cortex | June 4, 2008Last year, some drunken teens decided to trash the house of Robert Frost. The teens are now being required by a judge to take poetry classes focusing on the verse of Frost:
Using "The Road Not Taken" and another poem as jumping-off points, Frost biographer Jay Parini hopes to show the vandals the error of their ways -- and the redemptive power of poetry.
"I guess I was thinking that if these teens had a better understanding of who Robert Frost was and his contribution to our society, that they would be more respectful of other people's property in the future and would also learn something…
cortex | June 4, 2008Or so I say on the Bryant Park Project. We talk about tip-of-the-tongue moments, metacognition and why seeing a picture of a motorcycle will make you think about biopsies.
cortex | June 4, 2008Over at Neurophilosophy, Mo has an excellent summary of a drug in Phase II clinical trials that tries to treat depression by up-regulating neurogenesis. In other words, it wants to ease your sadness by giving you more new brain cells. What these new brain cells do, exactly, remains a mystery, but numerous studies have found a connection between reduced neurogenesis and rodent models of depression. This research strongly suggests that the most effective treatments for severe depression (Prozac and ECT) work by increasing the rate of neurogenesis in the hippocampus. For instance, if you…
cortex | June 3, 2008The latest Wired features a list of contrarian environmental facts (organically raised cattle emit more methane gas than conventionally raised cattle, nuclear power is great, the Prius battery takes a lot of energy to make, etc.) but I was most surprised by this factoid:
Cooling a home in Arizona produces 93 percent few carbon dioxide emissions than warming a house in New England
The math is quite simple. Most people set their thermostat to somewhere between 68 and 76 degrees. When it's really hot outside (let's pretend it's August in Phoenix, which means 105 and humid) that means you need to…
cortex | June 3, 2008Is your right parahippocampal gyrus feeling a little tired? Then maybe you should stop being such a sarcastic smart ass. It turns out that this obscure brain area, tucked deep inside the right hemisphere, is largely responsible for the detection of sarcasm, a rather sophisticated element of social cognition:
Dr. Rankin, a neuropsychologist and assistant professor in the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco, used an innovative test developed in 2002, the Awareness of Social Inference Test, or Tasit. It incorporates videotaped examples of exchanges in which a…
cortex | June 2, 2008What psychological phenomenon do you believe in but cannot prove? I'd have to go with birth order. Having grown up with three siblings, I can't help but be convinced that my birth order (I'm the second oldest) has had a profoundly important influence on my personality.
That said, birth order is mostly bunk. Numerous scientific studies and meta-analyses have found that the phenomenon doesn't seem to exist. There are few, if any, personality traits that consistently correlate with a child's order within the family.
But I'm not giving up on my empirical hunch. Like all good rationalizers, I can…
cortex | June 2, 2008I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on a phenomenon that's always fascinated me: the tip-of-the-tongue moment.
Late in 1988, a 41-year-old Italian hardware clerk arrived in his doctor's office with a bizarre complaint. Although he could recognize people, and remember all sorts of information about them, he had no idea what to call them. He'd lost the ability to remember any personal name, even the names of close friends and family members. He was forced to refer to his wife as "wife."
A few months before, the man, known as LS in the scientific literature, had been in a…
cortex | May 30, 2008I just wanted to thank everyone who came out to Water Taxi Beach last night to hear me, Dan Ariely and the Radio Lab team talk about the irrational brain. I had a great time. I hope you did, too. I'd never been to that "beach" before, but it's quite the spot to enjoy a beer, especially on such a lovely summer evening.
And if anyone has been to other Science Festival events, please put your comments below. I was especially excited about the creativity panel, with Ramachandran and Bill T. Jones.
Update: Pictures here.
cortex | May 30, 2008Before I became a writer, I assumed that some people (Nabakov, Updike, Bellow, etc.) were natural writers. They were born speaking in pithy prose, with taut sentences and interesting verb choice. But then, after reading all the usual Bellow masterpieces, I started reading his early novels. And I realized that even Bellow had to learn how to write. Nabakov juvenalia is similarly flawed. (Early Updike is still pretty fine, so maybe he's the exception.)
And then, once I started writing, I realized that writing is no different than any other craft or skill. It takes time and effort and the…
cortex | May 30, 2008Every science goes through several distinct phases. First, there is the dissection phase. The subject is broken apart into its simplest possible elements. (As Plato put it, "nature is cut at the joints, like a good butcher.") For neuroscience, this involved reducing the brain into a byzantine collection of chemical ingredients, from kinase enzymes to neurotransmitters to sodium ions. (Let's the say this phase began with Ramon y Cajal.) Then, there is the model phase. Scientists begin tentatively trying to figure out how these parts interact. Finally, once the models start to make sense,…
cortex | May 27, 2008In the past year, I've spent a small fortune at the dentist. Between wisdom teeth removal, a few routine cleanings and the replacement of an old cavity, my tab has come to several thousand dollars. (Needless to say, I don't have dental insurance: I'm a freelance writer. But I do have a dental plan.) After my last trip to the dentist, I left the office with two thoughts: 1) novocaine just might be the most effective medication neuroscience will ever invent and 2) do those cleanings by the dental hygienist (an extra $65 in my case) really do anything? I use one of those fancy toothbrushes, and…
cortex | May 27, 2008At first glance, "mindfulness" meditation practices seem completely counterintuitive. If people are suffering from pain, shouldn't they learn ways to not focus on their pain? Isn't it better to block out the negative sensations? (Repression isn't always such a bad thing...)
And yet, there's some tantalizing evidence (much of it anecdotal) that aspects of mindfulness mediation can help people deal with chronic pain and various mental illnesses, such as depression. The virtue of being acutely aware of every sensation, even negative sensations, is that people become better able to modulate them…
cortex | May 27, 2008The body control on this guy is utterly insane:
While there have been some interesting studies of dance and the brain, most of this research focuses on the learning of motor movements. (Not surprisingly, expert dancers exhibit increased activity in the cortical "action observation network" when watching dances "in the movement style of which they were expert". In other words, a ballet dancer shows increased activity in the brain when watching ballet, but not when watching cheerleaders, or Merce Cunningham.)
But I couldn't find any research that would explain the bizarre, and seemingly…
cortex | May 27, 2008Last Sunday, I had an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on the underlying causes of home field advantage.
The Celtics are an extreme example of a sporting phenomenon known as home-field advantage: teams playing on their home field, or court, are significantly more likely to win. The advantage plays a role in every major sport. Home teams in the NBA have a 62 percent chance of winning, while those in Major League Baseball and the National Hockey League have a 53 percent chance of winning. (Football teams are somewhere in between, with annual ranges typically between 54 and 64 percent…
cortex | May 21, 2008Joan Acocella has an interesting article on the science of hangovers:
Hangovers also have an emotional component. Kingsley Amis, who was, in his own words, one of the foremost drunks of his time, and who wrote three books on drinking, described this phenomenon as "the metaphysical hangover": "When that ineffable compound of depression, sadness (these two are not the same), anxiety, self-hatred, sense of failure and fear for the future begins to steal over you, start telling yourself that what you have is a hangover. . . . You have not suffered a minor brain lesion, you are not all that bad at…
cortex | May 21, 2008Iceland, apparently, is the happiest country on earth:
Highest birth rate in Europe + highest divorce rate + highest percentage of women working outside the home = the best country in the world in which to live. There has to be something wrong with this equation. Put those three factors together - loads of children, broken homes, absent mothers - and what you have, surely, is a recipe for misery and social chaos. But no. Iceland, the block of sub-Arctic lava to which these statistics apply, tops the latest table of the United Nations Development Programme's (UNDP) Human Development Index…
cortex | May 21, 2008There are lots of ways to combine science and art. Some of them are more problematic than others:
One of the strangest exhibits at the opening of "Design and the Elastic Mind," the very strange show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York that explores the territory where design meets science, was a teeny coat made out of living mouse stem cells. The "victimless leather" was kept alive in an incubator with nutrients, unsettlingly alive. Until recently, that is.
Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat. "It was growing too much," she said in an interview from a…
cortex | May 21, 2008In case you find yourself in Pasadena, CA tomorrow evening, and want to hear me prattle on about art, science, veal stock and Stravinsky, I'll be speaking at the Art Center College of Design at 7:30.
cortex | May 20, 2008There's something a little scary to me about TMS. (I should note, though, that my fear is irrational: the technology is now extremely safe. Seizures are a very, very rare side-effect of TMS. Unless, that is, you already have a brain lesion.) But this video shows just how easy it is to short-circuit a particular brain function. I particularly liked the elegant dissociation between speech and singing:
cortex | May 20, 2008Johann Hari decides to take Provigil (aka viagra for the brain) and reports back on the results:
I sat down and took one 200mg tablet with a glass of water. Then I pottered about the flat for an hour, listening to music and tidying up, before sitting down on the settee. I picked up a book about quantum physics and super-string theory I have been meaning to read for ages, for a column I'm thinking of writing. It had been hanging over me, daring me to read it. Five hours later, I realised I had hit the last page. I looked up. It was getting dark outside. I was hungry. I hadn't noticed anything…