cortex | March 5, 2008One of the most frequent questions I get when speaking about my book is the MSG question. My talk is about L-glutamate, the taste of umami and veal stock (it makes a little more sense if you've read the book) and, before I get to the punchline, I'm inevitably interrupted by someone insisting that MSG is toxic.* I will now refer all interested parties to this Times article:
Even now, after "Chinese restaurant syndrome" has been thoroughly debunked (virtually all studies since then confirm that monosodium glutamate in normal concentrations has no effect on the overwhelming majority of people),…
cortex | March 5, 2008My article on the Blue Brain project is now online*:
It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between them. "The column has been built and it runs," Markram says. "Now we just have to scale it up." Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. "If we build this brain right, it will do everything," Markram says. I ask him if that…
cortex | March 4, 2008I know I just wrote an article on the power of expectations, but this is ridiculous:
In a series of studies in the 1970s and '80s, psychologists at the University of Washington put more than 300 students into a study room outfitted like a bar with mirrors, music and a stretch of polished pine. The researchers served alcoholic drinks, most often icy vodka tonics, to some of the students and nonalcoholic ones, usually icy tonic water, to others. The drinks looked and tasted the same, and the students typically drank five in an hour or two.
The studies found that people who thought they were…
cortex | March 3, 2008The Times has an interesting profile of Johan Santana, perhaps the most effective pitcher in baseball. What's interesting about Santana is that his secret isn't a 98 mph fastball or some wicked new breaking ball. Rather, he strikes out batters because he denies batters the perceptual cues they rely on when making batting decisions:
Whether Santana fires a fastball that zooms in at 90 to 94 miles an hour or flips a changeup that lumbers in at 77 to 80, he does everything exactly the same. He uses the same delivery, the same release point and the same exertion. Then he does it again and again.…
cortex | February 29, 2008Jim Holt has a great article on the strange neural anatomy of mathematics in the new New Yorker:
One morning in September, 1989, a forme sales representative in his mid-fortie entered an examination room with Stanisla Dehaene, a young neuroscientist based in Paris Three years earlier, the man, whom researcher came to refer to as Mr. N, had sustained a brai hemorrhage that left him with an enormous lesion in the rear half of his lef hemisphere. He suffered from severe handicaps: his right arm was in a sling; h couldn't read; and his speech was painfully slow. He had once been married,…
cortex | February 28, 2008Noam Scheiber has an article in TNR touting Obama's connections to behavioral economics. The article isn't particularly persuasive, since the only examples Scheiber can muster are Obama's 401(k) savings plan and his embrace of automatic tax returns. Neither plan is unique to Obama, and only the 401 (k) savings plan is really rooted in the findings of behavioral economics.
Nevertheless, it's interesting to see the fruits of psychological science enter the arena of public policy. One of the advantages of interdisciplinary fields like behavioral economics (or neuroeconomics, for that matter)…
cortex | February 28, 2008A cool new PNAS paper from the Koch lab:
In their experiment, the researchers presented six volunteers with four types of ambiguous stimuli. The volunteers viewed or listened to the stimuli and pressed a key on a keyboard when a perceptual shift occurred. At the same time, infrared eye-tracking software measured the diameter of the subjects' pupils.
The scientists found a significant increase in the diameter of the pupil at the instant preceding the perceptual switch. The pupil, which is about 2 mm wide in bright light, dilated by as much as 1 mm at that moment--a change that, in theory,…
cortex | February 28, 2008Ronald Bailey looks at the data and concludes that having children doesn't make us happy:
"Economists have modeled the impact of many variables on people's overall happiness and have consistently found that children have only a small impact. A small negative impact," reports Harvard psychologist and happiness researcher Daniel Gilbert. In addition, the more children a person has the less happy they are. According to Gilbert, researchers have found that people derive more satisfaction from eating, exercising, shopping, napping, or watching television than taking care of their kids. "Indeed,…
cortex | February 27, 2008Lots of attention has been paid to the latest review/meta-analysis demonstrating that popular antidepressant medications don't seem to be that much more effective than placebos. While this certainly isn't the first time someone has demonstrated that Prozac is only mildly more useful than a sugar pill (unless, that is, you fall into the "severely depressed" category), this review was noteworthy because it consisted mainly of previously unpublished studies done by the drug makers before the drugs were put on sale. As Time magazine notes, this allows the researchers to "avoid a bias that often…
cortex | February 26, 2008Molly Young has a really interesting article on the rampant abuse of Adderall in elite universities in n+1. Essentially, Adderall is a composite of several different amphetamines, which are digested by the brain at different rates. So many kids are prescribed Adderall nowadays that virtually every university has an excess supply, which is then sold or bartered to kids sick of using Diet Coke to pull all-nighters:
It is probably surprising that the drug backfired only once, when I stayed up on Adderall for 72 hours before a philosophy final. My appearance in the testing hall the next day was…
cortex | February 26, 2008I had an article in the Sunday Boston Globe Ideas section on the way our expectations of reality often trump reality itself:
Expectations have long been a topic of psychological research, and it's well known that they affect how we react to events, or how we respond to medication. But in recent years, scientists have been intensively studying how expectations shape our direct experience of the world, what we taste, feel, and hear. The findings have been surprising - did you know that generic drugs can be less effective merely because they cost less? - and it's now becoming clear just how…
cortex | February 22, 2008Loyal readers know that I'm a big fan of Jason Kottke. His blog, aptly summarized as "liberal arts 2.0," is a consistent source of the best and smartest links from around the web. So I was really flattered to get interviewed on the site:
Kottke: Are there other books/media out there that share a third culture kinship with yours? I received a copy of Lawrence Weschler's Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences for Christmas...that seems to fit. Steven Johnson's books. Anything else you can recommend?
Lehrer: I've stolen ideas from so many people it's hard to know where to begin. Certainly…
cortex | February 22, 2008Michael Specter has written a really fine article on the ambiguities and complexities involved in the measurement of carbon emissions. Sounds dull, right? It's actually full of fascinating facts:
Just two countries--Indonesia and Brazil--account for about ten per cent of the greenhouse gases released into the atmosphere. Neither possesses the type of heavy industry that can be found in the West, or for that matter in Russia or India. Still, only the United States and China are responsible for greater levels of emissions. That is because tropical forests in Indonesia and Brazil are…
cortex | February 22, 2008In my recent Seed article on science and art, I wrote about how we need to foster a new cultural movement:
If we are serious about unifying human knowledge, then we'll need to create a new movement that coexists with the third culture but that deliberately trespasses on our cultural boundaries and seeks to create relationships between the arts and the sciences. The premise of this movement--perhaps a fourth culture--is that neither culture can exist by itself. Its goal will be to cultivate a positive feedback loop, in which works of art lead to new scientific experiments, which lead to new…
cortex | February 21, 2008First, a warning: the video below is very disturbing. It's footage of cows being prepared for slaughter at Hallmark Meat Processing. This video, which was surreptitiously shot by the Humane Society, led to the largest ever recall of beef - 134 million pounds - although most of the recalled meat has already been eaten. (A big percentage of the beef went to the school lunch program.) The NY Times today had a good editorial on the whole affair.
I like to eat meat, too. I'm not a vegetarian. (Although I am getting increasingly vigilant about only eating humanely raised meat.) The reality, though…
cortex | February 21, 2008A fascinating, if macabre, interview with a man who intentionally cut off his hand:
BME: We've touched on it, but I guess now the big question -- "why"?
I'm one of those body-integrity-disorder (BIID) dudes. As long as I can remember, having two hands was a defect in my body -- something that was not meant to be. For me philosophically, it's totally different from body mods, which I also have. I don't think I had any choice. My right hand just didn't belong to my body. As a little kid, I soon learned that I was the odd one out, and that amputation was a bad thing. My parents reprimanded me…
cortex | February 20, 2008Michel Foucault wouldn't be surprised to learn that yes, even comedy is defined by power-relations. Here's Ellen Horne of Radio Lab:
Tyler Stillman, a psychologist at Florida State University, did a series of studies showing that laughter isn't always about how funny something is. He found that when a boss tells a bad joke to an employee, the employee laughs. But when the employee tells a bad joke to a boss, well, you can hear pin drop.
The Radio Lab team then decided to replicate the study in their own office. The joke really isn't funny, but it is funny watching the influence of social…
cortex | February 20, 2008Have you heard about InnoCentive? It's my new favorite website. The premise of the site is simple: "seekers" post their scientific problems and "solvers" try to solve them. If the problem is successfully solved, then the "solver" gets a specified monetary reward. (The money is the incentive part of InnoCentive.) The questions on the site are astonishingly varied, and include everything from a food company looking for a "Reduced Fat Chocolate-Flavored Compound Coating" (Reward: $40,000) to a research foundation looking for a "Biomarker for measuring disease progression in Amyotrophic Lateral…
cortex | February 19, 2008Exciting news! I'm the new curator of the Scientific American expert blog seminar Mind Matters. (Thanks, David!) For those of you who are unfamiliar with the site, it features commentary by real scientists on recent scientific papers. This week's blog is by Mauricio Delgado, a neuroscientist at Rutgers, discussing a paper that found a neural correlate for social class.
In recent years, neuroscientific investigations of social class have really expanded, for several reasons. First of all, scientists are increasingly able to detect the fine-grained anatomical differences caused by differences…
cortex | February 18, 2008First, read this:
Prince Rupert's Drops are a glass curiosity created by dripping hot molten glass into cold water. The glass cools into a tadpole-shaped droplet with a long, thin, tail. The water rapidly cools the molten glass on the outside of the drop, while the inner portion of the drop remains significantly hotter. When the glass on the inside eventually cools, it contracts inside the already-solid outer part. This contraction sets up very large compressive stresses on the surface, while the interior of the glass is placed under tension. It can be said to be a kind of tempered glass.
The…