cortex | December 6, 2007The data is hard to believe:
It has long been known that dyslexics are drawn to running their own businesses, where they can get around their weaknesses in reading and writing and play on their strengths. But a new study of entrepreneurs in the United States suggests that dyslexia is much more common among small-business owners than even the experts had thought.
The report, compiled by Julie Logan, a professor of entrepreneurship at the Cass Business School in London, found that more than a third of the entrepreneurs she had surveyed -- 35 percent -- identified themselves as dyslexic. The…
cortex | December 5, 2007From VSL comes this list of truly weird scientific studies. My favorite was this one, which "assesses the link between country music and metropolitan suicide rates":
Country music is hypothesized to nurture a suicidal mood through its concerns with problems common in the suicidal population, such as marital discord, alcohol abuse, and alienation from work. The results of a multiple regression analysis of 49 metropolitan areas show that the greater the airtime devoted to country music, the greater the white suicide rate. The effect is independent of divorce, southernness, poverty, and gun…
cortex | December 5, 2007From the great Harold McGee comes an investigation into raw milk, bacteria and cultural evolution:
On our journey up to the Stichelton Dairy last September, Mr. Hodgson [a cheesemaker] explained how cheese quality progressed for centuries, then declined in the age of mass production and supermarkets.
"I think of it as a Darwinian process," he said. "People make cheeses many times a year, in many ways, and all kinds of factors -- accidents, chance, laziness, intentional changes -- cause variations in the result. In the past, the changes that caused an improvement survived because consumers…
cortex | December 4, 2007As I note in my book, the most famous impressionists all suffered from serious medical problems:
Monet became blind (but didn't stop painting the bridges of Giverny). Vincent Van Gogh, drinker of kerosene, turpentine, and absinthe, probably thought the coronas he painted around stars and streetlamps were real. Edgar Degas became severely myopic, which led him to do more and more sculpture ("I must learn a blind man's trade now," Degas said.) Auguste Renoir, poisoned by his pastel paints, became a rheumatic cripple.
Now scientists are able to simulate exactly what Monet would have seen…
cortex | December 4, 2007I had the pleasure of driving for a few hours in yesterday's New England blizzard. (I was coming back from a radio interview for "On Point," which is broadcast out of WBUR in Boston. You can listen to me here.) While driving up a white I-93, I counted more than a dozen vehicles that had lost control, zoomed off the highway shoulder, and ended up trapped in snow banks. So far, so normal. A snow storm makes for treacherous driving. But here's the surprising observation (at least, it was surprising to me): 8 of the 13 cars were trucks. Big, brawny 4x4's. The kind of vehicle that people buy…
cortex | December 1, 2007PZ attacks religious beliefs with his usual angry panache:
Religion is a bad thing. It encourages people to believe in things that are not true. It really is as simple as that; we'd be better off if people valued truth over comfortable delusions.
Unlike most Americans, I don't believe in angels, the devil or the possibility of eternal salvation. I think Armageddon has more to do with nuclear proliferation than the Book of Revelations. But attacking the ideas of religion fails to address the real value of religion. People don't go to church because they want to read the same old fantastical…
cortex | November 30, 2007Don't worry, the period of shameless self-promotion is almost over. But Proust Was A Neuroscientist has been in the news lately. The San Francisco Chronicle had a very kind review:
Interpreters of Woolf and Proust are legion, but Lehrer is gifted with the ability to find philosophy in science and stray bits of science buried amid the rubble of literary history. He is less critic than armchair philosopher, searching for meaning anywhere great thinkers have left their footprints. Chef Auguste Escoffier's brainstorm about the necessity of heat for fine cooking is granted no less significance…
cortex | November 29, 2007Ian McEwan is mischievous. He ends Enduring Love - a novel about a science writer - with a carefully faked psychiatric study from a non-existent British medical journal. Although the syndrome discussed in the article is real - De Clerambault's Syndrome is the delusional belief that someone else is in love with you - the particulars are all pretend. And yet, when Enduring Love was first released, most critics assumed that the journal article was, in fact, the inspiration for the novel. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, a former book critics for the New York Times, even went so far as to complain that…
cortex | November 28, 2007Watching this clip of a kid who has spent way too much time on Guitar Hero 2 reminded me of the classic study of the somatosensory cortex in string players:
Magnetic source imaging revealed that the cortical representation of the digits of the left hand of string players was larger than that in controls. The effect was smallest for the left thumb, and no such differences were observed for the representations of the right hand digits. The amount of cortical reorganization in the representation of the fingering digits was correlated with the age at which the person had begun to play. These…
cortex | November 28, 2007So the Times didn't think much of science books this year. Personally, I think the three big omissions from the "Notable" list are Musicophilia, Isaacson's Einstein and The Stuff of Thought. What other science books did you think were notable this year? I'm not sure how "notable" is supposed to be defined in this context, but let's say it's some combination of "good" plus "important".
In case you need some inspiration, here's the Amazon list of best science books, which I'm honored to be included in.
cortex | November 28, 2007I've never eaten Kobe beef from Japan, and now I never will. Authentic Kobe beef is essentially veal that isn't put out of its misery. Barry Estabrook, in the new Gourmet, investigates the real life of these very expensive cows (ten ounces of Kobe beef can set you back about $175):
Traditional Japanese producers raise their 1,600 pound cattle in highly confined areas. "From the time they are a week old until they are three and a half years old, these steers are commonly kept in a lean-to behind someone's house," said Blackmore [an expert on Kobe beef production], "where they get bored and go…
cortex | November 27, 2007I like this just-so story. Here's Natalie Angier:
Art, she [Ellen Dissanayake] and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade -- a proposal not surprisingly shared by our hora teacher, Steven Brown of Simon Fraser University. Through singing, dancing, painting, telling fables of neurotic mobsters who visit psychiatrists, and otherwise engaging in what Ms. Dissanayake calls "artifying," people can be quickly and ebulliently drawn together, and even strangers persuaded to treat one another as kin. Through the harmonic magic of…
cortex | November 27, 2007From Brad DeLong:
If inherited genetically-based IQ were the source of the extra edge that the children of the rich get in our society, than we would expect a parent with 4 times average lifetime full-time earnings--say $200,000 a year--to have a kid with a lifetime average income of $51,500 instead of the average of $50,000. But it is not $51,500. It is $150,000.
Our obsession with the IQ test seems to exploit what I'll call the quantification bias, which is the fact that being able to quantify something makes it seem more important than it really is. And so we fixate on IQ scores in such a…
cortex | November 26, 2007I'm quickly learning that these webmagazines really don't like my book. This review, however, is actually rather thoughtful. Daniel Engber of Slate begins by pointing out that neuroscientists are constantly quoting Proust:
My career as a grad student in neuroscience was filled with these obligatory madeleine moments: It seemed like every talk, lecture, presentation, or paper on the biology of memory began with a dip into Swann's Way. An extended passage from the book appears in the brain researcher's standard reference manual, Principles of Neural Science, and Proustian inscriptions routinely…
cortex | November 26, 2007Life is getting tough for the running backs of the NFL. First comes the news that becoming a star rusher doesn't require a Heisman Trophy or even a high-profile start in NCAA Division I-A:
The debate has simmered for a decade, at least since the Denver Broncos began making a habit of turning unsung players into 1,000-yard rushers. Other championship-caliber teams, like the Indianapolis Colts and the New England Patriots, began casting aside top running backs, finding younger and cheaper alternatives with no regrets.
But the question of whether N.F.L. running backs are overvalued -- generally…
cortex | November 26, 2007And it comes with recipes, too! Here's Billy Collins:
As soon as the elderly waiter
placed before me the fish I had ordered,
it began to stare up at me
with its one flat, iridescent eye.
I feel sorry for you, it seemed to say,
eating alone in this awful restaurant
bathed in such unkindly light
and surrounded by these dreadful murals of Sicily.
And I feel sorry for you, too --
yanked from the sea and now lying dead
next to some boiled potatoes in Pittsburgh --
I said back to the fish as I raised my fork.
And thus my dinner in an unfamiliar city
with its rivers and lighted bridges
was graced…
cortex | November 24, 2007Paul Davies dares to utter the f-word in the context of science:
The problem with this neat separation into "non-overlapping magisteria," as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn't be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to…
cortex | November 24, 2007One of my favorite parts of this whole book publication process has been getting to meet the people behind the voices on NPR. I spend so much time tuned to my local public radio station that I feel this intimate conversational bond with the anchors and reporters on the air. So it was a special treat to get to meet Kurt Andersen, host of Studio 360, which I listen to religiously. You can listen to an excerpt from our conversation this weekend on the show. We talk about Whitman and the body, Cezanne's blank spots and the possibility of unraveling the rainbow. (Even if you're sick of hearing…
cortex | November 23, 2007I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. My own holiday meal was the subject of a simple food experiment. I made two versions of the same dish: brussels sprout gratin with chestnuts, bacon and Comte. (Yes, it's as delicious as it sounds, even if you don't like baby cabbages.) One version was made with fresh brussels sprouts. (Cost: $13.25) The other dish was made with frozen brussels sprouts. (Cost: $5.97) I naively assumed that the fresh version would be clearly superior.
I was wrong. While I slightly preferred the texture of the fresh sprouts - they were a bit less mushy - the frozen…
cortex | November 21, 2007I've been trying really hard not to get excited about I'm Not There, in case it turned out to be a self-indulgent disaster. But early reviews suggest that it's actually rather compelling. That's great news, because I already love the soundtrack. In no particular order, my favorite tracks include:
Ring Them Bells, by Sufjan Stevens
Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again, by Cat Power
Simple Twist of Fate, by Jeff Tweedy
Going to Acapulco, by Calexico and Jim James
Knockin' on Heaven's Door, by Antony and the Johnsons
Here's my question: What are your dream pairings for Dylan…