cortex | March 20, 2008Over at Mind Matters, the expert blog I curate at Scientific American, we've had some really good posts lately. The most recent post, by Maryanne Wolf (author of that other Proust book on neuroscience, Proust and the Squid), Mirit Barzillai and Elizabeth Norton, looks at the reading brain. They discuss a recent paper by Laurent Cohen, Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues. (Look here for a recent profile of Dehaene in the New Yorker.)
The late, eminent cognitive scientist David Swinney of UCSD described how it is only in the acquisition of routines that later become automatic that we can see…
cortex | March 19, 2008First, watch this:
Then read the poem it inspired, which was written by one of my favorite poets, Wislawa Szymborska:
The Experiment
As a short subject before the main feature -
in which the actors did their best
to make me cry and even laugh -
we were shown an interesting experiment
involving a head.
The head
a minute earlier was still attached to...
but now it was cut off.
Everyone could see that it didn't have a body.
The tubes dangling from the neck hooked it up to a machine
that kept its blood circulating.
The head
was doing just fine.
Without showing pain or even surprise,
it followed…
cortex | March 19, 2008I guess I should make it clear that, contrary to the title of my talk, Kanye West isn't really a neuroscientist. (Conveying irony via the internet isn't easy. Although it's still amusing to imagine him, in full rapper regalia, doing minipreps and PCR's.) So what does Kanye have to do with the brain? Well, I use one of his songs to illuminate the basic cognitive mechanisms underlying the perception of music. I think one of the benefits of looking at art through the optic of neuroscience is that you can see all sorts of surprising connections. You can see that a rap star uses the same basic…
cortex | March 19, 2008Flying back from Little Rock, I had the pleasure of sitting next to a 68 year old man who had never flown on a plane before. For most of us, traveling through the air at 400 mph on a steel bird has become such a routine, banal, tiresome, frustrating experience that it's nice to be reminded of the incredible aspects of flight. The laws of physics are rather impressive.
There's also something deeply infectious about the state of wonder. I couldn't help but share, at least a little bit, the awe of the man sitting next to me. He thought the cotton ball clouds were gorgeous and loved the look of…
cortex | March 18, 2008Kennedy Fraser had an illuminating profile of the novelist Pat Barker in a recent New Yorker (not online):
Barker grew up with silent, wounded men. "And with talkative women, spinning stories," she said. "Stories with bits missing." She is a true war baby. "My mother was in the Wrems" - the Women's Royal Navy Service - "and her stories about World War Two were always quite interesting. She used to run home through an air rad, because she knew her mother would be worried. It was a very dangerous thing to do, but I'm afraid that wouldn't occur to my mother. She really adored the war. She was…
cortex | March 17, 2008If I've got any readers in the Little Rock area, you might be interested in a little talk I'm giving tomorrow evening at the Clinton School of Public Service. The title of the talk is "Kanye West Was A Neuroscientist," which has poor Marcel rolling over in his grave.
cortex | March 17, 2008This is very depressing:
The Chinook salmon that swim upstream to spawn in the fall, the most robust run in the Sacramento River, have disappeared. The almost complete collapse of the richest and most dependable source of Chinook salmon south of Alaska left gloomy fisheries experts struggling for reliable explanations -- and coming up dry.
Whatever the cause, there was widespread agreement among those attending a five-day meeting of the Pacific Fisheries Management Council here last week that the regional $150 million fishery, which usually opens for the four-month season on May 1, is almost…
cortex | March 17, 2008A few weeks ago, John Lanchester wrote a thoughtful meditation on the intertwined nature of perception, smell and taste:
A taste or a smell can pass you by, unremarked or nearly so, in large part because you don't have a word for it; then you see the thing and grasp the meaning of a word at the same time, and both your palate and your vocabulary have expanded. One day, you catch the smell of gooseberries from a Sauvignon Blanc, or red currants from a Cabernet, or bubble gum from a Gamay, or horse manure from a Shiraz, and from that point on you know exactly what people mean when they say they…
cortex | March 14, 2008It's long been recognized that American kids suck at math, at least when compared to kids in Singapore, Finland, etc. What's less well known is that the steep decline in proficiency only starts when kids are taught algebra. That, at least, is the conclusion of a new government report:
"The sharp falloff in mathematics achievement in the U.S. begins as students reach late middle school, where, for more and more students, algebra course work begins," said the report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, appointed two years ago by President Bush. "Students who complete Algebra II are more…
cortex | March 13, 2008Via bookslut comes a heartbreaking excerpt from Roger Deakin's Wildwood: A Journey Through Trees:
[Konrad] Lorenz observed that jackdaws form lifelong attachments, as rooks seem to do, and that there is a distinct, well-understood pecking order within the tribe to which all the members adhere without question. Lorenz gradually learnt the Jackdaw vocabulary: 'Zick, Zick' is uttered by the courting male to mean 'Let's nest together' and, once in possession of an actual mate and nest, 'Keep out.' Any act of social delinquency is immediately censured by the other tribe members with a variation of…
cortex | March 13, 2008One last note on the whole Spitzer affair. The reason I think it's dangerous to use the sexual habits of other species (or even other human cultures) as a baseline when discussing prostitution is that the evolutionary argument has very clear policy implications. If, as David Barash argued, sexual infidelity is not only natural but normal and inescapable, then you'd have a strong argument for the legalization of prostitution. (Let's call this the Netherlands model.) After all, why criminalize what can't be helped?
However, if you believe that our sexual urges, while powerful, can still be…
cortex | March 12, 2008Evolutionary psychologist David Barash excuses the behavior of Eliot Spitzer on the grounds that monogamy is unnatural, an artificial construct of bourgeois civilization:
One of the most important insights of modern evolutionary biology has been an enhanced understanding of male-female differences, deriving especially from the production of sperm versus eggs. Because sperm are produced in vast numbers, with little if any required parental follow-through, males of most species are aggressive sexual adventurers, inclined to engage in sex with multiple partners when they can. Males who succeed…
cortex | March 12, 2008Words of wisdom from Dario Checcini, the famous Tuscan butcher:
"The most important thing is what the animal eats and that it has a good life . . . just like us," Cecchini says. "My philosophy is that the cow has to have had a really good life with the least suffering possible," he says. "And every cut has to be cooked using the best cooking method. It's a matter of respect. If I come back as a cow, I want to have the best butcher.
On a related note, I've been really enjoying The River Cottage Meat Book, bu Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. It's so much more than a cookbook: Fearnley-Whittingstall…
cortex | March 11, 2008I've always been morbidly fascinated by examples of choking. It doesn't matter if it's Jean Van de Velde in the 1999 British Open, or Shaq at the free-throw line, there's something unbelievably poignant and nightmarish about watching a world-class performer get sabotaged by their own brain. I can't bear to watch, and yet I can't look away.
Sian Beilock, a professor of psychology at the University of Chicago, has helped illuminate the anatomy of choking. She uses putting on the golf green as her experimental paradigm. When people are first learning how to putt, the activity can seem daunting…
cortex | March 11, 2008This whole Spitzer affair got me thinking about the psychology of power. When you look around the world, it's clear that so many of our problems are due, at least in part, to abuses of power. From Mugabe to Putin, Chavez to Cheney, there's obviously something deeply intoxicating and dangerous about positions of power. (Especially when that power feels absolute.) Being in complete control - or having the illusion of complete control - can seriously warp our sense of morality, fairness and ethics. (Of course, the case of Eliot Spitzer, and perhaps Bill Clinton, would argue that a sense of power…
cortex | March 10, 2008This is crazy stuff:
A new study finds that moths can remember things they learned when they were caterpillars -- even though the process of metamorphosis essentially turns their brains and bodies to soup.
The implications of the PLOS study extend far beyond the world of moths and butterflies. For instance, one of the fundamental (and unresolved) mysteries of memory is how our memories persist. The cells of the brain, like all cells, are in constant flux. The average half-life of a brain protein is only 14 days. Our hippocampal neurons die, and are reborn, the mind in a constant state of…
cortex | March 10, 2008Cognitive Daily has a typically great review of some recent research connecting blood glucose levels and self-control:
Matthew Gailliot, along with Baumeister and six other researchers, asked 103 psychology students to fast for three hours before watching a video [the video required subjects to ignore salient stimuli, much like the stroop task]. Half the students were told to ignore the words, while the rest weren't required to exercise any self-control. Blood glucose levels were measured before and after this task. The students exercising self-control had significantly lower glucose levels…
cortex | March 7, 2008It's a new pilot program in a few dozen New York City schools: students are given cash rewards in exchange for higher test scores. Jennifer Medina reports:
The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a few minutes, they would learn how much money they had earned for their scores on recent reading and math exams. Some would receive nearly $50 for acing the standardized tests, a small fortune for many at this school, P.S. 188 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
When the rewards were handed out, Jazmin Roman was eager to celebrate her $39.72. She whispered to her…
cortex | March 6, 2008The NY Times group blog on Migraines just posted a really fantastic article by Jeff Tweedy, leader of Wilco (one of my favorite bands), on his chronic migraine condition:
There are a lot of different ways migraines have affected my music, and vice versa: being a musician has allowed me -- for lack of a better phrase -- to rise above the pain from time to time. I've never missed a show because of a migraine. But I've played some really horrible shows and cut them short because there was very little I could do to keep going. I've played shows where I had bucket on the side of the stage where I…
cortex | March 6, 2008Radio Lab delves into the mystery:
Yang and her colleagues put all 49 people, both the liars and the non-liars, into a magnetic resonant imaging scanner and took pictures of their prefrontal cortex. They chose to focus on this area of the brain because previous studies had shown that the prefrontal cortex plays a role in both lying and in antisocial behaviors.
If you could look into this part of the brain, which sits right behind your forehead, you would see two kinds of matter: gray and white. Gray matter is the groups of brain cells that process information. Most neuroscience studies focus…