cortex | December 27, 2006I've been reading Dave Eggers new book, What is the What. It's a beautifully told story of a boy's flight from Southern Sudan to a refugee camp in Ethiopia to the slums of Atlanta. Based on a true story - the novel's subtitle is "The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng" - Eggers recounts, in searing yet simple prose, the Job-like life of Deng. He has seen his friends get eaten by lions, starve to death in camps, get shot at by bandits, and get mugged by American gangsters. His survival is nothing but a miracle.
While reading the book, I kept on thinking about Primo Levi's Survival in…
cortex | December 27, 2006The Times has a story today on the recent boom in "brain health" programs:
From "brain gyms" on the Internet to "brain-healthy" foods and activities at assisted living centers, the programs are aimed at baby boomers anxious about entering their golden years and at their parents trying to stave off memory loss or dementia.
The most popular of these programs (by far) is Nintendo's Brain Age. The game is a slickly marketed confection of shareware - you do everything from play Sudoku to read Dickens out loud - that pretends to measure the age of your brain. Of course, all they're really doing is…
cortex | December 26, 2006Talking about death is hard, and many doctors aren't very good at it:
Researchers who in the mid-1990s observed more than 9,000 seriously ill patients in five American teaching hospitals found substantial shortcomings in the care of the dying. More than a third spent at least 10 of their last days in intensive care. Among patients who remained conscious until death, half suffered moderate to severe pain. And fewer than half of their physicians knew whether or not their patients wanted to avoid cardiopulmonary resuscitation.
That's from an interesting op-ed in the Times today by Dr. Pauline…
cortex | December 26, 2006Here is Scott Adams (the creator of Dilbert) weighing in on neuroscience and free will (a topic that has been heatedly discussed on this blog recently):
It seems to me that free will can be easily tested. The next time someone is getting brain surgery, just take a few minutes to perform the test. Sometimes the patient remains awake during brain surgery so he can report what functions are changing as the surgeon is poking around. So for example, when the surgeon electrically stimulates the language center of the brain, the patient might temporarily lose his ability to speak.
The test for free…
cortex | December 24, 2006The latest poll from my state of New Hampshire:
If the Democratic primary were held today, Obama would be in a statistical dead heat with New York Sen. Hillary Clinton, according to a new Monitor poll. Last month, a Monitor poll showed Clinton trouncing her opponents, with Obama lagging 23 points behind.
Although Clinton commands considerable support among likely Democratic primary voters, she struggles in general election match-ups, according to the poll. If the contest were held today, both Arizona Sen. John McCain and former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani would prevail over Clinton.…
cortex | December 22, 2006Tis the season of Santa Claus, and my neighborhood is full of these awful blow up Santa dioramas. The grinch in me hopes that some other grinch comes along with a sharp scissors and pokes a hole in all this inflatable lawn plastic.
Don't these people realize that there's nothing vaguely Christian or religious or spiritual about Santa Claus? That he wasn't there at the immaculate conception? That the modern image of Santa Claus was invented by the advertising executives of the Coca-Cola company? I kid you not:
Starting in 1931, magazine ads for Coca-Cola featured St. Nick as a kind, jolly man…
cortex | December 22, 2006Here's how Michel Gondry - director of the Science of Sleep,* and cinematic master of low-tech effects - created the illusion of solving a Rubiks Cube with his feet. Hint: it involves time.
And here's the Seed video of Gondry talking to sleep scientist Robert Stickgold.
*Beautiful movie, but really weird.
[Hat Tip: Kottke]
cortex | December 21, 2006These are just a few questions that Slate's Explainer couldn't, or wouldn't, answer:
What comes after 999 trillion?
Lasers are now powerful and small (at least I think they are), so why don't our troops carry laser guns?
Is it possible to collect all the cookie dough in Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough ice cream and actually bake cookies from it?
How clean is bar soap in a public bathroom? Is it "self-cleaning," since it's soap? It seems like a health hazard to me.
Why is grilled chicken tasting increasingly rubbery and odd?
I have noticed that a lot of mainstream movies feature men peeing. Are…
cortex | December 21, 2006My last post on neuroscience and free will generated lots of interesting comments. Please check them out. But I think a few readers misunderstood my ambition. It's easiest to begin by saying what I wasn't trying to do: I wasn't trying to construct a philosophically sound defense of free will (I'm not sure such a thing is possible), or reflect on quantum indeterminacy, or get into a metaphysical debate about the material causality of everything. If you believe, ala Laplace, that the world is governed by a discrete set of material rules (as I do), then, of course, freedom doesn't really exist.…
cortex | December 21, 2006We all know about Proust and his madeleine. One whiff of that buttery cookie, shaped like a seashell, and Proust suddenly remembered his long forgotten childhood in Combray. Proust makes it clear that his sense of smell was the trigger for his memory. He knew that our nose bears a unique burden of memory:
"When from a long distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping,…
cortex | December 20, 2006The Economist believes that "modern neuroscience is eroding the idea of free will":
In the late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he was due to be sentenced to prison for his crimes, he had his brain scanned. He had a tumour. When it had been removed, his paedophilic tendencies went away. When it started growing back, they returned. When the regrowth was removed, they vanished again. Who then was the child abuser?
His case dramatically illustrates the challenge that modern neuroscience is beginning to pose…
cortex | December 19, 2006So I don't think we should send more troops to secure Baghdad. This song explains why:
Note to Bruce: While I enjoyed your Seeger Sessions - even if I really don't listen to it that much - may I suggest that your next record of covers feature Bob Dylan?
cortex | December 19, 2006Nabokov always said that the only thing he enjoyed more than writing novels and solving chess puzzles was studying butterflies. As he notes in Strong Opinions:
Frankly, I never thought of letters as a career. Writing has always been for me a blend of dejection and high spirits, a torture and a pastime -- but I never expected it to be a source of income. On the other hand, I have often dreamt of a long and exciting career as an obscure curator of lepidoptera in a great museum.
Even after Lolita made Nabokov (in)famous and rich, he continued to put his scientific knowledge to work, and layered…
cortex | December 19, 2006The purpose of dreaming is learning. While you are sleeping, your brain is digesting the day, deciding which new experiences to consolidate into long-term memory. That's the implication of Matthew Wilson's latest paper, which documented the neural activity in the brains of dreaming rats. Here's the Times:
The finding, reported on the Web site of the journal Nature Neuroscience by Daoyun Ji and Matthew A. Wilson, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, showed that during nondreaming sleep, the neurons of both the hippocampus and the neocortex replayed memories -- in repeated…
cortex | December 18, 2006There was an excellent review this past Sunday of the new William James biography, by Robert Richardson. The review was written by Rebecca Newberger Goldstein. I heartily agree with this passage:
James's own philosophical positions were fused with his reactions to the experiences of his life. A deeply divided man who squandered years just trying to decide which profession to pursue, he not only defined "the divided self" as a technical term in psychology, but also wrought out of his own divisions a host of philosophical positions that had as their dominant theme the importance of the…
cortex | December 18, 2006DARPA, the often secretive research unit of the Pentagon devoted to sponsoring "revolutionary, high-payoff research," has recently turned its attention to neuroscience. DARPA is best known for creating the precursor of the internet, and for decades lavished its considerable resources on high-end physics. It should not be surprising that the Defense Department is now interested in the brain.
As Sharon Begley recently wrote in the WSJ:
Darpa has good reason to fund neuroscience. Discoveries and new technologies such as noninvasive imaging to detect what the mind is doing might help analysts,…
cortex | December 16, 2006Is inflation really so bad? The great scourge of the American economy - and the economic phenomenon that gives Greenspan and Bernanke nightmares - turns out to have some pretty progressive side-effects. This paper is from the December 2006 issue of the Journal of Political Economy:
This study quantitatively assesses the effects of inflation through changes in the value of nominal assets. It documents nominal asset positions in the United States across sectors and groups of households and estimates the wealth redistribution caused by a moderate inflation episode. The main losers from…
cortex | December 15, 2006There are so many confounding variables here I don't know where to begin, so I'll just post the study, in the hope that it convinces somebody to eat some tofu or cheese instead of some ethically dubious meat:
Children with high IQs are more likely to be vegetarians when they grow up, according to research reported on Friday.
A British study of more them 8,000 men and women aged 30 whose IQs had been measured when they were 10, showed that the higher the IQ, the greater the odds of being a vegetarian.
"People who are more intelligent as children, who will obviously keep that intelligence when…
cortex | December 15, 2006Just when I thought we are all doomed to inhabit a planet of acidic oceans and infernal heat, I learn that the Pentagon's top weaponeer - nicknamed Dr. Evil - will save us all from global warming.
PS. Did you know that the the army can create rain? I sure didn't.
cortex | December 15, 2006In December 1992, the FDA approved a new cancer drug called Taxol. The active ingredient was paclitaxel, a toxic chemical taken from the bark of the Oregon yew tree. Hailed as a treatment for metastasized tumors - the cancer had already spread - Bristol-Meyers Squib proudly announced that the pill reduced tumor size by at least one half in 30 percent of patients. For those without hope, the pill offered a last chance.
But Taxol's surprising effectiveness wasn't what made headlines. Instead, it quickly gained a reputation as the most expensive drug ever sold. Bristol-Meyers Squibb set a…