cortex | May 19, 2009Robert Krulwich has a fascinating piece on NPR about the binding problem and the speed of nerve transmission. In essence, it takes a split-second longer for sensory signals to reach the brains of tall people, which means that their "now" is actually a little less timely. (This explains a lot about the NBA...)
Because for the taller person it takes a tenth of a second longer for the toe-touch to travel up the foot, the ankle, the calf, the thigh, the backbone to the brain, the brain waits that extra beat to announce a "NOW!" That tall person will live his sensory life on a teeny delay (at…
cortex | May 16, 2009Matthew Yglesias advocates for the free movement of sports franchises, so that they can hop from city to city with ease and thus follow the movement of population:
Right now, the New York City Designated media area contains 6.5 percent of households. LA has 5 percent. Chicago has 3 percent. Philadelphia has 2.6 percent. Dallas, San Francisco, Boston, and Atlanta all have about 2.1 percent. And things taper off from there. But considering that New York City has a media market three times the size of large cities like Dallas and Atlanta (and especially considering that it's nearby to the…
cortex | May 15, 2009An interesting new study on mind-wandering and the default network was recently published in PNAS. The scientists, led by Kalina Christoff of UBC and Jonathan Schooler of UCSB, used "experience sampling" in an fMRI machine to capture the moment of daydreaming: essentially, subjects were given an extremely tedious task and, when their mind started to wander (this was confirmed with subjective reports and measurements of task performance), had changes in their brain activity recorded in the scanner. It's been known for nearly a decade that daydreaming is a metabolically intense mental process,…
cortex | May 14, 2009One question that came up yesterday during the radio show was whether or not Americans can learn, once again, to delay gratification and save money. Can we get back the thriftiness of earlier generations? Or are we destined to be a nation with a negative savings rate?
I certainly wouldn't want to underestimate the malleability of consumer habits, or the motivating force of seeing foreclosure signs in your neighborhood, but I think it's worth pointing out that the steep decline in American savings rates coincided with lots of financial innovations that make it much easier for us to spend…
cortex | May 14, 20091) The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac, by Freedarko.
This book is perpetually on my coffee table, if only so I can read through it (again and again) every time there's a commercial break during the NBA playoffs. It's a really hard book to describe, but if you think you might enjoy Langston Hughes references in an essay on Lamar Odom, or might like a digression into Shanghai architecture and globalization while reading about Yao Ming, then get this book. On a related note, I really enjoyed the email conversation between Simmons and Gladwell.
2) The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle.
Where…
cortex | May 13, 2009I was on On Point today with Walter Mischel, the subject of my recent New Yorker article. As usual, he was incredibly eloquent. One thing we both got a chance to emphasize was the plasticity of personality - as I mention in the article, Mischel has found a significant subset of subjects who, although they couldn't wait for a second marshmallow as four-year olds, ended up becoming "high-delaying" adults. How'd they get better? Nobody quite knows. Nevertheless, this group is an important reminder that just because you're an impulsive kid (and I certainly was) doesn't mean you're destined to…
cortex | May 13, 2009I've got a short column for the Seed website on the neuroscience of improvisation. I begin with one of my favorite stories of improv, which is Al Kooper's organ playing during the studio sessions for "Like A Rolling Stone":
Al Kooper didn't know what to play. He'd told some half-truths to get into Bob Dylan's recording sessionâ--âthe musicians were working on some song tentatively titled "Like A Rolling Stone"â--âand Kooper had been assigned the Hammond organ. There was only one problem: Kooper didn't play the organ. He was a guitarist.
The first takes were predictably terribleâ--âKooper was…
cortex | May 11, 2009I've got a new article in the New Yorker this week on the pioneering work of Walter Mischel and the science of delayed gratification:
In the late nineteen-sixties, Carolyn Weisz, a four-year-old with long brown hair, was invited into a "game room" at the Bing Nursery School, on the campus of Stanford University. The room was little more than a large closet, containing a desk and a chair. Carolyn was asked to sit down in the chair and pick a treat from a tray of marshmallows, cookies, and pretzel sticks. Carolyn chose the marshmallow. Although she's now forty-four, Carolyn still has a weakness…
cortex | May 8, 2009In his review of State of Play, David Denby laments the rise of incoherence as a filmmaking technique:
"State of Play," which was directed by Kevin Macdonald, is both overstuffed and inconclusive. As is the fashion now, the filmmakers develop the narrative in tiny fragments. Something is hinted at--a relationship, a motive, an event in the past--then the movie rushes ahead and produces another fragment filled with hints, and then another. The filmmakers send dozens of clues into the air at once, but they feel no obligation to resolve what they tell us. Recent movies like "Syriana," "Quantum…
cortex | May 6, 2009John Stewart had some fun the other night mocking conservative politicians and talking heads for criticizing Obama's desire for an "empathetic" Supreme Court justice, who will make legal decisions, in part, by "identifying with people's hopes and struggles."
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First of all, I can't imagine this is good politics - do voters really want a party that brags of their callousness? I know empathy is a code word for "activist judges," but it's still a noun with…
cortex | May 6, 2009The NY Times has a kind review of the Bruce Adolphe/Yo Yo Ma/Antonio Damasio performance that I was lucky enough to hear in person. (I also got to ask the collaborators a few questions afterwards, as moderator.)
Most composers would shy away from depicting the evolution of consciousness. Well, maybe not Mahler, who grappled with the afterlife in his "Resurrection" Symphony. Mr. Adolphe, who had already written two works based on Mr. Damasio's writings, plunged right in.
The result was "Self Comes to Mind," a 30-minute work for cello and two percussionists, with video imagery based on brain…
cortex | May 1, 2009Evan Lerner has a quite interesting article on seedmagazine.com about physical performance and exhaustion. That painful lactic acid throb? It's mostly in your head:
The finish line is in sight, but you're not going to make it. Your lungs are burning and deeply in oxygen debt. The muscle fibers in your legs have converted most of the carbohydrate supply in your body into lactic acid. This was a fine plan for generating the extra energy needed to keep you moving in the absence of adequate oxygen, but it is now making your quads and hamstrings feel like they are on fireâ--âwhich is more or less…
cortex | April 30, 2009There's no way in hell I deserve to be on the stage at this incredible event, but I'm so honored to be included:
Yo-Yo Ma performs the world premiere of Self Comes to Mind, a musical composition by Bruce Adolphe, composer in residence at the Brain and Creativity Institute and resident lecturer of The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, based on an evocative exploration of the evolution of human consciousness written especially for this collaboration by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, Director of the Brain and Creativity Institute at University of Southern California, and author of…
cortex | April 30, 2009Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan finds a fascinating review of recent books on the history of the senses. He highlights a short section of medieval theories of perception, which hypothesized that the eyes actively sent out "rays" that illuminated what we saw. (This view of visual sensation is what made the "evil eye" possible - people were infecting you with their sight.)
In 1492, learned debates also influenced how the world was perceived. As medical historians Nancy Siraisi and James T. McIlwain, also a neuroscientist, point out, medieval scholars would have located sensory perception in the…
cortex | April 29, 2009Margaret Talbot has a thorough and thought-provoking article in the New Yorker on the potential pitfalls of "neuroenhancing drugs". At this point, enhancement essentially consists of taking uppers (Adderall, Ritalin, Provigil, etc.) to improve concentration and focus. These drugs might have fancy new brand names, but the underlying concept is as old as caffeine and nicotine, which work by tweaking our neurons (often through the activation of excitatory neurotransmitters or, as in the case of coffee, by inhibiting our inhibitory neurotransmitters). Furthermore, there is a lofty literary…
cortex | April 27, 2009Here's a fascinating new study demonstrating that it's good to get exposed to multiple languages even as a preverbal infant:
Children exposed to bilingual input typically learn 2 languages without obvious difficulties. However, it is unclear how preverbal infants cope with the inconsistent input and how bilingualism affects early development. In 3 eye-tracking studies we show that 7-month-old infants, raised with 2 languages from birth, display improved cognitive control abilities compared with matched monolinguals. Whereas both monolinguals and bilinguals learned to respond to a speech or…
cortex | April 26, 2009My latest article for the Boston Globe Ideas section is now online. This piece was inspired by my brand new beautiful nephew, Jude Lehrer - may this blog post increase your Google presence!
What is it like to be a baby? For centuries, this question would have seemed absurd: behind that adorable facade was a mostly empty head. A baby, after all, is missing most of the capabilities that define the human mind, such as language and the ability to reason. Rene Descartes argued that the young child was entirely bound by sensation, hopelessly trapped in the confusing rush of the here and now. A…
cortex | April 25, 2009Just when you thought people couldn't get any sillier or more confused, psychologists uncover yet another innate foible. This one is called "choice blindness," and it refers to the ways in which people are utterly blind to their own choices and preferences. We think we want X, but then we're given Y, and so we invent all sorts of eloquent reasons why Y is actually a much better alternative and how we wanted Y all along. (What sort of fool would choose X?)
Lars Hall and Peter Johansson explain:
For example, in an early study we showed our volunteers pairs of pictures of faces and asked them…
cortex | April 23, 2009I've always been fascinated by traffic. (I grew up in LA, so I had plenty of time to indulge my interest.) City streets are a complex system in which seemingly insignificant changes - a broken street light, a stalled car, a poorly designed highway merge - can have dramatic consequences. In this sense, it's a useful metaphor for all sorts of intricate systems, from gene regulation to neural networks.
Perhaps the single greatest mystery of my childhood was this: Why do freeways get clogged when there isn't an accident? I would fantasize on my way to elementary school - we would often be sitting…
cortex | April 22, 2009I was doing my grocery shopping yesterday when I stumbled upon a discount that I assumed was a clerical mistake: some fancy olive oil had been reduced from $23 to $9. Needless to say, I immediately put a bottle in my cart, even though I didn't need another bottle of olive oil.
But then, just a few minutes later, I began to wonder: why was the olive oil so drastically reduced in price? Is something wrong with it? What isn't Whole Foods telling me? That nagging suspicion - and I'm sure it was completely unfounded - was enough for me to put the bottle back on the shelf. It was too good a deal…