cortex | November 17, 2009Success is intimidating. When we compete against someone who's supposed to be better than us, we start to get nervous, and then we start to worry, and then we start to make stupid mistakes. That, at least, is the lesson of a new working paper by Jennifer Brown, a professor at the Kellogg school.
Brown demonstrated this psychological flaw by analyzing data from every player in every PGA tournament from 1999 to 2006. The reason she chose golf is that Tiger Woods is an undisputed superstar, the most intimidating competitor in modern sports. (In 2007, Golf Digest noted that Woods finished with 19…
cortex | November 16, 2009The WSJ discovers the unreliability of wine critics, citing the fascinating statistical work of Robert Hodgson:
In his first study, each year, for four years, Mr. Hodgson served actual panels of California State Fair Wine Competition judges--some 70 judges each year--about 100 wines over a two-day period. He employed the same blind tasting process as the actual competition. In Mr. Hodgson's study, however, every wine was presented to each judge three different times, each time drawn from the same bottle.
The results astonished Mr. Hodgson. The judges' wine ratings typically varied by ±4…
cortex | November 13, 2009Ed Yong has a typically excellent post on a new paper that looks at how manipulating dopamine levels in the brain can change our predictions of future pleasure:
Tali Sharot from University College London found that if volunteers had more dopamine in their brains as they thought about events in their future, they would imagine those events to be more gratifying. It's the first direct evidence that dopamine influences how happy we expect ourselves to be.
Sharot recruited 61 volunteers and asked them to say how happy they'd feel if they visited one of 80 holiday destinations, from Greece to…
cortex | November 10, 2009David Dobbs has a fantastic new article on behavioral genetics at The Atlantic. He adds an important amendment to the vulnerability hypothesis, which holds that certain genes make people more vulnerable to psychiatric disorders. While these snippets of DNA aren't deterministic per se, when they are combined with traumatic childhood events, or a stressful few months, they can lead to serious mental illness. It's the old genes plus environment story, and it's typically cast in a negative light. But Dobbs finds that the vulnerability hypothesis comes with a positive (and often overlooked) flip-…
cortex | November 9, 2009A new paper by scientists at the Weizmann Institute documents the primal connection between whiffs of smell and episodic memory. This nasal nostalgia is mediated by the hippocampus, the manufacturer of long-term memory in the brain. Here's the abstract:
Authors, poets, and scientists have been fascinated by the strength of childhood olfactory memories. Indeed, in long-term memory, the first odor-to-object association was stronger than subsequent associations of the same odor with other objects. Here we tested the hypothesis that first odor associations enjoy a privileged brain representation…
cortex | November 6, 2009This is absolutely fascinating, yet another reminder that the structure of language infects everything. Here's Nell Greenfieldboyce, at NPR:
The distinctive sounds of a newborn's first cries may be influenced by the mother tongue of its parents.
A new study of over a thousand recorded cries from 30 French newborns and 30 German newborns found differences in the cries' melody patterns. French cries tended to have a rising melody, while the German cries tended to have a falling melody.
The finding suggests that newborns just a few days old may already be trying to imitate the prevailing…
cortex | November 4, 2009As a chronic insomniac, I'm always a little disturbed when I learn about the lingering cognitive effects of a bad night sleep:
In a study at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 2003, for example, scientists examined the cognitive effects of a week of poor sleep, followed by three days of sleeping at least eight hours a night. The scientists found that the "recovery" sleep did not fully reverse declines in performance on a test of reaction times and other psychomotor tasks, especially for subjects who had been forced to sleep only three or five hours a night.
In a similar study in…
cortex | November 3, 2009This is excellent news. Dan Delong will be back in the classroom today. I'm so relieved.
cortex | November 3, 2009Why are we so dishonest? Why do we bad things, even when we know we're doing something bad? Ever since Adam and Eve ate that apple, we've assumed that there is something inherently tempting about sin. If left to our own devices, we'd all turn into men at a Vegas bachelor party, indulging in sex, drugs and slot machines. We'd loot and pillage and lie. Immorality feels good, which is why it's so hard being moral.
Some people, of course, are made of stronger stuff, which is why they stay on the righteous path. Because they're better than us, they don't eat too much cake or cheat on their taxes…
cortex | November 2, 2009Michael Posner and Brenda Patoine make a neuroscientific case for arts education. They argue that teaching kids to make art has lasting cognitive benefits:
If there were a surefire way to improve your brain, would you try it? Judging by the abundance of products, programs and pills that claim to offer "cognitive enhancement," many people are lining up for just such quick brain fixes. Recent research offers a possibility with much better, science-based support: that focused training in any of the arts--such as music, dance or theater--strengthens the brain's attention system, which in turn can…
cortex | October 30, 2009I still don't have any additional details, but the initial newspaper report from the Jacksonville Journal-Courier is disturbing:
A Southwestern High School English teacher has been suspended after reports he had students in his classes to read an article about homsexuality in the animal kingdom.
Dan Delong of Carlinville acknowledged his suspension but declined to comment further until he spoke with his union representative.
Delong is said to have allowed students to read the article "The Gay Animal Kingdom" from the June 7, 2006, edition of Seed magazine. Seed magazine is a science and…
cortex | October 29, 2009In the latest N+1, Marco Roth takes a critical look at the rise of the "neuronovel":
The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel--the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind--has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain. ince 1997, readers have encountered, in rough chronological order, Ian McEwan's Enduring Love (de Clérambault's syndrome, complete with an appended case history…
cortex | October 27, 2009Natalie Angiers profiles dopamine, which isn't just about rewards:
In the communal imagination, dopamine is about rewards, and feeling good, and wanting to feel good again, and if you don't watch out, you'll be hooked, a slave to the pleasure lines cruising through your brain. Hey, why do you think they call it dopamine?
Yet as new research on dopamine-deficient mice and other studies reveal, the image of dopamine as our little Bacchus in the brain is misleading, just as was the previous caricature of serotonin as a neural happy face.
In the emerging view, discussed in part at the Society for…
cortex | October 26, 2009In a recent NY Times Magazine, Mark Bittman (aka the Minimalist) waxes enthusiastic on the potential of online grocery shopping:
That's why, to focus on things that could happen in our lifetimes, we should take a look at improving online grocery shopping. The one time I tried shopping online I was sent a free watermelon -- how does that happen? -- but that didn't make up for the even-less-than-supermarket quality of the food. This is my fantasy about virtual grocery shopping: that you could ask and be told the provenance and ingredients of any product you look at in your Web browser. You…
cortex | October 22, 2009In the latest Mind Matters, the psychologists Henry L. Roediger and Bridgid Finn review some interesting new work by Nate Kornell and colleagues, which looked at the advantages of learning through error. Conventional pedagogy assumes that the best way to teach children is to have them repeatedly practice once they know the right answer, so that the correct response gets embedded into the brain. (According to this approach, it's important to avoid mistakes while learning so that our mistakes get accidentally reinforced.) But this error-free process turns out to be inefficient: Kids learn…
cortex | October 22, 2009David Brooks has written yet another wonderful column on the mind. This time he explores the nagging gap between our intuitions about personality - we each express a particular set of character traits, which can be traced back to our early childhood - and the scientific facts, which suggest that the vague personality traits measured by the Myers-Briggs are too vague to mean much of anything. Here's Brooks:
In Homer's poetry, every hero has a trait. Achilles is angry. Odysseus is cunning. And so was born one picture of character and conduct.
In this view, what you might call the philosopher's…
cortex | October 20, 2009Via Felix Salmon comes this amusing anecdote about Robert Parker's blind tasting of 2005 Bordeaux, which he has declared the best vintage since 1982. Parker has previously rated all of these wines, and even given them exact point scores, so his public blind taste test was an interesting natural experiment: would Parker's new scores correlate with his 2007 scores? How many of these wines would he be able to identify?
The answers were humbling. (In Parker's defense, these wines are still very young and very tannic.) Parker confused merlot-based Bordeaux with cabernet-heavy blends; his favorite…
cortex | October 16, 2009The New York Times wonders if E-Books are inherently less pleasing for the brain that ink on a page. They canvass a diverse group of experts, most of whom focus on the nature of attention during the reading process. They see old-fashioned printed books as a distraction-free medium, stark and pure and elemental. Here, for instance, is Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist at Tufts and author of the excellent Proust and the Squid:
I have no doubt that the new mediums [like E-Books] will accomplish many of the goals we have for the reading brain, particularly the motivation to learn to decode, read…
cortex | October 15, 2009I've got a new article in Nature this week on the growing number of learning and memory enhanced strains of mice, and what these smart rodents can teach us about the human mind. I also discuss Luria's The Mind of A Mnemonist and the stunning research demonstrating that the cognitive deficits of many neurodevelopmental disorders, including Neuroï¬bromatosis, Down's Syndrome and Fragile X, have actually proven to be reversible, at least in mouse models. The article is behind a paywall, but here's the lede:
Ten years ago, Princeton researcher Joe Tsien eased a brown mouse, tail first, into a…
cortex | October 14, 2009In light of my recent post on the difficulty of changing our decision-making habits - even when we're aware that our habits are biased and flawed - I thought it might be interesting to look at two examples from professional football. Why sports? Given the intense competitive pressure in the NFL - there's a thin line between victory and ignominy - you'd expect head coaches to have corrected many of their decision-making mistakes, especially once those mistakes have been empirically demonstrated. But you'd be wrong.
Consider some research done by David Romer, an economist at UC Berkeley, who…