cortex | January 7, 2009A quick programming note: I'll be speaking at the Corcoran Gallery of Art next Monday, January 12. The lecture begins at 7 and, unfortunately, costs money. (I always get very insecure at the prospect of having people pay to hear me speak.) I'm currently in the process of developing my stump speech for the new book, but this will be my Proust powerpoint, in which I begin with umami and end with Girl Talk.
If you're a Frontal Cortex reader, please introduce yourself!
cortex | January 6, 2009Just a quick note to welcome back David Dobbs to the blogosphere. He's a fine, fine journalist and I'm thrilled that he's realized that long-form reportage can co-exist with blogging. I look forward to reading his future posts over at Neuron Culture.
Also, a quick endorsement that's long overdue: if you're looking for a way to celebrate the upcoming Darwin anniversary, I highly suggest Dobb's Reef Madness, which is a fascinating account of an important 19th century scientific paradox: where do coral reefs come from? The book is also a tale of empiricism and the scientific method, and you…
cortex | January 6, 2009Here's an interesting finding, which is summarized by Kevin Lewis in the Boston Globe Ideas section:
If you've ever had to take a test in a room with a lot of people, you may be able to relate to this study: The more people you're competing against, it turns out, the less motivated and competitive you are. Psychologists observed this pattern across several different situations. Students taking standardized tests in more crowded venues got lower scores. Students asked to complete a short general-knowledge test as fast as possible to win a prize if they were in the fastest 20 percent completed…
cortex | January 5, 2009I just wanted to draw attention to two fantastic blog posts that describe a new paper by Edward Vul, a grad student at MIT, and colleagues at UCSD. The first post comes from Vaughan over at MindHacks:
I've just come across a bombshell of a paper that looked at numerous headline studies on the cognitive neuroscience of social interaction and found that many contained statistically impossible or spurious correlations between behaviour and brain activity.
Social cognitive neuroscience is a hot new area and many of the headline studies use fMRI brain imaging to look at how activity in the brain…
cortex | January 5, 2009I had a longish article in the Boston Globe Ideas section yesterday exploring some recent research on how living in a city affects the brain:
The city has always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of London, where citizens gathered to discuss chemistry and radical politics, to the Left Bank bars of modern Paris, where Pablo Picasso held forth on modern art. Without the metropolis, we might not have had the great art of Shakespeare or James Joyce; even Einstein was inspired by commuter trains.
And yet, city life isn't easy. The same London cafes that…
cortex | January 2, 2009Baby strollers have become the latest bougie status symbol, but it's worth noting that one of the most important stroller features is almost always ignored. Here's VSL:
According to a new study, babies who sat in strollers that faced their parents during their daily walks had twice as many conversations, laughed ten times as much, and suffered less stress than babies who were in the more common, front-facing models.
The researchers studied 2,722 infants and found that kids who faced their parents had lower heart rates and fell asleep twice as easily as babies who faced forward. So along with…
cortex | December 30, 2008I'll have more to say about cities and the brain in the coming days, but I thought it was worth highlighting this thoughtful post by the economist Edward Glaeser on how NYC is "America's most resilient city":
When other cities, including Boston, experienced significant population declines from 1950 to 1970, New York City still grew, albeit modestly. Only during the 1970s, the years of my Manhattan youth, did the city a suffer major population decline.
However, New York managed to come roaring back, while other cities have just continued to fall. The secret of New York's post-1970 reinvention…
cortex | December 30, 2008I've written before about the the failure of basic neuroscience research to advance neuropharmacology (at least, it's been a failure so far), but it's nice to see Eric Kandel, my old mentor (and one of my scientific heroes), make the same argument. Kandel began his scientific career as a Freudian psychiatrist - he was soon turned off by the blatant the lack of empiricism - so his recent interest in the biological benefits of talk therapy, and ways of rigorously measuring those benefits, provides an interesting snapshot on the state of neuroscience.
On the one hand, it's sobering that talk…
cortex | December 24, 2008Oliver Morton has a lyrical and thoughtful op-ed today in the Times, in which he re-interprets the famous images of Planet earth seen from space:
They came for the Moon, and for the first three orbits it was to the Moon that the astronauts of Apollo 8 devoted their attention. Only on their fourth time round did they lift their eyes to see their home world, rising silently above the Moon's desert plains, blue and white and beautiful. When, later on that Christmas Eve in 1968, they read the opening lines of Genesis on live television, they did it with a sense of the heavens and the Earth, of…
cortex | December 22, 2008Tonight is the first night of Hanukkah, which is, as Adam Sandler has correctly noted, a rather unsatisfying holiday. It's typically sold to impressionable Jewish kids as being better than Christmas, since there are eight days of presents, and not just one climactic morning. But as one soon discovers, those eight days are a bit deceiving. The way Hanukkah typically works - at least in my family - is that all the good presents arrive on the first night (the new bike, the big Lego set, etc.) followed by seven days of diminishing returns. In my childhood, the last night of Hanukkah was usually…
cortex | December 22, 2008Brian Knutson, a very clever neuroeconomist at Stanford, sheds light on some of the cognitive biases currently holding back the economy over at Edge.org. From the perspective of the brain, uncertainty is hell:
The brain responds to uncertain future outcomes in a specific region, and ambiguity (not knowing the probabilities of uncertain outcomes) provokes even greater activation in this same region. Further, insular activation precedes risk avoidance in investment tasks, and is even more pronounced before people "irrationally" avoid risks (i.e., or violate the choices of a risk-neutral,…
cortex | December 19, 2008Over at the Daily Beast, Alexandra Penney describes what it feels like to lose all of your money to a Wall Street Ponzi scheme:
Last Thursday at around 5 p.m., I had just checked on a rising cheese soufflé in my oven when my best friend called.
"Heard Madoff's been arrested," she said. "I hope it's a rumor. Doesn't he handle most of your money?"
Indeed, he did. More than a decade ago, when I was in my late 40s, I handed over my life savings to Madoff's firm. It was money I'd been tucking away since I was 16 years old, when I began working summers in Lord & Taylor, earning about $65 a…
cortex | December 19, 2008Last week, Nature published an editorial arguing for the mainstream acceptance of "cognitive enhancing drugs":
Today, on university campuses around the world, students are striking deals to buy and sell prescription drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin -- not to get high, but to get higher grades, to provide an edge over their fellow students or to increase in some measurable way their capacity for learning. These transactions are crimes in the United States, punishable by prison.
Many people see such penalties as appropriate, and consider the use of such drugs to be cheating, unnatural or…
cortex | December 16, 2008When people ask for me tangible examples of how art and science can work together to discover new things - that's a theme of my first book - the first thing I mention is food. In recent years, chefs like Ferran Adria, Heston Blumenthal and Grant Achatz have demonstrated the possibilities of translating the lab techniques of modern science to the kitchens of fancy restaurants. And so you get things like the El Bulli "olive," which is actually a sphere of olive juice, encapsulated in a thin gel made from sodium alginate. Place an "olive" in the mouth, and a burst of briny liquid is released.*…
cortex | December 15, 2008I find the epic Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff morbidly fascinating. He managed to lose 50 billion dollars, which can't be easy:
A busy stock-trading operation occupied the 19th floor, and the computers and paperwork of Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities filled the 18th floor.
But the 17th floor was Bernie Madoff's sanctum, occupied by fewer than two dozen staff members and rarely visited by other employees. It was called the "hedge fund" floor, but federal prosecutors now say the work Mr. Madoff did there was actually a fraud scheme whose losses Mr. Madoff himself estimates at $50…
cortex | December 14, 2008Deborah Solomon and the Times Magazine were kind enough to ask me a few questions about my new book, How We Decide. You can read the interview here. And yes, I'm jumping in the photo.
cortex | December 11, 2008In the latest New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell has a thought-provoking article on the difficulty of figuring out what sort of person is best suited for a particular job. He begins by discussing the challenge of choosing college quarterbacks, a topic that I've written about a few times before (and cover at length in my forthcoming book):
All quarterbacks drafted into the pros are required to take an I.Q. test--the Wonderlic Personnel Test. The theory behind the test is that the pro game is so much more cognitively demanding than the college game that high intelligence should be a good predictor of…
cortex | December 10, 2008Sine-Wave speech is a wonderful example of the importance of patterns when it comes to our sense of sound. When people first hear a sentence that's been artificially degraded, the sentence sounds like a sequence of "simultaneous whistles, or science fiction sounds." However, when people are first played the undistorted sentence - they've been given the perceptual pattern in advance - they are able to easily interpret the garbled noises. Click here for an elegant example of the phenomenon.
In my book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, I use this search for patterns - the brain is a pattern-making…
cortex | December 10, 2008The pathetic behavior of the Illinois governor - his brazen attempt to sell a Senate seat - raises the larger question of power and corruption, and whether having a position of power reliably leads to unethical behavior. (My first thought, upon hearing that Blagojevich had been recorded by the Feds, was that even the lowliest corner boys on the Barksdale crew were smart enough to not say incriminating stuff over the phone.) Here's some suggestive evidence from Richard Conniff, writing in the Times:
Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and…
cortex | December 8, 2008While researching this story, I came across a fascinating (and controversial) take on the "depression epidemic" called The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder. It took a few months, but I've got a new interview with the authors up at Scientific American:
LEHRER: In your book, you take a critical look at major depressive disorder (MDD), a mental illness that will afflict approximately 10 percent of individuals at some point during their life. In recent decades, the number of cases of MDD has sharply increased. Are we currently experiencing an…