cortex | July 31, 2008One of the lessons of my article on insight (based largely on this research) is that mind wandering isn't necessarily a bad thing, at least if you want to tap into the obscure associations prevalent in the right hemisphere:
Schooler's research has also led him to reconsider the bad reputation of mind wandering. Although we often complain that the brain is too easy to distract, Schooler believes that mind-wandering is an essential mental tool. "Just look at the history of science," he says, "The big ideas seem to always come when people are sidetracked, when they're doing something that has…
cortex | July 30, 2008The devious slogan for the New York State lottery is "All you need is a dollar and a dream." Such state lotteries are a regressive form of taxation, since the vast majority of lottery consumers are low-income. As David Brooks notes:
Twenty percent of Americans are frequent players, spending about $60 billion a year. The spending is starkly regressive. A household with income under $13,000 spends, on average, $645 a year on lottery tickets, about 9 percent of all income.
A new study by Emily Haisley, Romel Mostafa and George Loewenstein explored some of the reasons why low-income people spend…
cortex | July 30, 2008Ed Yong has an excellent summary of a new experiment simulating the natural evolution of an artificial language as it's passed from one person to another. Every time we use a language we are subtly bending the rules and words to fit the contours of the brain:
Together with Kenny Smith at Northumbria University, they have provided the first experimental evidence that as languages are passed on, they evolve structures that make them easier to transmit effectively.
The team tracked the progress of artificial languages as they passed down a chain of volunteers. They found that in just ten…
cortex | July 29, 2008Sheena Iyengar has done some very cool studies on the debilitating effects of excessive choice. In one experiment, she ushered some undergraduates into a room with a variety of Godiva chocolates on a table. The students were then given vivid descriptions of each candy. They learned, for example, that the "Grand Marnier Truffle" consists of a "luxurious milk chocolate butter cream with a hint of liquor, housed in a dark chocolate shell and rolled in cocoa powder." After being told about all of their delectable options, the students chose the best sounding chocolate and rated it on a scale of…
cortex | July 29, 2008I was on The Takeaway this morning talking about irrational voters, Peter Jennings and why trying to multi-task is like running Microsoft Vista on an old computer.
cortex | July 28, 2008Do you scoff at those pale Tofu dogs in the health food aisles of the supermarket? Are you one of those people who taunt vegans by talking about Big Macs? A new study suggests that you should think about biting your tongue: According to the researchers, how we feel about a sausage, regardless of whether it's soy-based or beef, says more about our personal values than about what the sausage actually tastes like. In fact, most people can't even tell the difference between an ersatz vegan sausage and the real thing. (It should be noted, though, that not all vegan products are equally deceptive:…
cortex | July 25, 2008The latest report on home sales is bleak:
Sales of new homes fell in June for the seventh time in the past eight months, more proof that the worst housing slump in decades is getting deeper.
The Commerce Department reported Friday that sales of new single-family homes dropped by 0.6 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 530,000 units following an even bigger 1.7 percent fall in May.
The decline was slightly smaller than had been expected and sales were revised up a bit for May. Even with those changes, new home sales are down by a sharp 33.2 percent from a year ago.
At…
cortex | July 24, 2008A new paper in one of my favorite journals, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, tries to reverse-engineer the tricks of magicians to learn about the blind spots of the brain. Wired Science explains:
Magic tricks may look simple, but they exploit cognitive patterns that scientists are only beginning to understand. Now some psychologists are considering how they can use magic to advance our understanding of the brain -- and perhaps help inoculate us against advertising.
"For most of the past century, [magic tricks have] been ignored, even though the effects are large, replicable, and experienced by…
cortex | July 24, 2008John Donne, in this stanza from The Ecstasy, seems to anticipate the double helix:
Our hands were firmly cemented
By a fast balm which thence did spring
Our eye-beams twisted, and did thread
Our eyes upon one double string;
So to intergraft our hands, as yet
Was all the means to make us one,
And pictures in our eyes to get
Was all our propagation.
Obviously, this says more about the perfect metaphor of the double helix than Donne's intuitive knowledge of genetics. DNA really is the ideal molecule for the text of life: it's so stylish, elegant and, as Donne points out, poetic.
Thanks Sara!
cortex | July 23, 2008Funny stuff from McSweeney's:
General relativity is your high-school girlfriend all grown up. Man, she is amazing. You sort of regret not keeping in touch. She hates quantum mechanics for obscure reasons.
Cosmology is the girl that doesn't really date, but has lots of hot friends. Some people date cosmology just to hang out with her friends.
Can we come up with a similar list for the brain sciences? I think you could replace quantum mechanics with brain imaging and perhaps substitute electrophysiology for general relativity.
Via kottke
cortex | July 23, 2008Over at Mind Matters, the expert blog I curate at Scientific American, we're currently featuring a really interesting article by On Amir on the cognitive cost of making decisions:
For instance, it's long been recognized that strenuous cognitive tasks--such as taking the SAT--can make it harder to focus later on. But recent results suggests that these taxing mental activities may be much broader in scope-and may even involve the very common activity of making choices itself. In a series of experiments and field studies, University of Minnesota psychologist Kathleen Vohs and colleagues…
cortex | July 23, 2008Look up charming in a dictionary and I'm pretty sure you'll see this video:
Because we like to link everything to the brain over here at the Frontal Cortex, it's worth mentioning that the number four also represents the outer limits of our numerical brain. Here's Stanislas Dehaene, a leading researcher on the neuroscience of math:
Dehaene conjectured that, when we see numerals or hear number words, our brains automatically map them onto a number line that grows increasingly fuzzy above 3 or 4. He found that no amount of training can change this. "It is a basic structural property of how our…
cortex | July 22, 2008This kid is a poster child for deliberate practice:
Marc Yu, a 9-year-old piano prodigy from Pasadena, Calif., recently played at a benefit for victims of the earthquake in Sichuan, China. And he didn't play "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." He played a piece that Chopin wrote for victims of the Polish-Russian war, the composer's "Nocturne in C Minor."
"My legs are long enough for the pedal, but still my legs aren't straight," Marc says. "I sometimes have to sit close to the piano or stretch my legs." He says his left hand can reach an octave, but his right hand isn't quite there yet.
Marc says he…
cortex | July 22, 2008I've got an article in the latest New Yorker (not online) on the neuroscience of insight. I begin the article with the harrowing story of Wag Dodge and the Mann Gulch fire, before describing the research of Mark Jung Beeman, John Kounios and Earl Miller:
There is something inherently mysterious about moments of insight. Wag Dodge, for instance, could never explain where his idea for the escape fire came from. ("It just seemed the logical thing to do" was all he could muster.) His improbable survival has become one of those legendary stories of insight, like Archimedes shouting "Eureka!" when…
cortex | July 21, 2008David Carr, a media columnist for the New York Times, was addicted to crack for several years in the late 1980's. In the Times Magazine (and in his new book) he tells the story of his own investigation into his junkie years, as he tries to understand how he let a chemical nearly ruin his life. It's a harrowing tale of addiction and love, but a major subplot is the inherent fraudulence of memory:
When memory is called to answer, it often answers back with deception. How is it that almost every warm bar stool contains a hero, a star of his own epic, who is the sum of his amazing stories?
If I…
cortex | July 18, 2008Whenever I happen to watch some talking heads on a cable news channel - usually while stuck in an airport - I'm always impressed by how mistaken the basic premise of the conversation is. The pundits will waste lots of words on how Obama's pivot on FISA might turn off his liberal base, or how McCain's tax cuts will appeal to working women, or they'll consider the political implications of whatever issue happens to be in the news that day. The underlying assumption, of course, is that issues matter, that voters are fundamentally rational agents who vote for candidates based on a coherent set…
cortex | July 18, 2008I visited the Cambridge Google offices last month and talked about Escoffier, umami, Kanye West and the plasticity of dopamine neurons:
cortex | July 17, 2008Speaking of data visualization, a reader sent along this link to some fabulous examples. Each of these images, according to artist and creator Jason Salavon, is composed of "100 unique commemorative photographs culled from the internet. The final compositions are arrived at using both the mean and the median, splitting the difference between a specific norm and an ideal one." They remind me of some cheesy Renoir portraits.
cortex | July 17, 2008One way to understand the collapse of the real estate bubble (and our current financial mess) is as a massive case of bad decision-making. The mistakes, of course, were made by many different people and organizations: the investment banks who bought subprime debt, the credit rating agencies who gave that debt high ratings, the mortgage brokers who gave out shady loans to people with bad credit, etc. But, in the end, the bubble really began when lots of people chose to buy the wrong home. They bought homes that were too big and too expensive, fueling an unsustainable boom in new home…
cortex | July 16, 2008Steven Levitt writes about the difficulty of judging wine:
On Tuesday afternoons we had wine tastings. I asked if I could be allowed the opportunity to conduct one of these wine tastings "blind" to see what we could learn from sampling wines without first knowing what we were drinking. Everyone thought this was a great idea. So with the help of the wine steward I selected two expensive bottles from the wine cellar and then I went down the street to the liquor store and bought the cheapest bottle of wine they had made from the same type of grape.
I thus had two different expensive wines and…