cortex | April 29, 2008The Times has an interesting review of two new books that discuss the oft cited link between mental illness and artistic creativity. It's all too easy to indulge in cliched overgeneralizations about the thin line separating madness and genius, but the reality is that true mental illness is rarely conducive to acts of creation. Virginia Woolf, for instance, couldn't write when she was experiencing one of her "episodes": the onset of depression was "like a death," she wrote. Nevertheless, as Woolf's journals make clear, her writing was still profoundly influenced by her mental illness. Here…
cortex | April 28, 2008You probably thought this post was going to be about how Meredith Grey (or perhaps McDreamy?) is a neuroscientist, or how Shonda Rhimes (the creator of Grey's Anatomy) anticipated some surprising discovery of modern neuroscience. Alas, I have no such insights. Marcel Proust may have been a neuroscientist, but Grey's Anatomy is still just an entertaining and delightfully dumb primetime soap opera. To be perfectly honest, I'm always slightly ashamed at myself after I squander 42 minutes of my life on the randy residents of Seattle Grace hospital.
The most recent episode revolved around a…
cortex | April 28, 2008War Emblem, the 2002 Kentucky Derby winner, is one finicky horse:
By all accounts, he [War Emblem] is a happy horse -- gamboling through fields most of the day, showing the turn of foot that propelled him to lead every step of the way in America's greatest horse race.
In reality, however, War Emblem is in therapy.
He is isolated from the other studs at Shadai Stallion Station in the hope that he will feel safe and more confident in his sexuality. Mares surround him in an effort to revive a long-dormant libido.
"We know he is fertile, but he has no interest in mares," said Dr. Nobuo Tsunoda,…
cortex | April 25, 2008I'm no forager. Once, I took a foraging class in Brooklyn's Prospect Park and managed to find varieties of poisonous mushrooms that even the instructor had never encountered before. (They looked like porcini mushrooms to me.) Nevertheless, I've gotten very excited this year about the wild chives that grow in a nearby field. I trust myself to forage for these chives because their oniony reek is unmistakable, allowing me to easily distinguish between the chives and the interspersed leaves of grass that are there just to trick me. If I were smart, I'd sell my harvest in the Union Square…
cortex | April 25, 2008Razib calls my attention to this new Nature study on the genetic variation underlying the stress response. The researchers focused on neuropeptide Y, an endogenous anxiolytic (it's like an anti-anxiety drug naturally produced by the brain) which is released in response to stress. They focused on a single nucleotide polymorphism (aka SNP) which "alters NPY expression in vitro and seems to account for more than half of the variation in expression in vivo."
The pertinent question, of course, is how they measured variation in vivo. The researchers used a few different, and quite interesting,…
cortex | April 24, 2008It sounds like one of those 1950's psychological experiments that scientific ethics boards no longer allow: Nicholas White was trapped in an elevator in New York City's McGraw-Hill building for forty-one hours. Just thinking about such an ordeal gives me shivers of claustrophobic anxiety. Forty-one hours! In a suspended box!
Thankfully, security cameras caught the whole thing on tape:
And then read the article, which is fascinating throughout.
cortex | April 24, 2008Go see his new show at MoMA. Here's Peter Schjeldahl:
Eliasson is entertaining, yet his central concern seems less a working of spectacular magic than an investigation of how spectacular magic works. He raises awareness of the neurological susceptibilities that condition all of what we see and may think we know. This can be humiliating, as it often is in encounters with the menacingly proportioned spaces, grim videos, and noise assaults of Bruce Nauman, the greatest of post-minimalist explorers, whose influence Eliasson is quick to acknowledge. But with Eliasson the experience of our…
cortex | April 24, 2008Rebecca Solnit, author of some wonderful books, astutely describes one of the worst side-effects of testosterone:
We were preparing to leave [a party in Aspen] when our host said, "No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you." He was an imposing man who'd made a lot of money in advertising or something like that.
He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night, and then sat us down at his grainy wood table and said to me, "So? I hear you've written a couple of books."
I replied, "Several, actually."
He said, in the way you encourage your friend's 7-year-old to…
cortex | April 23, 2008Did you know that more than 53 percent of the prisoners in Federal prisons are serving time for drug offenses? That's crazy. When will our politicians realize that drug addiction is a mental illness, and that the War on Drugs is essentially a futile struggle against the dopamine reward pathway? Addicts need treatment, not incarceration.
This article remains one of the best things I've read on the failures of American drug policy.
cortex | April 23, 2008Over at the wonderful World's Fair, Ben Cohen has an interview with Kelly Joyce, author of the forthcoming Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency. Here is how Joyce summarizes the main argument of her book:
In the United States, MRI is socially constructed as a sacred technology--one that represents progress, certainty, and good health care. The technique's sacred status is achieved in part because cultural ideas link anatomical pictures and mechanical reproduction to transparency and truth. But, it is also achieved because information about contexts and actors is often missing…
cortex | April 22, 2008Crazy stuff, courtesy of John Tierney:
The natural impulse to stop holding your breath (typically within 30 seconds or a minute) is not because of an oxygen shortage but because of the painful buildup of carbon dioxide. Mr. Blaine said he began trying to overcome that urge when he was a child in Brooklyn and at age 11 managed to hold his breath for three and a half minutes.
In his current training, he said, he does exercises every morning in which he breathes for no more than 12 minutes over the course of an hour, and he sleeps in a hypoxic tent in his Manhattan apartment that simulates the…
cortex | April 22, 2008Is this chart surprising?
I was an Arts (English) and Psychology (Neuroscience) major, so I clearly didn't choose the most lucrative fields. (And I contemplated a philosophy minor...) For me, the most surprising aspect of the chart (and it's still not that surprising) was the payoff of practicality. The best paying sciences, like chemistry, computer science and engineering, are also the ones with the most direct applications to the real world. Clearly, the only reason to pursue the path of pure knowledge (aka basic science, comp lit and metaphysics) is for the sake of knowledge. Plus, it's…
cortex | April 21, 2008Speaking of the senses, it's always fascinating what happens when that sensory spigot is turned off, so that the cortex is suddenly filled with silence. Jad Abumrad, the co-host of Radio Lab (download their new season!), recently spent some time in an anechoic chamber, or a room designed to stifle soundwaves and erase echoes. The brain, it turns out, can't stand the quiet. When confronted with utter silence, it starts to hallucinate:
Deep in the bowels of a nondescript 1950's era government building is Bell Lab's very own anechoic chamber, no longer in use. The nice folks at Bell Labs agreed…
cortex | April 21, 2008In honor of National Poetry Month, which always struck me as a very bizarre month (is poetry less essential in the other eleven months of the year? And why April?), I thought I'd post a selection of some poetry on brainy themes. Here, for instance, is the opening stanza of Franz Wright poem in the latest New Yorker, entitled "The World of the Senses":
What a day: I had some trouble
following the plotline; however,
the special effects were incredible.
I sometimes wonder if people have always had a sense of their senses being special effects, or if the modern age (and by modern I mean…
cortex | April 20, 2008I've got a cockatiel with an inverted beak - it's a pretty funny looking underbite, but doesn't interfere with his eating - and I've often wondered if animals ever get self-conscious about their appearance. Does my cockatiel have any clue that he looks a little ridiculous? Does the chinese crested hairless dog realize that it's a hairless dog? This probably strikes you as a silly question - vanity, after all, can seem like such a human preoccupation - but the logic of sexual selection would imply that creatures, especially males, are actually exquisitely aware of how they look. That's why my…
cortex | April 17, 2008Nicholas Kristof has an excellent column on rationalizing, partisan affiliation and the Clinton/Obama race:
If you're a Democrat, your candidate won in Wednesday night's presidential debate -- that was obvious, and most neutral observers would recognize that. But the other candidate issued appalling distortions, and the news commentary afterward was shamefully biased.
So you're madder than ever at the other candidate. You may even be more likely to vote for John McCain if your candidate loses.
That prediction is based on psychological research that helps to explain the recriminations between…
cortex | April 17, 2008One of the odd things about blogs, at least for me, is that they encourage a really informal and oddly intimate relationship between the writer and reader. I feel like I really know my favorite bloggers, in a way that I would never presume to know my favorite novelists or newspaper columnists or magazine writers. Partly, I imagine, it's the informal voice of the blogosphere, and partly it's the enticing mix of idiosyncratic personal information and opinionated commentary that defines the bloggy format. A blog, at least for me, is the writing genre that most closely approximates a friendly…
cortex | April 16, 2008For more than 30 years, it has been a truism of social science that, once our basic needs are met, money doesn't buy happiness, or even upgrade despair. In one well-known survey, people on the Forbes 100 list of the richest Americans were only slightly happier than the American public as a whole; in an even more famous study, done in 1978, a group of researchers determined that 22 lottery winners were no happier than a control group. This is commonly referred to as the Easterlin paradox, after the economist Richard Easterlin who first proposed it in 1974.
But new evidence suggests that the…
cortex | April 15, 2008It's a joke I've heard many times from neuroscientists who use monkeys in their research: "There are all these regulations about the treatment of primates, but there are no regulations governing the treatment of post-docs". (Of course, we don't record from neurons in the post-doc brain, or at least I hope we don't.) But the joke captures something important about the use of primates for biomedical research in most developed nations, which is that they get treated, in most cases, rather well. Obviously, they're still research subjects, which sucks. But they're generally kept in enriched…
cortex | April 15, 2008Over at Freakonomics, they invited several prominent thinkers to weigh in on a rather lofty question: How much progress have psychology and psychiatry really made?
The answers are mostly interesting, with nearly everyone agreeing that the sciences of the mind and brain have made tremendous progress. That is, of course, the correct answer. When you think that, one hundred years ago, Ramon y Cajal had just published his "speculative cavort" laying out the neuron doctrine, or that we still had no effective treatments for any mental disorders (the frontal lobotomy would become popular a few…