cortex | January 30, 2007For some reason, I find the death of Barbaro rather upsetting. The first two horse races I've ever watched on television were his victory at the Kentucky Derby and his injury at the Preakness. I've since followed his medical travails with baited breath, rooting for his left foot, then his right foot, and then his left foot.
That said, some of this Barbaro commentary is just silly. This morning, while listening to NPR and watching the news, I've heard Barbaro being compared to Mozart, Beethoven and Muhammad Ali. His graceful movements are "like a symphony". He ran so beautifully "because he…
cortex | January 29, 2007There's a new collection of Einstein's personal letters that are about to be published. They give us a portrait of the young scientist before he revolutionized science. At the time these letters were written, Einstein was insecure, poor and struggling to publish. In other words, he was just like every other post-doc:
In 1915, as Western civilization teetered on the brink, Albert Einstein stood at the threshold of a scientific achievement so bold that it would forever change him and the world.
His general theory of relativity, which described how large bodies warped space and time, would…
cortex | January 29, 2007Paul Krugman's analysis of Milton Friedman's intellectual legacy is one of the best articles I've read recently. Krugman not only paints a balanced portrait of Friedman's accomplishments - great economist, bad popularizer - but ably summarizes the rival tensions in 20th century economics. It's all fascinating stuff, but I was particularly interested in this section on the rational agent model:
For most of the past two centuries, economic thinking has been dominated by the concept of Homo economicus. The hypothetical Economic Man knows what he wants; his preferences can be expressed…
cortex | January 27, 2007It almost seems as if the faddish claims of nutritional science have an inverse relationship with reality. If a nutrient is supposed to be good for us, chances are that later research will contradict the claim. Here's Michael Pollan in the Times Magazine:
Last winter came the news that a low-fat diet, long believed to protect against breast cancer, may do no such thing -- this from the monumental, federally financed Women's Health Initiative, which has also found no link between a low-fat diet and rates of coronary disease. The year before we learned that dietary fiber might not, as we had…
cortex | January 26, 2007It's an astonishingly robust finding:
Smokers with damaged insulas were 136 times more likely to have their addictions erased than smokers with damage in other parts of their brains.
What makes this paper so interesting is that it actually makes sense. The insula has been recognized for more than a decade as a crucial substrate for feeling. It sits at an important neural intersection, and is largely responsible for integrating signals generated by our body - so called "somatic markers" - into mental states. As Antonio Damasio has written (his wife is a co-author on the cigarette paper): "The…
cortex | January 24, 2007Is the Hard Problem of consciousness solvable by science? Will we ever come up with a meaningful explanation as to how squirts of neurotransmitter and minor jolts of electricity create subjective experience? As far as I'm concerned, this is the major philosophical question hovering over neuroscience. If the new Mysterians are right, and we will never understand how the texture of experience arises from neural computation, then neuroscience has a very profound limitation. The most important question in the field will always remain an ineffable mystery. There will always be a big void in the…
cortex | January 23, 2007Is this true? Are neuroscientists really the cool kids? If so, then what is the "coolest" avenue of neuroscience research? (And please don't say consciousness studies.)
Q. Among biologists, is sperm research very respected?
A. Well, in biology, all the glamour is in neuroscience. The common thing said is: "Learning and memory, that's the theoretical physics of biology." In terms of prestige, reproduction is far down the line. Another thing: because reproductive research is about sex and possibly about contraception, it doesn't get a lot of funding. That too has something to do with its low…
cortex | January 23, 2007For most of the 20th century, neuroscience treated our memories like inert packets of information. They were created through Pavlovian reinforcement, and then just shelved away in the brain, like dusty old books in a library. While this approach led to many important discoveries, like CREB, Cam Kinase and cAMP, it also created a strange blind spot in the literature: while scientists were starting to understand how we create a memory, then had no idea how we remember our memories. What happens during he recollection process?
An important paper arrived in 2000, when Karim Nader, Glenn Shafe…
cortex | January 22, 2007This is an important medical story about the spread of a drug-resistant strain of bacteria called Acinetobacter baumannii. The spread of this superbug - it's known as an opportunistic pathogen, since it preys on the old, young and weak - seems to largely be a consequence of war. Here's Steve Silberman of Wired:
The first news that US troops had engaged an unforeseen enemy in Iraq appeared on a physicians' email list called ProMED on April 17, 2003. A communicable-disease expert in the Navy named Kyle Petersen posted a request for information about unusual infections he was seeing aboard the…
cortex | January 22, 2007Last night's Colts-Patriots game was a painful experience. (As you probably guessed, I'm a Patriots fan.) But it wasn't just painful because the Pats lost the game: it was how they lost the game. The Pats dominated the 1st half, only to have their 18 point lead slowly chipped away by Manning's precision passes. The Colts scored the go-ahead touchdown with one minute remaining in the 4th quarter.
Based upon a careful introspection of my own Sunday night misery, I'm hereby proposing a new law of sports fandom: the inverse peak-end rule. This is an altered version of the traditional peak-end…
cortex | January 19, 2007From Steven Shapin's recent New Yorker article on the history of vegetarianism:
A recent report by the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization reckons that at least eighteen per cent of the global-warming effect comes from livestock, more than is caused by all the world's transportation systems.
The number of vegetarians in developed countries is evidently on the increase, but the world's per-capita consumption of meat rises relentlessly: in 1981, it was 62 pounds per year; in 2002, the figure stood at 87.5 pounds. In carnivorous America, it increased from 238.1 to 275.1 pounds, and the…
cortex | January 19, 2007In the past two years, we've been blessed with two remarkable novels about neuroscience and the brain: The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers, and Saturday, by Ian McEwan. Personally, I thought Saturday was the more perfect work, although both books address a similar set of themes. Can science solve consciousness? How do we deal with the fact that there is no soul, and that we are nothing but three pounds of fatty membrane? How does subjective experience arise from the shuttling of ions? In Saturday, McEwan's protagonist is a neurosurgeon, who, while operating on an exposed brain, ruminates on…
cortex | January 18, 2007I've got good news and bad news. I'll give you the good news first:
A cheap and simple drug that kills almost all cancers by switching off their "immortality". The drug, dichloroacetate (DCA), has already been used for years to treat rare metabolic disorders and so is known to be relatively safe.
It also has no patent, meaning it could be manufactured for a fraction of the cost of newly developed drugs.
Evangelos Michelakis of the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, and his colleagues tested DCA on human cells cultured outside the body and found that it killed lung, breast and brain…
cortex | January 18, 2007People who have near-death experiences often report a similar set of symptoms: they levitate above their body while being slowly pulled towards a bright white light. Nevertheless, the details of this experience - the particular afterlife that lies beyond the light - reveal a tremendous amount about the culture you exist in. From the Mental Floss Blog:
Many Africans interpret near-death experiences as somewhat evil, a bad omen or a sign that they were somehow "bewitched."
Among 400 Japanese NDErs that participated in a study, many reported seeing long, dark rivers and beautiful flowers, two…
cortex | January 18, 2007Good news: cancer deaths have declined for the second year in a row. This trend has a number of causes, including fewer smokers and improved treatment options. But one cancer accounts for more than 65 percent of the overall decline in deaths:
By far the greatest decreases in mortality have been in colorectal cancer -- 1,110 fewer deaths in men, 1,094 fewer in women.
Dr. Elizabeth Ward, a managing director in epidemiology and surveillance at the cancer society, said the most important factor in the decrease was screening for colorectal cancer, which can detect the disease early when it is most…
cortex | January 17, 2007I'm always startled by the sheer variety of toothpastes being sold at my local drug store. It's a classic example of excessive choice: all those different products, most of which seem interchangeable, actually make me less likely to buy anything. I dread the oral health aisle.
So how do corporations distinguish their brand of toothpaste, if they all contain the same active ingredients? The answer is predictable: they spend hundreds of million dollars on advertising:
Procter is backing Pro-Health with a $100 million advertising campaign, its largest spending ever for a new dental product. The…
cortex | January 17, 2007Here is the most depressing lede of the day:
$1.2 trillion would pay for an unprecedented public health campaign -- a doubling of cancer research funding, treatment for every American whose diabetes or heart disease is now going unmanaged and a global immunization campaign to save millions of children's lives.
Combined, the cost of running those programs for a decade wouldn't use up even half our money pot. So we could then turn to poverty and education, starting with universal preschool for every 3- and 4-year-old child across the country. The city of New Orleans could also receive a huge…
cortex | January 16, 2007What is the neural correlate of the self? The easy answer is that nobody knows. We have yet to discover a neurological patient who has lost their sense of identity, but still retained their conscious sensations. Nevertheless, certain brain areas have been implicated in distinguishing the self from non-self.
This 2006 paper by Todd Heatherton of Dartmouth, for example, detected increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) when people were forced to perform "self-referrent tasks". In other words, the mPFC is what recognizes your reflection in the mirror. It might not be the…
cortex | January 16, 2007John Tierney inaugurates his new Science Times column with a charming mediation on a recent neuroeconomics paper published in Neuron:
The economists teamed with psychologists at Stanford to turn an M.R.I. machine into a shopping mall. They gave each experimental subject $40 in cash and offered the chance to buy dozens of gadgets, appliances, books, DVDs and assorted tchotchkes. Lying inside the scanner, first you'd see a picture of a product. Next you'd see its price, which was about 75 percent below retail. Then you'd choose whether or not you'd like a chance to buy it. Afterward, the…