cortex | December 26, 2007I hope everyone had a lovely and merry Christmas. I've got a post-Christmas question: What cognitive skills are required for present-wrapping? Spatial logic? An intuitive sense of geometry? A belief in neatness? All of the above? I only ask because I am clearly missing whatever skills are required.
cortex | December 23, 2007I've got a review of Pinker's latest in The Washington Post:
Language comes so naturally to us that it's easy to believe there's some sort of intrinsic logic connecting the thing and its name, the signifier and the signified. In one of Plato's dialogues, a character named Cratylus argues that "a power more than human gave things their first names."
But Cratylus was wrong. Human language is an emanation of the human mind. A thing doesn't care what we call it. Words and their rules don't tell us about the world; they tell us about ourselves.
That's the simple premise behind Steven Pinker's…
cortex | December 20, 2007I always assumed that the best race horses simply had the best genes. It seemed like the kind of domain where nature trumped nurture, where the genetics of fast twitch fibers and heart size was more important than the details of training. But my assumptions were exactly backwards:
The offspring of expensive stallions owe their success more to how they are reared, trained and ridden than good genes, a study has found.
Only 10% of a horse's lifetime winnings can be attributed to their bloodline, research in Biology Letters shows.
By far the biggest factor was the horse's environment - the way…
cortex | December 20, 2007Since it's supposed to be the season of charity, that time of year when we remember those who are less fortunate than we are, I thought I'd post on altruism and the brain, since there have recently been a few interesting studies. The basic moral of these experiments is that we are built to be altruistic. We are social animals that have evolved the ability to care about each other.
Consider a paper recently published in Nature Neuroscience. Scientists at Duke University imaged the brains of people as they observed a computer play a simple video game. Because the subjects were told that the…
cortex | December 19, 2007Malcolm Gladwell endorses the use of Human Growth Hormone for athletes, at least when it's used to recover from injury:
What, exactly, is wrong with an athlete--someone who makes a living with their body--taking medication to speed their recovery from injury? Is it wrong to take ibruprofen? Is it wrong to ice a sore elbow? For that matter, is it ethical or even legal for Major League Baseball--or indeed any employee or governing body--to deny an employee access to a potentially beneficial medical treatment?
The closest analogy I can think of here is to medical marijuana, which is another…
cortex | December 19, 2007Ben Wallace-Wells, in Rolling Stone, recently wrote a fantastic and tragic article on America's War on Drugs:
All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic. Virtually the only success the…
cortex | December 18, 2007Are teenagers too rational? That, at least, is the conclusion of a recent study showing that teens overestimate the riskiness of things like unprotected sex and drunk driving, yet choose to do them anyways:
A study by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, found that teenagers were more likely than adults to overestimate risks for every outcome studied, from low-probability events like contracting H.I.V. to higher-probability ones like acquiring more common sexually transmitted diseases or becoming pregnant from a single act of unprotected sex.
"We found that teenagers…
cortex | December 17, 2007For a wonderful example of Oliver Sacks' "romantic scientific method" at work - a method he borrowed, at least in part, from the great Russian neurologist A.R. Luria - listen to this NPR piece, by Robert Krulwich.
It's a beautiful story about the power of stories to help us make sense of our ourselves. Here's how I summarized this romantic method in my recent profile of Sacks:
In his writings, he [Sacks] uses music as a metaphor for his unusual approach to medicine. He cites a Novalis aphorism--"Every disease is a musical problem; every cure is a musical solution"--in several books, usually…
cortex | December 14, 2007There was a very astute comment left in response to my post on evolution and psychopaths:
Normal people (however you define that term) can be desensitized to the suffering of others. Soldiers fighting in a war - those who don't become shellshocked - become insensitive to killing and wounding. Indeed, people with ordinary lives sometimes have to "harden their hearts" just to do their jobs.
I think one of the more uplifting facts of human nature is that it's very hard for us to "harden our hearts". Consider the behavior of soldiers during war. On the battlefield, men are explicitly encouraged…
cortex | December 13, 2007The latest issue of Nature has a thought-provoking article on new research trying to understand the psychopathic brain. On most psychological tests, psychopaths appear perfectly normal. Their working memory isn't impaired, they use language normally, and they don't have reduced attention spans. In fact, several studies have found that psychopaths have slightly above average IQ's.
So what causes the psychopath pathology? The problem seems to reside in the emotional brain: psychopaths have tremendous difficulty sympathizing with the emotions of others. When normal people are shown staged…
cortex | December 13, 2007Home sales are plummeting. In the Times, David Leonhardt focuses on Paramount, CA, site of the most precipitous drop in home sales in the country:
Just south of Los Angeles, there is a small city called Paramount where houses have all but stopped selling.
Since the summer, only about three homes a week -- including houses and condominiums -- have sold in Paramount. In the third quarter of this year, only 30 homes changed hands, down from 134 in the third quarter of last year.
That 78 percent drop is bigger than the decline in any other ZIP code in the country, according to an analysis that a…
cortex | December 12, 2007Paul Ekman, the eminent UCSF psychologist, has a new exhibit of his photography on display at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The photographs are primarily of the South Fore people, an isolated group living in the New Guinea highlands. Ekman was studying their facial expressions, trying to figure out if the articulations of human facial muscles were universal, as Darwin had first theorized:
Ekman's team found that the Fore's facial expressions for happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger, and disgust were strikingly similar to those found in other cultures. For example, when asked to…
cortex | December 11, 2007The answer is a tenuous yes, although it depends on where you live. If your local utility burns lots of coal, then perhaps you should stick with a fuel efficient compact car. If you don't know how your local utility generates electricity, then check out this nifty website from the EPA.
cortex | December 11, 2007I'm honored/flattered/thrilled/etc. to have Proust Was A Neuroscientist listed as one of the 25 best non-fiction books of the year by the LA Times. Other science-themed* books included on the list are The Atomic Bazaar, by William Langewiesche and Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America by Eric Jay Dolin.
*I know these aren't straight science books, but Langewiesche's frightening text taught me an awful lot about the practical physics of nuclear weapons and I really want to read Leviathan, if only to better understand Moby Dick.
cortex | December 11, 2007Shakespeare bent language in peculiar ways. He had a habit of violating our conventional grammatical categories, so that nouns became verbs and adjectives were turned into nouns. (This is known as a functional shift.) Here's Phillip Davis:
Thus in "Lear" for example, Edgar comparing himself to the king: "He childed as I fathered" (nouns shifted to verbs); in "Troilus and Cressida", "Kingdomed Achilles in commotion rages" (noun converted to adjective); "Othello", "To lip a wanton in a secure couch/And to suppose her chaste!"' (noun "lip" to verb; adjective "wanton" to noun).
The effect is…
cortex | December 11, 2007Jason Kottke, a consistent fount of great links, finds a revealing interview with David Foster Wallace about Infinite Jest. Here is DFW answering a question about whether or not his novel actually follows a fractal form*:
David Foster Wallace: That's one of the things, structurally, that's going on [in the novel]. It's actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal, although what was structured as a Sierpinski Gasket was the first- was the draft that I delivered to Michael in '94, and it went through some I think 'mercy…
cortex | December 10, 2007No, it's not an oxymoron: philosophers have discovered the virtue of experimentation.
Now a restive contingent of our tribe is convinced that it can shed light on traditional philosophical problems by going out and gathering information about what people actually think and say about our thought experiments. The newborn movement ("x-phi" to its younger practitioners) has come trailing blogs of glory, not to mention Web sites, special journal issues and panels at the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association. At the University of California at San Diego and the University of…
cortex | December 8, 2007The Times takes the FCX for a spin. The good news is that it drives like an ordinary car, even though it runs on hydrogen:
Normalcy is a recurring, and intentional, theme of the FCX Clarity. It is refueled using a high-pressure connector tucked behind a typical gas-cap door on the rear fender. It has a handsome exterior, a nice audio system and plenty of knee room in the back. (A design analysis is at nytimes.com/autos) Anyone who has driven a Toyota Prius will feel at home with the dash-mounted gear selector and the park button.
And yet, this car manages to get 68 miles to the gallon and…
cortex | December 8, 2007So I was out to dinner recently with some friends and the conversation eventually degenerated into a dork competition. The rules of the game are simple (and extremely dorky). Each person confesses the single dorkiest thing about them. The winner gets a beer. Competing entries ranged from a friend who had pictures of western blots on her cell phone (second place) to someone who kept the Sigma molecular biology catalog next to his toilet (honorable mention). Needless to say, I won the competition. My winning entry was my iPod, which had playlists named for various neurotransmitters. For example…
cortex | December 6, 2007So the new Seed is now on the newstands. I've got a longish essay sketching out possible future interactions between science and art:
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 that are the seeds of scientific progress…