cortex | April 14, 2008Raymond Tallis recently launched a broadside against the nascent field of neuroaesthetics, especially as applied to literature:
A generation of academic literary critics has now arisen who invoke "neuroscience" to assist them in their work of explication, interpretation and appreciation. Norman Bryson, once a leading exponent of Theory and a social constructivist, has described his Damascene conversion, as a result of which he now places the firing of neurons rather than signifiers at the heart of literary criticism. Evolutionary theory, sociobiology and allied forces are also recruited to…
cortex | April 14, 2008When I mutter about the fourth culture, about the possibility of bridging the cultural chasms separating art and science, I should make it clear that I'm not talking about stuff like this. In fact, I think there's something mildly offensive about turning one of the more profound equations of modern physics into a lame, self-aggrandizing album title.
cortex | April 11, 2008A recent scene at the Bronx Zoo gorilla exhibit:
On the left side of the enclosure, standing five feet away from the glass wall separating man and animal, is a big male gorilla. He crosses his arms as he gazes out at his adoring audience. The humans are thrilled - "He has such sensitive eyes!' is a common refrain - but the gorilla looks a little bored, as if he's tired of the crowds. Nevertheless, it's a poignant moment of primate solidarity.
Another gorilla is crouching off to the right side of the grass. Her back is turned and, at first, it's not quite clear what she's doing. Her hand is…
cortex | April 9, 2008A great comment by Joel Kahn, who argues that we need a new science of human interaction, able to study what Durkheim referred to as "the conscience collective":
Durkheim was obviously not the first to advance a notion of mind which transcended the individual. But while it may have been common for many nineteenth century figures to write about group minds with distinctive emergent or transcendent properties (think for example of all that interest in the spirit of history, or more concretely in crowds, or 'primitive' minds), which required minds to be viewed collectively rather than as…
cortex | April 7, 2008For those who might be interested (hi mom!): I'll be on the Leonard Lopate show on WNYC show early this afternoon, around 1 pm. I'll be talking about veal stock, glutamic acid and umami, so I suggest that you eat lunch before listening, or else the subject will make you even hungrier.
cortex | April 7, 2008Here's Junot Diaz, talking about his writing process:
It was an incredibly difficult struggle. I tell a lot of young people I work with that nothing should be more inspirational than my dumb ass. It took me 11 years to struggle through one dumb book, and every day you just want to give up. But you don't find out you're an artist because you do something really well. You find out you're an artist because when you fail you have something within you--strength or belief or just craziness--that picks you back up again.
One of the criticisms of my book, and it's a criticism I take rather seriously…
cortex | April 6, 2008It seems that you can't go to a chic restaurant nowadays without encountering octopus on the menu. Like its cephalopod cousins, octotpus is best cooked according to the "two-minute or two-hour" rule. You can either grill the octopus quickly, imbuing it with a meaty smoke flavor, or you can braise it for hours until its tentacle chewiness gives way to a pleasing tenderness. Serve with some bold Mediterranean flavors, like tapenade, paprika or oily beans.
Now I happen to really enjoy eating octopus. But I can't help but wonder if it's an ethically dubious proposition. The problem is that…
cortex | April 4, 2008Sorry for the light posting - I've been flitting about, spending way too much time in airports. (My carbon footprint is a constant source of guilt.) I've recently spent a lot of time hanging around various universities, which always reminds me of just how good undergraduates have it. They manage to live a purely intellectual life, with nothing to do but explore the world of ideas and wander around libraries so vast they'd make Borges blush. (Meanwhile, their professors are begging for grants and grading piles of papers.) The students also have schedules fit for philosopher-kings, with every…
cortex | April 2, 2008I've been remiss in not linking to Benjamin Cohen's incredibly interesting series of posts on scientific objectivity.
The mere fact that objectivity *has* a history is revealing. It's more typical that the timeless, ahuman connotation of "objectivity" renders it the precise sort of thing that does not change throughout history. Subjectivity certainly does, since people change. But objectivity would seem to be ahistorical.
It is not.
In their 1992 article, by looking across scientific atlases and forms of visual representation across the nineteenth century and to the mid-twentieth, they…
cortex | April 2, 2008There's no shortage of books on neurological patients with brain injuries, but Head Cases, the new book by Michael Paul Mason, is one of my recent favorites. (See here for the Times review.) Mason brings a unique perspective to the tragic tales, as he's not a neurologist or a neuroscientist. Instead, he's a brain injury case manager based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, so the stories are as much about the bureaucratic maze of insurance claims as they are about the hippocampus. The Times review criticizes Mason for "giving the neuroscience short shrift," but, for me, that was one of the strengths of the…
cortex | March 31, 2008The Economist has compiled a really interesting chart on the ideological differences between the American and British electorates. (I've been kind of obsessed with all things Anglo-American since the start of the John Adams miniseries on HBO.) The article focuses on the large gap between the two publics, but I was actually impressed by how, once you removed God and God-tainted issues (like abortion and homosexuality) from the equation, the two countries were actually rather similar in ways I wouldn't have expected. For instance, both British and American voters feel virtually identically…
cortex | March 31, 2008This is from The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1:
Q: I would like to ask about your having said that you were very timid about beginning to write stories.
Borges: Yes, I was very timid because when I was young I thought of myself as a poet. Then I had an accident. You can feel the scar. If you touch my head here, you will see. Feel all those mountains, bumps? Then I spent a fortnight in a hospital. I had nightmares and sleeplessness - insomnia. After that they told me that I had been in danger, well, of dying, that it was really a wonderful thing that the operation had been successful. I…
cortex | March 31, 2008Someone should really tell the NCAA tournament television commentators that "the hot hand" doesn't exist. I've gotten pretty tired of hearing these tired cliches about Texas going cold, or Stephen Curry catching fire yet again. Never has a cognitive illusion gotten so much play.
The illusory nature of basketball shooting streaks was first demonstrated by Amos Tversky (of kahnemanandtversky fame) and Thomas Gilovich, a psychologist at Cornell. They began the investigation by sifting through years of Philadelphia 76er statistics. They looked at every single shot taken by ever single player,…
cortex | March 27, 2008If you happen to be in the Charlottesville area, I'll be at the Virginia Book Festival tomorrow afternoon, on a panel entitled: "The Creative Mind: How Artists and Writers Invent the World."
cortex | March 26, 2008A commenter asked an astute question in response to my post on religion and dietary laws:
What are your thoughts on kashrut primarily as a means of group indentity reinforcement, ritual, and control? In pre-literate times or in unstable social settings, wouldn't dietary habits be a useful means of tracking who is and is not a member of one's tribe? (Dietary laws also have the effect of confering monopoly power to those preparing and selling the food.)
I think the function of these religious laws - and the Old Testament is stuffed full of such laws - goes well beyond mere identification. While…
cortex | March 26, 2008I was raised in a kosher household, which meant that I grew up convinced that bacon, lobster, pepperoni pizza and cheeseburgers were the promised land of food. (I assumed the banning of trafe was part of God's punishment for Eve and the apple.) I'm no longer kosher, which means that I've since learned that I was right: bacon really does make everything taste better. If I see shellfish on a menu, especially when the shellfish is combined with a pork product (scallops wrapped in prosciutto?) I can't not order the dish.
My point is that we learn to crave what we are denied. It's a perversity of…
cortex | March 25, 2008I had no idea this many Americans were nocturnal:
Twenty percent of American workers are night-shift workers, and the number is growing by about 3% per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the rest of society sleeps, police officers, security guards, truck drivers, office cleaning crews, hotel desk clerks, nurses, pilots and many others keep patients alive, streets safe and packages moving. But at a price.
These workers -- and people with more conventionally sleep-deprived lifestyles -- are known to be at higher risk for accidents, sleep disorders and psychological stress…
cortex | March 24, 2008If you're into art, science and the brain, or enjoyed the recent MoMA show on design, then be sure to check out this Seed/MoMA/Parsons event on April 4th. The guest list is pretty fantastic, and includes everyone from Benoit Mandelbrot to Henry Markram to Chandler Burr to Erik Demaine to Greg Lynn. The timing of the presentations is almost comically dense - by my calculations, the "What is Reality?" talk will get about 15 minutes - but that's how I prefer my academic talks: lofty and short.
cortex | March 24, 2008My bracket is a disaster: I seem to have an uncanny talent for picking all the wrong upsets. But perhaps I should find solace in the fact that the NCAA tournament is inherently unpredictable. That, at least, was the conclusion of a 2001 paper by the economists Edward Kaplan and Stanley Garstka. They mined every statistical tool they could think of in an attempt to crack the office pool. They searched for secret algorithms in past NCAA tournaments, and used Markov models to see if regular season performance affected post-season performance. They ran endless computer simulations, and plugged in…
cortex | March 21, 2008Over at Mixing Memory, there's an excellent and fierce critique of a recent fMRI paper on linguistic relativity. Although the post is shot through with overly broad insults - he or she complains about "how much cognitive neuroscience sucks" - it still manages to carefully dissect the data. In short, the author concludes that the earlier behavioral work was more interesting and definitive than the more recent study that looked inside the black box of the brain. Anyways, it's worth a read. (Longtime readers will know that I've got a few quibbles with brain imaging boom myself.) What I'd really…