cortex | September 7, 2006Seed just posted a video of a "salon" between Noam Chomsky and Robert Trivers. These are two deliriously smart men, and it's worth checking out...
cortex | September 6, 2006Over at Slate, Gregg Easterbrook proposes an audacious hypothesis: the rise of television viewing among infants is responsible for the current autism epidemic.
The idea is wholly speculative. No scientist has shown a link between autism and television, but so far as I could determine no scientist is working on this question, either--and maybe someone should be. Beginning in about 1980, TV watching in early childhood began to rise, coincident with the proliferation of affordable VCRs and cable channels offering nonstop cartoons and kids' shows. The child's brain is self-organizing in the first…
cortex | September 6, 2006An excellent review has just been published in Nature Reviews Neuroscience on the relationship between enriched environments and the onset and severity of nervous system diseases. A consensus seems to be emerging: putting rodents in enriched environments - cages with space for foraging, toys and social interaction - not only delays disease but reduces the symptoms. The list of diseases for which this effect has been verified is staggering. It reads like a who's who of neural nightmares: Alzheimers, Huntington's, Parkinson's, epilepsy, stroke, traumatic brain injury, Fragile X syndrome and…
cortex | September 5, 2006Jerry Vlasak is a dangerous lunatic, a spokesman for domestic terrorists. He is also a trauma surgeon living in Woodland Hills:
Vlasak's views are so incendiary that he is banned from ever visiting Britain. He has been arrested on a Canadian ice floe, at a traveling circus, at a Rodeo Drive furrier. In La Cañada Flintridge, he once fended off a furious PTA mom while disrupting an elementary school fundraiser featuring circus animals.
Vlasak, a trauma surgeon who lives in Woodland Hills, takes his belief that animal life is as valuable as human to the extreme -- openly arguing that killing…
cortex | September 5, 2006How long before this is on YouTube?
Videotape of the moment Steve Irwin was hit by a stingray's tail shows the Australian naturalist pulling the barb from his chest, his manager has said.
"The tail came up, and spiked him here [in the chest], and he pulled it out and the next minute, he's gone," Mr Irwin's manager, John Stainton, said.
For an intellectual explanation of why Irwin was so damn entertaining, read this.
cortex | September 4, 2006Bill Simmons is right:
I'd put Season 1 of "The Wire" against anything. The first three seasons of "The Sopranos." Seasons 1 or 2 of "24." The first seasons of "NYPD Blue," "ER" or "Miami Vice." You name it. I have never seen a show like it. Season 2 wasn't as good (if Season 1 was an A-plus-plus-plus, then Season 2 was a B-plus), and we're just about to dive into Season 3, so I don't have an opinion on that yet. Everyone seems to agree that they outdid themselves with Season 4 and that it's a legitimate masterpiece. Just know that you can absolutely start watching Season 4 without having…
cortex | September 4, 2006It was the final exam of my freshman year. I was taking Intro to Psych, and I had just pulled an all-nighter. After a few minutes, I began to notice some odd paper shuffling off to my left. The kid next to me was carelessly using a small cheat sheet, dense with definitions written in 8 point font. I was infuriated. For one thing, the test was curved, so a perfect score hurt everyone. I was also pissed that the cheater would never get caught. We were taking the test in a huge lecture hall, and the grad students monitoring the exam were a distant blur at the front of the class. I briefly…
cortex | September 1, 2006The talented Elizabeth Gould of Princeton has done it again: she has produced another study documenting the power of structural plasticity. This time she studied marmoset fathers. She compared the brains of first time and experienced fathers with males who never had children. Her results showed that experienced marmoset fathers had a higher density of dendritic connections in the prefrontal cortex than nonfathers. In addition, marmoset dads had more vasopressin receptors, which makes sense since vasopressin is thought to be involved in parental behavior and social bonding. Furthermore, the…
cortex | September 1, 2006The economists Alberto Alesina, William Easterly and Janina Matuszeski have recently published a working paper analyzing the "artificiality" of Iraq's borders. Their conlusion is sobering: Iraq is a fake state, a lingering blot of colonialism that merges different ethnicities together with little regard for how they might co-exist. The paper seems to support those politicians arguing for some kind of partition. Is Iraq the new Yugoslavia? Are our soldiers trying to hold together a country that shouldn't even exist?
Artificial states are those in which political borders do not coincide with a…
cortex | September 1, 2006My vacation is over. Your humble blogger is now back to work, complete with some awkward tan lines and a slightly jet-lagged brain.
I'd thought I'd begin by making sure everybody read Richard Rorty's scathing review of Marc Hauser's new book, Moral Minds, in the NY Times. Hauser's claims are simple: he holds that "we are born with abstract [moral and ethical] rules or principles, with nurture entering the picture to set the parameters and guide us toward the acquisition of particular moral systems." Thus, he believes that neuroscience will soon discover "what limitations exist on the range…
cortex | August 21, 2006I'll be on vacation for the next ten days, and probably won't have much time to blog.
In the meantime, I thought I'd leave everyone with a few random quotes. Even though these jingles have embedded themselves in my brain, I don't really pretend to understand any of them. Your thoughts, as always, are much appreciated.
"To say that we should drop the idea of truth as out there waiting to be discovered is not to say that we have discovered that, out there, there is no truth."
-Richard Rorty
"The psychology which explains everything/explains nothing"
-Marianne Moore
"The final belief is to…
cortex | August 21, 2006It's easy to forget that science and religion weren't always at war in America. Once upon a time (the late 19th century), they managed to co-exist in a romantic synergy. Enlightened theologians tried to integrate Darwin into the Bible, and scientists freely admitted that not every question had a scientific answer. It was an age of agnostics.
Books like this (and this, which is a true masterpiece) remind us of what we have lost. Instead of intellectuals like William James, who tried to reconcile experimental psychology with the mystery of conscious experience, or Ralph Waldo Emerson (a lapsed…
cortex | August 18, 2006Over at Cracked.com, they have posted the five most obviously drug fueled TV appearances ever. Richard Pryor is pretty absurd - he can't stop rubbing his sweaty face - but my favorite is James Brown, who answers every question by chanting "Living in America!"
cortex | August 18, 2006Cigarettes are in the news again. A Federal judge just imposed strict new limits on tobacco advertising - no more "low tar" cigarettes - and Michael Bloomberg announced that he has set up a new foundation dedicated to starting a global anti-smoking campaign.
Personally, I think the solution is simple: raise the cigarette tax. If you want to decrease the numbers of smokers, that's the only proven solution. The distant threat of lung cancer can't compete with the Marlborough man. A hefty surcharge, however, can. In fact, a 10 percent increase in the price of cigarettes causes a 4 percent…
cortex | August 18, 2006That's the conclusion of a new study by economists Andrew Leigh and Christoper Jencks. (I suppose this is good news - poor people aren't more likely to die in developed countries - although I fear how these statistics will be interpreted by policy makers and the Wall Street Journal editorial page. Yet another reason to abolish the estate tax...) The actual paper hasn't been released yet, but here is Leigh's summary:
It is often argued that inequality is bad for your health. In theory, there are several ways this might happen. If each additional dollar does less for your health, then moving a…
cortex | August 18, 2006Cass Sunstein in the Washington Post offers an excellent explanation of why an international deal on global warming is so unlikely:
The obstacle stems from the unusual incentives of the United States and China. As the world's leading contributors to climate change, these are the two countries that would have to bear the lion's share of the cost of greenhouse gas reductions. At the same time, they are both expected to suffer less than many other nations from climate change -- and thus are less motivated to do something about it. And while the international spotlight has rightly been on the…
cortex | August 17, 2006Can we get any more self-indulgent? These desert dwellers have decided that the best way to survive the summer heat is to install gigantic misters and air-conditioners in their backyard.
Not content to spend summers housebound, Berger and his wife, Eileen, decided to reclaim their backyard with a misting system, a device that cools outdoor areas through the evaporation of a super-fine mist.
As Berger and I settle into chaise lounges with a view of his pool and palms, we chill to the whoosh of 50 tiny nozzles shooting out 3-foot-long plumes of fog from the periphery of the patio roof. The…
cortex | August 17, 2006One of my persistent problems with evolutionary psychology is its consistent lack of interest in the way culture affects human nature. Instead of trying to understand the way pop jingles, political systems and pulp fiction novels influence our behavior, evo psychers prefer to explain away our culture by referencing some innate congitive module or hard-wired habit. In other words, they see culture as just a secretion of our psychology, and only find it interesting when it signifies something about our evolutionary past.
Too harsh a judgment? Take this example from Steven Pinker's How the Mind…
cortex | August 16, 2006What happened when LSU adopted a business model budget? This is what happened.
Hint: It wasn't very good for inter-disciplinary programs. But it was great for the majors favored by football players...