see it as yet another…
cortex | February 25, 2009In case you were wondering how you should invest your retirement savings (assuming you're fortunate enough to still have some), yet another study demonstrates that low cost index funds are the way to go:
Basic stock market index funds generally aspire to nothing more than matching the returns of a market benchmark. So in a miserable year for stocks, index funds may not look very appealing. But it turns out that, after fees and taxes, it is the extremely rare actively managed fund or hedge fund that does better than a simple index fund.
That, at least, is the finding of a new study by Mark…
cortex | February 24, 2009One of the frustrations with writing a science book is that you keep on bumping into brand new research that you want to include. That's precisely what happened to me when I read this just published paper in the Journal of Consumer Research by Leonard Lee, Dan Ariely, and On Amir. The behavioral economists were interested in evaluating which decision-making system - the slow rational, deliberate approach (System 1) or the fast, emotional, instinctive approach (System 2) - was best suited for everyday consumer choices. The question, of course, is how one defines a "superior" decision. Who's to…
cortex | February 22, 2009For the last week, I've been suffering from one of those head colds that won't go away. The worst part of the cold isn't the raw nose, or the sinus headaches, or the scratchy throat - it's not being able to smell. I really hate not being able to smell. A world without scent is just so much less interesting, like a color photograph that's faded to a monochromatic gray. You know something is missing but you don't know what it is. Just this morning I was frying bacon and was seized by this peculiar feeling that something was wrong. That's when I realized: I couldn't smell the bacon. The most…