cortex | October 21, 2008Richard Powers, one of my favorite novelists, just got his entire genome sequenced and wrote about the results for GQ:
I come from a long line of folks, on my mother's side, with congenital difficulty making choices. My father's family, on the other hand, are born snap deciders. This time the paternal genes won out, and half an hour after reading the invitation, I was on board.
So I went shopping. A day online gave me my first taste of the bewildering range of consumer genetic products. There was Family Tree DNA, specializing in tracing genetic genealogies. There was DNA Direct, whose Web…
cortex | October 20, 2008Dashi, a Japanese stock made from kelp and dried fish, is going mainstream. It's suddenly appearing on the menus of all sorts of fancy restaurants, many of which have little to do with Japanese food. The reason? Umami.
"It's basically water, but fantastically perfumed water," said Eric Ripert, the chef at Le Bernardin. He complements Kumamoto oysters with dashi gelée, finishes mushrooms with the stock, and brushes it on raw fish before layering on olive oil and citrus. "The dashi is invisible," he said, "but it brings more depth."
At Per Se, its chef de cuisine, Jonathan Benno, weds the…
cortex | October 16, 2008Another way that credit cards dupe the brain into spending way too much money on interest payments:
New research by the University of Warwick reveals that many credit card customers become fixated on the level of minimum payments given on credit card bills. The mere presence of a minimum payment is enough to reduce the actual amount many people choose to pay on their bills, leading to further interest payments.
The research, by University of Warwick Psychology researcher Dr Neil Stewart, is to be published in Psychological Science, in a paper entitled "The Cost of Anchoring on Credit Card…
cortex | October 13, 2008Michael Pollan makes so much sense it's actually a little painful, since such basic agricultural reforms will never, ever get through Congress. At some point in the twentieth century, American lawmakers forgot that the sole goal of farming wasn't efficiency; high-fructose corn syrup should not be the epitome of modern agriculture.
It must be recognized that the current food system -- characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table -- is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific…
cortex | October 13, 2008Over at Mind Matters, I've got an interview with Dr. Robert Burton on the danger of certainty and its relevance during a presidential election:
LEHRER: To what extent does the certainty bias come into play during a presidential election? It seems like we all turn into such partisan hacks every four years, completely certain that our side is right.
BURTON: The present presidential debates and associated media commentary feel like laboratory confirmation that the involuntary feeling of certainty plays a greater role in decision-making than conscious contemplation and reason.
I suspect that…
cortex | October 9, 2008At any given moment, the cortex is riven by disagreement, as rival bits of tissue contradict each other. Different brain areas think different things for different reasons; all those mental components stuffed inside our head are constantly fighting for influence and attention. In this sense, the mind is really an extended argument. This vociferous debate is made clear in this new paper, which shows that different brain areas are activated by risk and reward when people make a risky decision:
Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and a task that simulates risky decisions, we found that…
cortex | October 7, 2008A fundamental problem in the financial markets right now - a problem that's often traced to the failure of Lehman Brothers last month - is the breakdown of trust. Because financial institutions don't "trust" the solvency of other institutions and corporations, they aren't willing to lend money. The end result is a frozen credit market. This is precisely what happened during the Great Depression. After Black Friday, the public lost confidence in the economy, and people began to hastily withdraw their money from banks. The result was a rash of bank failures, and an even larger push to withdraw…
cortex | October 6, 2008I'm pretty sure that if Dante had known about locked-in syndrome he would have rewritten the chapter in the Inferno devoted to the ninth circle of hell. In the most recent Esquire, Joshua Foer has an excellent profile of Erik Ramsey, who suffered a devastating injury to his brain stem, leaving him entirely paralyzed. (The only muscles Erik could consciously control were the ones that moved his eyeballs up and down.)
There are stories of people being locked-in for years before anyone notices the fully conscious person hiding inside the paralyzed body. In 1966, a thirty-two-year-old woman named…
cortex | October 6, 2008My latest article in the Boston Globe Ideas section is on presidential decision-making and the virtues of metacognition, or being able to think about thinking:
For the last eight years, America has had a president with an audacious approach to making decisions. "I'm a gut player. I rely on my instincts," President Bush has said repeatedly. It doesn't matter if he's making a decision about invading Iraq, the intentions of a foreign leader, or pushing ahead with Social Security reform: Bush believes in the power of his intuition.
Critics have lampooned this aspect of the Bush presidency.…
cortex | October 4, 2008Last night, while stuck in an airport (the inevitable delay), I decided to get a Wendy's milkshake. Not a particularly noteworthy decision - when traveling, I like to subsist entirely on fast food - but it occurred to me, while standing in line, that I wasn't actually hungry. At all. (I'd just finished a greasy combo meal.) So why was I lining up to pay $4 for ice cream? Over at Mind Matters, we're discussing a new paper that sheds some light on the issue. The problem turns out to involve the dopamine reward pathway (not so surprising), which responds not just to the delicious taste of a…
cortex | October 2, 2008One of the enduring mysteries of neurogenesis - the process of creating new neurons in the brain - is the purpose of all these new cells. After all, one of the reasons scientists believed that neurogenesis didn't exist (this was the scientific dogma for most of the 20th century) was that newborn neurons seemed so disruptive. How do untutored cells slot into the intricate networks of the brain? The idea was that, at some point in our distant past, mammals traded the ability to give birth to new neurons for the ability to retain plasticity in old neurons. We don't need new cells because we're…
cortex | September 30, 2008Over the next few days, lots of people are going to be poring over their investment portfolio, trying to figure out which stocks to keep and which stocks to sell. Unfortunately, many of these investors will make the exact same mistake, causing them to lose vast sums of money over the long term.
The problem is loss aversion. Kahnemanandtversky stumbled upon loss aversion after giving their students a simple survey, which asked whether or not they would accept a variety of different bets. The psychologists noticed that, when people were offered a gamble on the toss of a coin in which they…
cortex | September 29, 2008The hypocrisy is dazzling. Charles Murray (of Bell Curve fame) just wrote a book arguing that the vast majority of American college students shouldn't actually be attending college, since they lack the cognitive ability to "deal with college-level material." Instead, he argues that these people should become skilled laborers. ("There are very few unemployed first-rate electricians...") He also insists that "the future of America depends on "the gifted," or those who are genetically blessed with above-average intelligence.
I certainly don't agree with Murray's argument, but I understand that…
cortex | September 25, 2008I couldn't sleep last night. As far as I can tell, there was no particular reason for my insomnia. I wasn't stressed, or anxious, or caffeinated, or sick. My mind was tired, but my brain just wasn't in the sleeping mood. And no, I hadn't been talking on a cell phone.
For me, one of the most annoying parts of insomnia is the way I continually almost fall asleep. I'm drifting off into that dreamy netherworld, my thoughts growing languid and slow, when all of a sudden I remember I can't sleep, and snap back into awakeness. It's damn annoying.
What causes this insomniac process? If I had to…
cortex | September 24, 2008Walter Pater famously declared that "all art aspires to the condition of music." What he meant is that music is able to work on our feelings directly; no ideas interfere with its emotions. I'd amend that slightly, and say that art should also aspire to the condition of architecture, especially when the architecture looks like this. (von Schelling said that "architecture is music in space," which has nothing to do with anything but is a nice line.) In other words, art should fill us with visceral feelings, but it should also be rooted in the real world. An architect can't just make beautiful…
cortex | September 24, 2008The power of Warren Buffett is impressive. He decides to invest a few billion in Goldman Sachs and panicked investors calm down. And why not? Nobody has an investing record that can even come close to comparing with Buffett's record: he is the lone outlier of Wall Street. According to most calculations, since 1951 Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway has generated an average annual return of about 31%. The average return for the Standard & Poor's 500 over that period is 10% a year. The stock market is a random walk, but Buffett has somehow found a way to consistently beat the randomness.
So what'…
cortex | September 24, 2008A little housekeeping. First, I've got a new website! The best part is the article archive. I've also got a few speaking gigs in the next month, in case you happen to be in the area. On Friday, I'll be at the Idea Festival in Louisville. On October 1, I'm at Georgia Tech. I'll be at the GAIN conference on 10/24, talking about Escoffier and cheap wine. On October 29, I've got the pleasure of interviewing Mark Jung Beeman (the scientist featured in my recent New Yorker article) at the Neuroleadership conference.
cortex | September 23, 2008Over at BLDGBLOG, Geoffrey makes an astute observation about how the latest consumer technologies have a way of becoming metaphors for the mind. Before the brain was a binary code running on three pounds of cellular microchips, it was an impressive calculator, or a camera, or a blank slate. In other words, we're constantly superimposing the gadgets of the day onto the cortex. Geoffrey notes that a recent article featured on the BBC on fMRI scans of taxicab drivers ("Taxi drivers have brain sat-nav") is very similar to an earlier study, except that the most recent article used satellite…
cortex | September 23, 2008This is interesting stuff. As G.K. Chesterton is said to have once said: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything."
"What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor University yesterday, shows that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases belief in everything from the efficacy of palm readers to the usefulness of astrology. It also shows that the irreligious and the members of more liberal Protestant denominations, far from being resistant to superstition, tend to be much more likely to believe in the…
cortex | September 22, 2008Last week, I had a short article in Play, the NY Times sports magazine. It was on how quarterbacks make decisions and why the Wonderlic is such a waste of time:
Three and a half seconds: that's how long, on average, a quarterback has to make a decision about where to throw the ball. So, how does he make sense of his options in such a short amount of time, while a swarm of humongous, angry men attempt to pancake him? (Imagine skeet shooting while running for your life, and you get a sense of what it's like to stand in the pocket during a blitz.) At first glance, the answer seems obvious: a…