cortex | July 3, 2008Zadie Smith, writing in The Believer, offers future novelists some advice:
When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second - put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year of more is ideal - but even three months will do. Step away from the vehicle. The secret to editing your work is simple: you need to become its reader instead of its writer. I can't tell you how many times I've sat backstage with a line of novelists at some festival, all of us with red pens in hand, frantically editing our…
cortex | July 2, 2008The thrill I get from watching Michael Phelps swim is the same thrill I get from watching Tiger Woods put for birdie on the 18th hole or from reading 1930's Auden: the impossible isn't just made possible: these guys make the impossible look easy. So I was struck by this paragraph in an old profile of Phelps:
In testing conducted by physiologists from USA Swimming, Phelps scored as one of the weakest elite swimmers they had ever measured, but that was on such traditional tests as the bench press and how much weight he can lift with his legs. ''He's fine on land,'' Heinlein says. ''He can walk…
cortex | July 2, 2008This new article on the website of the NY Times listing "the 11 best foods you aren't eating" is a perfect example of nutritionism run amok, full of dubious claims like this:
Pumpkin seeds: The most nutritious part of the pumpkin and packed with magnesium; high levels of the mineral are associated with lower risk for early death.
Turmeric: The "superstar of spices,'' it has anti-inflammatory and anti-cancer properties.
I have no doubt pumpkin seeds are good for you (they're also delicious when salted and toasted or when turned into an oil) or that turmeric is a "superstar," but I've read…
cortex | July 1, 2008An Onion classic:
Is there no morality in science? Last night I tried to have a barbecue on my back patio and I ran inside before the spicy shish-kabobs were even half-grilled because of the mosquitoes. With all that chemical engineering going on today, with all that military technology, I should at least be able to sip a sloe gin and sour without getting run out of my own yard by something smaller than my fingernail!
I hear jabber-jabbering about the discovery of new subatomic particles. What good is a quark to me? Three and a half minutes it takes to cook a bag of microwave popcorn. Three…
cortex | July 1, 2008Another day, another sinking stock market. The Dow has officially entered bear territory, which is defined by a drop of 20 percent or more. Many variables are responsible for the financial malaise, from rising gas prices to a weakening job market, but the root cause seems to be the busting of the housing bubble. In retrospect, of course, bubbles are easy to recognize and ridicule. What were all those Wall Street suits thinking when they bought up so much subprime debt? Didn't they realize that the booming real estate market was bound to implode?
And yet, such irrational exuberance is a…
cortex | July 1, 2008Via Vaughan, over at MindHacks, a great quote on the utility of social psychology from Dan Gilbert:
Psychologists have a penchant for irrational exuberances, and whenever we discover something new we feel the need to discard everything old. Social psychology is the exception. We kept cognition alive during the behaviourist revolution that denied it, we kept emotion alive during the cognitive revolution that ignored it, and today we are keeping behaviour alive as the neuroscience revolution steams on and threatens to make it irrelevant. But psychological revolutions inevitably collapse under…
cortex | June 30, 2008I've written before about the dangers of transparency and medical technology, at least when it comes to diagnosing back pain. Simply put, doctors tend to assume that any imaging technology with better resolution will lead to better diagnoses. But that's often not the case:
A large study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) randomly assigned 380 patients with back pain to undergo two different types of diagnostic analysis. One group received X-rays. The other group got diagnosed using MRI's, which give the doctor a much more detailed picture of the underlying…
cortex | June 30, 2008This makes me feel very lonely:
The "Pillars of Creation" may be the most iconic Hubble photograph ever taken. "Located in the Eagle Nebula, the pillars are clouds of molecular hydrogen, light years in length, where new stars are being born," says Aguilar. "However, recent discoveries indicate these pillars were destroyed by a massive nearby super nova some 6,000 years ago. This is a ghost image of a past cosmic disaster that we won't see here on Earth for another thousand years or so-and a perfect example of the fact that everything we see in the universe is history."
Isn't that bleak? There…
cortex | June 27, 2008Somewhere, Walt Whitman is smiling:
From "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry":
FLOOD-TIDE below me! I watch you face to face;
Clouds of the west! sun there half an hour high! I see you also face to face.
Crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes! how curious you are to me!
On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning home, are more curious to me than you suppose;
And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence, are more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.
The lovely photo is by Nicole Bengiveno of the NY Times. And the waterfall is…
cortex | June 27, 2008Language is the stuff of thought. I'm reminded of this truism every time I sip a glass of wine and some pretentious snob (usually me) insists on saying something about the Chianti Classico smelling like cherries, or how the New Zealand sauvignon blanc exudes the perfume of pineapple. As soon as I hear those nouns, my olfactory cortex goes into dishonest overdrive and, before I know it, all I can smell is those damn cherries. My experience of the wine is completely altered by a few choice words; language subverts reality.
Of course, this isn't always a bad thing. Parmesan cheese and vomit, for…
cortex | June 26, 2008There's an interesting review on prediction errors and temporal difference learning theory in the latest Trends in Cognitive Sciences. (Really, it's fascinating stuff.) But I don't want to talk today about the content of the article. Instead, I want to discuss its form.
The vast, vast majority of science articles follow the same basic pattern: abstract, introduction, methods, results, discussion. (Update: As bsci points out in the comments, review articles obey a slightly less strict pattern, but they're still pretty predictable.) There are no stories, no narrative, no amusing anecdotes. (…
cortex | June 25, 2008Here are three food-related items I've been enjoying lately:
1) Fennel Pollen: Like all great spices, the flavor of wild fennel pollen eludes adjectives. It's like a fennel seed, only much more so. I sprinkle it on everything from roasted wild salmon to pasta with zucchini, basil and mozzarella. (The Tuscans use it on pork.)
2) John Cope's Dried Sweet Corn: This is the Platonic form of corn. It's intensely sweet and yet also deeply corny. Made according to an old Amish recipe, Cope's corn is nothing but August summer corn dried slowly, so that the sugars naturally caramelize. I use the dried…
cortex | June 25, 2008This is the car I covet:
It's been a long day for our adorable yellow test car. This morning we headed for Think's factory in Aurskog, some 40 miles into the bluegrass Scandinavian countryside, with about an 85% charge in the car's advanced sodium-cell battery. But Ladehaug -- who is directionally challenged too -- got us turned around. Now, after several course corrections that added perhaps 20 miles to the trip, we're both eyeing the battery gauge, while warning lights flash ominously. Still the Think City -- a 2,449-pound runabout with plastic body panels and an official range of 112 miles…
cortex | June 25, 2008If William James were alive today, I'm pretty sure that he'd be an experimental philosopher. (He'd also be a cognitive psychologist, a public intellectual in the mold of Richard Rorty and a damn fine essayist, filling the back pages of the New Yorker and New York Review of Books with incisive articles on everything from poetry to public affairs.*) But back to experimental philosophy, or x-phi...Here's how Kwame Anthony Appiah summarized the movement last year in the Times:
It's part of a recent movement known as "experimental philosophy," which has rudely challenged the way professional…
cortex | June 24, 2008I was on the Takeaway last week talking about this study:
We examined the role of serotonin transporter (5-HTT) and oxytocin receptor (OXTR) genes in explaining differences in sensitive parenting in a community sample of 159 Caucasian, middle-class mothers with their 2-year-old toddlers at risk for externalizing behavior problems, taking into account maternal educational level, maternal depression and the quality of the marital relationship. Independent genetic effects of 5-HTTLPR SCL6A4 and OXTR rs53576 on observed maternal sensitivity were found. Controlling for differences in maternal…
cortex | June 24, 2008In a recent issue of Nature, Nikos Logothetis, director of the Max Plank Institute for Biological Cybernetics, wrote some surprisingly harsh sentences about the experimental limitations of fMRI. The piece is especially noteworthy because Logothetis has probably done more than anyone else to document the tight correlation between what fMRI measures (changes in cortical blood flow) and the underlying neural activity of the brain. (His 2001 Nature paper, "Neurophysiological investivation of the basis of the fMRI signal," has been cited more than 1200 times.)
Although brain scanner technology is…
cortex | June 23, 2008There are a few writers who manage to trigger a contradictory mixture of feelings in me: the joy of reading their prose is fused with the mild anguish of not having written their prose. It's one part status anxiety, a dash of jealousy and a big heaping of aesthetic appreciation. Atul Gawande is one of those writers. His latest article in the New Yorker, on the new science of itching, is a real gem, even by his bejeweled standards. The article opens with the story of a patient M., whose scalp was so itchy she managed to do permanent damage:
For M., the itching was so torturous, and the area so…
cortex | June 23, 2008Robert Krulwich, speaking at the Caltech Commencement, issues a cri de coeur for the importance of stories, even (especially!) when speaking about science:
Because talking about science, telling science stories to regular folks like me and your parents, is not a trivial thing. Scientists need to tell stories to non-scientists because science stories have to compete with other stories about how the universe works and how it came to be....and some of those other stories, bible stories, movie stories, myths, can be very beautiful and very compelling. But to protect science and scientists -…
cortex | June 19, 2008It's a truism that the favorite philosopher of every scientist is Karl Popper. (In my own experience, this truism is mostly true.) Popper, or so the story goes, stood up for empirical fact when the post-modernists were descending into Deleuze and Derrida and difference. His popularity among experimentalists is also a side-effect of simplicity, as his fundamental idea is easy enough for just about anyone to understand: Popper famously pointed out that science never proves things true, it merely proves things false (this is the falsifiability doctrine). In other words, scientists proceed in…
cortex | June 18, 2008From Rachel Herz's quite interesting The Scent of Desire:
In one study that contrasted the trauma of being blinded or becoming anosmic [losing you sense of smell] after an accident, it was found that those who were blinded initially felt much more traumatized by their loss than those who had lost their sense of smell. But follow-up analyses on the emotional health of these patients one year later showed that the anosmics were faring much more poorly than the blind. The emotional health of anosmic patients typically continues to deteriorate with passing time, in some cases requiring…