cortex | July 3, 2006This week's question is "What are some unsung successes that have occurred as a result of using science to guide policy?"
That's a tough question. I'm going to go with mental health. Until relatively recently (i.e., the 1960's), our mental health institutions were illiberal asylums, mass penatentaries for the psychotic, schizophrenic, depressed, autistic, retarded, etc. They were Foucaultian prisons where we sent anyone who couldn't quite manage the real world.
But thanks to the discoveries of science, we now know that the mad are sick and that mental illness is really an illness. Of course…
cortex | July 3, 2006The NY Times Magazine had an interesting article on deja vu and memory. It's about a group of cognitive psychologists who are using patients afflicted with a continual sense of deja vu (sounds a little hellish to me) in order to understand the neural mechanisms of remembering.
This is a relatively new field. While psychologists and neuroscientists have long wondered how we create new memories, they have shied away from a far more complicated question: how we remember our old memories.
But now that's beginning to change. The Times' article doesn't discuss this research, but I think some of…
cortex | June 30, 2006So we now have a short list of some great but forgotten psychologists:
Karen Horney: "Neurosis and Human Growth"
Frederic Bartlett: "Remembering"
Kurt Lewin
William James: "Pragmatism"
Alfred Adler
Edward Tolman
John Dewey
George Mead
Keep the suggestions coming!
cortex | June 30, 2006Why can't we supress laughter?
I have no idea, but this video is hilarious. It's also a little cruel. I dare you not to laugh.
cortex | June 30, 2006I've really enjoyed Olivia Judson's columns on Times $elect. They've been funny, eloquent and haven't shied away from the biological nitty-gritty. In her last column, she ends with a meditation on three questions she wants evolutionary biologists to solve:
The first is metamorphosis. Everyone knows a caterpillar becomes a butterfly; and it is easy to work out why it might be useful to split your life between growing (caterpillar) and loving (butterfly). But what I find peculiar is the manner of becoming a butterfly: within the pupa, the caterpillar breaks down its body, including much of its…
cortex | June 30, 2006From The Daily Telegraph:
Scientists who carry out embryonic stem cell research and politicians who pass laws permitting the practice will be excommunicated, the Vatican said yesterday.
"Destroying human embryos is equivalent to an abortion. It is the same thing," said Cardinal Alfonso Lopez Trujillo, head of the Pontifical Council for the Family.
"Excommunication will be applied to the women, doctors and researchers who eliminate embryos [and to the] politicians that approve the law," he said in an interview with Famiglia Christiana, an official Vatican magazine.
Excommunication forbids…
cortex | June 29, 2006It seems that supply and demand are compensating for the ineffectual policies of the Bush Adminstration. An Energy Information Adminstration press release announced the following:
U.S. carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels increased by 0.1 percent in 2005, from 5,903 million metric tons of carbon dioxide (MMTCO 2) in 2004 to 5,909 MMTCO 2 in 2005, according to preliminary estimates released today by the Energy Information Administration (EIA). The 2005 emissions increase was the third smallest during the 1990 to 2005 period, exceeding only the emissions declines recorded in 1991…
cortex | June 29, 2006I've lived in New Hampshire for almost a year now, and I'm still not used to the constant presence of presidential hopefuls. Yesterday, Bill was here. Pataki was supposed to come, but the floods kept him in NY. In the last month, we've had Warner, Feingold, Clark, McCain and just about everyone else daydreaming about a White House run in 2008. Last time I checked, Kerry still had a billboard up.
Now I don't mind all the attention. It's pretty amusing. But I've also lived in Los Angeles and New York City, and I can honestly say that I've seen more politicians in the last few months (and the…
cortex | June 29, 2006Did you know that we can thrive with only half a brain? Weird. The New Yorker has a wonderful article documenting the lives of patients who live through these hemispherectomies. The strangest thing is that no one knows how they do it:
When I asked the surgeons how it's possible for people with half a brain to live, let alone have a life, each of them spoke about plasticity, flexibility, redundancy, and potential, and then they smiled and said the same thing: "We don't really know."
cortex | June 29, 2006Over at Small Gray Matters, there is an excellent critique of my last post on fMRI. Here is the nut graf:
While fMRI certainly has important technical limitations people should be aware of (low spatial and temporal resolution, high costs giving rise to underpowered studies, etc.), I think the issue Lehrer chooses to focus on-namely, the relationship between the BOLD signal (the signal measured by fMRI machines) and underlying neuronal activity-is actually one of the few areas that aren't controversial.
Well, yes, that was my point. There have been no shortage of philosophical critiques of…
cortex | June 28, 2006Mixing Memory's post on the undeserved obscurity of Franz Brentano got me thinking. What other great scientists of mind are modern neuroscientists neglecting?
My own vote goes to William James. While his Principles of Psychology are often mandatory reading in Intro to Psych courses - not bad for a 19th century textbook - few neuroscientists grapple with his philosophical writings. That's a shame, because they are often more relevant than his Principles. Take this quote from his late essay "Psychical Research":
"This systematic denial on science's part of personality as a condition of events…
cortex | June 28, 2006The blogosphere has begun debating the merits of fMRI. That's a good thing. The debate began with Paul Bloom's excellent editorial in Seed, in which he argued that "fMRI imagery has attained an undue influence, and we shouldn't be seduced." It continues here and here.
I used to work in a neuroscience lab grounded in molecular biology, and there was no shortage of fMRI bashing. A typical complaint went like this: "I'm here struggling with my damn Western blot [or Southern, or PCR, etc.], trying to be a good reductionist, while all those fMRI researchers just pick a sexy question, stuff some…
cortex | June 27, 2006Mixing Memory posted an interesting reply to my "Gladwell is the New Freud" post. He argued that my "Freud bashing was just wrong":
For one, while Jonah attempts to criticize Gladwell for being too Freud-like in his discussion of the "adaptive unconscious" (another term for the "cognitive unconscious"), the very fact that contemporary psychologists have begun to show just how important unconscious processes are is, in a way, a vindication of Freud. As is the fact that we are just now beginning to understsand the interplay of affect, motivation, and cognition -- the very focus of Freudian…
cortex | June 26, 2006It's in every neuroscience textbook: the kitten that never saw with stereoscopic vision, because Hubel and Weisel sutured one of its eyes shut during the "critical period" of brain development. The moral, at least as I was taught it, was that plasticity has limits. After infancy, our brain begins to harden into shape. If you don't see stereoscopically as a baby, then you never will. Binocular cells don't develop in adults.
Oliver Sacks had an insightful article in The New Yorker a few weeks ago about a woman who seems to disprove Hubel and Weisel's cat. And now, Robert Krulwich has a…
cortex | June 26, 2006According to the Wall Street Journal, DaimlerChrysler is going to announce this week that it is introducing the Smart car into the U.S. market. For those who don't know, the Smart car is an incredibly tiny line of cars that get excellent gas mileage and are targeted at urban dwellers. In Paris, for example, Smart cars have been known to park with their front facing the curb. Of course, in Paris Smart cars don't have to compete with Suburbans and Navigators.
cortex | June 26, 2006My post comparing Gladwell and Freud seemed to provoke a few defenses. Dave Munger over at Cognitive Daily offered a guarded defense of Gladwell, while Mixing Memory offered a defense of Freud. I'll respond to Cognitive Daily first. Here is Dave on me on Gladwell:
Jonah's problem with Gladwell's method is that Gladwell doesn't parse the data the way Jonah wants him to. Jonah would like to see Gladwell explain all the data he discusses in the context of showing how the mind works. But that's not what Gladwell's doing in Blink: Gladwell's goal is to show how we respond to a particular type of…
cortex | June 26, 2006Today's rumination on faith and fundamentalism by Edward Rothstein in the NY Times left me cold. In the process of reviewing Bill Moyer's new program on "religion and reason," Rothstein rejects the idea that fundamentalism, violence and religious faith are especially intertwined. He goes on to suggest that Colin McGinn's "proselytizing for wind-surfing" is somehow equivalent to the fatwah against Salman Rushdie, or the zealous faith that propels suicide bombings:
After all, the fundamentalism of belief was typical of pre-Enlightenment faith, and if, like post-Enlightenment reason, it has much…
cortex | June 24, 2006This comment was in response to my earlier post which argued that researchers should try to discover the genetic causes of mental illness instead of trying to decipher intelligence. The commenter makes some excellent points, although I still believe that untangling the (incredibly) complicated genetic underpinnings of mental illness has far more social value than connecting the dots between IQ and race.
It's far from clear that schizophrenia is a less complex phenomenon than intelligence. In fact, the opposite may be true. In the first instance, schizophrenia isn't an 'unambiguous…
cortex | June 24, 2006My next article for Seed will talk briefly about Toyota and some of the reasons for its astonishing success in one of the most competitive industries in the world. But I thought it was worth highlighting a quote from the former chairman of Toyota, Hiroshi Okuda, who stepped down yesterday. "I do not view efforts to address issues in the energy and environmental fields as a burden to industry or society," Mr. Okuda said in a 2004 speech. "To the contrary, I believe they should be recognized as opportunities for growth." As the CEO's of the Big Three lobby Congress to not raise fuel economy…
cortex | June 23, 2006Sharon Begley has an interesting column today in the WSJ on the growing chorus of voices aiming to discredit string theory.
String theory isn't any more wrong than preons, twistor theory, dynamical triangulations, or other physics fads. But in those cases, physicists saw the writing on the wall and moved on. Not so in string theory.
"What is strange is that string theory has survived past the point where it should have been clear that it wouldn't work," says Mr. Woit. [Professor Peter Woit of Columbia University] Not merely survived, but thrived. Virtually every young mathematically inclined…