cortex | October 31, 2007It really is one of the great culinary techniques, and yet it's almost never used. I'm talking about salt roasting, and Russ Parsons has put together a lovely introduction to the subject. Basically, you bury a piece of protein in a mound of kosher salt. Put the dish in a hot oven and bake for 20 minutes or so. Then you just crack open the saline shell and peel away the salty skin. The resulting flesh is incredibly succulent and flavorful. The kitchen chemistry behind the technique is rather simple:
The salt melts and forms a crust, making a kind of "oven within an oven". The effect is quite…
cortex | October 30, 2007Ever wanted to fly through a neocortical column? Yeah, me too. The bad news is that, until I manage to shrink myself to the micron level, such a flight is probably impossible. This computer simulated video is probably the closest I'll get.
cortex | October 30, 2007I've always wondered about why manual transmissions generally get better mileage than automatics. The answer is surprisingly simple: humans are better shifters.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency's fuel economy ratings, cars with manual transmissions typically beat their automatic peers by a mile or two per gallon. This is largely because manuals give you more control over an engine's exertions. Despite recent advances in slushbox design, humans are still better than automated systems at recognizing precisely when to shift gears. And smart shifting enables you to limit an engine…
cortex | October 30, 2007The Cartesian wall separating the mind and body has been so thoroughly deconstructed that it's newsworthy when a bodily condition is not affected by our mental state. After all, recent studies have shown that everything from chronic back pain to many auto-immune diseases are all modulated by various psychological factors, such as stress levels. But cancer appears to be relatively immune to the mind. Those tumor cells don't care about what you think or feel. Here's the Times:
The idea that emotional well-being can affect the course of disease finds no support in a new report on head and neck…
cortex | October 29, 2007I linked to an interesting new paper in Frontiers in Neuroscience last week, but I thought it was worth talking a bit more about the journal itself. It's a brand new publication, which attempts to completely transform the peer review process. The journal grew out of frustration with the traditional scientific publication crapshoot, which the editors of Frontiers criticize as:
Complicated and time consuming,
Biased and controlled by local lobbies and powerful journals,
And not geared towards the needs of Authors. In this publishing system the prestige comes from where one publishes and not…
cortex | October 29, 2007A note to readers: For the next few weeks, this blog is going on a book tour. So if you're averse to self-promotion and blatant shows of immodesty (I promise to also link to the negative reviews!), or just aren't interested in Proust Was A Neuroscientist, then I kindly suggest you check back in December, when I'll be back talking about lots of other things beside myself. I promise this book related chatter won't last forever...
With that warning out of the way, the LA Times ran a very generous and thoughtful review of the book yesterday:
Jonah Lehrer, a science journalist with a neuroscience…
cortex | October 24, 2007An intriguing new hypothesis that seeks to explain all of the diverse psychological symptoms associated with autism. Here's the abstract:
While significant advances have been made in identifying the neuronal structures and cells affected, a unifying theory that could explain the manifold autistic symptoms has still not emerged. Based on recent synaptic, cellular, molecular, microcircuit, and behavioral results obtained with the valproic acid (VPA) rat model of autism, we propose here a unifying hypothesis where the core pathology of the autistic brain is hyper-reactivity and hyper-plasticity…
cortex | October 23, 2007Forgive the light posting. I've been traveling. I'm now in Switzerland, reporting a story that I'm sure we'll be talking about later. But for now, I'd like to share a few thoughts on being an American abroad.
The first thought is sobering. One can't help but be impressed by the infrastructure of Europe. To get to JFK, I had to take a grimy rush hour A-train that broke down in the middle of Brooklyn. Then there were the requisite security lines that took forever, since the Department of Homeland Security (I still get Orwellian shivers whenever I write that bureaucratic name) has a fondness…
cortex | October 22, 2007Taking advantage of a new Amazon feature, Steven Johnson does some literary data-mining:
The two stats that I found totally fascinating were "Average Words Per Sentence" and "% Complex Words," the latter defined as words with three or more syllables -- words like "ameliorate", "protoplasm" or "motherf***er." I've always thought that sentence length is a hugely determining factor in a reader's perception of a given work's complexity, and I spent quite a bit of time in my twenties actively teaching myself to write shorter sentences. So this kind of material is fascinating to me, partially…
cortex | October 22, 2007A nice article on birth order in the latest Time. One of the interesting things about birth order effects is that, although they are statistically subtle, people have been noticing the consistent differences between first and last borns for a long time. It's one of those examples of folk psychology where the folk turn out to be right.
It's awfully hard to resist the charms of someone who can make you laugh, and families abound with stories of last-borns who are the clowns of the brood, able to get their way simply by being funny or outrageous. Birth-order scholars often observe that some of…
cortex | October 22, 2007My book got a very nice little spread in the new Wired. There's a picture of me at an uncomfortable zoom and a short Q&A:
Q: Do you really think that we'll find answers to science's Big Questions in the arts?
A: Virginia Woolf isn't going to help you finish your lab experiment. What she will do is help you ask your questions better. Proust focused on problems that neuroscience itself didn't grapple with until relatively recently - questions of memory that couldn't be crammed into Pavlovian reinforcement: Why are memories so unreliable? Why do they change so often? Why do we remember only…
cortex | October 20, 2007The New Yorker recently had a cool short story by T.C. Boyle about a boy who couldn't experience pain. The story is told from the perspective of a doctor who has trouble believing that the symptoms of the child are real. The mother pleads:
"He's not normal, doctor. He doesn't feel pain the way others do. Look here"--and she lifted the child's right leg as if it weren't even attached to him, rolling up his miniature trousers to show me a dark raised scar the size of an adult's spread hand--"do you see this? This is where that filthy pit bull Isabel Briceño keeps came through the fence and bit…
cortex | October 19, 2007America is getting good at exporting our diseases. Everybody already talks about obesity and the way American eating habits are slowly fattening up the rest of the world. But that's not the only disease we are sending abroad. Here's VSL*:
Americans are on pretty chummy terms with depression, chatting almost as easily about therapists and Paxil and Lexapro as we would about sports scores and the weather. But in Japan -- where Buddhism has encouraged the acceptance of sadness and warns against the pursuit of "happiness" -- the concept of depression is just now beginning to permeate public…
cortex | October 18, 2007Bldg blog writes an ode to LA:
L.A. is the apocalypse: it's you and a bunch of parking lots. No one's going to save you; no one's looking out for you. It's the only city I know where that's the explicit premise of living there - that's the deal you make when you move to L.A.
The city, ironically, is emotionally authentic.
It says: no one loves you; you're the least important person in the room; get over it.
What matters is what you do there.
And maybe that means renting Hot Fuzz and eating too many pretzels; or maybe that means driving a Prius out to Malibu and surfing with Daryl Hannah as a…
cortex | October 17, 2007Hendrick Hertzberg takes on the Navy sonar technology which is killing whales:
Whales live in a world of sound. A large part of their brains, which in many species are larger than ours, is devoted to processing sound. We don't know how they subjectively experience the processed sound, but it is reasonable to speculate that their experience of hearing is comparable in depth, detail, and complexity to our experience of vision. (They may be able, for example, to "see" inside each others' bodies, giving them an analogue of the nonverbal communication of emotion for which we use gesture and facial…
cortex | October 17, 2007Joseph LeDoux helped make the amygdala famous - his seminal studies of fear conditioning illuminated, among other things, the importance of unconscious processing - so it's only fitting that he would be part of a rock band called The Amygdaloids.
Imagine Jefferson Airplane, with perhaps a dash of the Eagles and a lot of a neuroscientific puns, and you've got a pretty good idea of what The Amygdaloids sound like. "All in a Nut," for example, begins with a slightly psychedelic guitar solo and a plaintive question: "Why do we feel so afraid?/Don't have to look very far/Don't get stuck in a rut…
cortex | October 16, 2007As heard recently on The Daily Show:
Those guys don't know membrane vesicles from their taint.
It's a funny line, but membrane vesicles are serious stuff. Just ask Jack Szostak:
Our goal is generate a nucleic acid system that can replicate accurately and rapidly, without any enzymatic assistance. We have already developed a membrane vesicle system that allows for the repeated growth and division of the vesicles, without the involvement of any biochemical machinery. We are just beginning to do experiments in which we combine the nucleic and membrane systems, and we can already see the…
cortex | October 16, 2007So my book, Proust Was A Neuroscientist, is now shipping from Amazon and Barnes and Noble. It might even be in your local bookstore. I'll do my best not to turn this blog into an orgy of self-promotion, but feel free to check out some of the early blurbs (from Oliver Sacks, Joe Ledoux, Antonio Damasio and others) and nice reviews. And stay tuned for news about the book tour, which begins in November...
cortex | October 16, 2007It's an audacious idea, and I didn't believe it was possible until I saw the video. But it really is possible to teach blind people to see using their tongue. By connecting a camera to an array of electrodes that stimulate the sensitive nerves inside the mouth - a pixel of light is translated into a slight pinch - scientists can literally retrain the brain. Check out the video:
This might seem like an impossible example of sensory plasticity, but it's been done before. The neuroscientist Mriganka Sur, for example, literally re-wired the mind of a ferret, so that the information from its…