cortex | June 26, 2007I've discovered my new favorite example of artists and scientists working together. It features Cecil Balmond, an engineer for Arup, and Anish Kapoor, the Turner-Prize winning sculptor. They collaborated on Marsyas, the spectacular 2003 installation inside the Tate Modern. David Owen describes their collaboration in The New Yorker:
Kapoor came to feel an unusual imaginative harmony with Balmond. "The traditional role of the engineer is to perform, so to speak, the ideas of the architect, or of the artist, or whatever," Kapoor told me not long ago. "But Cecil and I decided, quite clearly, that…
cortex | June 22, 2007David Brooks makes a good point:
A little while ago, a national study authorized by Congress found that abstinence education programs don't work. That gave liberals a chance to feel superior because it turns out that preaching traditional morality to students doesn't change behavior.
But in this realm, nobody has the right to feel smug. American schools are awash in moral instruction -- on sex, multiculturalism, environmental awareness and so on -- and basically none of it works. Sex ed doesn't change behavior. Birth control education doesn't produce measurable results. The fact is, schools…
cortex | June 21, 2007This is what happens when a wine critic decides to scientifically test his sense of taste:
She first handed me a cotton swab and instructed me to rub it vigorously against the inside of one of my cheeks. This was the genotype test; as soon as I was done, Reed's assistant, Fujiko Duke, whisked the sample to the lab. Reed then handed me a Q-tip, and told me to dab the end of my tongue with some blue food dye, which would more clearly reveal the fungiform papillae. I placed a white binder ring on the tip of my tongue, at a slight angle from the center, and Reed began counting the bumps inside…
cortex | June 20, 2007So the Times is reporting that online sales are starting to stall/ (Jack Shafer disagrees.) This trend certainly jives with my own shopping experiences. While I still buy most of my things online - the only thing I will never buy online are pants - I've grown disenchanted with the vast majority of online retail sites. Simply put, they offer me way too many options.
Take flip-flops. A few weeks ago, I decided to get a new pair of flip flops. I dutifully went to Zappos (free shipping!) and looked in the "casual sandals" section. There were 1590 options. Just for men. In my size. So then I…
cortex | June 19, 2007n+1 nails an important psychological aspect of blogs:
Imagine a grandfather clock that strikes at random intervals. You can't tell time by it and yet you begin to live in constant anticipation of the next random chime.
Pavlov was there first. He realized that there was something especially alluring about random reinforcements. When the reward was unpredictable, it was extra rewarding. Blogs take advantage of this mental principle. (So do slot machines.) After all, the updating of blogs is inherently idiosyncratic. Bloggers don't have deadlines.
I'm acutely aware of this whenever I visit The…
cortex | June 19, 2007It was one of those unquestioned rituals of childhood: after getting a little scrape or cut (generally in the knee or elbow area), your mother dutifully applies some hydrogen peroxide to the injury. The peroxide burns, but the pain is just evidence that the peroxide is working. The cut is being cleaned. That, at least, was my childhood understanding of bacterial theory. Only it turns out that hydrogen peroxide isn't useful at all. In fact, it may actually make things worse:
In a study published in The Journal of Family Practice in 1987, scientists compared the effects of various topical…
cortex | June 18, 2007Another heartbreaking tale of improper medical care for veterans from The Washington Post. This time, the article is about the lack of mental health care for mentally troubled veterans, especially when it comes to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). While the Army excels at providing emergency trauma care for veterans injured in the body - only ten percent of wounded soldiers have died in this Iraq war, compared to 24 percent for the first Gulf war - the Army and Veterans Administration have consistently failed to adequately care for the injured brain. It's as if the Army still subscribes…
cortex | June 15, 2007I'm a fan of both Dennett and Rorty*, and I thought this touching anecdote from Dennett really captures a crucial difference between the two philosophers:
At one three-hour lunch in a fine restaurant in Buenos Aires, we [Dennett and Rorty] traded notes on what we thought philosophy ought to be, could be, shouldn't be, and he revealed something that I might have guessed but had never thought of. I had said that it mattered greatly to me to have the respect of scientists--that it was important to me to explain philosophical issues to scientists in terms they could understand and appreciate.…
cortex | June 15, 2007Given recent inane comments about the immateriality of altruism by a certain neurosurgeon, I thought this recent article on the neural underpinnings of "pure altruism" might be of interest:
You don't need to donate to charity to feel all warm inside. Researchers have found that even when money is taken from some people involuntarily, they feel good about the transaction, as long as the funds go to a good cause. The findings may force economists to rethink just what guides our response to taxes and other financial decisions.
The behavior under the microscope is altruism, which refers to…
cortex | June 15, 2007Over at the Economist, Jason Furman worries about the long-term implications of growing societal inequality:
Regardless of the cause of rising inequality, lefties, utilitarians, Rawlsians and anyone with a deep-seated reverence for markets and the capitalist system should all be concerned. As Alan Greenspan memorably stated, "income inequality is where the capitalist system is most vulnerable. You can't have the capitalist system if an increasing number of people think it is unjust."
I'm as concerned about inequality as the next liberal. I can't help but listen to my inner Marx when some…
cortex | June 14, 2007Imagine you are a doctor, and a patient comes into your office with a serious case of back pain. You begin by performing all the standard diagnostic tests, including an MRI and X-ray. Then, you perform an extensive interview. You ask about his psychological history, and rate his level of depression, fear and anxiety. You also assess him for a variety of risk factors that tend to correlate with back pain, including his job satisfaction, and whether or not he is involved in pertinent litigation. After this extensive medical evaluation, you try to predict how intense his back pain is and how…
cortex | June 14, 2007If people were rational creatures, you might expect them to respond to rising gas prices by doing less solitary commuting. The cost of filling up the tank would provide an incentive to either carpool or use a heavily subsidized mass transit system. But that hasn't happened:
Despite high gasoline prices, the share of commuters driving alone has increased slightly since 2000 while the proportion in car pools dropped and those using mass transit remained about the same, according to a Census Bureau analysis released yesterday.
Nationally, the share of people car pooling dipped, to 10.7 percent…
cortex | June 13, 2007Felice Frankel is a model of consilience:
When people call Felice Frankel an artist, she winces.
In the first place, the photographs she makes don't sell. She knows this, she says, because after she received a Guggenheim grant in 1995, she started taking her work to galleries. "Nobody wanted to bother looking," she said.
In the second place, her images are not full of emotion or ideology or any other kind of message. As she says, "My stuff is about phenomena."
As first an artist in residence and now a research scientist at M.I.T., and now also a senior research fellow at the Institute for…
cortex | June 13, 2007So I guess this belongs under the shameless self-promotion tag - I helped plan the show - but the latest Radio Lab is on a topic near and dear to my frontal cortex. It's about the dishonesty of memory, the way we are constantly recreating, reconsolidating and refining our sense of the past. Highlights include interviews with Joe Ledoux, Oliver Sacks and Elizabeth Loftus. The show also digresses into the necessity of protein synthesis for the remembering process, the possibility of implanting false memories and, in my favorite section, the case of an amnesiac who can only remember reality in…
cortex | June 12, 2007So everybody is talking about the Sopranos. I might as well weigh in. Personally, I thought the ambiguous ending was pretty brilliant. The Sopranos is always being compared to literature, but the engineered vagueness of that final scene is perhaps its most literary act. As the literary critic Frank Kermode famously pointed out, classic literature is defined not by the certainty of its meaning, but by its linguistic instability, its ability to encourage a multiplicity of interpretations. What makes a novel or poem immortal is, paradoxically, its complexity, the way every reader discovers in…
cortex | June 12, 2007Freud thought that the male psyche was forged by our relationship with our mother. Our repressed Oedipal wishes form the "nuclear complex" of our neuroses. As a result, Freudian psychoanalysis tends to emphasize the role of the maternal figure when excavating our childhood. (Look, for example, at Tony Soprano and Dr. Melfi.) A new study, however, casts some skeptical light on this Freudian/Sophoclean hypothesis. It turns out that, at least when it comes to depression in male adults, our mothers matter less than our siblings:
Men who had poor relationships with siblings during childhood are at…
cortex | June 11, 2007Richard Rorty has died. I was one of those innumerable undergraduates who, after failing to understand Heidegger or Wittgenstein or Quine or Davidson, picked up Rorty and felt enlightened. The man had a tremendous facility for interpreting the philosophy of others. After reading Rorty on Dewey, I went out and purchased a selection of Dewey books. I soon discovered that I preferred Rorty's Dewey to the actual Dewey. (For one thing, Dewey was a terrible writer. Rorty, on the other hand, was one of the few modern philosophers who cared about his prose.)
One other Rorty note: I've never…
cortex | June 8, 2007I discuss the neuroscientific sensitivities of Saturday, Ian McEwan's 2004 novel, in my forthcoming book, so I was happy to read this paragraph in Jonathan Lethem's review of McEwan's latest novel. Lethem is wondering why McEwan, despite his dabbles in modernist structure (Saturday is modeled on Mrs. Dalloway), doesn't feel like a late modernist:
The answer may lie in the fact that modernism in fiction was partly spurred by the appearance of two great rivals to the novel's authority, psychoanalysis and cinema -- one a rival at plumbing depths, the other at delineating surfaces. McEwan, who…
cortex | June 8, 2007David Leonhardt makes a good point. Controlling health care costs - one of our most important domestic policy problems - will require our politicians to make hard (and unpopular) decisions.
In Idaho Falls, Idaho, anyone suffering from the sort of lower back pain that may conceivably be helped by the fusing of two vertebrae is quite likely to have the surgery. It's known as lumbar fusion, and the rate at which it is performed in Idaho Falls is almost five times the national average. The rate in Idaho Falls is 20 times that in Bangor, Me., where lumbar fusion is less common than anywhere else.…
cortex | June 7, 2007Reductionism is seductive, especially when it comes attached with a nifty sounding brain region:
Explanations of psychological phenomena seem to generate more public interest when they contain neuroscientific information. Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation
of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people's abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation. We tested this hypothesis by giving naiÌve adults, students in a neuroscience course, and neuroscience experts brief descriptions of psychological phenomena followed by one of four…