cortex | September 9, 2008Oliver Sacks, writing on mania and manic depressive disorder in the New York Review of Books:
One may call it mania, madness, or psychosis--a chemical imbalance in the brain--but it presents itself as energy of a primordial sort. Greenberg likens it to "being in the presence of a rare force of nature, such as a great blizzard or flood: destructive, but in its way astounding too." Such unbridled energy can resemble that of creativity or inspiration or genius--this, indeed, is what Sally feels is rushing through her--not an illness, but the apotheosis of health, the release of a deep,…
cortex | September 9, 2008What a vivid example of human irrationality:
An erroneous headline that flashed across trading screens Monday, saying United had filed for a second bankruptcy, sent the airline's stock plummeting.
United Airlines shares fell to about $3 from more than $12 in less than an hour before trading was halted, wiping more than $1 billion in value. Its shares closed at $10.92, down 11.2 percent.
By the end of the day, fingers were pointing in many directions to assign blame.
The episode was a reminder of how negative news, rumors and even outdated articles can travel at lightning speed, with some…
cortex | September 8, 2008The great Laurie Colwin, on learning to cook and eat without salt:
After a few weeks I felt I had gotten the hang of my new regime. I had discovered saltless bread, smoked mozarella, green peppercorns and fresh sage. I felt I might venture out into the real world for a meal. I did, and I was shocked. How incredibly salty everything was! A bite of ham seemed almost inedible. A Chinese meal brought a buzz to my head and tears to my eyes.
She goes on to describe how cooking without salt made her more sensitive to the other flavors of food, much like a blind person who develops an especially…
cortex | September 5, 2008We shouldn't be surprised when every presidential election - even an election between two candidates committed to some vague post-partisan future - veers into identity politics and the culture war. I can't help but watch these conventions through the lens of Jane Goodall, as a gathering of social primates affirming their role within the tribe. Politics is an emotional sport, defined by teams with visceral identities, and not some rational arena in which issues and analysis take center stage. Of course politics always degenerates into some version of Us versus Them: that's just human nature.…
cortex | September 4, 2008Razib makes an excellent and obvious point:
I do not believe scientists are particularly rational people as compared to the normal human. Because the average scientist has a higher IQ than the average artist I am willing to grant marginally higher rationality to an average scientist. Their ability to decompose and abstract any given conceptual system is greater. That being said, the contrast between the disciplines of art and science are far greater than those of individual artists and scientists. Why?
Because at the end of the day science does not rely on the rationality of a scientist. It…
cortex | September 4, 2008Is it football season already? It seems like I just got over the epic disappointment of the Superbowl. (Yes, I'm a Pats fan) So, in honor of football season, I think it's worth highlighting one of the major trends to affect the sport over the last few decades: the ascent of the passing game. Since 1960, quarterbacks have managed to increase their average gain per pass attempt by nearly 30 percent, from 4.6 yards to 6.5 yards. (Running backs only get about 4 yards per attempt, a number that hasn't changed in thirty years.) Furthermore, even as quarterbacks have gotten more yards per pass, they…
cortex | September 3, 2008So there's been a lot of talk about how John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for VP demonstrates the danger of trusting your instincts and making important decisions with your gut. But I think such a conclusion is unfair - not to McCain, but to our very own brain.
After all, one of the major findings of neuroscience in the last decade or so has been the tremendous power of the emotional mind. The unconscious, long derided as a Freudian underworld, is now seen as an adaptive supercomputer. Antonio Damasio, for instance, has demonstrated that when people lose the ability to experience emotion -…
cortex | September 3, 2008Panhandling is a surprisingly lucrative profession:
Anecdotal surveys by journalists and police, and even testimony by panhandlers themselves, suggest that begging can yield anywhere from $20 to $100 a day--though police in Coos Bay, Oregon, found that local panhandlers were taking in as much as $300 a day in a Wal-Mart parking lot. "A panhandler could make thirty to forty thousand dollars a year, tax-free money," Baker says. In Memphis, a local FOX News reporter, Jason Carter, donned old clothes and hit the streets earlier this year, earning about $10 an hour.
Why do people give money away…
cortex | September 2, 2008I love these experiments, if only because everyone assumes that the basic finding doesn't apply to them. It's only these other simpletons who can't tell the difference between red and white wine, or cheap plonk and fancy Bordeaux, or strawberry and chocolate yogurt:
In one recent test, psychologists asked 32 volunteers to sample strawberry yogurt. To make sure the testers made their judgments purely on the basis of taste, the researchers said, they needed to turn out the lights. Then they gave their subjects chocolate yogurt. Nineteen of the 32 praised the strawberry flavor. One said that…
cortex | September 2, 2008On the last day of every golf tournament, Tiger Woods insists on wearing a bright red polo shirt. Woods says the habit is merely superstition, but new research suggests that his fashion sense might actually come with athletic benefits. A paper published this month in Psychological Science reports that referees and umpires subconsciously favor competitors in red uniforms. The experiment was clever: the scientists showed 42 experienced tae kwon do referees video clips of five different male competitors. Each clip featured one athlete in red and another athlete in blue. At first, the referees…
cortex | September 2, 2008You've got to feel very sorry for Bristol Palin. The poor teenager isn't running for political office and yet she's the subject of two front page stories in the NY Times today. All of a sudden, every talking head on the cable news is wondering how her pregnancy will influence the election. Is this what politics has become?
And yet, this teenage pregnancy is indicative of something: the pitiful failure of abstinence-only sex education. Governor Palin, of course, strongly supports abstinence-only education in the classroom. (She also believes in teaching creationism alongside evolutionary…
cortex | September 1, 2008Sorry for the radio silence - I've been out and about doing some reporting. But I've got a story in the Sunday Boston Globe on the benefits of daydreaming and the default network:
Teresa Belton, a research associate at East Anglia University in England, first got interested in daydreaming while reading a collection of stories written by children in elementary school. Although Belton encouraged the students to write about whatever they wanted, she was startled by just how uninspired most of the stories were.
"The tales tended to be very tedious and unimaginative," Belton says, "as if the…
cortex | August 26, 2008The latest Men's Vogue has a rather interesting article (not online) by Jay McInerney on a small group of real estate moguls who like to drink very, very expensive wine. For these oenophiles, a 1982 Romanee-Conti is a young wine - even their champagne is typically several decades old - and a $500 bottle is borderline plonk. It's not uncommon for these winos to consumer $30,000 worth of rotten grape juice at a single dinner.
Not surprisingly, these expensive wines are often highly praised, with descriptions that feature some very purple prose. And while I would certainly love to drink a 1945…
cortex | August 26, 2008Once upon a time, back when the Human Genome Project threatened to unravel the mystery of human nature - every aspect of individuality would be reduced to a SNIP - the Nature/Nurture debate seemed like the most hotly contested question in science. Are personality traits inherited or learned? To what extent can we rebel against our nature? How free are we?
Those questions now seem rather obsolete. They were rooted, after all, in a false dichotomy. Here is how I summarized this new understanding in my book:
What makes us human, and what makes each of us our own human, is not simply the genes…
cortex | August 21, 2008I've often suspected (based on a highly unsystematic series of conversations with classic New Hampshire independents) that most undecided voters are really just low-information voters, who have actually made a decision but don't quite know how to explain their decision. If you prod, you'll typically find that they're "leaning" in one direction or another, or that they "like" one candidate a little bit more, but they can't articulate the reasons behind their choice. As a result, the bias remains mostly subterranean: they don't know what they really believe.
I don't mean to sound condescending…
cortex | August 21, 2008Over at Neurophilosophy, Mo highlights one of my favorite William James quotes:
The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.
Notice his emphasis on the inherent unknowability of the mind, the way so many of our thoughts and sensations are constantly falling into the "abyss of oblivion". This was, in…
cortex | August 20, 2008Here's Seth Godin:
A journalist asked me, Most people have a better standard of living today than Louis XIV did in his day. So why are so many people unhappy?
What you have doesn't make you unhappy. What you want does.
And want is created by us, the marketers.
Marketers trying to grow market share will always work to make their non-customers unhappy.
It's interesting to note that marketers trying to maintain market share have a lot of work to do in reminding us that we're happy.
I think it's also important to note that our central nervous system conspires with advertisers to make us eternally…
cortex | August 20, 2008Over at Mind Matters, we've got an interesting article on how believing in free will can affect our ethical behavior:
In a clever new study, psychologists Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler at the University of California at Santa Barbara tested this question by giving participants passages from The Astonishing Hypothesis, a popular science book by Francis Crick, a biochemist and Nobel laureate (as co-discoverer, with James Watson, of the DNA double helix). Half of the participants got a passage saying that there is no such thing as free will. The passage…
cortex | August 19, 2008I had an article this weekend in the Washington Post looking at the recent spate of "age defiance" - Dara Torres, Madonna, John McCain, etc. - and some recent neuroscience research:
A s a 27-year old science writer who still gets carded at bars, I often find discussions of the aging process pleasantly abstract. I'm more likely to use Clearasil than anti-wrinkle cream. But the spectacle of Torres's competing and McCain's campaigning has rekindled an important scientific debate about the inevitability of the aging process and what even young and middle-aged people can do to blunt the adverse…
cortex | August 18, 2008John McCain remarked last week that the hostilities in Georgia marked the "first serious crisis" since the end of the Cold War. His surrogates on the news shows have expanded on that position, as they repeat the talking point about how the world is so dangerous and full of evil.
This strategy shouldn't be surprising: in recent elections, the Republican party has consistently emphasized national security threats and subtly tried to stoke the fear of voters. Remember this Bush ad, which ran during the closing weeks of the 2004 election? After criticizing Kerry for voting against increased…