cortex | April 4, 2007There's been a bit of controversy over John McCain's recent remarks suggesting that Baghdad was much safer than conventional media descriptions suggest. "There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods," McCain said, before castigating Baghdad reporters for not "getting out more".
McCain was part of a Congressional delegation visiting Iraq. At this point, I think it's pretty clear that these visits are rather useless. They aren't serious fact-finding missions. Instead, they are little more than dangerous photo-ops. Congressmen don't go to Iraq to…
cortex | April 4, 2007Does power corrupt? And is absolute power absolutely corrupting? Here's some suggestive evidence:
Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and randomly put one of them in charge. Each trio had a half-hour to work through a boring social survey. Then a researcher came in and left a plateful of precisely five cookies. Care to guess which volunteer typically grabbed an extra cookie? The volunteer who had randomly been assigned the power role was also more likely to eat it with his mouth open, spew crumbs on partners and get cookie detritus on…
cortex | April 3, 2007A recent study in The Archives of General Psychiatry suggests that 25 percent of all Americans diagnosed with depression are actually just dealing with the normal disappointments of life, like divorce or the loss of a job. Their sadness is being treated like a medical condition. They were given drugs, when what they really needed was support:
The study also suggested that drug treatment may often be inappropriate for people who are experiencing painful -- but normal -- responses to life's stresses. Supportive therapy, on the other hand, may be useful -- and may keep someone who has been…
cortex | April 3, 2007So I'm watching a DVD and the usual legal disclaimer - "The views expressed in the commentary do not reflect the views of the studio, etc." - comes on the screen. Whatever. Such a warning label seems unnecessary, but what do I know? Maybe there's been a rash of lawsuits over DVD extras. Then the same legal warning comes on in French. Another 15 seconds pass by. Then Spanish. By the time all the warnings are complete, I've wasted 45 seconds of my life, and this doesn't even include the requisite FBI copyright warning.
Granted, 45 seconds isn't a lot of time. But multiply those same 45 seconds…
cortex | April 2, 2007Why do we remember shards of poetry when we can't remember anything else? After Tom Chaffin's brain tumor was removed, he temporarily lost the ability to speak in coherent sentences. (He also lost the ability to move the right side of his body.) And yet, even when he couldn't name more than two kinds of animals, he was able to recite the opening lines of Walt Whitman's Song of the Open Road:
Then about a day or so later, while working with a speech therapist, I found that I could recall the first dozen or so lines of a favorite poem:
"Afoot and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy…
cortex | April 2, 2007I had a very bizarre dream last night. I was driving to the gas station to buy milk. It was the middle of the night. (In case you were wondering, I don't normally make nocturnal milk runs, or buy my dairy products at the local Exxon-Mobil station.) As I pull into the gas station, I notice several police cars parked outside. That's odd, I think. Then, as I get out of my car, I notice a police officer frantically waving at someone near me, trying to tell them something. But I'm determined to get milk, so I head inside. That's when I notice that the store clerk is being held hostage. I've walked…
cortex | March 30, 2007It's the worst of all possible worlds: gas prices have gone up, but Americans haven't adjusted their gasoline consumption habits. Instead of using higher energy costs as a prod to use less energy (or at least use less foreign oil), we have fully acclimated to the price at the pump:
In the late 1970s, OPEC oil shocks and gas lines persuaded most Americans to sacrifice some of their pleasure trips and drives to the mall, ease up on the gas pedal, and switch to the bus or train.
But as Americans enter the sixth year of rising oil and gasoline prices, their shift in driving habits this time has…
cortex | March 29, 2007I love whale sharks. There's something very uplifting about such an enormous animal being so gentle. But I think it's pretty clear that whale sharks don't belong in aquariums:
A young whale shark that sank to the bottom of its tank at the Georgia Aquarium this year and died had been forcibly fed for months, a practice that may have punctured its stomach and caused an infection that led to its death, scientists said Wednesday.
The whale shark was fed with a tube after it seemed to lose its appetite over a period of months last year, said Robert Hueter, director of the center for shark research…
cortex | March 29, 2007President Bush has recently taken up reading. Ordinarily, that would be a good thing, if only because I found his anti-intellectualism and lack of curiousity deeply troubling. The bad news is that we know what books Bush has actually been reading. I think the man has a serious case of confirmation bias. Bush was recently caught reading A History of the English Peoples Since 1900, by the conservative British historian Andrew Roberts:
With this book, Andrew Roberts takes his place as the fawning court historian of the Bush administration. He claims this role not just by singing the Bush…
cortex | March 28, 2007In a recent issue of The New Republic, Alex Heard takes David Sedaris to task for blurring the line between memoir and novel, fiction and non-fiction, truth and lies:
I do think Sedaris exaggerates too much for a writer using the nonfiction label. And after spending several weeks fact-checking four of his books--Barrel Fever (1994), Naked (1997), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004)--I'd recommend that he issue Oprah Moment apologies to a few people, including all the unclothed frolickers at the Empire Haven nudist camp in the summer of 1996;…
cortex | March 27, 2007It was a day of unexpected findings for the field of cardiology. First, there was the news that patients with stents did not have a longer life span or a reduced number of heart attacks compared to patients treated with statins and other heart drugs. (Only a few years ago, drug-coated stents were being hailed as an important advance for patients with heart disease.) Then came news that a new Pfizer drug designed to raise levels of so-called good cholesterol did not reduce the amount of plaque build up in arteries. (This result complicates the presumed causal relationship between levels of HDL…
cortex | March 26, 2007This is the funniest thing I've read today. Over at McSweeney's, Simon Dedeo compares our physical theories to types of women:
0. Newtonian gravity is your high-school girlfriend. As your first encounter with physics, she's amazing. You will never forget Newtonian gravity, even if you're not in touch very much anymore.
3. Quantum mechanics is the girl you meet at the poetry reading. Everyone thinks she's really interesting and people you don't know are obsessed about her. You go out. It turns out that she's pretty complicated and has some issues. Later, after you've broken up, you wonder if…
cortex | March 26, 2007Here's your medical factoid of the day:
As of 2003, the average income of a French physician was estimated at $55,000; in the U.S. the comparable number was $194,000.
Personally, I'm a little frightened by the idea of my doctor not being highly paid. I don't want my surgeon to be a member of the middle class. I hope that anybody who's holding my heart in his hands is a highly trained professional, worthy of a ridiculously high salary. Medicine is labor intensive and high doctor salaries are inseparable from high health insurance premiums. But I'd rather invest in a better doctor than some…
cortex | March 23, 2007Over at Mind Matters, there's a typically fascinating discussion of a paper concerning the underlying mechanisms of executive control and attention:
To find out what happens during attentional lapses, a team of researchers led by Daniel H. Weissman used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to try to identify how these brain areas behave when attention is paid and when it flags. They describe their work in "The Neural Bases of Momentary Lapses in Attention." They measured localized blood flow (and thus, presumably, brain activity) with the scanner as their test subjects tried to solve…
cortex | March 22, 2007On Monday, I posted about some recent imaging work documenting the way the brain distinguishes between "personal" and "impersonal" moral dilemmas. Now comes a new Nature paper from a medley of researchers documenting how damage to a single brain region - the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPO) - erases this fundamental distinction.
Damage to an area of the brain behind the forehead, inches behind the eyes, transforms the way people make moral judgments in life-or-death situations, scientists reported yesterday. In a new study, people with this rare injury expressed increased willingness to…
cortex | March 21, 2007I used to work in a restaurant where we served wild salmon with a Barolo sauce. (This was back when drinking red wine with fish was still very au courant.) Needless to say, the chef wasn't wasting real Barolo on a wine reduction. Instead, we used some of the generic plonk you buy in two gallon jugs. It wasn't Gallo Hearty Burgundy, but it wasn't that much better, either. The chef actually swore that the cheap wine, with its sweetish edge, actually made superior sauces.
So I wasn't surprised to read this:
Two weeks ago I set out to cook with some particularly unappealing wines and promised…
cortex | March 21, 2007Here are your disturbing prison facts for the day:
Percentage of American adults held in either prison or mental institutions in 1953 and today, respectively: 0.67, 0.68
Percentage of these adults in 1953 who were in mental institutions: 75
Percentage today who are in prisons: 97
That's from the latest Harper's magazine. My first reaction to this bit of data was dismay: we've turned prisons into insane asylums, and are locking up people who should be treated for mental illness. These statistics make it clear that the boom in the prison industry is fed, in part, by the closing of our mental…
cortex | March 20, 2007It's hard to believe that just over fifty years ago psychology was in the firm grip of behaviorism, which denied any semblance of intelligence or emotion in animals. (They were just biological machines.) Talk of anything but stimulus and reward was just sentimental pseudoscience. Then came Chomsky and Goodall and de Waal and a legion of other brave scientists who dared to document the actual behavior of animals. And now we have discoveries like this, in which birds display behavior that seems quintessentially human (at least if you frequent bars and nightclubs):
Emily DuVal, a biologist at…
cortex | March 20, 2007If you fancy a very small car that gets 60 miles per gallon, or just fell in love with the cute Smart roadster while vacationing in Europe, then you'll be happy to know that you can now reserve, for $99, a Smart car of your very own. How small are Smart cars? Small enough that they can be parked on the street with their front facing the curb. And while I'm not sure that I'm ready to drive a Smart car while being surrounded by Chevy Suburbans and Ford F-150's, I'm glad American consumers will have a new eco-friendly alternative. The base model starts at $12,000.
cortex | March 19, 2007Descartes is turning over in his grave: the mind and body grow more intertwined by the day. It's becoming clear that maintaining a healthy mind into old age isn't simply a matter of keeping the brain active with card games and crossword puzzles. Perhaps equally important is an active body. Physical exercise is a crucial part of mental health:
Researchers are realizing that the mental effects of exercise are far more profound and complex than they once thought. The process starts in the muscles. Every time a bicep or quad contracts and releases, it sends out chemicals, including a protein…