cortex | October 13, 2007The correlation is pretty clear: the older we get, the happier we become.
Only in the last decade have researchers begun to measure happiness across the life span and, in doing so, try to understand why older people tend to be so content.
The explanation doesn't appear to be biological -- some chemical in the brain that mellows us just when all those plump neurons needed for thinking and memory are shriveling up. Rather, most scientists now think that experience and the mere passage of time gradually motivate people to approach life differently. The blazing-to-freezing range of emotions…
cortex | October 11, 2007Here's Vaughan on a neat grammatical shortcut:
Whilst drinking with a psycholinguist (say that after a few pints) I was taught a useful way of quickly working out the stressed syllable in any English word - something which is apparently called the 'fuck test'.
Simply insert the word 'fucking' into the word, as if you were using the swear word for emphasis, and the syllable that follows the 'fucking' is the stressed syllable.
For example, absolutely -> abso-fucking-lutely. The stressed syllable is the third: i.e. absolutely. It works for every multi-syllable word I've found so far.
On a…
cortex | October 11, 2007Alex Ross brings my attention to a recent letter in Science:
"...Watanabe and Sato [Behav. Processes 47, 1 (1999)] have shown that Java sparrows can discriminate between Bach's French Suite no. 5 in G minor and Arnold Schoenberg's Suite for Piano opus 25. The birds were also able to generalize new music by Bach (Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D major) and Schoenberg (Five Orchestra Pieces, Opus 16) and artists in similar categories, i.e., Vivaldi and Elliott Carter. In these experiments, music by Bach and Vivaldi was considered classical music, while the music of Schoenberg and Carter was…
cortex | October 10, 2007Or at least they play the ultimatum game more rationally than humans:
German researchers have demonstrated chimpanzees make choices that protect their self-interest more consistently than do humans.
Researchers from the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig studied the chimp's choices by using an economic game with two players. In the game, a human or chimpanzee who receives something of value can offer to share it with another.
If the proposed share is rejected, neither player gets anything.
Humans typically make offers close to 50 percent of the reward. They also…
cortex | October 8, 2007In the latest New Yorker, the always fascinating and fair Jerome Groopman* has an article on the recent Science paper documenting neural activity in vegetative patients:
For four months, Kate Bainbridge had not spoken or responded to her family or her doctors, although her eyes were often open and roving. (A person in a coma appears to be asleep and is unaware of even painful stimulation; a person in a vegetative state has periods of wakefulness but shows no awareness of her environment and does not make purposeful movements.) Owen placed Bainbridge in a PET scanner, a machine that records…
cortex | October 6, 2007This year, California will spend three times as much operating its prisons than running the UC system.
cortex | October 5, 2007This seems like a really good thing:
In this isolated Taliban stronghold in eastern Afghanistan, American paratroopers are fielding what they consider a crucial new weapon in counterinsurgency operations here: a soft-spoken civilian anthropologist named Tracy.
Tracy, who asked that her surname not be used for security reasons, is a member of the first Human Terrain Team, an experimental Pentagon program that assigns anthropologists and other social scientists to American combat units in Afghanistan and Iraq. Her team's ability to understand subtle points of tribal relations -- in one case…
cortex | October 4, 2007I think the NY Times Style section should invest in a resident evolutionary psychologist. Its pages are often filled with the most blatant examples of human nature and sexual selection. The scientist could also help me understand stories like this:
Dr. David Stoker, a plastic surgeon in Marina Del Rey, Calif., has a surgical cure for the ravages of motherhood. He, like many plastic surgeons nationwide, calls it a "mommy makeover."
Aimed at mothers, it usually involves a trifecta: a breast lift with or without breast implants, a tummy tuck and some liposuction. The procedures are intended to…
cortex | October 4, 2007It's not easy to re-educate our sense of taste. Britain is learning that the hard way:
Two years ago, celebrity chef Jamie Oliver expressed horror at the Turkey Twizzlers being served in Britain's school cafeterias and equated many school lunches with a four-letter word for the ultimate byproduct of all meals. He vowed to help lead students down the road to healthful eating.
The Pied Piper, it turns out, he was not. In the wake of an Oliver-inspired national program to provide more nutritious food, students have gravitated away from the cafeteria in a majority of the schools surveyed,…
cortex | October 3, 2007Wired has a fascinating interview with Oliver Sacks about music. I particularly enjoyed this question from Steve Silberman about the joys of combining a good melody with drugs:
Wired: You write that there was a time in med school when you took a lot of amphetamines. What's the most vivid experience of music you ever had on drugs?
Sacks: Hume wondered whether one can imagine a color that one has never encountered. One day in 1964, I constructed a sort of pharmacological mountain, and at its peak, I said, "I want to see indigo, now!" As if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge, trembling drop of…
cortex | October 2, 2007You know what I think of when I read stories like this?
The pace of change [in the polar ice caps] has far exceeded what had been estimated by almost all the simulations used to envision how the Arctic will respond to rising concentrations of greenhouse gases linked to global warming. But that disconnect can cut two ways. Are the models overly conservative? Or are they missing natural influences that can cause wide swings in ice and temperature, thereby dwarfing the slow background warming?
I think of the Atlantic Cod. These fish used to be everywhere. (Once upon a time, they were considered…
cortex | October 2, 2007The transition from basic science to useful technology is so unpredictable. Look, for example, at DNA. Ten years ago, everybody assumed that the payoff of the genetic revolution would arrive in the form of gene therapy. We'd cure disease by tinkering with our genome. Well, that didn't work out so well. Who could have guessed that one of the most important contributions of the genetic revolution would be the use of DNA in the criminal justice system? We know so little about what our new knowledge will do.
State lawmakers across the country are adopting broad changes to criminal justice…
cortex | October 1, 2007There are lies, damn lies and statistics. Last week, the newspapers were filled with stories about rising divorce rates. It was widely reported that couples that married in the 1970's had a less than even chance of celebrating their 25th wedding anniversary. But those statistics were misleading. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers report:
The story of ever-increasing divorce is a powerful narrative. It is also wrong. In fact, the divorce rate has been falling continuously over the past quarter-century, and is now at its lowest level since 1970. While marriage rates are also declining, those…
cortex | October 1, 2007Over at the MIT Tech Review website, neuroscientist Ed Boyden argues for brain augmentation:
It's arguably time for a discipline to emerge around the idea of human augmentation. At the MIT Media Lab, we are beginning to search for principles that govern the use of technology to augment human abilities--that make the idea of normal obsolete...
One argument in favor of going for optimality, and forgetting about normal, is that it's becoming harder and harder to know what is normal. For example, it's been demonstrated that two-thirds of all people have at least one copy of a DNA sequence that…
cortex | September 28, 2007In light of Mahmoud Ahmadenijad's recent comment about there being no gay people in Iran, Matthew Yglesias links to this really interesting article about homosexuals in Saudi Arabia:
What seems more startling, at least from a Western perspective, is that some of the men having sex with other men don't consider themselves gay. For many Saudis, the fact that a man has sex with another man has little to do with "gayness." The act may fulfill a desire or a need, but it doesn't constitute an identity. Nor does it strip a man of his masculinity, as long as he is in the "top," or active, role. This…
cortex | September 26, 2007From David Leonhardt:
There appears to be a growing happiness gap between men and women.
Two new research papers, using very different methods, have both come to this conclusion. Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, economists at the University of Pennsylvania (and a couple), have looked at the traditional happiness data, in which people are simply asked how satisfied they are with their overall lives. In the early 1970s, women reported being slightly happier than men. Today, the two have switched places.
Mr. Krueger, analyzing time-use studies over the last four decades, has found an even…
cortex | September 26, 2007Fear isn't our most rational feeling; the amygdala is an inherently inscrutable bit of brain. Tyler Cowen makes a good point about how the irrationality of fear manifests itself with global warming:
I believe, for instance, that ocean acidification will, in the long run, be the most dangerous consequence of carbon emissions. (And by saying that I don't mean to downgrade the other worries.)
I am aware that this belief isn't necessarily justified. It is shared by some scientists as a speculation, and it could turn out to be true, but it is hardly well-grounded as our major worry even though…
cortex | September 25, 2007Here's Drake Bennett:
In a set of experiments carried out in 2005 by the economists Nina Mazar and Dan Ariely, of MIT, and On Amir, a marketing expert at the University of California at San Diego, subjects were given a timed test of general-knowledge questions and paid for each correct answer. They varied the setup of the experiment and found that people would tend to cheat when given the chance, but that the risk of being discovered did not deter them. Even more surprisingly, the experimenters found a way to limit cheating that had nothing to do with the threat of getting caught. When they…
cortex | September 25, 2007Can you engineer a yawn to become perfectly contagious?
A number of studies found that a medley of ordinary yawns on video played to a classroom for five minutes would induce a responsive yawn in 55 percent of the audience. So that was his starting point: could he design a yawn powerful enough to move from a 55 percent response right up to Total Yawn-ness?
He tried.
Our story (just push on the icon up above and cover your mouth) describes what happened next.
Listen to the whole thing. And yes, studying the spread of yawning has a real practical application.
cortex | September 24, 20071) Away, by Amy Bloom. The prose is perfect. It's the best written new novel you'll read this year, and that's saying something, since Ian McEwan also came out with a new novel. Another interesting thing about the book is that I almost didn't buy it because the cover is so terrible, or at least unappealing to me. But that would have been a mistake.
2) Into the Wild, by Eddie Vedder. Haven't seen the movie, but the music is fantastic. If Thoreau had an iPod, he'd be listening to this in the woods. That, of course, begs the question: would Thoreau have owned an iPod?