cortex | September 7, 2007Yawning is famously contagious. Except that is, if you're autistic. Here's Mindhacks:
The study showed that children with autism were far less likely to yawn in response to watching others do the same.
Often, autistic social difficulties are put down to a problem with 'theory of mind' the ability to understand other people's beliefs, intentions and desires, but it's not clear that contagious yawning relies on this.
The researchers don't have any easy answers for why yawn contagion is reduced in autism, but suggest, without committing, that known differences in viewing faces, possible…
cortex | September 7, 2007From Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz:
Sooner of later, everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.
Needless to say, this quote is neurochemically accurate. The brain is an equilibrium machine.
cortex | September 7, 2007In my post on warm milk and sleepiness - the dairy acts like a placebo - a commenter made an astute point:
what does "placebo" mean in that context? If you have developed the pathways that insist on Warm Milk = Time to Sleep, that effect is very real...
Whether purely conditioned, or based on some real effect we still don't understand...is seems to me to go beyond what we typically called placebo.
Was Pavlov's dog suffering from Placebo effect each time he salivated?
From the perspective of the brain, the placebo effect is simply a specific pattern of brain changes that make us feel better.…
cortex | September 6, 2007From Tyler Cowen:
1. In Danish data, if a CEO's child dies, the value of that CEO's company falls by one-fifth in the following two years.
2. If a CEO's wife dies, the value of that CEO's company falls by fifteen percent.
3. If a CEO's mother-in-law dies, the value of that CEO's company rises slightly.
The moral is simple: grief is debilitating, or at least distracting. Read the original paper here.
cortex | September 6, 2007Is it bad if your favorite philosophy comes in aphorism form? This is why I've always enjoyed Wittgenstein: his writing has the density of plutonium, since it's just pre-digested quotes. I can read it without having to remember what anomalous monism is. Now Colin McGinn, who's one of my favorite philosophers of mind, has entered the blogosphere. One of his first posts is a list of 79 meditations on laws, causality and the nature of reality. And if you find consciousness studies interesting, be sure to check out The Mysterious Flame, which practically invented new mysterianism.
14. Could God…
cortex | September 6, 2007Chemistry gets short shrift. Theoretical physics and neuroscience and molecular biology get all the sexy press, while chemistry departments slowly wither away. In many respects, this is just because chemistry has been so successful: there don't seem to be any great unknowns or theoretical gaps left within the field. It's not like neuroscience (which can't even begin to explain consciousness, Alzheimer's, etc.) or modern physics (which still can't reconcile the theory of relativity with quantum mechanics).
Of course, the unfortunate fate of every successful science is to become a branch of…
cortex | September 6, 2007So tax breaks for philanthropy increase inequality:
For every three dollars they give away, the federal government typically gives up a dollar or more in tax revenue, because of the charitable tax deduction and by not collecting estate taxes.
[snip]
The charitable deduction cost the government $40 billion in lost tax revenue last year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, more than the government spends altogether on managing public lands, protecting the environment and developing new energy sources.
I think it's pretty tough to defend tax deductions for cultural organizations. As…
cortex | September 5, 2007One of the innate limitations of every intelligence test is that the test is forced to conflate the measurable aspects of intelligence with a general definition of intelligence. What can't be quantified is ignored. And what can be easily quantified is privileged. The end result is a woefully distorted view of learning, g, and education. Programs like No Child Left Behind only exacerbate this trend, since they turn K-12 education into one long test. Good teaching is confused with successful measurement.
Occasionally, we get depressing glimpses of what this "rigorous" view of education is…
cortex | September 5, 2007My own experience tells me that a glass of warm milk is a potent sedative. All it takes is a few ounces of heated dairy before my eye lids start getting real heavy.
It turns out, though, that warm milk is just a placebo. It works because I think it works.
According to age-old wisdom, milk is chock full of tryptophan, the sleep-inducing amino acid that is also well known for its presence in another food thought to have sedative effects, turkey.
But whether milk can induce sleep is debatable, and studies suggest that if it does, the effect has little to do with tryptophan.
To have any…
cortex | September 4, 2007I'm a big fan of Mad Men, the new HBOesque drama about 1960's advertising executives on AMC. It's basically an extended melodrama about why the Ike years actually sucked, and neatly punctures that lame American nostalgia for the "simpler" times of the middle twentieth century.
One of the subplots in the show concerns the "neurotic" (probably depressed) housewife of the lead character. She starts to visit a shrink to help her cope with her moods. What amazes me is that her husband will occasionally call her therapist and get updates on her condition. The confessions of the wife are promptly…
cortex | September 2, 2007Saw Bill and Hillary today. I'll spare you my political commentary, except for two brief observations:
1) Hillary's biggest applause line came when she declared that, once she's President, she'll "listen to what scientists say and stop being so anti-science". Much to my surprise, the crowd loved it. (The applause from the science line exceeded just about everything save for a reference to civil unions in New Hampshire.) Mooney would have been proud.
2) I've seen Bill Clinton in person a couple times now, and his charisma never ceases to amaze me. The Elvis cliches are all true. I'm sure that…
cortex | August 31, 2007The new Honda Accord comes out next month and, like virtually every new car, it boasts a bigger frame and bigger engine than last year's model. So I thought it might be worth revisiting some of the earlier generation Accords. It turns out that they were signifcantly more fuel efficient. For example, the 1982-1985 model got an extremely respectable 29/40 mpg. (In contrast, the four-cylinder engine in the new Accord comes in at 21 city, 31 hwy. The 6 cylinder gets 19/29.) The bad news is that the 1982 Accord only had 86 horsepower.
Here's my question: do consumers really want/need such big…
cortex | August 31, 2007A few weeks ago, I put up a post on the neuroscience of subprime mortgages. A significant percentage of subprime loans get customers by advertising low introductory teaser rates, which trick the brain into making an irrational decision. In essence, we are duped into using our short-sighted emotional mind to make a long-term financial decision.
Look, for example, at the popular 2/28 loan, which consists of a low, fixed-interest rate for the first two years and a much higher, adjustable rate for the next twenty-eight. Most people taking out a 2/28 loan can't afford the higher interest rates…
cortex | August 31, 2007Christopher Vrountas, of Andover, sent in a very astute letter to the Boston Globe in response to my recent article on dopamine and gambling:
I read Jonah Lehrer's article "Your brain on gambling" (Ideas, Aug. 19), about how gambling hijacks the brain's pleasure centers. The gambler's brain remembers and desperately seeks a repeat of unexpected and unlikely pleasure events, such as winning a slot machine jackpot. I was struck by how the description of such an addictive obsession fit the brain of the typically hopeless Red Sox fan. We remember the thrill of "Impossible Dream" victories and…
cortex | August 30, 2007Two examples of blinkered thinking:
1. Jeff Lewis, the incredibly entertaining lunatic at the center of Flipping Out, the real-estate reality television show on Bravo, fires his psychic because she wasn't doing a good job of predicting the future. So what does he do? He goes and hires a different psychic. I'm fascinated by this thought process. On the one hand, Jeff's empirical enough to realize that his psychic sucked. But he never even flirts with the possibility that all psychics suck. I know that we all have our rational blind spots, but rarely are they so elegantly captured on television…
cortex | August 30, 2007Here's Megan McArdle on our self-perceptions of attractiveness:
A late night conversation last night brought me to the inescapable conclusion that neither I, nor anyone else, is as hot as they think they are.
You hate photographs of yourself, don't you? A tiny minority of people are terribly photogenic (I recall one girl in high school who was maybe a 7 in person, but a 9.75 in an 8X10 glossy) and like having their pictures taken; everyone else in the world is convinced that they don't photograph particularly well.
A cognitive scientist at the University of Chicago explained why to me last…
cortex | August 29, 2007Ten years ago, neuroscientists were bullish about pharmaceuticals. It sometimes seemed as if every tenured professor was starting his own drug company or consulting for someone else's drug company. But virtually none of those drugs have come to market, at least not yet. The brain is an exquisitely complicated machine, and every beneficial effect seems to inspire numerous side-effects. (Our neurons also have a labyrinth of redundant pathways, which makes it treat any particular bit of errant cellular activity.) It's a little depressing how many of our most effective drugs owe nothing to the…
cortex | August 29, 2007Last week, we discussed the differences between reading text printed on dead trees (paper) and reading on a computer screen. I confessed that I'm wedded to my laser printer, since I can only edit when I've got the tactile page in my hand.
It turns out I'm not alone. William Powers, the media critic for the National Journal, has written a wonderfully learned essay on the strange anachronistic endurance of paper. He covers everything from Gutenberg to Shakespeare to the much-hyped paperless office, which was actually a dismal failure. But I was most interested in this bit of research, by…
cortex | August 28, 2007For me, the most depressing aspect of the Michael Vick dog-fighting case is that I can't draw a bright moral line between his acts of sadism and the publicly acceptable forms of animal cruelty that we all support in the supermarket. (I'm talking about the cheap meat from big poultry farms and slaughterhouses.) Why is one illegal and the other condoned?
Honestly, I want to be able to distinguish between killing dogs for sport and confining chickens to inhumane living conditions, or farming veal, but I can't find any good reasons, apart from the obvious "puppies are real cute" argument. Isn't…
cortex | August 27, 2007Daniel Dennett, in the latest Technology Review, argues that there's no meaningful difference between the chess cognition of Deep Blue and that of Gary Kasparov. Both are functionalist machines, employing mental shortcuts to settle on an optimal strategy:
The best computer chess is well nigh indistinguishable from the best human chess, except for one thing: computers don't know when to accept a draw. Computers--at least currently existing computers--can't be bored or embarrassed, or anxious about losing the respect of the other players, and these are aspects of life that human competitors…