cortex | January 31, 2008One of the questions I get asked most often when discussing my book is what artists working today are creating work that's relevant to the discourse of science. My stock answer is to mutter something inarticulate about Richard Powers. But now I've got someone new to talk about: Olafur Eliasson.
Until I saw Eliasson's retrospective at SFMOMA, I was really only familiar with his big Tate Modern installation, The Weather Project:
But my favorite pieces at SFMOMA were of a much more intimate scale. As Eliasson puts it, they are about "seeing yourself seeing". I'd describe the work, but it can'…
cortex | January 31, 2008I just got back from a week long trip to California. (You can hear me talking about Proust on KQED here.) The weather was awful - rain and more rain - but I still got glimpses of what I love so much about the Golden State. Consider the Hollywood Farmer's Market. It's a weekly gathering of a few dozen farmers, tamale stands and organic cheese makers. The crowd is an eclectic mix of dreads and Prada, birkenstocks and Tod loafers. But I can summarize my fondness for the place with a single conversation I had with a chicken farmer who sells eggs:
Me: Are these eggs cage free?
Farmer: Yes. The…
cortex | January 30, 2008I've got a new article on the psychology of back pain in the February issue of Best Life (the one with Jeff Gordon on the cover):
I've put the entire article below the fold:
Dr. Marc Sopher, a family physician in Exeter, New Hampshire, is drenched in sweat. He's just run eight miles on a humid summer morning and played a game of tennis. (He's going for a bike ride later, after he sees his patients.) His short hair is salted with whiteâ¯Sopher is 46â¯but he has the taut body of a young athlete. Whenever he moves, you can see his muscles flex and twitch. He shakes my hand, ushers me into his…
cortex | January 24, 2008Are too many neuroscientists are trying to popularize the state of their science? Jason Zevin thinks so:
At best, most of what is known is more complicated than I'm able to understand--much less explain to a general audience. And at least some of what I know about any topic in neuroscience is liable to have been discredited by a recent article in Science or Nature. This makes me cautious whenever anyone turns to me for an authoritative opinion on anything regarding the brain.
This is why it is always so disorienting to talk to people who have just read or are reading anything by Steven Pinker…
cortex | January 24, 2008I'm sorry about the lack of posts: I've been traveling. (I'm currently in the surprisingly chilly and wet Los Angeles area.) Given the turbulence on Wall Street recently, I thought I'd repost something I wrote last year on the neuroscience of regret and financial decisions. The experiment, designed by the lab of Read Montague, was simple: each subject was given $100 and some basic information about the "current" state of the stock market. The "investors" then chose how much money to invest in the market. After making up their mind, the players nervously watched as their investments either…
cortex | January 22, 2008Interesting stuff:
The research team led by Tania Singer, at UCL, asked volunteers to play a game with employees of the lab, secretly instructing the employees to play either fairly or unfairly. Afterward, the scientists measured brain activity in the same volunteers under quite different circumstances: looking on as their former game opponents were subjected to various degrees of pain. In both male and female volunteers, the brain areas that signal pain became active, giving neural evidence of their empathy with the others' pain. Strikingly, however, that empathy did not appear to extend to…
cortex | January 21, 2008Last week, David Brooks had a smart column on the essential "irrationality" of voters. (I'm defining irrationality here as any mental process that's not rational/deliberate/System 2. I have no idea if our democracy would be better off if voters imitated the rational agents in economics textbooks. I only know that the mind doesn't work that way.)
In reality, we voters -- all of us -- make emotional, intuitive decisions about who we prefer, and then come up with post-hoc rationalizations to explain the choices that were already made beneath conscious awareness. "People often act without knowing…
cortex | January 21, 2008I had an op-ed in the LA Times on Sunday. It's about reductionism and the brain:
The reductionist method, although undeniably successful, has very real limitations. Not everything benefits from being broken down into tiny pieces. Look, for example, at a Beethoven symphony. If the music is reduced to wavelengths of vibrating air -- the simple sum of its physics -- we actually understand less about the music. The intangible beauty, the visceral emotion, the entire reason we listen in the first place -- all is lost when the sound is reduced into its most elemental details. In other words,…
cortex | January 18, 2008That, at least, is the consensus of a new paper in Neuropharmacology:
There is a general consensus that the effects of cannabinoid agonists on anxiety seem to be biphasic, with low doses being anxiolytic and high doses ineffective or possibly anxiogenic. Besides the behavioural effects of cannabinoids on anxiety, very few papers have dealt with the neuroanatomical sites of these effects. We investigated the effect on rat anxiety behavior of local administration of THC in the prefrontal cortex, basolateral amygdala and ventral hippocampus, brain regions belonging to the emotional circuit and…
cortex | January 17, 2008Economists parse the stats and find the correlation:
We find that college football games are associated with sharp increases in crime. For instance, assaults increase by about 9% when a community hosts a college football game, vandalism increases by about 18%, and DUIs increase by about 13%. We also find evidence that upsets result in larger increases in crime than games that do not produce an upset. For instance, an upset loss at home is associated with a 112% increase in assaults and a 61% increase in vandalism. We discuss these results in the context of psychological theories of fan…
cortex | January 17, 2008I'm definitely ready for the writer's strike to be over. I actually watched two hours of American Idol last night. I haven't watched many of these pre-competition shows before, when Paula, Randy and Simon sit through the auditions of strangers off the street, but I couldn't help but notice that the show seemed to feature some mentally ill and mentally handicapped people. The performers were both incredibly sincere and unbelievably bad , which was supposed to create some comic relief. The joke got old pretty quickly, though.
I'm obviously not a doctor, but it seemed a little cruel to feature…
cortex | January 16, 2008My recent article in Seed is now online. Here is the nut graf:
The current constraints of science make it clear that the breach between our two cultures is not merely an academic problem that stifles conversation at cocktail parties. Rather, it is a practical problem, and it holds back science's theories. If we want answers to our most essential questions, then we will need to bridge our cultural divide. By heeding the wisdom of the arts, science can gain the kinds of new insights and perspectives that are the seeds of scientific progress.
The article was really an extension of the argument I…
cortex | January 16, 2008I was talking to a neuroscientist the other day and he started complaining about fMRI studies. They are too easy, unreliable, etc. (This is a surprisingly common complaint among neuroscientists who rely on the techniques of molecular biology.) But then he asked me a question that I couldn't answer. "Tell me one brain imaging study," he said, "that was really, truly surprising? You get lots of studies showing that the DLPFC is important for deliberate reasoning or that the amygdala responds to negative stimuli, but is that surprising?" He went on to note that, while fMRI studies have certainly…
cortex | January 16, 2008I've got a big man-crush on Jamie Oliver. And I really appreciate his latest stunt:
Last Friday, in front of 4 million television viewers and a studio audience, the chef Jamie Oliver killed a chicken. Having recently obtained a United Kingdom slaughterman's license, Mr. Oliver staged a "gala dinner," in fact a kind of avian snuff film, to awaken British consumers to the high costs of cheap chicken.
"A chicken is a living thing, an animal with a life cycle, and we shouldn't expect it will cost less than a pint of beer in a pub," he said Monday in an interview.
"It only costs a bit more to give…
cortex | January 15, 2008So I'm reading about the latest cosmological absurdity and feeling pretty smug. It turns out that, according to the equations, your existence is simply "some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space...Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions."
Aren't those physicists funny? Once upon a time, we thought quantum mechanics was weird. Then came string theory and all those extra unfolded dimensions. And now comes the latest hypothesis, which is so surreal it's almost nihilistic. Apparently, I'm just an elaborate illusion, a fictional figment…
cortex | January 15, 2008I've written about our wine biases before, but now we have anatomical evidence of why, exactly, expensive wine seems to taste better.
The experiment, led by researchers at Cal-Tech and Stanford, was simple. [A free version of the study is here.] Twenty subjects tasted five wine samples which were distinguished solely by their retail price, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the subjects were told that all five wines were different, the scientists had actually only given them three different wines. This meant that the first two wines were used twice, but given two different price…
cortex | January 14, 2008After posting on some new research that suggests we are more sexually fluid than we typically assume - in other words, our strict sexual categories are largely cultural - I got a fascinating email from a reader:
I thought you may find my own experience, having lived in both eastern and western societies, interesting. I was born and lived the first 18 years of my life in Iran, and have been in the States for the last 21 years. Although Iran is an extremely conservative and mostly religious society; social and sexual norms are not what one may expect them to be in a muslim society (or at…
cortex | January 14, 2008It took a few centuries, but it looks as though psychology and neuroscience are finally moving beyond the dualisms of Descartes. Here is the always interesting Boston Globe Ideas section:
The brain is often envisioned as something like a computer, and the body as its all-purpose tool. But a growing body of new research suggests that something more collaborative is going on - that we think not just with our brains, but with our bodies. A series of studies, the latest published in November, has shown that children can solve math problems better if they are told to use their hands while thinking…
cortex | January 10, 2008How universal are our first impressions of people? Test yourself against this piece of video art:
Do you agree with most of the descriptions? The art is surprisingly riveting, no?
Via kottke
cortex | January 10, 2008There's an interview with me in Newsweek.com:
NEWSWEEK: What surprised you most while doing the research for this book?
Jonah Lehrer: One thing was how seriously all of these artists took their art. They really believed that their novels and paintings and poetry were expressing deep truths about the human mind. As Virginia Woolf put it, the task of the novelist is to "examine for a moment an ordinary mind on an ordinary day ... [tracing] the pattern, however disconnected and incoherent in appearance, which each sight or incident scores upon the consciousness." In other words, she is telling…