cortex | May 17, 2008Haven't we done enough to the poor tomato? We've turned the voluptuous fruit into a pale imitation of itself: the average supermarket tomato, turned red with ethylene, tastes like, well, nothing. And now we have to genetically modify it for the sake of ketchup?
At a research farm in California, scientists for H.J. Heinz Co. are also cautiously eyeing their young tomato plants. Their goal, however, is a little more specific.
Heinz is trying to breed a sweeter tomato in order to cut down on the costly corn syrup now used in its ketchup. It's one response to the soaring price of corn, caused in…
cortex | May 16, 2008How would science ever progress without anomalies? Theories are useful things, but they are most useful when they're wrong, when their Newtonian predictions are off, as in the case of the Pioneer space probes, by a hundred-millionths of an inch per second for every second of spaceflight. Robert Lee Hotz has the fascinating story:
Beyond the edge of the solar system, something has gradually dragged two of America's oldest space probes -- Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 -- a quarter-million miles off course. Astrophysicists have struggled 15 years in vain to identify the infinitesimal force at play.…
cortex | May 15, 2008The secret to winning in the NBA playoffs this year is to play on your own court: teams at home are 20-1. At first glance, this makes little sense. It's much easier to understand why football teams (the noise can disrupt play calling) and baseball teams (each field is unique) might benefit from playing at home. But why basketball? The court is always the same and the offense doesn't rely on audibles.
The only tenable hypothesis, it seems to me, is that teams on their home-court have an affective advantage.* The cheering fans make them more likely to be in the proper emotional state of mind.…
cortex | May 15, 2008D.T. Max has an absolutely fascinating article in a recent New Yorker on the molecular gastronomist and chef Grant Achatz and his battle with tongue cancer. While Achatz's doctors initially insisted that he get his tongue surgically removed, the chef opted for an experimental treatment of radiation and chemo. The treatment appears to have worked, but it took months before Achatz regained his sense of taste:
When irradiated, taste receptors usually disappear and reappear according to the importance that they had to our hominid ancestors: sweetness goes last and returns first. "Before you can…
cortex | May 14, 2008One of the delicious ironies of memory is that, even when our recollections are utterly false, they still feel true. Consider this wonderful tale from the upcoming season of This American Life (I've loved the first two episodes, by the way):
Or as Proust put it: "How paradoxical it is to seek in reality for the pictures that are stored in one's memory...The memory of a particular image is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years." That bleak view of memory jives with lots of recent work looking at the cellular reconsolidation of…
cortex | May 14, 2008I admire David Brooks for trying to expand the list of topics written about by Times columnists. (To be honest, I'm a little tired of reading about presidential politics.) His latest column, on "The Neural Buddhists," tries to interject modern neuroscience into the current debate over New Atheists and religion.
Lo and behold, over the past decade, a new group of assertive atheists has done battle with defenders of faith. The two sides have argued about whether it is reasonable to conceive of a soul that survives the death of the body and about whether understanding the brain explains away or…
cortex | May 12, 2008The tragedies are so vast they are incomprehensible: thousands are dead after a powerful earthquake in China while up to half a million people in Myanmar may die as a result of post-cyclone epidemics. How does the mind grapple with such nightmarish statistics?
The answer is simple: it doesn't. Paul Slovic, a psychologist at the University of Oregon, has demonstrated that suffering on such a epic scale falls into one of the brain's many blind spots. His experiments are straightforward: he asks people how much they would be willing to donate to various charitable causes. For example, Slovic…
cortex | May 9, 2008From the new Atlantic:
Four researchers compared the effectiveness of a cell phone equipped with a GPS receiver to traditional paper maps and to "direct experience" (first walking through a route with a guide, then trying it alone). They asked 66 participants to each walk six different routes, finding their way each time using one of the three navigational aids, and later to sketch from memory the routes they had taken. The GPS users traveled longer distances, walked more slowly, and made more stops during the walk than the participants using the low-tech methods, and they made more…
cortex | May 9, 2008Sorry about the light posting - I've been traveling. As far as I'm concerned, the best thing about air-travel (besides the safety aspect) is that I get to read novels. For some reason, I've decided that I can't work or sleep on planes, so I always make sure that my carry-on bag is stuffed full of fiction. On my last flight, I consumed Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri. I won't bore you with my praise, but it's a remarkable collection of short stories. The sheer fluidity and poise of her writing is, as a fellow writer, somewhat depressing. She makes it look so easy. I'm really curious about…
cortex | May 7, 2008Over at Mind Matters, my other site, we just posted a rather interesting article on the ways in which ordinary cell phones can alter your patterns of brain activity, and even interfere with sleep. Here's Doug Fields:
Hospitals and airplanes ban the use of cell phones, because their electromagnetic transmissions can interfere with sensitive electrical devices. Could the brain also fall into that category? Of course, all our thoughts, sensations and actions arise from bioelectricity generated by neurons and transmitted through complex neural circuits inside our skull. Electrical signals between…
cortex | May 6, 2008British papers are fun. The Daily Mail recently ran a deliciously nasty article on hippy-crites, those pious celebrities (like John Travolta, Chris Martin and Brangelina) who talk endlessly about global warming and yet still fly in lots of private jets. Travolta, for instance, recently few by himself from Europe to the United States in a Boeing 707, which can normally hold more than 100 people.
But this isn't just a problem for celebrities. A new paper in Conservation Biology looked at how the "environmental attitudes" of individuals affected the location of their home in the Teton Valley of…
cortex | May 6, 2008In recent years, there has been lots of speculation on the potential intersection of neuroscience and the legal system. Will brain imaging became a fool-proof lie detector? Are some violent offenders suffering from a defective emotional brain that's beyond their control? Should we replace the insanity defense with a less rationalist account of human morality? etc, etc. The assumption is that the latest tools of science can help us refine our squishy concepts of justice, which we've inherited from Plato, the Old Testament and the 18th century British legal system. Needless to say, Plato didn't…
cortex | May 5, 2008The Times recently had an article on the booming business of brain fitness:
Decaying brains, or the fear thereof, have inspired a mini-industry of brain health products -- not just supplements like coenzyme Q10, ginseng and bacopa, but computer-based fitter-brain products as well.
Nintendo's $19.99 Brain Age 2, a popular video game of simple math and memory exercises, is one. Posit Science's $395 computer-based "cognitive behavioral training" exercises are another. MindFit, a $149 software-based program, combines cognitive assessment of more than a dozen different skills with a personalized…
cortex | May 5, 2008It is, perhaps, the most nightmarish of neurological conditions: when the brain stem is selectively injured, a person can be perfectly self-aware and yet completely paralyzed, so that they lose control of virtually all voluntary muscles. The technical name of the syndrome captures the horror: "Locked-In Syndrome".
This weekend, I watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (newly released on DVD), which tells the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French journalist, who suffered a massive stroke that left him painfully cognizant of his complete paralysis. He ended up writing a memoir by…
cortex | May 4, 2008I completely agree with the sentiments voiced in this column, by William Rhoden:
Why do we keep giving thoroughbred horse racing a pass? Is it the tradition? The millions upon millions invested in the betting?
Why isn't there more pressure to put the sport of kings under the umbrella of animal cruelty?
The sport is at least as inhumane as greyhound racing and only a couple of steps removed from animal fighting.
It's hard to think otherwise after watching the brutal death of Eight Belles. And, of course, it's not just high-stakes races like the Derby that are so hazardous. A recent article in…
cortex | May 2, 2008Razib has some thought-provoking, if incorrect, speculations on literature, literary audiences and modernity:
Here's the argument: contemporary mainstream fiction is very different from the storytelling of the deep past because of a demand side shift. Women consume most fiction today, and their tastes differ, on average, from those of men. How do they differ? To be short about it men are into plot, while women are into character. This means that modern literary fiction emphasizes psychological complexity, subtly and finesse. In contrast, male-oriented action adventure or science fiction…
cortex | May 1, 2008Now that the boomers are entering their sixties, the problem of age-related cognitive decline is going to become a serious mental health issue. The aged brain often suffers from a bevy of symptoms, from memory loss to problems with concentration. The question, of course, is what causes these symptoms?
Over at Mind Matters, we recently featured an interesting post on some recent research that tried to answer these pertinent questions. The short answer is that, over time, the different parts of the brain becomes less interconnected.
Jessica Andrews-Hanna and her colleagues at Harvard…
cortex | April 30, 2008So there's an acute fertilizer shortage. The big problem is a lack of nitrogen which, although it accounts for most of the atmosphere (78.1 percent), is notoriously tough to "fix," since it's got those pesky triple bonds. One of the unsung heroes of modernity is the Haber process, which makes nitrogen-rich fertilizer by heating, under high heat and pressure, nitrogen and hydrogen.
The Haber process now produces 100 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer per year, mostly in the form of anhydrous ammonia, ammonium nitrate, and urea. 3-5% of world natural gas production is consumed in the Haber…
cortex | April 30, 2008A calm and cool summary of the value of arts education in public schools:
What are "the habits of mind" cultivated in arts classrooms, they ask in their book "Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education." As unsatisfied with wafty promises that arts learning inspires "creativity" as with pledges that it boosts scores, the Project Zero researchers videotaped several very different classrooms in two schools with intensive arts instruction. They watched teachers imparting techniques and introducing students to the world of the visual arts, and saw certain cognitive "dispositions…
cortex | April 29, 2008First, the Hotel St. George Press, a really cool literary publishing group in Brooklyn (where else?) was kind enough to ask me a few questions:
Heather McCalden: Would you mind relaying a bit about your experiences in the lab, the kitchen, and the writer's desk - how they may have fed each other, for instance? Have the commonalities (assuming they exist) provoked any of the ideas in Proust was a Neuroscientist?
Jonah Lehrer: A few years before I started working in a lab, back when I was working as a weekend prep cook in a restaurant for gas money, I had this epiphany about chefs: they…