cortex | August 18, 2008The paperback version of my first book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, is now shipping from Amazon. Needless to say, everyone should buy the book in triplicate. I'd apologize for the self-promotion, but isn't blogging just one big orgy of self-promotion?
cortex | August 18, 2008My latest article for the Boston Globe Ideas section looks at some recent criticisms of fMRI, at least when it's misused:
The brain scan image - a silhouette of the skull, highlighted with bright splotches of primary color - has also become a staple of popular culture, a symbol of how scientific advances are changing the way we think about ourselves. For the first time in human history, the black box of the mind has been flung wide open, allowing researchers to search for the cortical source for every flickering thought. The expensive scanners can even decode the hidden urges of the…
cortex | August 17, 2008I really don't understand how Olympic athletes deal with the grief of losing by 1/100th of a second. That's an incomprehensible amount of time and yet it's the defining difference in the biggest event of their lives. I can only assume that, if I lost by a fraction of a second, I would have recurring nightmares for many years afterwards, dreaming of all the ways I could have reached the wall just a little bit faster.
In the post-race interviews, however, I'm always struck by the equanimity of the athletes. Dara Torres, who lost by 1/100th of a second in the 50 meter freestyle, just shrugged…
cortex | August 15, 2008Over at the Times website, Harold McGee takes a question on salt and baking:
Q: Is there any truth to the old cook's adage that adding a pinch of salt brings out the sweetness in sugars? If so, can you please explain the science behind it?
Harold McGee replies: I'm not sure that salt makes sugar taste sweeter, but it fills out the flavor of foods, sweets included. It's an important component of taste in our foods, so if it's missing in a given dish, the dish will taste less complete or balanced. Salt also increase the volatility of some aromatic substances in food, and it enhances our…
cortex | August 14, 2008There's a very cool study in the latest Nature Neuroscience that looks at how professional basketball players make predictions about whether or not a shot will go in. Obviously, this is a key skill, as being able to anticipate the position of a basketball gives players additional time to jostle for a rebound.
The experiment went like this: 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters, plus a group of complete basketball novices watched a video clip of a player attempting a free throw. (You can watch the videos here.) Not surprisingly, the players were significantly better at…
cortex | August 14, 2008It's a nightmarish scenario: after a car crash, a man is brought into a hospital with a severe injury to his frontal lobes. When he wakes up, the doctors realize that their patient is missing one crucial mental faculty: his memory has been erased. He has no idea who he is, or even where he came from.
"There was a bundle of clothing that came in with him when he entered the hospital, and in there we found a voter registration card from Mexico," Felix says.
The ID had a name -- Omar -- and a picture. But as he healed after surgery, the patient no longer looked like the picture. And when the…
cortex | August 13, 2008My profile of Read Montague and the dopamine prediction-error hypothesis is now online. I wanted to write this article for two main reasons. First of all, I think the dopamine story is incredibly exciting and remains one of the best examples of how subtle shifts in neural firing rates can allow the brain make sense of the real world. Yes, I know there are caveats, but the prediction-error hypothesis is still a very powerful paradigm. Wolfram Schultz should win a Nobel Prize.
Secondly, there's so much crappy fMRI research out there - and it always get so much press attention - that I wanted to…
cortex | August 13, 2008Sometimes, I wish America had British libel laws. This sort of dishonesty masquerading as "scholarship" makes me furious:
Mr. Corsi has released a new attack book painting Senator Barack Obama, the Democrats' presumed presidential nominee, as a stealth radical liberal who has tried to cover up "extensive connections to Islam" -- Mr. Obama is Christian -- and questioning whether his admitted experimentation with drugs in high school and college ever ceased.
Significant parts of the book, whose subtitle is "Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," have already been challenged as…
cortex | August 12, 2008Some new research sheds light on why chili plants are spicy:
It has been thought that the chemicals known as capsaicinoids, which surround the seeds and give peppers their characteristic heat, are the chili's way of deterring microbes. But if so, then microbial infestation should bring selective pressure on chilis -- the more bugs, the hotter the peppers should be.
That has never been shown in the wild. Now, however, in a study of wild chili plants, Joshua J. Tewksbury of the University of Washington and colleagues show that the variation in heat reflects the risk that the plants will be…
cortex | August 12, 2008I was on The Takeaway this morning talking about the ineffectiveness of Human Growth Hormone (HGH) and the potency of the placebo effect. Even though most studies demonstrate that HGH does little to enhance athletic performance, world class athletes continue to take the banned hormone. Why? Because they're convinced that HGH is effective. As a result, the drug gives them a mental edge - because athletes expect to perform better, they do perform better. The illusion of an advantage, if it's sincerely believed, can be a real advantage.
Here's more on why I'm in favor of taking HGH off the…
cortex | August 11, 2008This seems a wee bit reductive to me, but it's still an interesting hypothesis:
One of the more intriguing patterns in psychology is that different cultures are characterized by different personality types. A team of psychologists has proposed a new explanation: the legacy of disease. They matched the personality scores of people to historical data on the prevalence of major diseases in each country. They found that a history of disease in a country corresponded to a personality characterized by a less promiscuous orientation - especially for women - and by less extraversion and openness to…
cortex | August 8, 2008Dr. Felix Rey was the first doctor to diagnose Vincent Van Gogh with epilepsy, after the artist was hospitalized following this bizarre incident:
When Gauguin left their house, van Gogh followed and approached him with an open razor, was repelled, went home, and cut off part of his left earlobe, which he then presented to Rachel, his favorite prostitute. The police were alerted; he was found unconscious at his home and was hospitalized. There he lapsed into an acute psychotic state with agitation, hallucinations, and delusions that required 3 days of solitary confinement. He retained no…
cortex | August 7, 2008I was on the Brian Lehrer show (no relation) this morning talking about insight, firefighters and the right hemisphere. Give it a listen. And I'm curious how readers engineer their own insights. Warm showers? Long walks? Richard Feynman preferred strip clubs, a cognitive strategy I have yet to test.
cortex | August 7, 2008One of the great themes of post-Darwinian science is the inter-relatedness of life. From the perspective of our neurons, there is little difference between a human and a rat, or even a sea slug. All animals use the same ionic cells and the same neurotransmitters. Pain receptors in different species share a similar design. Blood and flesh and skin are always constructed of the same elemental stuff. We share 98 percent of our genome with chimps.
The distinctions are just as murky from the perspective of behavior. Ants exhibit altruism. Parrots use symbolic logic. Gorillas mourn the death of a…
cortex | August 6, 2008This ridiculously adorable video cheered me up today:
Via Ezra Klein and Zooillogix
cortex | August 6, 2008Over at Mind Matters we recently featured an interesting article by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Adina Roskies (two philosophers at Dartmouth) reviewing a recent paper by Joshua Greene, et. al. The paper tested the dual-process model of morality, which argues that every moral decision is the result of a tug-of-war between the "rational" brain (centered in the prefrontal cortex) and the "emotional" brain, rooted in areas like the amygdala and insula.
In their study Greene et al. give subjects difficult moral dilemmas in which one alternative leads to better consequences (such as more lives…
cortex | August 5, 2008The history of science is littered with surprising discoveries that forever changed our conception of the unvierse and ourselves. The earth is a sphere, even though it appears flat. Life has no designer, even though it looks designed. But this may be the most surprising discovery yet, a fact that seems to undermine one of the basic truisms of my morning routine:
It was long thought that caffeinated beverages were diuretics, but studies reviewed last year found that people who consumed drinks with up to 550 milligrams of caffeine produced no more urine than when drinking fluids free of…
cortex | August 4, 2008Razib has a super-interesting post on the prevalence of obesity among individuals of mixed race. His post was based on this paper:
The sample included 215,000 adults who reported one or more ethnicities, height, weight, and other characteristics through a mailed survey. ... The highest age-adjusted prevalence of overweight (BMI greater than or equal to 25) was in Hawaiian/Latino men (88% ; n = 41) and black/Latina women (74.5% ; n = 79), and highest obesity (BMI greater than or equal to 30) rates were in Hawaiian/Latino men (53.7% ; n = 41) and Hawaiian women (39.2% , n = 1,247). The…
cortex | August 4, 2008Robert Krulwich had a really lovely piece on Weekend Edition discussing Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, split-brain patients and the emergent self. Much of the piece was drawn from my chapter on Woolf in Proust Was A Neuroscientist.
Here is how I summarize the paradox in the book, using the phenomenon of blindsight to make my point:
The one thing neuroscience cannot find is the loom of cells that creates the self. If neuroscience knows anything, it is that there is no ghost in the machine: there is only the vibration of the machinery. Your head contains 100 billion electrical cells, but not…
cortex | July 31, 2008A mule is a biological hybrid, an offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. According to a new paper, all of this cross-pollination has real benefits: mules are significantly smarter than either of their parents. No regression to the mean here:
Six of each animal were shown sets of two food buckets, each marked with a different symbol.In order to gain access to the food, the animals had to pick the correct bucket. The mules learned to discriminate between more pairs of symbols than the horses or donkeys, and did so more consistently.
The scientists argue that the intelligence of mules…