cortex | November 13, 2008Zadie Smith has a terrific essay in the NY Review of Books on the future of the novel, or why realism - even when perfectly executed - has limitations:
From two recent novels, a story emerges about the future for the Anglophone novel. Both are the result of long journeys. Netherland, by Joseph O'Neill, took seven years to write; Remainder, by Tom McCarthy, took seven years to find a mainstream publisher. The two novels are antipodal--indeed one is the strong refusal of the other. The violence of the rejection Remainder represents to a novel like Netherland is, in part, a function of our…
cortex | November 12, 2008I've been really enjoying Alex and Me, the new book by Irene Pepperberg, and not only because I've got an African Grey of my own. It's full of wonderful anecdotes like this:
The students occasionally took Alex to the washroom, where there was a very large mirror above the sinks. Alex used to march up and down the little shelf in front of the mirror, making noise, looking around, demanding things. Then one day in December 1980 when Kathy Davidson took him to the washroom, Alex seemed really to notice the mirror for the first time. He turned to look right into it, cocked his head back and forth…
cortex | November 12, 2008It's hard to imagine that fifteen years ago scientists were forced to read old science papers on actual paper, as they paged through bound volumes of past journals. How quaint! How inefficient! (All that wasted shelf space...) How scholarly, in an old-school kind of way! It's so much easier to just rely on Google Scholar or Pubmed, especially when ensconced in a university with electronic subscriptions to everything.
But what's lost when information goes online? Sure, it becomes easier to find stuff, but have our searches become too narrow? A recent paper in Science looked at this very…
cortex | November 11, 2008Think, for a moment, about one of your cherished childhood memories, one of those sepia-tinged recollections that you've repeated countless times. I've got some bad news: big chunks of that memory are almost certainly not true. According to scientists, the brain is a consummate liar, a bullshit artist of the first order. To remember is to fabricate.
Why is memory so inherently dishonest? To make a long story short, it's now pretty clear that the act of remembering a memory changes the structure of the memory itself. (This is known as memory reconsolidation; Freud called it Nachtraglichkeit,…
cortex | November 10, 2008Thoreau would have liked this study: interacting with nature (at least when compared to a hectic urban landscape) dramatically improves improve cognitive function. In particular, being in natural settings restores our ability to exercise directed attention and working memory, which are crucial mental talents. The basic idea is that nature, unlike a city, is filled with inherently interesting stimuli (like a sunset, or an unusual bird) that trigger our involuntary attention, but in a modest fashion. Because you can't help but stop and notice the reddish orange twilight sky - paying attention…
cortex | November 6, 2008From the fanastic series of just-released Newsweek articles on the presidential campaign:
Obama was something unusual in a politician: genuinely self-aware. In late May 2007, he had stumbled through a couple of early debates and was feeling uncertain about what he called his "uneven" performance. "Part of it is psychological," he told his aides. "I'm still wrapping my head around doing this in a way that I think the other candidates just aren't. There's a certain ambivalence in my character that I like about myself. It's part of what makes me a good writer, you know? It's not necessarily…
cortex | November 6, 2008Whatever It Takes, the new book by Paul Tough that profiles Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone, is one of the most bracing, sobering and inspiring books I've read in a while. It's the story of one man's attempt to systematically disrupt the cycle of poverty, and fundamentally alter the nature of childhood in Harlem. Fixing the schools is only a small part of the solution: Canada realized that it was also crucial to change the typical parent-child interaction, and so he developed a Baby College where new parents are given lessons on how to speak to their child in the supermarket.…
cortex | November 5, 2008The Boston Globe Ideas section recently published a short interview I did with Kelly Bulkeley, author of the quite interesting "Dreaming in the World's Religions". It's an attempt to extract some common psychological themes from the descriptions of dreaming and dream-states in various religious texts. In a sense, Bulkeley is employing a similar strategy to the one I pursue in Proust Was A Neuroscientist. While I looked at art to learn about the brain - what can a Cezanne watercolor teach us about the visual cortex? - Bulkeley wants to use the case reports of dreams in the Bible, Koran,…
cortex | November 5, 2008Rolling Stone recently published a truly excellent article by David Lipsky on the struggles, triumphs and suicide of David Foster Wallace. It's a heart-breaking read, a chronicle of a genius done in by a mental illness. (It reminded me, in parts, of Woolf's diaries: the acute self-consciousness, the Sisyphean struggle against this internal shadow, the inevitability of a tragic ending.) I didn't know, for instance, that Foster-Wallace's final bout of depression began after he was taken off Nardil, an old-school monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
In June of 2007, Wallace and Green were at an Indian…
cortex | November 5, 2008Indulge me, for I can't stop thinking about this poem. It's an excerpt from The Cure at Troy, by Seamus Heaney:
Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted or endured.
The innocent in gaols
beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker's father
stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
faints at the funeral home.
History says, Don't hope
on this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
the longed for tidal wave
of justice can rise up,
and hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great…
cortex | November 1, 2008This sounds like a fantastic event, a genuine dialogue between artists and scientists:
The taste of a ripe tomato, the hook of a catchy song, the scent of a lover's hair. What is it, exactly, that drives us to seek these things again and again?
Neuroscientists who study perception are starting to discover the inner workings of the sensory mind. Starting on Monday at the New York Academy of Sciences, researchers and artists will team up to explore this new research in a series of talks called Science of the Five Senses. Their conversations will raise a question for the amateur hedonist: If we…
cortex | October 30, 2008Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan discusses a fascinating new paper on how psychotic delusions take on different manifestations over time:
A Slovenian research team, led by psychiatrist Borut Skodlar, discovered that the Ljubljana psychiatric hospital had patient records going as far back as 1881. They randomly selected 10 records from every 10 year period to see how delusions matched up to the society of the time.
One key finding was that paranoid and persecutory delusions seem much more common now, with a big jump after the 1960s, in line with other studies that have found that paranoia is much…
cortex | October 28, 2008You know what I think about when I hear about the epic failure of all these fancy financial models that were designed to calculate risk? I think about the Atlantic Cod. These fish used to be everywhere. (Once upon a time, they were considered the cash crop of the ocean. Spanish fishing vessels would trek across the Atlantic just to fish the abundant cod off the coast of Canada.) Now the Newfoundland cod fishery is gone, yet another victim of overfishing.
The story of cod is usually told as the tragedy of trawlers. A trawler is boat designed to drag a massive net behind it. These nets are…
cortex | October 28, 2008Comes courtesy of David Brooks:
This [financial[ meltdown is not just a financial event, but also a cultural one. It's a big, whopping reminder that the human mind is continually trying to perceive things that aren't true, and not perceiving them takes enormous effort.
For more, see here.
cortex | October 27, 2008There's something poignant about the possibility that one of the reasons obese people eat too much is because they are unable to take pleasure in the taste of their food. But according to a new study published in Science, that's exactly what happens:
The dorsal striatum plays a role in consummatory food reward, and striatal dopamine receptors are reduced in obese individuals, relative to lean individuals, which suggests that the striatum and dopaminergic signaling in the striatum may contribute to the development of obesity. Thus, we tested whether striatal activation in response to food…
cortex | October 27, 2008Last week, I reviewed Buyology, a new book on neuromarketing, in the Washington Post. Although the book is based on a large, privately funded neuromarketing experiment, I wasn't so wowed by the science:
If "Buy-ology" itself is any indication, these companies got ripped off. It's not that the book doesn't have interesting moments: I enjoyed learning about how slices of lime got indelibly associated with Corona beer and why the logos plastered on race cars are so effective at getting consumers to buy particular brands. However, what makes these stories interesting is that, unlike the rest of…
cortex | October 25, 2008Click here to hear the only known recording of Virginia Woolf's voice. A few thoughts: 1) What an Oxbridge accent! So posh and crisp. This is the voice I always imagined for Mrs. Dalloway, but then I guess Woolf had a few servants as well. 2) Isn't it amazing that we only have a single audio recording of Woolf? There's no video of her, of course, and only a precious few photographs. Although Woolf is one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century, she exists now as a short stack of novels and a thick stack of letters and diaries. In other words, we can only know her through her…
cortex | October 24, 2008Over at Mind Matters, I've got an interview with Sheldon Solomon. We talk about fear, death, the fear of death, and politics. In this excerpt, Solomon describes an extremely clever experiment, in which he primed judges to think about death and then observed how this affected their judicial decisions:
LEHRER: How does this theory relate to mortality salience (MS)? And what's an experimental example of mortality salience at work?
SOLOMON: A large body of evidence shows that momentarily making death salient, typically by asking people to think about themselves dying, intensifies people's…
cortex | October 23, 2008There's a new scientific appreciation for the importance of self-control. This trend began with Walter Mischel's astonishing marshmallow experiments, in which the ability of a four-year old to resist the temptation of a second marshmallow turned out to be a better predictor of future academic success than his or her IQ score. In other words, willpower trumped raw intelligence.
But what cortical muscles are behind self-control? An excellent Boston Globe article summarizes some current research and future projects:
Most recently, Yale University researchers found that delaying gratification…
cortex | October 23, 2008Apologies for the radio silence - I've been on vacation. This time, I actually tried to stay away from the internet while away. My online withdrawal period actually went though several distinct psychological stages. (And yes, I know such stages don't actually exist.) At first, I experienced a weird, existential anxiety - what if the world was about to end, or some cataclysm just occurred, and I didn't know about it? Shouldn't I peek at the Drudge? Then came acceptance: I was merely vacationing in the world circa 2002, before smartphones and twitter and online news alerts. I made it through…