cortex | April 26, 2007Mike Penner, a sports writer for the LA Times, has decided to become a woman. He will return to the paper as Christine Daniels. He wrote a gripping personal reflection for the paper explaining his decision:
Transsexualism is a complicated and widely misunderstood medical condition. It is a natural occurrence -- unusual, no question, but natural.
Recent studies have shown that such physiological factors as genetics and hormonal fluctuations during pregnancy can significantly affect how our brains are "wired" at birth.
As extensive therapy and testing have confirmed, my brain was wired female.…
cortex | April 26, 2007Christof Koch makes a compelling argument:
My empirical studies into the neurobiology of consciousness have convinced me that many species share the sights and sounds of life with us humans. Why? First, except for size, there are no large-scale, dramatic differences between the brains of most mammals (including humans). Second, when people experience pain and distress, they contour their face, moan, cry, squirm, and try to avoid anything that would trigger a reoccurrence of the pain. Many animals do the same. Likewise for the physiological signals that attend pain--like changes in blood…
cortex | April 25, 2007Does football cause brain damage? The evidence remains sketchy and completely inconclusive, but is nevertheless suggestive:
Bennet Omalu, a man who knew nothing about football and was a soccer goalie in his homeland, believes he has proven that repeated concussions in football lead to early-onset dementia, very similar to the boxing ailment known as "punch-drunk syndrome," possibly leading to dementia and depression.
Omalu has been able to examine four brains -- those of former Philadelphia Eagles defensive back Andre Waters, former Pittsburgh Steelers offensive linemen Mike Webster and Terry…
cortex | April 25, 2007David Leonhardt has an excellent column on the squeezed middle class. He notes that while inequality is increasing, the other common complaint - that the income of middle class workers is now more volatile - is not supported by government statistics. There has been no great risk shift, at least when you look at income. As Leonhardt notes, accurately diagnosing the problem is a necessary part of coming up with a solution:
There is now a big push in both Washington and state capitals to come up with policies that can alleviate middle-class anxiety. That's all for the good. In fact, it is…
cortex | April 24, 2007Take note historians of the future. When you set out to write your tome, The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, you might find the following three stories, all of them appearing in today's New York Times, to be of interest. They are all symptoms of decadence run amok, the sure sign of a country in decline*:
1. Top Hedge Fund Managers Earn over $240 Million
Combined, the top 25 hedge fund managers last year earned $14 billion -- enough to pay New York City's 80,000 public school teachers for nearly three years.
2. Toyota Overtakes GM in Sales for First Time
Toyota sold more cars and trucks…
cortex | April 24, 2007Not all wags mean the same thing. Careful analysis reveals an emotional difference between wags to the right and wags to the left. This asymmetry reflects an underlying asymmetry built into the mammalian brain:
When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.
A study describing the phenomenon, "Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli," appeared in the March 20 issue of Current Biology. The authors are Giorgio…
cortex | April 20, 2007So Harry Reid announced that the Iraq war is lost, that there is no military solution to the crisis. He's being denounced, of course, by lots of right wing pundits, who are clamoring for his resignation. Regardless of whether or not you think the war is lost, I have trouble understanding how saying the war is lost is a bad thing. As I noted earlier, I think President Bush is suffering from a serious case of loss aversion. I believe that admitting defeat is simply be too painful a decision for Bush to make. Losing sucks, especially when the loss is entirely of your own making.
Psychologists…
cortex | April 19, 2007When I discover a new band* I follow a set routine. I go to the Itunes store and start sampling the songs that are most often downloaded. I tacitly trust in the wisdom of crowds and assume that more popular songs are better, or at least catchier. It turns out that I'm wrong. Here's Duncan Watts, a sociologist at Columbia:
In our study, published last year in Science, more than 14,000 participants registered at our Web site, Music Lab (www.musiclab.columbia.edu), and were asked to listen to, rate and, if they chose, download songs by bands they had never heard of. Some of the participants saw…
cortex | April 19, 2007I'm excited by Nissan's announcement that the next generation Maxima will come up with a cleaner burning diesel engine:
Nissan Motor will offer its flagship Maxima sedan with a cleaner-burning diesel engine in the United States by 2010, the company's chief executive, Carlos Ghosn, said on Wednesday, offering new details of a plan intended to resonate with environmentally conscious consumers.
Modern diesel technology, already widespread in Europe, is slowly making its way to the United States. The new engines are a far cry from the coughing, stinking diesel engines of the past, and have lower…
cortex | April 18, 2007From Psychology Today:
Conventional wisdom dictates that people become parents because children bring joy. But do they really? For scientists studying the subject, simply correlating parenthood and happiness can't answer this question, since happy people might be more likely to have kids to begin with. But a recent study that compared happiness levels in adult identical twins--some of whom are parents and some who aren't--may be getting to the bottom of the issue.
The study, headed by sociology professor Hans-Peter Kohler of the University of Pennsylvania, found that people with children are…
cortex | April 17, 2007It's long been noted that the impressionists steadily grew more abstract as the 19th century came to a close. One only has to compare an early Monet from the 1870's to a late Monet landscape to understand the importance of this transition. The pretty pastels and dappling light gave way to thick impasto paints and blank spots on the canvas. In other words, the impressionists had become post-impressionists.
This transition is usually explained in terms of culture: the impressionists were simply reacting to the increasing acceptance of painterly abstraction. Modernism was beginning,…
cortex | April 16, 2007I'm fascinated by these sorts of mass delusions. They seem almost laughably strange - hundreds of people convince themselves they are sick - until you realize that collective hysteria is only the flip-side of the placebo effect. We are all capable of talking ourselves into feeling better so it only makes sense that we are also capable of talking ourselves into feeling worse. (In this sense, most alternative medicine is just another form of mass delusion. We confuse our expectations with reality.) Needless to say, this is yet more evidence of Descartes' Error: the mind and body are…
cortex | April 13, 2007Stalin famously said that "A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." Sadly, it turns out that Stalin's observation is psychologically accurate. That, at least, is the conclusion of Paul Slovic, a scientist at the University of Oregon. Slovic set out to answer a tragically simple question: Why do good people ignore mass murder and genocide?
The answer may lie in human psychology. Specifically, it is our inability to comprehend numbers and relate them to mass human tragedy that stifles our ability to act. It's not that we are insensitive to the suffering of our fellow human…
cortex | April 12, 2007So I'm sitting in the movie theater the other day (I went to see The Lives of Others - go see it), and as soon as the first scene begins, the elderly lady sitting next to me says to herself: "Gosh darnit! I've already seen this movie! But it sounded so different when I read about it!"
When the movie was over, I struck up a conversation with the woman. It turns out that she read the description of the movie in the lobby and didn't recognize any of the plot elements. However, as soon as she saw the face of the main character she instantly remembered having seen the movie a few weeks before. At…
cortex | April 10, 2007I always assumed that all aquaculture was created equal. Fish farms produced massive algae blooms and fecal waste, polluted the coast and corrupted wild fish stock. (Of course, I'm still not sure that aquaculture isn't preferable to massive overfishing of the Cod-in-Newfoundland variety. What do you think?) Anyways, it never occurred to me that some types of aquaculture are actually good for the environment. A recent NY Times op-ed argued that what our polluted waterways - like the Chesapeake bay - really need is more oyster farms:
Aquaculture has a bad name. We picture fish farms with tons…
cortex | April 8, 2007A friend of mine (who happens to be Ph.D student in economics) sent me a skeptical email regarding a recent article that sought to measure marginal utility:
I'm really not convinced that marginal utility can be so easily correlated with activity in the midbrain. I think one of the virtues of the economic definition of marginal utility is that it's ultimately vague in definition. Depending on the context it can be happiness or money or satisfaction or whatever that person wants. I'm not sure it benefits from a strict neuroscientific definition.
I understand the skepticism. But I think there is…
cortex | April 6, 2007Matsuzaka looked impressive in his MLB debut. He had 10 strikeouts in 7 innings and only threw 108 pitches. I'm still not convinced he's worth $103.1 million, but the weak Kansas City lineup looked pretty dazed and confused.
Matsuzaka's genius, I think, is to create as much batter uncertainty as possible. He's one of the few pitchers who really uses psychology to his benefit. Take, for example, the much hyped gyroball. Such a pitch probably doesn't even exist. But that doesn't even matter: as long as batters think it might exist, they have to think about it, and batters don't have time to…
cortex | April 5, 2007Marginal utility can be measured. According to new research out of Wolfram Schultz's lab, poor people are much quicker learners than rich people when playing a Pavlovian paradigm for small amounts of money. (Poor people took about 12 trials to figure out the game, while rich people took about 35 trials.) This behavior was then confirmed with fMRI. Sure enough, rich people demonstrated less dopaminergic midbrain activity than poor people in response to the experimental paradigm. They were bored by the pocket change. Here's the abstract:
A basic tenet of microeconomics suggests that the…
cortex | April 5, 2007Dave and Greta Munger have posted an excellent reply to the following question:
What's the difference between psychology and neuroscience? Is psychology still relevant as we learn more about the brain and how it works?
You have to be a pretty staunch reductionist to believe that neuroscience makes psychology obsolete. After all, according to scientific materialism, neuroscience is ultimately just a subset of quantum mechanics. So should we all become physicists? Of course not. While our different levels of inquiry are obviously interconnected, they are also autonomous. As Dave points out,…