cortex | October 9, 2006Shrinking natural habitats are driving elephants crazy, and it all seems to be due to excess stress. Charles Siebert reports:
Since the early 1990's, for example, young male elephants in Pilanesberg National Park and the Hluhluwe-Umfolozi Game Reserve in South Africa have been raping and killing rhinoceroses; this abnormal behavior, according to a 2001 study in the journal Pachyderm, has been reported in "a number of reserves" in the region. In July of last year, officials in Pilanesberg shot three young male elephants who were responsible for the killings of 63 rhinos, as well as attacks on…
cortex | October 8, 2006As seen in the White Mountains of New Hampshire this weekend:
If you want to read a wonderful book about this expansive Northern Forest, read this one by our very own David Dobbs.
cortex | October 6, 2006Here is Pelosi's plan for the first 100 hours as Speaker of the House. Much to my surprise, her agenda is coherent, well-packaged and urgently needed:
Day One: Put new rules in place to "break the link between lobbyists and legislation."
Day Two: Enact all the recommendations made by the commission that investigated the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Time remaining until 100 hours: Raise the minimum wage to $7.25 an hour, maybe in one step. Cut the interest rate on student loans in half. Allow the government to negotiate directly with the pharmaceutical companies for lower drug prices…
cortex | October 6, 2006Over at Seed, V.S. Ramachandran shares his thoughts on how science can solve consciousness. Color me unimpressed:
We know that awareness is not a property of the whole brain, so the problem can be reduced to, "What particular neural circuits are involved in consciousness? And what's so special about these circuits that they can explain consciousness?"
I suggest that a new set of brain structures evolved during hominid evolution, turning the output from more primitive sensory areas of the brain into what I call a "metarepresentation"... I believe the anatomical structures involved in creating…
cortex | October 6, 2006Atul Gawande is a working surgeon, and yet he also finds time to write some of the best medical journalism around. His latest article on the "industrialization of childbirth" is a real gem.
The degree to which birth has been transformed by medicine is astounding and, for some, alarming. Today, electronic fetal-heart-rate monitoring is used in more than ninety per cent of deliveries; intravenous fluids in more than eighty per cent; epidural or spinal anesthesia in three-quarters; medicines to speed up labor (the drug of choice is no longer ergot but Pitocin, a synthetic form of the natural…
cortex | October 6, 2006From the WSJ's always thought-provoking Sharon Begley. This column is so interesting I'm going to post a big chunk of it:
You have 100 doses of a vaccine against a deadly strain of influenza that is sweeping the country, with no prospect of obtaining more. Standing in line are 100 schoolchildren and 100 elderly people.
The elderly are more likely to die if they catch the flu. But they also have fewer years left to live and don't get out enough to easily spread or catch the disease. The kids are more likely to act like little Typhoid Marys, sneezing virus over anyone they encounter, and have…
cortex | October 5, 2006A final list, by the man in full, the Falstaff of our time.
Update: There is a nice e-shrine to R.W. Apple over at New York Magazine, which features links to a few of his more sublime food articles.
cortex | October 5, 2006No, I didn't do actual research. But I do have a news feature on neuroeconomics in the new issue. Here's a snippet:
Read Montague spent the summer of 2003 thinking about soft drinks. His teenage daughter was working as an intern in his lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, and Montague, a neuroscientist, wanted to find an experiment that she could "wrap her head around". After much deliberation, he came up with the perfect research topic: recreating the Pepsi Challenge. In a brain scanner1.
Pepsi launched this advertisement, one of the most famous of all time, in the early…
cortex | October 5, 2006The much awaited Harvard University proposal to revise its aged core curriculum has been released. So far, two details have gotten most of the attention:
1) The committee did not follow Larry Summer's suggestion to increase core requirements for science. Students would still have to take one course each in life science and physical science.
2) The committee has added a mandatory course on religion, dubbed "Reason and Faith". From the WSJ:
The proposed religion course would address topics from personal beliefs to foreign policy to the interplay between science and religion. The report, which…
cortex | October 4, 2006Don't ever buy them. Ever.
Each year, millions of people gladly pay an additional 10 to 50 percent of a product's original price to extend a warranty. These snap purchases help fuel a booming, $15 billion-a-year business and feed a lucrative profit stream for retailers that sell the warranties and companies that underwrite them. Many consumers do so because they say the plans provide them with peace of mind.
The decision to buy an extended warranty defies the recommendations of economists, consumer advocates and product quality experts, who all warn that the plans rarely benefit consumers…
cortex | October 4, 2006Well, that didn't take long: thanks to falling gas prices, sales of light trucks and SUV's rose 1.2 percent last month. The good news, though, is that policy makers now know how much gas needs to cost before consumers start buying subcompacts. If I were a politician who didn't want to get re-elected, here's what I'd call for: a floating gas tax designed to maintain a steady price of $3 a gallon. If the price of crude falls, then the tax increases. Only by keeping the price of gas consistently elevated will we create a marketplace in which companies and consumers are willing to invest in fuel-…
cortex | October 3, 2006From the latest edition of Science. It's worth noting in advance that, if one were to design an educational system that were the exact opposite of No Child Left Behind, it would look a lot like Montessori's approach:
Montessori education is a 100-year-old method of schooling that was first used with impoverished preschool children in Rome. The program continues to grow in popularity. Estimates indicate that more than 5000 schools in the United States--including 300 public schools and some high schools--use the Montessori program. Montessori education is characterized by multi-age classrooms,…
cortex | October 3, 2006At last, someone demolishes the bad cognitive science and even worse political science being peddled by George Lakoff. If the Democrats really think that calling income taxes "community dues" or "membership fees" will help them retake the White House, then God help us all, because Rove is going to be pulling the strings for many elections to come. In the new TNR (subscription only), Pinker takes his intellectual axe to Lakoff's theory of "conceptual metaphor," which advises Democrats to package their policies into Orwellian sounding soundbites, so that stupid voters might be tricked into…
cortex | October 3, 2006Neuroscience now knows that chronic stress and impoverished environments - the two hallmarks of human poverty - are debilitating to the primate brain. Stress releases glucocorticoids which, if they hang around long enough, turn into poison, while impoverished environments diminish the growth and density of our dendrites. As I wrote in my profile of Elizabeth Gould:
The social implications of this research are staggering. If boring environments, stressful noises, and the primate's particular slot in the dominance hierarchy all shape the architecture of the brain--and Gould's team has shown…
cortex | October 2, 2006Bob Lutz, the vice-chairman for development at GM, is best known for creating gas-guzzling and eye-catching icons, like the Dodge Viper, Camaro concept and latest generation Corvette. He loves V-12's and ridiculous amounts of horsepower. So I was shocked to read this quote in today's WSJ:
"I'd say the best thing the (U.S.) government can do is to raise the gas tax by 10 or 15 cents a year until it reaches European levels," Mr. Lutz said, during an impromptu interview just before GM Europe's media event last Thursday.
That way, he says, car makers could concentrate on designing for the U.S.…
cortex | October 2, 2006Just when you thought GM might be learning from its past mistakes, they go and do something really stupid like this...
cortex | October 2, 2006Nobody knows much about this "ultracapacitor" technology - and one must always be skeptical of technological utopias - but it sure sounds promising:
Imagine the day when cellphones charge up in seconds, laptop batteries never degrade, and electric cars have the same power, driving range and purchase price as their gas-powered cousins.
It's a consumer's dream and an engineer's fantasy: Safe, affordable and eco-friendly batteries that can store immense amounts of energy, allow for lightning-fast charging, and handle virtually unlimited discharging with little affect on quality.
Such a battery…
cortex | September 30, 2006Sometimes I'm amazed at the pockets of ignorance lurking in our midst. This is the sad story of a Texas art teacher who got suspended for taking her class to the museum. Her crime? Letting her innocent pupils glimpse some 16th century paintings that - gasp! - revealed a nipple or two. If the mirror of art reveals our own reflection, then this is sad indeed. The same artistic subjects that were suitable for pre-Enlightenment Europe - even religious paintings used to celebrate the nude body - are now deemed pornographic. Manet is laughing at us:
cortex | September 29, 2006It's Michael Kinsley day here at the Frontal Cortex. Over at the Guardian, Kinsley has another stupendous piece lamenting the sharp division that American newspapers (especially the NY Times) try to draw between fact and opinion.
According to a column by its "public editor" (aka ombudsman, or official busybody), the New York Times has been asking itself whether it does enough to distinguish between fact and opinion in its pages. A "newsroom committee on credibility" looked into the matter and decided that what was needed was a "news/opinion divide committee". The nine lucky editors on this…
cortex | September 29, 2006No, I'm not talking crystal meth, and that much hyped syndrome, methmouth. I'm talking about your cholesterol medication, or your blood pressure pills, or your Prozac. From Steven Dubner:
Dr. Reiss [Dubner's dentist] told me that tooth decay in general, even among wealthy patients, is getting worse and worse, particularly for people in middle age and above. The reason? An increased reliance on medications for heart disease, high cholesterol, depression, etc. Many of these medications, Dr. Reiss explained, produces drymouth, which is caused by a constricted salivary flow; because saliva kills…