cortex | August 24, 2007The Best Cigarette, a poem by Billy Collins:
Don't forget that cigarette addiction seems to be modulated by the insula, a brain area that secretes aversive emotions. Earlier this year, a team of scientists at the University of Iowa found that cigarette addicts with damaged insulas were 136 times more likely to have their addictions erased than smokers with damage to other parts of the brain. Once their insula was offline, the awful emotions associated with nicotine withdrawal vanished. "My body forgot the urge to smoke," one man confessed. While his brain still wanted that rush of toxic…
cortex | August 24, 2007Our mind has a sick sense of humor. It turns out that as we lose our memory, and sink into the darkness of dementia, the last memories to disappear are the memories we spent our lives trying to repress. So the final thing that you know is what you've been trying to forget:
For more than half a century, Rachel Kane kept the memories at bay.
There were her daughters to think of, twins born in a displaced persons camp in the aftermath of the second World War. Kane didn't want to burden them with tales of the Holocaust, of a husband shot to death by the Nazis, a baby who starved to death in the…
cortex | August 23, 2007Here's a very cool experiment:
Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences -- the sensation of drifting outside of one's own body -- in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science.
When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies.
I think there are two surprising lessons in this experiment.
The first odd finding is that our sense of being in a body is a surprisingly cognitive…
cortex | August 23, 2007You often hear scientists and philosophers of science talk about the peer-review process as if it's some epistemological magic trick, as if it automatically sifts through the mass of submitted articles and finds The Truth. Of course, if you've ever been through the peer-review process you know that there's nothing magical about it. The process can be just as arbitrary, unfair, illogical, and irrational as, well, everything else that humans do. My own encounter with peer-review left me acutely aware that scientists have big egos, and that big egos don't like contradictory data. That said, the…
cortex | August 23, 2007I thought this obit was rather fascinating. Not only did I learn about phone phreaks - a subculture I'm ashamed to say I didn't know existed - but Joybubbles sounds like an utterly unique person, truly an n of 1.
Joybubbles (the legal name of the former Joe Engressia since 1991), a blind genius with perfect pitch who accidentally found he could make free phone calls by whistling tones and went on to play a pivotal role in the 1970s subculture of "phone phreaks," died on Aug. 8 in Minneapolis.
He was 58, though he had chosen in 1988 to remain 5 forever, and had the toys and teddy bears to…
cortex | August 22, 2007Silas Weir Mitchell was a great American neurologist. Unfortunately, he's best known now for pioneering "the rest cure," which became a common treatment for hysteria and other afflictions of the "frail female nervous system". (See, for example, "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.)
But Weir Mitchell's most important contribution to neurology came from his diagnosis of phantom limbs, which he called "sensory ghosts". His discovery came during the middle of the Civil War, when he was working as a doctor at Turner's Lane hospital in Philadelphia. The battle of Gettysburg had…
cortex | August 22, 2007A few months ago, when I was writing an article on cities and metabolic theory for the latest issue of Seed, I spent several frustrating hours trying to explain the underlying logic of metabolic theory. For those who don't know, metabolic theory is a set of simple equations that are capable of describing the energy consumption of practically every living organism. The question, of course, is why these equations are so universal. As far as I can tell, the answer involves fractals, the geometry of blood vessels and a smidgen of chaos theory. Needless to say, I didn't get very far with my…
cortex | August 21, 2007I'm one of those writers who can't edit on a computer. After I write something, I'm always forced to print it out on dead trees, so that I can fix my sentences. When I try to edit on the computer, I always miss repetitions, redundancies and other bits of bad writing that I easily catch when I've got the pages in my hand.
I know several other writers who suffer from a similar dependence on the printed word. But why does this effect exist? Why is it so much harder to edit on a computer?
I suppose one possible answer is habit. Perhaps there's some critical period of reading and writing, and my…
cortex | August 21, 2007Two economists have studied the effects "of classroom gender composition on scholastic achievements of boys and girls in Israeli primary, middle, and high schools." They wanted to know if having a disproportionate number of one gender in the classroom influences academic performance. Their conclusion? Your son will be a better student if he attends an all-girl school:
Our results suggest that an increase in the proportion of girls leads to a significant improvement in students' cognitive outcomes. The estimated effects are of similar magnitude for boys and girls. As important mechanisms, we…
cortex | August 20, 2007This is the car I covet:
And I don't just want the new variant of the Volvo C30 because it's oh so cute:
Called the C30 Efficiency, this special car will sip diesel fuel at the rate of 4.5L per every 100 kilometers. That's 52.26 mpg to us Yanks. It achieves these numbers using a variety of techniques. For the engine, efficiency was increased by using low-friction transmission oil and optimizing the engine management software. An age old trick for good gas mileage, higher gearing, was used on 3rd, 4th and 5th gears to eek out a few more kilometers, as well. Low rolling resistance tires,…
cortex | August 20, 2007Pardon the self-promotion, but I've got an article in yesterday's Boston Globe on neuroscience and gambling:
The growth of the gambling industry has been accompanied by a large amount of new scientific research explaining the effects of gambling on the brain. The neural circuits manipulated by gambling originally evolved to help animals assess rewards, such as food, that are crucial for survival. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter involved with the processing of these rewards. Whenever we experience something pleasurable, such as winning a hand of blackjack or eating a piece of chocolate cake,…
cortex | August 20, 2007There's an illuminating four part series looking at neuroscientist Gary Lynch in the LA Times. It's written by Terry McDermott. What makes this series so compelling is that it does two things rarely done by science journalists.
First of all, the articles present Gary Lynch as a complex human being, complete with the usual human flaws, features and foibles. Most newsy profiles of scientists portray the researcher as some sort of emotionless lab machine, motivated by nothing but the search for objective truth. This, of course, is a false stereotype. Science is a human endeavor, and the data is…
cortex | August 18, 2007This seems like a pretty terrible policy:
Eric Miller's career as an Army Ranger wasn't ended by a battlefield wound, but his DNA.
Lurking in his genes was a mutation that made him vulnerable to uncontrolled tumor growth. After suffering back pain during a tour in Afghanistan, he underwent three surgeries to remove tumors from his brain and spine that left him with numbness throughout the left side of his body.
So began his journey into a dreaded scenario of the genetic age.
Because he was born with the mutation, the Army argued it bore no responsibility for his illness and medically…
cortex | August 17, 2007Given the recent bursting of the housing bubble (let's hope, at least, that we've hit rock bottom), Kevin Drum raises an interesting issue:
Bubbles come along with some frequency these days, always with some shiny new reason for bankers to become irrationally exhuberant. Just in the last couple of decades we've seen bubbles in S&Ls (safe as houses!), South American countries (sovereign states never default!), junk bonds (greed is good!), dotcoms (eyeball, not profits!), and now housing (safe as houses!). Every time, it turns out that there's nothing new at all. The economy has not been…
cortex | August 16, 2007Here's a cool new music site. The premise of the site, musicovery.com, is simple: you pick a mood (somewhere between the poles of "energetic," "dark," "calm," or "positive"), select a few musical genres and a favorite decade, and then the site automatically finds songs that reflect your state of mind. It's affective reverse-engineering.
For someone like me, who habitually self-medicates with music, musicovery is a fun helper. Although I might quibble with a few of their suggestions - late Herbie Hancock isn't very soothing - the site has certainly expanded my musical mood horizons. (My normal…
cortex | August 15, 2007Tyler Cowen summarizes a few of the more surprising aspects of the Flynn effect, which refers to the phenomenon of rising scores on mental ability tests (like the IQ test) from one generation to the next:
1. Non-verbal IQ has risen more rapidly than has verbal IQ.
2. Performance gains are smallest on the most culturally specific tests, and largest on the most abstract tests.
3. Performance gains, as they occur over time, are roughly constant for all age groups.
4. Problem-solving abilities have seen the biggest performance gains.
Here's the paper from which these factoids have been drawn.…
cortex | August 15, 2007The Boston Globe recently had an interesting article on some possible downsides of societal diversity, which have been uncomfortably quantified by Robert Putnam, a political scientist at Harvard. Putnam has found that:
...the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of…
cortex | August 14, 2007I had the pleasure of studying philosophy with Nick Bostrom while at Oxford. He's a great teacher, but, unlike John Tierney, I'm not persuaded by his latest conjecture:
Until I talked to Nick Bostrom, a philosopher at Oxford University, it never occurred to me that our universe might be somebody else's hobby. I hadn't imagined that the omniscient, omnipotent creator of the heavens and earth could be an advanced version of a guy who spends his weekends building model railroads or overseeing video-game worlds like the Sims.
But now it seems quite possible. In fact, if you accept a pretty…
cortex | August 14, 2007Little kids love McDonald's:
Hamburgers, french fries, chicken nuggets, and even milk and carrots all taste better to children if they think they came from McDonald's, a small study suggests.
In taste tests with 63 children ages 3 to 5, there was only a slight preference for the McDonald's-branded hamburger over one wrapped in plain paper, not enough to be statistically significant. But for all the other foods, the McDonald's brand made all the difference.
Almost 77 percent, for example, thought that McDonald's french fries served in a McDonald's bag tasted better, compared with 13 percent…
cortex | August 13, 2007There is wonderful, disturbing, and extremely graphic article in last week's New Yorker (not online) about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a mysterious disorder characterized by excessive amounts of uric acid and a dangerous tendency to injure oneself. In its bleakest incarnation, Lesch-Nyhan turns victims into their own worst enemy, as their can't help but chew off their lower lip, or bite of their own fingers, or curse at a loved one. (For Lesch-Nyhan patients, aggression and hateful speech are a sign of love.)
What biological mistake could cause such a tragic behavioral disorder? The problem…