cortex | December 5, 2008Yawn. Just seeing that word made you more likely to open your mouth in a big inhalation, contort your face and stretch out your arms. In other words, yawning is a contagious experience.
Now it turns out that happiness is like a yawn: it easily spreads between people in social networks. Nicholas Christakis, a doctor/sociologist at Harvard, is doing some of the most interesting work on social networks - he's shown, for instance, that when a loved one gets ill people suffer serious medical consequences, and that the ability to quit smoking depends in large part on the number of smokers in your…
cortex | December 4, 2008Nicholas Kristof has an important column on the link between iodized salt and IQ in developing countries:
Almost one-third of the world's people don't get enough iodine from food and water. The result in extreme cases is large goiters that swell their necks, or other obvious impairments such as dwarfism or cretinism. But far more common is mental slowness.
When a pregnant woman doesn't have enough iodine in her body, her child may suffer irreversible brain damage and could have an I.Q. that is 10 to 15 points lower than it would otherwise be. An educated guess is that iodine deficiency…
cortex | December 3, 2008If you're in the New Haven area, I'll be talking about the neuroscience behind Proust, umami and Girl Talk at Yale tomorrow at 5 PM. The talk is free and open to the public.
cortex | December 2, 2008What would it be like to have an immaculate memory, so that every detail of life was instantly inscribed in the brain? It's actually unbearable. Here's Der Spiegel:
Price can rattle off, without hesitation, what she saw and heard on almost any given date. She remembers many early childhood experiences and most of the days between the ages of 9 and 15. After that, there are virtually no gaps in her memory. "Starting on Feb. 5, 1980, I remember everything. That was a Tuesday."
She can also date events that were reported in the media, provided she heard about them at the time. When and where did…
cortex | December 2, 2008Vaughan Bell, of Mindhacks fame, wrote a really interesting article on "post-bereavement ghosts" over at Mind Matters. I had no idea that such hallucinations were so ubiquitous:
Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common, to the point where feeling the presence of the deceased is the norm rather than the exception. One study, by the researcher Agneta Grimby at the University of Goteborg, found that over 80 percent of elderly people experience hallucinations associated with their dead partner one month after bereavement, as if their perception had yet to catch up…
cortex | December 1, 2008Now that the broken windows theory of crime has been experimentally validated - disorderly streets really do make people more likely to steal - Jason Kottke wonders if the theory also applies to online spaces:
Much of the tone of discourse online is governed by the level of moderation and to what extent people are encouraged to "own" their words. When forums, message boards, and blog comment threads with more than a handful of participants are unmoderated, bad behavior follows. The appearance of one troll encourages others. Undeleted hateful or ad hominem comments are an indication that that…
cortex | December 1, 2008Cerebrum just published an interesting article on the ethical implications of using drugs to treat drug addiction. In particular, the scientists examine the benefits of naltrexone, an opioid receptor antagonist. (This means that the drug blocks receptors that normally bind opiates, like heroin. Methadone, in contrast, activates opioid receptors but appears to be an antagonist for NMDA receptors.) The scientists begin the article by discussing one of the few studies that actually investigated the benefits of naltrexone:
Despite not using opioids for a long period, incarcerated opioid addicts…
cortex | December 1, 2008It's the best show on the radio* and it's all about science. If you're not listening to Radio Lab, then you're missing something quite special. The new season has just begun with a fantastic episode on "Choice," and I'm not saying it's fantastic just because it occasionally features my stammering voice. If you're curious what working memory has to do with chocolate cake, or why Oliver Sacks ate lamb kidneys for breakfast, or why you should never hand a stranger iced coffee, then you'll enjoy the show.
*Ok, maybe it's tied for first.
cortex | November 26, 2008Speaking of decisions, I've got to make a rather difficult one today: beer for the Thanksgiving table. I was inspired by a totally wonderful Burkhard Bilger article in the New Yorker on the rise of "extreme beer" and the sheer difficulty of being able to afford a wine that fits the varied foodstuffs of the table. (Don't get me wrong: I'm not one of those insufferable souls who worry constantly about food-wine pairings, but the food being served this year is especially varied. What possible fermented liquid goes well with sweet potatoes and marshmallow and brussel sprouts covered in gruyere…
cortex | November 25, 2008The next few months are going to be full of news and riffs on my next book, How We Decide, which comes out in February. As a result, I'm trying to pace myself and limit the shameless self-promotion, at least for now. But sometimes one just can't resist! So here are some nice early reviews. Kirkus called it "a treasure trove of scientific data, clinical research and real-life examples of decision-making processes." And here's what Publishers Weekly had to say, in a starred review:
What is going on in the brain of a pilot deciding how to handle an emergency or a man trying to escape a wildfire…
cortex | November 25, 2008Lincoln Center recently featured a stage adaptation of Virginia Woolf's The Waves. Here's what Ben Brantley had to say in the Times:
Life unfolds in a series of exquisite contradictions in "Waves," a remarkable, genre-defying work from the National Theater of Great Britain that raises the bar for literary adaptations. The world that is so magically summoned in this improbable page-to-stage translation of "The Waves," Virginia Woolf's most challenging novel, is one of fragmentation and flux, of impenetrable solidity and ghostly transparency, of simultaneous bloom and decay.
The six lives this…
cortex | November 24, 2008I have a feeling that this holiday season there will be even more drinking than usual, as people self-medicate with booze. Worried about your 401(k)? Have some egg nog. The good news is that there's a new studyshowing, once again, that expensive wine doesn't necessarily taste better, at least for people who aren't wine experts.
Individuals who are unaware of the price do not derive more enjoyment from more expensive wine. In a sample of more than 6,000 blind tastings, we find that the correlation between price and overall rating is small and negative, suggesting that individuals on average…
cortex | November 21, 2008I know I've written about the virtues of art-science interactions, but I never imagined that the AAAS would sponsor a "dance your dissertation" competition, and that one of the winners would feature an interpretative dance inspired by the "cerebral activation patterns induced by the inflection of regular and irregular verbs":
cortex | November 21, 2008This American Life recently featured an astonishing series of recordings from Hard Times, the radio series created by Studs Terkel. It featured a variety of American voices, from the short order cook in Arkansas to the migrant worker in Texas to the wealthy elite of Manhattan, talking about what it was like to live through the Great Depression. The sheer suffering was astonishing. People talked about hunger and living off oily brown water and stale bread. They described what it was like to have no heat in winter and spend years in the unemployment line. The rich guy was hilariously greedy.…
cortex | November 20, 2008I'm a contributor to Very Short List: Science, the latest offshoot of the VSL brand. (David Dobbs is another contributor.) For those who don't know, VSL is a very short email on something interesting sent daily to your inbox. We recently featured this paper in the Science channel:
We've always known that rats were capable of complex thought: They memorize mazes and form elaborate social hierarchies. Now we're learning that they seem to think about thinking itself. Until recently, that crucial skill -- called metacognition -- was believed to be unique to humans.
Scientists at the University of…
cortex | November 19, 2008It's one of those modern taboos: pregnant women must abstain from alcohol. Even a sip of wine in a restaurant can lead to menacing glances from passerby, as they imagine a fetus drunk on Chardonnay. According to a new study, however, the taboo has it backwards: women who drink lightly while pregnant are less likely to have children with behavioral and cognitive problems.
The research, led by a team at the University College of London, analyzed thousands of pregnancies drawn from a large British government survey. As expected, heavy drinking mothers put their offspring at serious risk for a…
cortex | November 17, 2008A nice summary of "humaniquness," or the cognitive talents that make homo sapiens such an unprecedented species:
[Marc] Hauser describes animals as having "laser-beam" intelligence, in which each cognitive capacity is locked into a specific function. Humans, by contrast, have "floodlight" intelligence, he says: they can use a single system of thought in multiple ways and can translate information from one context to another. "Animals," he elaborates, "live in a world in which the systems don't talk to each other."
This sort of abstract cognition is generally thought to reside in the…
cortex | November 14, 2008It's one of the more annoying side-effects of the financial collapse: instant updates of the Dow Jones Industrial Average are suddenly everywhere, popping up in the corner of cable news shows, in between weather reports on the radio, highlighted on websites, etc. It's a bizarre form of financial melodrama, as the moods of the market seem to lurch and pivot for no good reason. Yesterday afternoon, on the same day a terrible unemployment report came out, the Dow swung upwards and closed 500 points higher. This morning, it's down 350 points, although nobody seems to know why. This chart…
cortex | November 14, 2008A quick programming note: I'll be in Baltimore this Sunday (11/16), giving a talk at the Walters Art Museum. The event starts at 2PM.
cortex | November 13, 2008Tyler Cowen weighs in on the latest twist in the bailout plan, which involves funneling money to credit card companies. Tyler asks if the Feds should really be in the business of encouraging more credit card borrowing. (I've actually been enjoying getting fewer credit card offers in the mail.) His answer:
No, and especially not with federal dollars. We're talking about credit card debt as a means of financing consumption expenditures. I am not sure what is the going credit card interest rate for the marginal borrowers who will be aided by this new change in the Paulson plan, but I believe it…