cortex | March 19, 2007It's hard to believe it's been four years since the war began. If you missed Bob Woodruff's important documentary on the epidemic of brain injuries caused by war, I highly suggest watching it. According to Woodruff, up to 10 percent of all veterans suffer some sort of brain injury - often caused by explosive shock waves - while in Iraq. Most of these injuries will go untreated.
And then there's the psychological toll. Numerous reports indicate that the army still doesn't get PTSD, and isn't providing our veterans with a suitable level of care. It seems that, because mental illness is…
cortex | March 18, 2007This is an unbelievably poignant story about what it's like to learn that your nervous system is fated to self-destruct. Katherine Moser, a 25 year old occupational therapist, decided to take a genetic test that would tell her whether she carried the gene for Huntington's disease:
The test, the counselor said, had come back positive.
Katharine Moser inhaled sharply. She thought she was as ready as anyone could be to face her genetic destiny. She had attended a genetic counseling session and visited a psychiatrist, as required by the clinic. She had undergone the recommended neurological exam…
cortex | March 16, 2007The 20th century was the American century, but we got progressively less happy as the years rolled along:
The authors also find that over the last century, Americans, both men and women, have gotten steadily--and hugely--less happy. The difference in happiness of men between men of my generation, born in the 1960s, and my father's generation, born in the 1920s, is the same as the effect of a tenfold difference in income. In other words, if my father had little money compared to his contemporaries and I have lots of money compared to mine, I can still expect to be less happy. Here, curiously,…
cortex | March 16, 2007Apparently, Wilfrid Sellars came up with this "philosophical time-waster":
Identify three foods A, B, and C such that any two of these are complementary (taste good in combination) but the trio does not. So A and B must be complementary, B and C must be complementary, and A and C must be complementary, but A, B, and C must be foul when combined together.
I'm stumped. Tyler Cohen proposes Merlot, Coke and Chicken, but the idea of mixing Merlot and Coke seems pretty foul to me. Other options include sharp cheddar cheese, quince jelly and peanut butter, but I'm not too excited about eating a…
cortex | March 15, 2007Do any neuroscientists actually take Roger Penrose's theory of quantum microtubules seriously? When I hear phrases like "quantum Platonic non-computational influences" being applied to the brain, I tend to get very sleepy. But Andrew Sullivan, in a post titled "The Big Wow," recently featured a long letter laying out Penrose's latest musings on the quantum nature of consciousness, life after death, etc. I haven't looked at The Emperor's New Mind for several years, but Penrose's new version of the theory sounds even more improbable than I remember.
I have a feeling that the attractiveness of…
cortex | March 15, 2007In response to a recent post on spindle cells in which I referred to that neuronal cell type as a transmitter of social emotions, I received a very astute comment:
This doesn't as a statement make any sense "their antenna-like cell body is able to convey our social emotions across the entire brain". Neurons fire action potentials and the best they can conduct is patterns of firing or epsps/ipsps. They can't convey something as complex as 'social emotions'! That sounds like very sloppy thinking, even if they conduct something, some pattern, some information, to other brain regions its not '…
cortex | March 14, 2007Chris Shays (R-CT) has introduced an important piece of legislation. It's called The Farm Animal Stewardship Purchasing Act, and it would set basic humanitarian standards for any farm trying to sell meat to the federal government.
Humane treatment would be defined as:
Adequate shelter that allows animals to stand up, lie down and extend their limbs without touching any part of their enclosure. Daily access to food and water sufficient to maintain the animal's health. Adequate veterinary care, including prompt treatment of injuries or euthanasia for a sick or injured animal.
These modest…
cortex | March 14, 2007Here are some choice quotes from Will Wright's recent speech at SXSW. Is it odd that one of the most insightful thinkers in our culture designs computer games?
[When designing a game], we're trying to generate the largest rulespace in a game. This is the opposite of science, where we try to find simple rules to describe all this data. There's this topological difference...
So in some sense the entire planet is a toy. One of the really nice things with a toy like this is you can give people long term dynamics over short term sense. It's so hard for us to think over the long term, longer than…
cortex | March 14, 2007What's the biggest philosophical difference between neuroscientists and physicists?* I think neuroscientists are more averse to discussions of mystery and the limits of knowledge. They've spent so much time convincing the public that there is no soul - the ghost is just a side-effect of our vibrating machinery - that they are unwilling to let some immaterial presence back in.
Physicists, on the other hand, strike me as much more willing to confess their ignorance. Perhaps this epistemic modesty is just a result of time: physics is a much older field than neuroscience. Perhaps it's just a…
cortex | March 13, 2007Since the science of humor is in the news today, I thought I'd point out an interesting tidbit from a recent Cerebral Cortex paper:
The speculation that humor may be a uniquely human cognitive trait (Bergson 1924; Caron 2002) prompted our third hypothesis: humor will activate both anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and frontoinsula cortex (FI), the 2 regions in which an evolutionarily recent neuron type, the Von Economo cells (previously termed ''spindle neurons''), are present. A review of the functional imaging literature reveals that the Von Economo cell regions, particularly FI, are active…
cortex | March 13, 2007I'm pleased with my generation:
Young Americans, it turns out, are unexpectedly conservative on abortion but notably liberal on gay marriage. Given that 18- to 25-year-olds are the le ast Republican generation (35 percent) and less religious than their elders (with 20 percent of them professing no religion or atheism or agnosticism), it is curious that on abortion they are slightly to the right of the general public. Roughly a third of Gen Nexters endorse making abortion generally available, half support limits and 15 percent favor an outright ban. By contrast, 35 percent of 50- to 64-year-…
cortex | March 13, 2007Experiments like this demonstrate why Puritanism is so psychologically unrealistic:
A paper in The Journal of Consumer Research looks at the effects of self-restraint on subsequent impulse purchases.
In one experiment, college students spent a few minutes free-associating and writing down their thoughts, under instructions not to think of a white bear. Given $10 afterward to save or spend on a small assortment of products, they spent much more money than students who had free-associated without having to avoid thoughts of bears.
This isn't the first time people have explored the impact of…
cortex | March 12, 2007Now that the NCAA basketball tournament brackets have been announced, it's worth reminding ourselves not to bet too much money on our (overconfident) predictions. Why not? Because the tournament is impossible to predict. That, at least, was the conclusion of a 2001 paper by the economists Edward Kaplan and Stanley Garstka. They mined every statistical tool they could think of in an attempt to crack the office pool. They searched for secret algorithms in past NCAA tournaments, and used Markov models to see if regular season performance affected post-season performance. They ran endless…
cortex | March 9, 2007After Freud lost his scientific credibility, psychology became very dismissive of dreams. The leading scientific theory held that dreams consisted of mental detritus, the scraps and fragments of memories that your brain didn't want to remember. While Freud mined our nighttime thoughts for hidden meanings - they were symbol laden narratives of wish-fulfillment - this modern theory held that our dreams were entirely meaningless, a montage of hallucinations. They were the result of our hippocampus taking out the trash.
But dreams have been slowly making a comeback. There's now a large body of…
cortex | March 8, 2007
Somehow, magnification makes the grossness disappear. The insect almost looks like a religious icon, an angel nailed to a cross. See more entomological splatterings here.
cortex | March 8, 2007Everybody wants to cure cancer and pioneer gene therapy. This sort of scientific discovery, especially when the discovery could have profound consequences, is a worthy ambition. But does this ambition distract us from less appealing but even more important endeavors? Does searching for the miracle cure come at a cost?
Atul Gawande, in his new book Better, argues that medical research should search for low-tech improvements (like making doctors more diligent about hand-washing) with the same zeal it lavishes on potential drugs and surgical techniques. He uses the treatment of cystic fibrosis…
cortex | March 8, 2007A friend of mine recently asked me a simple question that I couldn't answer:
i want to know if there is a physiological explanation for why we have an easier time remembering things that we perceive to be true.
bad example: suppose that you believed that the earth was flat. then i took you out into space and showed you that it was round. you would not forget that. i'm having a hard time expressing this very simple thought: we are constantly replacing old beliefs with new ones that are in some sense "more true". you can intuitively distinguish between those thoughts that you have that…
cortex | March 7, 2007I'm a junkie for medical stories. You give me a good narrative description of a mysterious set of symptoms, and I'm hooked. If you share my obsession with patient histories and diagnostic case-studies, then I highly recommend Complications, by Atul Gawande (2003). It's easily the best medical book I've ever read. Gawande writes with the clarity of Chekhov (another writerly doctor) and the analytical rigor of Bertrand Russell. He simultaneously humanizes surgeons - they also make mistakes - while leaving you in awe of their talents. (What kind of person can hold a heart in their hands?) The…
cortex | March 7, 2007This is getting ridiculous:
Matthew Reich is a baker dedicated to natural ingredients. He prefers butter in the cookies and brioche he turns out at Tom Cat Bakery in Long Island City, Queens, and like many professional cooks he applauds the public health effort to get artificial trans fat out of food.
But, in a twist of science, the law and what some call trans-fat hysteria, Mr. Reich and other wholesale bakers are being forced to substitute processed fats like palm oil and margarine for good old-fashioned butter because of the small amounts of natural trans fat butter contains.
Some…
cortex | March 5, 2007I'll be away from my desk tomorrow, so I thought I'd keep you entertained with a video of me. (Forgive the shameless self-promotion.) In this short video, I'm discussing how Walt Whitman anticipated some truths of modern neuroscience. (I've written a whole book on this subject, which will come out this fall.) To be honest, I have yet to watch the video. I just find it too painfully embarrassing*. For those who just want the knowledge without suffering through my voice and nervous bodily tics, here's a short summary of the talk cribbed from my book:
Whitman was the first poet to write poems in…