cortex | February 18, 2008There's a nice overview of recent work on animal cognition in the latest National Geographic.
Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others' motives, imitating others, and being creative. Bit by bit, in ingenious experiments, researchers have documented these talents in other species, gradually chipping away at what we thought made human beings distinctive while offering a glimpse of where our own abilities came from. Scrub jays know that other jays are thieves and that stashed food can…
cortex | February 15, 2008There are so many reasons to despair about human diversity. There's Iraq, Kenya, the immigration debate, the research of Robert Putnam. It seems that, in tragic example after tragic example, humans react to diversity by splintering into tribalisms, regressing to an Us vs. Them mentality.
So that's why The Difference, a new science book by Scott Page, is so uplifting. The basic premise of the book is simple: when it comes to group achievement, diversity often trumps ability. To prove his point, Page draws on a variety of data, from the anecdotal to the experimental. But much of the book is…
cortex | February 14, 2008To call "Radio Lab" a science radio show is like calling "This American Life" a radio show about, well, what the hell is "This American Life" about? (Quirky themes? Good stories? Bourgeois dilemmas?) The point is that the best radio shows defy easy categorization. And Radio Lab is definitely one of the best radio shows around. (I've been honored to be an occasional contributor to the show.) This is just a friendly reminder that Season Four of Radio Lab is coming up, so if you aren't subscribing to the podcast on iTunes then you will soon be missing out. And if you're lucky enough to live in…
cortex | February 13, 2008Woody Allen was a prescient man. Dr. Stuart Meloy has created a device that seems to help women with sexual problems regain their ability to have an orgasm:
The experimental implant -- now trademarked by Meloy as the Orgasmatron after the orgasm-inducing cylinder in Woody Allen's 1973 movie "Sleeper" -- rests on the skin just above the belt line. Two electrodes snake into the space between the vertebrae and the spinal cord. A video-game-like remote control allows women (or their partners) to turn electrical pulses on and off and fiddle with timing and intensity.
Electrodes in the right place…
cortex | February 13, 2008The Times Magazine had an interesting article on whether or not "preterm infants" can experience pain. "Experience" is the key word in that sentence:
In a series of clinical trials, he [Kanwaljeet Anand] demonstrated that operations performed under minimal or no anesthesia produced a "massive stress response" in newborn babies, releasing a flood of fight-or-flight hormones like adrenaline and cortisol. Potent anesthesia, he found, could significantly reduce this reaction. Babies who were put under during an operation had lower stress-hormone levels, more stable breathing and blood-sugar…
cortex | February 12, 2008It's so easy to take our cultural forms for granted. We get so used to their particulars that we forget there is nothing inviolate about them. Movies can have sad endings, classical music can turn atonal and novelists can get self-referential. Such transgressions are the mark of cultural progress. (Or decadence, depending on your aesthetic preferences. Me? I like Jane Austen and Italo Calvino.)
But I've always assumed that there was only one way to write a letter, that the epistle was the sturdiest of cultural forms. But I was wrong. It turns out that, back in the 19th century, people…
cortex | February 12, 2008Remember a few years ago, when there were all these books that tried to explain the history of everything in terms of some seemingly minor subject, like "Cod" or "Salt"? I think it's time to apply this publishing trope to neuroscience: we need a book on dopamine. That damn neurotransmitter is everywhere. Now it's even being hailed as an orgasm accelerator:
Abundant evidence points to dopamine as the key neurotransmitter involved in stimulating orgasm in humans. Thus, administration of the dopamine precursor L-dopa, dopaminergic agonists (e.g. apomorphine), dopamine releasers (e.g. amphetamine…
cortex | February 11, 2008There was something particularly infuriating about Mitt Romney's concession speech. He's clearly a smart guy - once upon a time, he was a socially moderate, pragmatic Republican - and yet the address was filled with utter nonsense like this:
Europe is facing a demographic disaster. That's the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life, and eroded morality...
It's time for the people of America to fortify marriage through a constitutional amendment, so that liberal judges cannot continue to attack it...
Today we are a nation…
cortex | February 10, 2008I recently had the pleasure of getting interviewed by Natasha Mitchell, host of All in the Mind. To be honest, I can't bear to listen to the interview - the sound of my own voice grates against my ears, like fingernails on a chalkboard.*
I know others have a similar aversion. But why is that? I don't mind looking at visual reflections (photographs) of myself, and yet auditory reflections make me wince. It's worth pointing out that, until the 20th century, humans had never heard recordings of their voice. While we've always had visual reflections - Narcissus looked in the still water -…
cortex | February 7, 2008Here's a good test of your critical acumen. This site has a quiz comparing the priceless designs of Donald Judd against cheap furniture from Ikea and Wal-Mart. It's often surprisingly hard to tell the two apart, although I take this less as an indictment of Judd (who I've always admired) and more as an affirmation of capitalism, which has a knack for turning masterpieces into mass-produced kitsch. (Nobody does this better than Target. Adorno is rolling over in his grave.) Here is the one item that I got wrong on the quiz:
via VSL
cortex | February 7, 2008We spend so much time fixating on our genetic differences that we tend to overlook the places where the human genome has converged over time.
In a study published yesterday in Nature Genetics, geneticists from France's Pasteur Institute compared DNA variations in people from Japan, China, Nigeria and northwest Europe. They found 582 genes associated with skin color, hair texture and other physiological characteristics. These are likely just a fraction of the genes historically tweaked by regional variations in selective pressures, producing the differences between -- for example -- an…
cortex | February 6, 2008Deprive the mind of sensory stimuli, and what does the mind do? It starts to hallucinate. It invents perceptions amid the emptiness, filling in the void with make-believe. This is known as Charles Bonnet syndrome, and it affects approximately 10 percent of who go blind:
It took almost 50 years, but slowly, slowly David Stewart went blind.
A former long-time executive at the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in Washington, D.C., Stewart has a hereditary disease, retinitis pigmentosa, which affects the rods and cones in his eyes. In his 20s, his vision narrowed. By the time he hit 80, he was…
cortex | February 5, 2008That is, if your window happens to be a cockpit over Maui. I thank the reader who sent this photo in. Not only does the tropical sunset brighten another gloomy New England day, but it reminds us that even wind farms can be beautiful:
cortex | February 5, 2008I'm morbidly fascinated by the massive losses recently incurred by the French Bank Societe Generale. My fascination is partly rooted in the sheer scale of the disaster, a scale that's essentially incomprehensible. (I have no idea what a $7,000,000,000 loss really means.)
But I'm also interested in how, exactly, a trader could lose so much money and not get noticed. It now appears that the risk-taking culture of Societe Generale is partly to blame:
The 144-year-old bank allowed a culture of risk to flourish, creating major flaws in its operations that enabled the rogue trader's activities to…
cortex | February 4, 2008I'm really looking forward to reading Anne Harrington's new book on the history of mind-body medicine. I thought this factoid, from her interview with the Boston Globe Ideas section, was quite interesting:
IDEAS: One of the things I learned reading the book is that there's no word for "hot flashes" in Japanese because menopausal women there don't get them.
HARRINGTON: This is the work of an anthropologist named Margaret Lock, who looked at older Japanese women and found that this very common symptom of menopause in Western countries didn't seem to be widely known in Japan.
IDEAS: How does she…
cortex | February 4, 2008This video is shamefully manipulative. It's just a bunch of celebrities, from Scarlett to John Legend, harmonizing over a particularly eloquent Obama speech. The rhetoric is beautiful, poetic and vapid. The camera work is a little too artful. The crescendo at the end is a little too obvious.
And yet, it works. The short video manipulates you even though you know you're being manipulated. I'm not a big fan of celebrities mixing with progressive politics, but I still got shivers at the end of the song, right when the "Yes we can!" chorus picks up speed.
Those shivers are the sole message of…
cortex | February 4, 2008Apparently, if you breathe in vaporized bits of swine cortex you have a decent chance of getting very sick. That, at least, is the tenuous conclusion of a doctors in Minnesota:
The ailment is characterized by sensations of burning, numbness and weakness in the arms and legs. For most, this is unpleasant but not disabling. For a few, however, the ailment has made walking difficult and work impossible. The symptoms have slowly lessened in severity, but in none of the sufferers has it disappeared completely.
While the illness is similar to some known conditions, it does not match any exactly.…
cortex | February 2, 2008This is from Paul Bloom's review of Kwame Anthony Appiah's new book on the uses and abuses of experimental philosophy:
Near the end of the book, Appiah says that when he tells a stranger on a plane that he is a philosopher, he often gets the question, "So, what's your philosophy?" He answers, "My philosophy is that everything is more complicated than you thought."
cortex | February 1, 2008This prank reminds me of that Stanley Milgram experiment where people stopped on busy New York City sidewalks and looked up. When only one person was stopped, about 4 percent of pedestrians joined the man and looked at whatever he was looking at. But as Milgram increased the crowd size, more and more people stopped and stared. In other words, it was a positive feedback loop. A bigger crowd staring at the sky led to even bigger crowds. And everybody was looking at nothing.* Such is the power of "social validation".
*I like to pretend that this psychological phenomenon explains American Idol.…
cortex | January 31, 2008Baudelaire famously described his memory as "a tomb, a corpse filled Potter's field/a pyramid where the dead lie down by scores/I am a graveyard that the moon abhors." Well, the neural reality of the brain suggests that his poetic metaphors weren't such exaggerations. That, at least, is the implication of a bizarre new finding:
Surgeons made this accidental discovery while a 50-year-old-male patient was undergoing "deep brain stimulation," as part of an experimental treatment for obesity.
With the patient under local anesthesia, but fully awake, surgeons traveled into the deepest recesses of…