cortex | February 21, 2007I'm all for clean air regulations, but sometimes they don't make very much sense. Case in point: California, along with four Northeastern states, has imposed strict limits on the type of pollutants coming out of the tailpipe of a car. There's only one problem: these regulations make diesel engines illegal, since even the most modern diesel engines emit slightly too much NOx (nitrides of oxygen). Fancy diesel engines (like the Mercedes Bluetec) go to great lengths to reduce their NOx emissions, such as injecting ammonia-rich urea into the exhaust stream. But it's still not clear that they will…
cortex | February 20, 2007I had a happy and healthy American childhood, but perhaps I was an exception. According to a new report by UNICEF on children in developed countries, the US and UK rank last and second to last in the "well-being" of their children. (The Netherlands and Sweden were first and second.) The report looked at a variety of factors, from rates of teen pregnancy to infant mortality to poverty. But perhaps the most convincing evidence, at least for some observers, was the fact that American and British children are most likely to describe their own health as "fair" or "poor". In other words, kids in…
cortex | February 20, 2007Who knew B flat was so strange? Robert Krulwich explains, as only he can:
During World War II, the New York Philharmonic was visiting the American Museum of Natural History. During rehearsal, somebody played a note that upset a resident live alligator named Oscar. Oscar, who'd been in the museum on 81st Street, suddenly began to bellow. Naturally, with so many scientists in residence, an experiment was quickly devised to see how to get Oscar to bellow again. Various musicians -- string, percussive and brass -- were brought to Oscar to play various notes. It turned out the culprit was B flat,…
cortex | February 20, 2007Over at the academic blog Overcoming Bias, Arnold Kling makes a good point:
Before the Iraq invasion, President Bush did not say, "I think that there is a 60 percent chance that Saddam has an active WMD program."
Al Gore does not say, "I think there is a 2 percent chance that if we do nothing there will be an environmental catastrophe that will end life as we know it."
Instead, they speak in the language of certainty. I assume that as political leaders they know a lot better than I do how to speak to the general population. So I infer that, relative to me, the public has a bias toward…
cortex | February 19, 2007In his most recent column, David Brooks argues that the new discoveries of neuroscience and biology have confirmed the conservative view of human nature.
Sometimes a big idea fades so imperceptibly from public consciousness you don't even notice until it has almost disappeared. Such is the fate of the belief in natural human goodness.
This belief, most often associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, begins with the notion that "everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man." Human beings are virtuous and free in their natural state…
cortex | February 16, 2007According to some recently published research by Carol Dweck, knowing about brain plasticity makes kids smarter:
100 seventh graders, all doing poorly in math, were randomly assigned to workshops on good study skills. One workshop gave lessons on how to study well. The other taught about the expanding nature of intelligence and the brain.
The students in the latter group "learned that the brain actually forms new connections every time you learn something new, and that over time, this makes you smarter."
Basically, the students were given a mini-neuroscience course on how the brain works. By…
cortex | February 16, 2007It's been one of the enduring mysteries of neurogenesis: where do all our new cells go? Do they plug themselves into the cortical network? Do they travel to the olfactory cortex? Or do they wither away and die, a vestigal legacy of a more primitive brain?
Now a big part of the puzzle has been solved, in a groundbreaking paper in the new Science by researchers in New Zealand and Sweden. They located the superhighway that conducts newly born cells across the brain:
The rostral migratory stream (RMS) is the main pathway by which newly born subventricular zone (SVZ) cells reach the olfactory…
cortex | February 15, 2007There's an interesting evolutionary psychology paper in the new Nature. It's by Tooby and Cosmides, and it investigates the roots of the incest taboo. The researchers found that, on average, our repulsion at the idea of having sex with a sibling correlates with two variables: how long we lived with that sibling and how long we watched our mother care for that sibling (their "perinatal association"). We use these two variables to compute a "kinship index" that "corresponds to an estimate of genetic relatedness between self and other." Siblings with a high "kinship index" not only triggered the…
cortex | February 15, 2007When sexual education classes in the Montgomery County public schools were outsourced to the Rockville Pregnancy Center, an "evangelical, antiabortion clinic," the education part of the class took a dramatic turn for the worse. Instead of actually learning about birth control or STD's, Rockville high schoolers played edifying games like the "gum game," where the students are forced to share the same piece of gum. They also play the "ex-lax game":
In this game, students were handed squares of Hershey's chocolate, but before they popped the candy, they were told that a few kids had instead…
cortex | February 15, 2007I have trouble remembering my own telephone number, so feats like this are totally incomprehensible:
When he [Daniel Tammet] gets nervous, he said, he sometimes reverts to a coping strategy he employed as a child: he multiplies two over and over again, each result emitting in his head bright silvery sparks until he is enveloped by fireworks of them. He demonstrated, reciting the numbers to himself, and in a moment had reached 1,048,576 -- 2 to the 20th power. He speaks 10 languages, including Lithuanian, Icelandic and Esperanto, and has invented his own language, Mantï. In 2004, he raised…
cortex | February 14, 2007It seems wrong to connect this memoir - which is so sincere, honest and lovely - to Valentine's Day, which is little more than a marketing conspiracy put together by Hallmark, the neighborhood florist and Tiffany's. But if you're looking for a little romantic reading, and don't mind a tragic ending, then pick up a copy of Love Is A Mix Tape, by Rob Sheffield. It's the true story of his love affair with Renee, a charismatic Appalachian with a penchant for Pavement and REM. (Rob, on the other hand, was a "shy, skinny, Irish Catholic geek from Boston.") They got married at the tender age of 25.…
cortex | February 14, 2007Irony and wit can be very patriotic, although my patriotism has never felt this sad:
cortex | February 14, 2007Greg Clark, an economist at UC Davis, has come out with a new paper arguing that natural selection accounts for the rise of "capitalist" attitudes. Simply put, the rich capitalists had more offspring than the poor serfs, so humans evolved a "set of preferences that were consistent with capitalism." Here's the abstract:
Before 1800 all societies, including England, were Malthusian. The average man or woman had 2 surviving children. Such societies were also Darwinian. Some reproductively successful groups produced more than 2 surviving children, increasing their share of the population,…
cortex | February 13, 2007Since the 2008 election appears to be in full swing, and the political prognosticators have started peddling their predictions, I thought it was worthwhile to remind everybody that political experts are not to be trusted. The psychologist Philip Tetlock has spent decades following the predictions of these so-called "experts," and seeing if their predictions are prophetic. The results are pretty dismal:
People who make prediction their business -- people who appear as experts on television, get quoted in newspaper articles, advise governments and businesses, and participate in punditry…
cortex | February 12, 2007Here's Pat Churchland, from a recent New Yorker profile (not online):
Paul and Pat believe that the mind-body problem will be solved not by philosophers but by neuroscientists, and that our present knowledge is so paltry that we would not understand the solution even if it were suddently to present itself. "Suppose you're a medieval physicist wondering about the burning of wood," Pat likes to say in her classes. "You're Albertus Magnus, let's say. One night, a Martian comes down and whispers, 'Hey, Albertus, the burning of wood is really rapid oxidation!' What could he do? He knows no…
cortex | February 12, 2007What biological organ does this machine resemble?
In leaping beyond the two- and four-core microprocessors that are being manufactured by Intel and its chief PC industry competitor, Advanced Micro Devices, Intel is following a design trend that is sweeping the computing world.
Already, computer networking companies and the makers of PC graphics cards are moving to processor designs that have hundreds of computing engines, but only for special applications.
For example, Cisco Systems now uses a chip called Metro with 192 cores in its high-end network routers. Last November Nvidia introduced…
cortex | February 11, 2007It's a fine line separating intelligence and insanity. According to a new study, the same gene that makes you smarter also makes you more likely to go crazy:
Most people inherit a version of a gene that optimizes their brain's thinking circuitry, yet also appears to increase risk for schizophrenia, a severe mental illness marked by impaired thinking, scientists at the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have discovered. The seeming paradox emerged from the first study to explore the effects of variation in the human gene for a brain master switch,…
cortex | February 10, 2007So Hillary Clinton came to my town today. She packed the local high school gym and brought with her a phalanx of television cameras, hordes of reporters and a hefty dose of political celebrity. (The doors opened at 1:15, and the gym was filled to capacity by 1:30.)
What did she say? Nothing particularly revelatory, apart from the fact that she took the stage to Jesus Jones' "Right Here, Right Now." She was predictably eloquent on issues where the crowd was behind her (universal health care, Bush's incompetence, abortion, stem-cell research, etc.) and predictably evasive/nuanced on issues…
cortex | February 9, 2007This is the Milgram experiment come to life. Eric Fair was a civilian interrogater in Iraq, working for the 82nd Airborne. The Washington Post published his op-ed today:
The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.
Despite my best efforts, I cannot…
cortex | February 9, 2007It's just an n of 1, a small anecdote within a larger story, but it illuminates some of the perpetual controversies of the cognitive sciences, from the accuracy of the IQ test to the plasticity of the human mind. It occurs on page 189 of Michael Lewis' The Blind Side, a gripping history of the left tackle position in football. It's also the story of Michael Oher, an impoverished kid from the mean streets of Memphis. When the book begins, Oher is virtually homeless. His mom is addicted to crack. But through a strange twist of fate, Oher is enrolled at a fancy Christian private school, where…