cortex | September 24, 2007Loss aversion is so easy to understand - it can be explained using a coin flip in ten seconds - and yet it manages to explain so many anomalies of modern life*, from the 4th down habits of football coaches to the collapsing real estate market:
The professors gathered data on almost 6,000 Boston condominium listings from 1991 to 1997 and showed that for essentially identical condominiums, people who had bought at the peak and were facing a loss generally listed their properties for significantly more than those who had bought at a time when prices were lower.
Properties listed above the market…
cortex | September 21, 2007Like many Patriots fans, I've been suffering from an acute case of cognitive dissonance ever since I learned about Bill Belichick's taping habits. On the one hand, I know cheating is wrong. On the other hand, winning sure feels good. The end result is that I deftly rationalize away the sin, and come up with all sorts of elaborate reasons why videotaping defensive signals doesn't really matter. (Everybody does it. Well, everybody would do it if they were smart enough. The Pats would have beaten the Jets anyways. It was really the Jets fault for making their signals so damn obvious.)
But it…
cortex | September 21, 2007Context is everything:
Sana Klaric and husband Adnan, who used the names "Sweetie" and "Prince of Joy" in an online chatroom, spent hours telling each other about their marriage troubles, Metro.co.uk reported.
The truth emerged when the two turned up for a date. Now the pair, from Zenica in central Bosnia, are divorcing after accusing each other of being unfaithful.
"I was suddenly in love. It was amazing. We seemed to be stuck in the same kind of miserable marriage. How right that turned out to be," Sana, 27, said.
Someone should teach these people about the fundamental attribution error…
cortex | September 21, 2007Alan Greenspan seems to have discovered the irrationality of human nature. In his recent appearance on the Daily Show, he lamented the stubborn persistence of financial bubbles, from junk bonds to dot-com stocks to real estate. (For a thorough history of bubbles, from tulips to today, check out this book.) John Stewart confessed that Greenspan's gloomy view of human nature - we are all gullible fools - bummed the expletive out of him. (Greenspan, of course, could also be rationalizing away his own failure to deflate either the dot-com bubble or the real estate bubble.)
But why are bubbles so…
cortex | September 20, 2007I've said it before and I'll say it again: the vast majority of hybrid cars aren't worth the surcharge. You'd get much better mileage with a smaller engine, especially if it was a clean diesel. What worries me about hybrids is that they seem to satisfy this bourgeois lust for environmentally friendly brands - nothing says upper class liberal like a Prius parked in a Whole Foods parking lot - and yet typically don't represent significant environmental improvements. We assuage our conscience without doing much good. Now Forbes has compiled a list of the least fuel-efficient hybrids:
In fact,…
cortex | September 20, 2007So it's the High Holy Day season again - the pious two weeks in the Jewish calendar connecting Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur - and that means that many American Jews are going to shul. For most of these religious observers, this will be their only trip to temple during the year (unless, of course, they've been invited to a bar mitzvah).
The one thing that always strikes me about spending time in a non-Orthodox temple is just how little God there is. Sure, His name is constantly invoked, but it's always in a rather rote, ritualistic way. I never get the sense that most of the people crammed…
cortex | September 19, 2007There's a really wonderful article by Oliver Sacks in the New Yorker this week, excerpted from his forthcoming Musicophilia. I've got a profile of Sacks in the next issue of Seed (hitting newsstands soon), which was a real thrill to write, since he's always been one of my intellectual heroes. Here's how I describe Clive Wearing, the amnesiac subject of the article, in my profile:
One of the final stories in Musicophilia is that of Clive Wearing, an English musician and musicologist who was struck by a severe brain infection that decimated his memory. As a result, Clive lives inside brief…
cortex | September 18, 2007Rachel Donadio, over at the Times Book Review, had an interesting little essay on the canon wars, Allan Bloom and the fate of the humanities. But what caught my eye was this melancholy paragraph:
All this reflects what the philosopher Martha Nussbaum today describes as a "loss of respect for the humanities as essential ingredients of democracy." Nussbaum, who panned Bloom's book in The New York Review in 1987, teaches at the University of Chicago, which like Columbia has retained a Western-based core curriculum requirement for undergraduates. But on some campuses, "the main area of conflict…
cortex | September 18, 2007One of the more fascinating bits of research I couldn't cram into my recent article on the bird brain concerned some work out Erich Jarvis' lab. In 2004, Jarvis and colleagues found that songbirds have a nearly identical version of a gene known as FoxP2 that has been linked to inherited language deficits in humans. (People with mutated versions of FoxP2 have normal motor coordination, but are unable to form grammatical sentences or understand complex linguistic structures.) Jarvis discovered that this gene is expressed at higher levels in the bird brain precisely when the bird is learning new…
cortex | September 17, 2007One day, your iPod will be made out of biological flesh. Just kidding. In general, I'm a pretty staunch skeptic of The Singularity, but I've got to admit that experiments like this are pretty rad:
A team in Silver's HMS lab led by Caroline Ajo-Franklin, now at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and postdoctoral scientist David Drubin decided to demonstrate that not only could they construct circuits out of genetic material, but they could also develop mathematical models whose predictive abilities match those of any electrical engineering system.
"That's the litmus test," says Drubin, "…
cortex | September 17, 2007I've always thought someone could make a great television show by featuring some of the more bizarre and enlightening neurological syndromes that afflict the human brain. What is it like, for example, to not have an amygdala, or OFC, or insula? Or to be suffering from Capgras syndrome? Or to have a severed corpus callosum? Since the Discovery Channel has yet to implement my idea, we'll have to make do with You Tube:
Via Mind Hacks.
cortex | September 17, 2007I've got an article in yesterday's Boston Globe on the acute intelligence of birds, which is a by-product of their sociality:
There is a growing scientific recognition of the genius of birds. Scientists are now studying various birds to explore everything from spatial memory to the grammatical structure of human language. This research is helping to reveal the secrets of the human brain. But it is also overturning the conventional evolutionary story of intelligence, in which all paths lead to the creation of the human cortex. The tree of life, scientists are discovering, has numerous branches…
cortex | September 16, 2007Gary Taubes has a pretty damning takedown of modern epidemiology at the Times Magazine:
In the case of H.R.T. [Hormone Replacement Therapy], as with most issues of diet, lifestyle and disease, the hypotheses begin their transformation into public-health recommendations only after they've received the requisite support from a field of research known as epidemiology. This science evolved over the last 250 years to make sense of epidemics -- hence the name -- and infectious diseases. Since the 1950s, it has been used to identify, or at least to try to identify, the causes of the common chronic…
cortex | September 14, 2007David Brooks makes a really smart macro point today about one of the big themes of modern neuroscience. His op-ed (Times $elect) is about the decline of IQ as a general metric of intelligence:
Today, the research that dominates public conversation is not about raw brain power but about the strengths and consequences of specific processes. Daniel Schacter of Harvard writes about the vices that flow from the way memory works. Daniel Gilbert, also of Harvard, describes the mistakes people make in perceiving the future. If people at Harvard are moving beyond general intelligence, you know…
cortex | September 14, 2007There was something sad yet slightly poignant about watching President Bush's speech on Iraq last night. I thought Andrew Sullivan got the atmospherics exactly right:
He seemed almost broken to me. His voice raspy, his eyes watery, his affect exhausted, his facial expression almost bewildered. I thought I would feel angry; but I found myself verging toward pity. The case was so weak, the argument so thin, the evidence for optimism so obviously strained that one wondered whom he thought he was persuading. And the way he framed his case was still divorced from the reality we see in front of our…
cortex | September 13, 2007The new Kanye West album is solid, although it could use a dose of ironic humor. But that's neither here nor there. What interests me about Kanye is his masterful ability to embed hooks and samples into the background of his songs. He'll literally repeat the same three second acoustic loop over and over again, until the song has this fierce forward momentum. ("The Glory" is probably the best example of this on the new album.)
And this got me thinking: why are these samples so effective? Why is my brain so riveted by an endlessly repeated shard of sound? I think the answer helps to reveal the…
cortex | September 12, 2007My vestibular system is totally confused:
See James Fallows for the explanation. Movies like this make me glad that pilots rely on gyroscopes to guide them through the clouds.
cortex | September 12, 2007Just a quick note on the liberal/conservative psychological study that everyone is talking about. (Dave Munger has a thorough write-up here.) Color me dubious. My own bias is to distrust any experiment that tries to collapse extremely complex cognitive categories - such as political belief - into a simple and quantifiable experimental paradigm. The research is certainly interesting, but I'd find it more trustworthy (and more interesting) if it got a result that contradicted the conventional wisdom.
And then there's the fact that it contradicts some of the work of Philip Tetlock, who found…
cortex | September 12, 2007Boy, was Descartes wrong. His philosophy of duality divided our being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was "clocklike," just a machine that bleeds. With this schism, Descartes condemned the body to a life of subservience, a power plant for the brain's light bulbs.
One of the great themes of modern neuroscience is that Descartes was utterly wrong. (I discuss this theme in my Walt Whitman chapter of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Whitman's mantra, after all, was that "the…
cortex | September 10, 2007There are so many stupid studies of the gendered brain that it's easy to conclude that good research into psychological sex differences is impossible. But that would be a mistake. I think one of most interesting recent investigations into the cognitive differences of men and women comes from a clever neuroeconomics experiment, designed by Colin Camerer and Read Montague. It's called the trust game, and it goes like this: at the start of each of 10 rounds, an "investor" is given an imaginary stake of $20. They can keep it all, or "invest" some of it with a "trustee". Any money that gets…