cortex | May 18, 2007At first glance, it sounds like a cheesy third-culture gimmick:
UCLA molecular biologists have turned protein sequences into original compositions of classical music.
"We converted the sequence of proteins into music and can get an auditory signal for every protein," said Jeffrey H. Miller, distinguished professor of microbiology, immunology and molecular genetics, and a member of UCLA's Molecular Biology Institute. "Every protein will have its unique auditory signature because every protein has a unique sequence. You can hear the sequence of the protein."
"We assigned a chord to each amino…
cortex | May 17, 2007Help Hillary pick her campaign song. The music fan in me would vote for U2's "City of Blinding Lights" or The Staple Singers "I'll Take You There". The political strategist in me would vote for The Dixie Chicks "Ready to Run," since they give you credibility with the anti-Bush, anti-war bloc and have that charming Top-40 Country sound that plays so well in the battleground states.
What song would you pick? If I was thinking outside the box, I'd go with a solemn classic: Dylan's "The Times They Are A Changin". That song (one of the few protest songs from the 60's that has aged well) would…
cortex | May 17, 2007It's not the usual version of love at first sight: it's much better. Elizabeth Fitzsimons was adopting a Chinese baby. The girl was a year old, but she already suffered from a long list of medical ailments. She'd had a tumor removed from her back, and suffered nerve damage during the surgery. She had a terrible rash, was dangerously thin and wouldn't smile. Elizabeth was now faced with a profound dilemma:
Back at the hotel, we hounded the women from the [adoption] agency: Why wasn't this in her medical report? How could a scar that size not be noticed? It was two inches long, for God's sake.…
cortex | May 16, 2007David Leonhardt has an interesting column on the importance of using subtle environmental cues - Leonhardt calls them "nudges" - to encourage good decision-making. He begins with a fascinating anecdote about patients in hospital beds:
For more than a decade, it turns out, medical researchers have known that people on ventilators should generally have their heads elevated. When the patients are lying down, bacteria can easily travel from the stomach, up to the mouth and breathing tube, and ultimately into the lungs, causing pneumonia. When people are propped up, gravity becomes their ally.…
cortex | May 16, 2007Dan Neil, the finest car critic around, drives the Fortwo, aka the Smart car. He likes the car just fine - "it's a minor hoot to drive" - but worries about his safety on American streets:
So, the first question potential buyers must consider is a cosmic version of: Do I feel lucky? The Fortwo -- sold in 36 countries and a familiar sight to anyone who has traveled abroad -- is supposed to be a very safe car. I'm sure it is, relatively. The cabin is surrounded by something called the Tridion safety cell, a highly reinforced steel superstructure designed to deform and redistribute crash energy…
cortex | May 15, 2007Anthony Gottlieb has an excellent review of several recent books on atheism in the New Yorker. I especially enjoyed his comparison of David Hume and some of the more polemical atheists currently atop the bestseller lists:
In 1779, a year after Voltaire died, that idea was attacked by David Hume, a cheerful Scottish historian and philosopher, whose way of undermining religion was as arresting for its strategy as it was for its detail. Hume couldn't have been more different from today's militant atheists.
In his "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion," which was published posthumously, and…
cortex | May 15, 2007Here's the Pope, speaking on his recent trip to Brazil:
Where God is absent -- God with the human face of Jesus Christ -- these [moral] values fail to show themselves with their full force: nor does a consensus arise concerning them.
I do not mean that nonbelievers cannot live a lofty and exemplary morality; I am only saying that a society in which God is absent will not find the necessary consensus on moral values or the strength to live according to the model of these values.
I think the Pope gets his causality backwards. Human morality is largely a product of natural selection, not…
cortex | May 11, 2007One day, I want to compile a collection of all the metaphors that have shaped modern science. The sciences of the mind, perhaps because we know so little about the mind, have been particularly vulnerable to the lure of facile analogy. There's the classic "mind-as-computer" metaphor which, although useful, is certainly imperfect. Before computers, the mind was compared to "holograms," "telephone switchboards" and "hydraulic pumps". It seems that we can hardly invent a new technology before we feel the need to impose it onto the mysterious workings of the brain.
Of course, every science has…
cortex | May 10, 2007Let's say your plate is filled with three different foods: a turkey sandwich, some spears of broccoli and a chocolate chip cookie. Which food do you eat first?
According to Brian Wansick's new book, Mindless Eating, your birth order helps to shape your eating habits:
When we looked at the food questionnaires, we discovered that people who at the best food first [as opposed to saving the best food for last] shared one of two characteristics: they either grew up as a youngest child or came from large families.
The people most likely to save the best for last, on the other hand, had grown up as…
cortex | May 9, 2007Yesterday, Massachusetts announced a massive new stem cell research program, which amounts to more than $1 billion dollars in new funding. The grants are good, but I'm most excited by Governor Patrick's proposal for a stem cell bank, the first of its kind in America. According to the Boston Globe, eight hospitals and universities, including Harvard, have agreed to send their stem cell lines to the bank. Back when I was living in England, I wrote an article for the MIT Technology Review on the British stem cell bank:
The centerpiece of the British stem cell plan is a national stem cell bank,…
cortex | May 8, 2007Obama gave a good speech yesterday, outlining his plan to save Detroit from itself. He would basically force the Big Three (really the Shrinking Two) to invest in fuel efficient vehicles that run on alternative fuels*:
Obama proposed that the government pay for 10 percent of domestic automakers' health-care costs for retired workers through 2017 if the firms plow half the savings into equipment for making more efficient cars and trucks. Obama's campaign estimates that this would cost taxpayers roughly $7 billion over the next 10 years.
That said, I'd feel better about Obama's plans if he wasn…
cortex | May 7, 2007In the world of oenophiles, terroir is a sacred term. It's a French word with a murky English definition, but it's generally used to describe the relationship between a wine and the geographical place that it comes from. Chablis, for example, is renown for its hint of flint, which is supposedly a side-effect of the limestone beds in which the grapes are grown. Terroir is used to explain why genetically identical grape varietals (Chardonnay, Cabernet, Sangiovese) can taste so different in different locations. Grapes express the earth like oysters express the sea.
But is terroir a scientific…
cortex | May 4, 2007Jonathan Weiner, author of the magisterial Beak of the Finch, has a lovely essay explaining what Darwin can teach writers. This struck close to the bone:
Sitzfleisch. Robert Oppenheimer once observed that a physicist needs not only inspiration but also sitzfleisch--the ability to keep one's flesh sitting in a chair. Writers need the same gift, and Darwin was a hero of sitzfleisch. Even his patience was larger than life. His motto was, "It's dogged as does it." After his big idea, he spent 20 years sitting at his desk, in the bosom of his growing family, working out his theory and its…
cortex | May 3, 2007Factoid of the day:
Bad eyewitness identifications contributed to 75 percent of wrongful convictions in cases that were overturned by DNA evidence.
Given these dismal statistics, some states have tried to fix their procedures for eyewitnesses. New Jersey, for example, used to do police lineups the standard way: witnesses identified suspects from an in-person lineup as detectives stood next to them. The police officers would sometimes offer words of encouragement. New Jersey has now done away with the lineup, and instead presents people one after the other. This is supposed to prevent…
cortex | May 2, 2007Mind Matters, David Dobbs' research blog over at Scientific American, is indispensable weekly reading. This week is no different. The topic is a paper documenting the importance of maternal presence in rat-pups. Apparently, the absence of a rat mother during a critical period of pup development permanently alters the behavior of the pup*:
In their recent Nature Neuroscience article, researchers Stephanie Moriceau and Regina Sullivan explore learned olfactory preference and aversion as mediated by maternal presence. In this study rat pups were exposed to a peppermint odor that was paired with…
cortex | May 1, 2007Score another one for unconscious processing, which is especially prevalent during sleep. A new study in PNAS suggests that, as people sleep, their brains are forming relational memories, which require "the flexible ability to generalize across existing stores of information".
Earlier studies found that people appear better able to remember things they have just learned if they are able to sleep soon after. In effect, they found, the brain appears to use sleep time to consolidate memories.
This study suggests that the process is still more complex, and that sleep helps people make inferences…
cortex | April 30, 2007So here's a link to my future book (due out in November), which gives you a nice little synopsis of the subject. What do you think of the cover?*
*I'm personally interested in whether or not most people recognize the cookie as a madeleine, and thus get the Proust reference. My hunch is that, if it weren't for those insipid little madeleines next to the register at Starbucks, the madeleine would still be a relatively obscure French cookie.
cortex | April 30, 2007Another great Atul Gawande article on the aging process and the need for more geriatric specialists:
The single most serious threat she [an 86 year old woman] faced was not the lung nodule or the back pain. It was falling. Each year, about three hundred and fifty thousand Americans fall and break a hip. Of those, forty per cent end up in a nursing home, and twenty per cent are never able to walk again. The three primary risk factors for falling are poor balance, taking more than four prescription medications, and muscle weakness. Elderly people without these risk factors have a twelve-per-…
cortex | April 29, 2007I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section today on the cognitive revolution, and recent research demonstrating the relationship between cognition and emotion.
Ever since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Cognitive psychology tended to reinforce this divide: emotions were seen as interfering with cognition; they were the antagonists of reason. Now, building on more than a decade of mounting work, researchers have discovered that it is impossible to understand how we think without understanding how we feel.
"Because we subscribed to this…
cortex | April 26, 2007Alison Gopnik has written a thoroughly entertaining takedown of the mirror-neuron hype:
The myth of mirror neurons may not do much harm. Perhaps it's even good for science that in the 21st century we turn to the brain, rather than gods and monsters, for our mythical images. Still, science and science writing are supposed to get us closer to the truth, while the myth of mirror neurons may do just the opposite. Instead of teaching us about how the mind works, it may perpetuate some broad misconceptions about neuroscience and what the study of the brain can tell us about human nature.
You should…