cortex | June 17, 2008Like so many golf fans, I'd never even thought about watching golf on television until Tiger Woods. I don't play the game and the images of all those manicured greens and hushed crowds always struck me as incredibly boring. Why would I want to watch a game that seems to consist mostly of people walking?
But then, one day, I saw Tiger play the game. And now I'm a PGA addict. I spent way too much of the weekend (and most of a Monday afternoon) camped out on my couch, watching Tiger and Rocco perform acts of finesse at the US Open that I can't even begin to comprehend. There's a certain…
cortex | June 17, 2008I really enjoyed The Death of Vishnu when it came out several years ago. It was a Calvinoesque exploration of a single Bombay apartment dwelling, as refracted through the prism of a dying peasant. But I had no idea that the author, Manil Suri, was actually an academic mathematician:
Q. ARE THERE AREAS WHERE MATH AND WRITING CONVERGE?
A. Actually, there are a few. If you're writing and plotting the path of your characters, you have to consider the different directions they might go. "If I move something there, what will happen with this other thing?" Or, "How will the characters interact, if…
cortex | June 16, 2008When I first got a Prius, I was tempted to cover the rear bumper with liberal decals, like "Support Local Farms!" (that's on my bike) or "Women for Obama!" (a popular Prius sticker here in New Hampshire). I wanted to embrace my inner cliche, to see what it felt like to be a right-wing talking point. (I also enjoy the occasional latte...) But then, just as I was about the deface the car with ideological mottos, my better half intervened. She had no interest in being a cliche.
As usual, my better half was right: it turns out that putting bumper stickers on your car increases your aggressive…
cortex | June 16, 2008M. Night Shyamalan, the director of the vaguely anti-evolution (and thoroughly mediocre) film The Happening, uses the brain to discuss the limits of science:
There's so much unexplained stuff. I don't quite understand the scientific explanation of the placebo effect. What is the core of that? The fact that the placebo effect exists is a fact, but what is it? We have no idea. I love that. I even love that with regard to the home-court advantage in sports. What is that? It's connected to a belief system. Both things, the placebo and the home-court effect, are a belief system that we can turn…
cortex | June 13, 2008It happens to me every time: I tell myself that it's just a game, that these overpaid basketball superstars don't really have any loyalty to a particular team, place, city, etc., that I really shouldn't care about the outcome of the NBA finals. And yet and yet: despite my self-awareness, I can't help but nervously pace during the 4th quarter, as I watch my Lakers surrender a 24 point lead. (The possessive pronouns of sports fan are so odd, considering that Kobe Bryant made more money in the 4th quarter than I will in the next decade.) And then, after the heartbreaking loss, I'm way too upset…
cortex | June 12, 2008At first glance, it's hard to think of a more frivolous form of culture than the daily soap opera. It's pure and delicious escapism. And yet, at least in Brazil, soap operas have powerfully influenced family planning, according to a new study:
What are the effects of television, and of role models portrayed in TV programs, on individual behavior? We focus on fertility choices in Brazil, a country where soap operas (novelas) portray families that are much smaller than in reality. We exploit differences in the timing of entry into different markets of Rede Globo, the network that has an…
cortex | June 12, 2008Bookslut has a really interesting interview with Jeff Warren, author of The Head Trip:
Q: It turns out sleep is more interesting than we usually expect -- and that it even has a history! What are some key misconceptions about sleep?
A: I would like to spiel about dreaming for a moment if you don't mind. The writer Rodger Kamenetz tipped me off to a great Borges quote. Borges once wrote: "Lately I've been rereading psychology books, and I have felt singularly defrauded. All of them discuss the mechanisms of dreams or the subjects of dreams, but they do not mention, as I had hoped, that which…
cortex | June 12, 2008Over at Marginal Revolution, a commenter asks Tyler a great question:
I wanted to ask for survival tips in case I am unexpectedly transported to a random location in Europe (say for instance current France/Benelux/Germany) in the year 1000 AD (plus or minus 200 years). I assume that such transportation would leave me with what I am wearing, what I know, and nothing else. Any advice would help.
Tyler's answer is instructive:
I hope you have an expensive gold wedding band but otherwise start off by keeping your mouth shut. Find someone who will take care of you for a few days or weeks and then…
cortex | June 11, 2008I wandered into the ICP a few weeks ago, wandering amid Midtown with an hour to spare. I ended up transfixed by an exhibit called Bill Wood's Business:
The Bill Wood Photo Company supplied local snap shooters and amateur photographers with cameras, flash bulbs, accessories, and quality photo finishing. In addition, the business provided commercial photographic services: using large format cameras, and shooting mostly black-and-white film, Wood offered studio portraits and professional photographs, taken on location. The variety of subjects and situations he captured provide an in-depth…
cortex | June 11, 2008In the latest Atlantic, John Staddon, a professor of psychology at Duke, has an article on the dangers of road signs and speed limits:
The American system of traffic control, with its many signs and stops, and with its specific rules tailored to every bend in the road, has had the unintended consequence of causing more accidents than it prevents. Paradoxically, almost every new sign put up in the U.S. probably makes drivers a little safer on the stretch of road it guards. But collectively, the forests of signs along American roadways, and the multitude of rules to look out for, are quite…
cortex | June 11, 2008A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on various explanations for home field advantage. One of the more interesting tidbits I learned was this:
Professional teams, however, seem to be better adjusted to life on the road. (The chartered planes and fancy hotels probably help.) A 1986 analysis of nearly 3,500 Premier League English professional soccer games found that the distance traveled had no effect on home-field advantage. A study in 1992 of professional baseball and hockey teams concluded that "travel factors" accounted for less than 1.5 percent of the variance in the home advantage. A…
cortex | June 10, 2008David Brooks' column today is filled with some depressing financial facts:
Between 1989 and 2001, credit-card debt nearly tripled, soaring from $238 billion to $692 billion. By last year, it was up to $937 billion, the report said.
State governments aggressively hawk their lottery products, which some people call a tax on stupidity. 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.
Fifty-six percent of…
cortex | June 9, 2008An eloquent elegy to age, written by Steven Johnson on his fortieth birthday:
One of the things that's always stuck with me from my Mind Wide Open research is that human beings vary predictably in their perception of time as they age. Time literally seems to go faster the older you get--not just in the span of decades, but also in the span of minutes. Put someone in a room without a clock or watch and ask them to guess when an hour has passed, and on average, the older person will perceive the hour zipping by faster than the younger person.
The older I get, the more I think that one of the…
cortex | June 9, 2008Given the weather on the Eastern seaboard - it's one of those hot, sultry days where you wait for a thunderstorm to purge the humidity from the air - I decided to do a quick literature search for the effects of heat on cognition. But as so often happens when I play with vague search terms on Google scholar, I ended up getting entranced by completely unrelated papers. Like this one by Lawrence Williams and John Bargh:
In one experiment, Williams had an undergraduate assistant meet each volunteer at the door and bring him or her up to the lab. In the elevator, the assistant asked the volunteer…
cortex | June 7, 2008Dave Munger has a great post on how fMRI images bias the brain. The researchers asked 156 students at Colorado State University to evaluate three different summaries of brain research. As you can probably guess (especially if you're familiar with this research) the students gave significantly higher ratings for "scientific reasoning" to articles accompanied by pretty pictures of brains. Anatomy is persuasive.
In a final experiment, McCabe and Castel modified a real write-up of a real brain-imaging study, which argued that brain imaging can be used as a lie detector. Students read one of two…
cortex | June 6, 2008Kottke links to some early reviews of cinema. Needless to say, hyperbole ruled the day. As one critic proclaimed:
Photography has ceased to record immobility. It perpetuates the image of movement. When these gadgets are in the hands of the public, when anyone can photograph the ones who are dear to them, not just in their immobile form, but with movement, action, familiar gestures and the words out of their mouths, then death will no longer be absolute, final.
But Hollywood didn't erase death and the internet won't nullify time, space, geography, etc. Technology is marvelous, but human nature…
cortex | June 6, 2008Humans are exquisitely social animals, and yet we're vulnerable to some pretty stunning flaws in social cognition. Unfortunately, most of these flaws are on full display during a presidential campaign. Consider the false rumor, which can influence our beliefs even when it has been debunked. The most powerful example of this phenomenon, of course, is the swift-boating of John Kerry. It didn't matter that every reputable news source found most of the charges to be misleading. The sheer fact that Kerry was being accused of lying was enough to impugn his honesty. Even when we're found innocent, a…
cortex | June 5, 2008It's been recognized for a few years that drinking diet sodas can actually cause weight gain, since the phony sweetness of artificial sweeteners disrupts the "predictive relationship" between a sweet taste and caloric satisfaction. In other words, people drink a diet Coke when they are craving a sweet pick-me-up. However, because the soda doesn't actually contain any calories, the craving remains unsatisfied. The end result is that rodents (and people) end up consuming more calories later on. The craving returns with a vengeance. Here, for instance, is the abstract for a recent paper in…
cortex | June 5, 2008Allegra Goodman is a marvelous writer. Intuition, her last novel, was an uncannily accurate depiction of the slog of a science lab. It captured the epic tedium of empiricism, the way experiments are ambiguous even when they work. (And they so rarely work!) I bring her up now because she just wrote a gorgeous few paragraphs on religion, faith and doubt. The piece doesn't neatly slot into the religious wars of scienceblogs - Goodman isn't devout about anything - but it manages to express an idea that I often struggle to put in words. She begins by talking about the boredom of a child when…
cortex | June 4, 2008Sometimes, when I walk through international airports, I get a little sad about the homogeneity of homo sapiens. I guess it's an inevitable by-product of globalization and modernity, but I can't help but wish that we didn't all drink Starbucks and wear Nike shoes and listen to Rihanna on our iPods.
So when I see pictures like this (and you better click on that link) I'm utterly shocked. The world isn't all flat: somewhere, somehow, members of my own species are living a completely different sort of life. And then I wonder what the people in red body paint were thinking. Did they just…