cortex | June 7, 2007The headline says it all: "Forgetting May Be Part of the Process of Remembering":
The more efficiently that study participants were tuning out irrelevant words during a word-memorization test, the sharper the drop in activity in areas of their brains involved in recollection. Accurate remembering became easier, in terms of the energy required.
This is an idea that Jorge Luis Borges would have understood. In his classic short story, Funes the Memorious, Borges invented a character (Ireneo Funes) whose "perception and memory are infallible...the present to him was almost intolerable in its…
cortex | June 6, 2007I've always been embarrassed by my relentless fidgeting. I play with my beer bottlecaps at bars and endlessly twirl the remote while watching television (this drives my girlfriend crazy). I tap my leg at the dinner table and rap my fingers all day long on my desk. I fold napkins, twirl forks and play with my buttons. It turns out, though, that my behavior has a genetic basis. It also keeps me slender:
Are you the type of person who is constantly fidgeting? If you are there is a chance fidgeting may be in your genes - and the good news is that you are less likely to be fat, according to the…
cortex | June 6, 2007Simon Baron-Cohen (of Mindblindness fame) has written a short little essay about a rather gigantic subject:
Let's make this concrete. Your eye looks at a fish. This causes your brain to form a visual image of a fish. So far, your primary representation 'fish' still has accurate truth relations with the outside world. The real fish has fins, eyes and gills, and so does your image of the fish. Or your eye looks at a woman, and this causes your brain to form a visual image of the woman. Now you not only have a primary representation of a fish, but you also have a primary representation of a…
cortex | June 5, 2007There's something unbearably poignant about scientific discoveries that delineate the limitations of science. Dennis Overbye explains:
Our successors, whoever and wherever they are, may have no way of finding out about the Big Bang and the expanding universe, according to one of the more depressing scientific papers I have ever read.
If things keep going the way they are, Lawrence Krauss of Case Western Reserve University and Robert J. Scherrer of Vanderbilt University calculate, in 100 billion years the only galaxies left visible in the sky will be the half-dozen or so bound together…
cortex | June 4, 2007Matt Yglesias makes an important psychological point about political debates:
My read of what I see in these debates is so heavily colored by ex ante beliefs and information that it's hard for the debate to change anything. During the first 100 days question, for example, John Edwards gave his spiel about "restoring American leadership" which Hillary Clinton followed up by straightforwardly saying that bringing the troops home from Iraq would be Priority Number 1 in a Clinton administration. In a vacuum, that from Clinton would have impressed me a great deal. But in the real world it didn't…
cortex | June 4, 2007The new season of Radio Lab has begun. For those of who aren't NPR junkies, Radio Lab is a sonically dense, narrative driven science shown broadcast out of WNYC. Each episode has a theme (ala This American Life), and then explores the theme from a variety of different angles. I'd love the show even if I didn't work for it. You can get the podcast on iTunes or stream it from WNYC. The latest show is on Zoos, and describes the birth of the modern zoo, neurogenesis (and the work of Fernando Nottebohm), meatsicles, "Jaguar Man" and why humans like looking at other animals behind bars. It's a…
cortex | June 1, 2007I'm not a big Damien Hirst fan, but this is really beautiful:
The diamond encrusted skull, which is estimated to be worth more than $50 million, comes from the skeleton of a man who lived between 1720 and 1810.
cortex | June 1, 2007Razib has a frighteningly smart post on religion, secularism, Korea, etc., but I thought this excerpt was worth noting:
Religion adapts to the world as it is, engaging in dynamic processes of retrofitting. If supernaturalism is the cognitive default in many then the details of the religious narrative are of only proximate importance. But, I also think it is important to note that the decline of organized religion does not imply a concomitant decline in supernaturalistic or non-scientific thinking per se. An equal number of Americans and Europeans believe in reincarnation after all! The…
cortex | May 31, 2007The physicist David Ruelle gives a convincing demonstration that suspending the gravitational effect on our atmosphere of one electron at the limit of the observable universe would take no more than two weeks to make a difference in Earth's weather equivalent to having rain rather than sun during a picnic.
That factoid is from Chances Are..., a really wonderful tour of probability. And I thought butterflies flapping their wings in Tokyo had big effects.
cortex | May 30, 2007So there's an interesting debate over at TPM Cafe about this article in the Nation, which argues that neoclassical economics (the mainstream) suppresses its heterodox alternatives. If true, this would be a classic case of a Kuhnian paradigm, in which the entrenched dogma resists any alternative explanation. The anomalies are ignored, until there are just too many anomalies, and then the whole edifice comes crashing down. That, at least, is how "normal" science is supposed to work.
But my problem with economics isn't that it ignores its heterodox alternatives, which is what the article tries…
cortex | May 30, 2007Lou Dobbs has repeatedly asserted on his CNN show that there have been 7,000 cases of leprosy in the US over the previous three years. If true, that statistic would represent a stunning increase. Dobbs' insinuation, of course, was that illegal immigrants are responsible for bringing an influx of deadly diseases across the border. (He prefaced the segment on leprosy by saying "The invasion of illegal aliens is threatening the health of many Americans...")
That statistic would be alarming if true. But it's not true. There have been 7,000 cases of leprosy over the past thirty years, not the…
cortex | May 29, 2007David Brooks uses neuroscience to criticize Al Gore's latest book:
[Gore's argument] grows out of a bizarre view of human nature. Gore seems to have come up with a theory that the upper, logical mind sits on top of, and should master, the primitive and more emotional mind below. He thinks this can be done through a technical process that minimizes information flow to the lower brain and maximizes information flow to the higher brain.
The reality, of course, is that there is no neat distinction between the "higher" and "lower" parts of the brain. There are no neat distinctions between the "…
cortex | May 29, 2007Here's a great L.A. Times editorial on the various policy options that we can use to combat climate change. The editorial comes out firmly against regulation (simply ordering polluters to clean up), and mounts a reasoned criticism of cap-and-trade schemes (the EU trading scheme has been a bust). So what should we do instead? The Times' recommendation is simple: impose a carbon tax. It's the simplest, easiest and most effective way to reduce carbon emissions.
A well-designed, well-monitored carbon-trading scheme could deeply reduce greenhouse gases with less economic damage than pure…
cortex | May 27, 2007It works. Dick Cheney shows how to do it:
These are events [9/11] we can never forget. And they are scenes the enemy would like to see played out in this country over and over again, on a larger and larger scale. Al Qaeda's leadership has said they have the right to "kill four million Americans, two million of them children, and to exile twice as many and to wound and cripple thousands." We know they are looking for ways of doing just that -- by plotting in secret, by slipping into the country, and exploiting any vulnerability they can find.
Al Gore, in The Assault on Reason, explains the…
cortex | May 25, 2007A new study by economists James Heckman and Dimitriy Masterov argues that investing in the education of young children (pre-K) provides the greatest return on investment. In contrast, trying to educate the brains of adolescents, the economists say, is largely a waste of resources. Here's Joel Waldfogel:
The early investment [in education] is needed, the authors argue, to supplement the role of the family. Recent developments in neuroscience have shown that the early years are vital to cognitive development, which in turn is important to subsequent success and productivity in school, life, and…
cortex | May 24, 2007We are surprisingly bad at it:
Although last year was quieter than anticipated and the storms of 2005 caused the Weather Service to raise its prediction, the number of tropical storms predicted in May was within the expected range in 1999, 2000, 2002 and 2004.
The forecast was low in 2001 and 2003.
Got that? Since 1999, the Weather Service was relatively accurate only half the time (1999, 2000, 2002, 2004). It was inaccurate in 2001, 2003, 2005 and 2006. Maybe we should 1) rethink the models or 2) not put too much stock in these meteorological predictions.
This study may help explain why our…
cortex | May 24, 2007So the Yankees aren't quite as bad as we've been led to believe. (At least, until Petite also pulls his hamstring.) They've taken two of the last three from the Red Sox. That said, it's still obvious that the Yankees are one of the most least productive baseball teams when looked at through the prism of salary vs. performance. Ben Fry has a fantastic chart illustrating this.
Why do the Yankees get such a measly rate of return from their players? The answer, I believe, involves the winner's curse, which is the old dictum that, in auctions with incomplete information, the winner tends to…
cortex | May 22, 2007From the March 31 issue of The Lancet:
The ease of getting to sleep and staying asleep depends not only on previous wake time, but also on associations with the circadian rhythm of core temperature. Sleep is easiest to initiate when core temperature is falling rapidly or is at its lowest, and most difficult when body temperature is rising rapidly or is high. Waking is the opposite of sleep initiation, because it happens when core temperature is rising or is high.
Normally, our body is at its coolest in the wee hours of morning, just before 5 a.m. Our body temperature peaks around noon, when…
cortex | May 20, 2007Daniel Zwerdling has an excellent article on the chicken slaughter industry in the latest Gourmet. I had no idea that Americans consumed more than 9 billion broiler chickens every year. Or that, thanks to newfangled forms of feed, it only takes a broiler chicken six weeks to reach market weight. (In the 1950's, it took more than seventeen weeks.) Unfortunately, this fast growth has terrible side-effects. As Zwerdling writes:
Animal behavior scientists have devised studies to gauge pain from a bird's point of view. The research has found, for instance, that starting in the sheds, the chickens…
cortex | May 18, 2007I've got an article in New Scientist on changing scientific perceptions of synesthesia, and how synesthetic experiences are helping scientists understand how language is processed inside the brain. The article is behind a subscription wall, but here's the link:
For the woman known as AP, everyday language is like a soap opera. Every letter of the alphabet has a distinct human personality. "A is a mother-type, very sensible. I is a little guy, H and G are always fussing over him. M and N are two old ladies who spend all their time together and natter a lot. T is a protective male."
AP isn't…