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Why Would Anybody in Their Right Mind Build the LHC?

In the comments following the silly accelerator poll, onymous wrote: [T]he point of the LHC isn't to discover the Higgs. No one in their right minds would build a 14 TeV pp collider if their only goal was to discover the Higgs. While it's true that the ultimate goal of the LHC is to discover more exotic particles that may or may not exist (blah, blah, supersymmetry, blah) most of the hype has focussed on the Higgs, which is the one thing they're pretty sure they'll find (comments later in that thread notwithstanding). This is one of the potential problems with the way the machine has been…

Are Communications Skills Holding Science Back?

Over in yesterday's communications skills post commenter Paul raises a question about priorities: I wonder to what extent good writers, public speakers and communicators are being promoted in science in place of good thinkers - people who can challenge prevailing dogma, invent promising novel approaches to old problems, and who have the intuition needed for deducing correct theories from just a few observations. I think of this as the "Weinstein Perelman Theory" because Eric Weinstein on Twitter has been pushing something similar with respect to Grisha Perelman turning down major math…

What to do if you accidentally end up with a roommate who is religious?

So, I have this friend who lives in the Midwest (nearest large city of consequence is Chicago1), who shall remain nameless (well, she has a name and all but I'm not telling you what it is) who brought up an interesting, not unusual, and sad dilemma. She has just moved into a new living situation, and has several roommates none of whom she knows very well. During a conversation not long after she moved in, one of the roommates made a god reference during a conversation. This was a comment that clearly indicated that this person is religious, probably Christian. It was also one of those…

Suburbs, Jesus and Teh Gay: Unliving the American Dream

Every place is different, and some places are more different than others. ... So we're channel surfing and working at the same time ... Amanda is working on her Transitive Phosphorescent Anisotopy or whatever the heck it is she's working on, and I'm messing around with making networks work, and Super Nanny comes on. They're in Boston and they're bowling, and Amanda looks up and goes "What the f*ck kind of bowling is that?" So I look up and see the nine pin bowling and say "That's nine-pin bowling. That's how they do it in Boston" "Uffda." Eyes Roll. Click off TV. Back to the anisotopy…

Darwin Crossing The Atlantic

 Behold this humble passage by Darwin, which is what immediately follows his discussion of the octopus. This passage is a touchstone to several important aspects of what Darwin was doing and thinking, and is a poignant link to what Darwin did not know: Repost with slight modifications ST. PAUL'S ROCKS.--In crossing the Atlantic we hove to, during the morning of February 16th, close to the island of St. Paul. Ah, sorry to interrupt. Saint Paul's Rocks are in the Atlantic roughly half way between South America and Africa. That geographical information should give you a hint of why…

The Carnvial of the Liberals: The Post Election Blues

Post Election 2008, Liberals have the blues. Two kinds of blues. First, we have BLUE STATES!!! Lots of them! Unsurprisingly, many of the submissions for this edition of the carnival are about the election. Second, we have the blues over Proposition Eight, which we Hate. Many of this edition's submissions are about this topic. In both areas, we find the usual insight and thoughtful writing. We also have a third category this time around, called Honorable Mention. The COL is a selective carnival: Only a small number of posts get in each time compared to the avalanche of entries we…

Drs Myers and Decker: Advice on Teaching Evolution

Continuing with our discussion of the Evolution 2008 conference ... many things have been going on and I have more to report than time to report it. But I will get to all of it, I assure you. Tonight, I just want to cover part of today's Education Symposium (moderated by your's truly) ... not all of it at once, thought, as it is kind of complex. If you happen to work for the University of Minnesota or know anyone who does, best to not read this or let anyone know about it. This is a little to heavy to be spoken of openly. (Since there are only 11 of you who read my blog, I think we'll…

The Vacuity of “Natural Law”

In this recent essay at The New York Times, philosopher Gary Gutting argues that the Catholic Church should reconsider its ban on gay sex and its opposition to gay marriage, for explicitly Catholic reasons. He is especially critical of “natural law” arguments against homosexuality. It’s mostly a sensible essay, I think, but it is not the subject of this post. Instead I shall consider this reply to Gutting, written by John Finnis and Robert George. They were unhappy with Gutting, a philosophy professor at Notre Dame, for being so dismissive of natural law. Sadly, though, their attempted…

Sunday Chess Problem

I guess it's been clear that I haven't been in a blogging mood lately. There's plenty of fodder out there, but somehow every time I sit down to write about it I suddenly remember I had something else to do. But that doesn't mean that fans of Sunday Chess Problem should suffer! So this week I have something exotic for you. For the first time in this series we shall consider a retrograde analysis chess problem, or retro for short. It was composed by Raymond Smullyan. Have a look at this position: We are to imagine that this position occurred in the course of an actual game of chess.…

Are Superheroes Fascists?

Writing at Salon, Richard Cooper expresses dismay with recent superhero movies. Here's a sample: I was reminded of this by Jor-El’s speech in “Man of Steel”: You will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun. In time, you will help them accomplish wonders. How, though? Those watching him can’t fly, topple buildings or fire heat rays from their eyes. What else does Superman do other than these purely physical feats? The 1978 version of Jor-El warned: “It is forbidden for you to…

Good Theology?

Here's an interesting interview with Susan Jacoby on the subject of atheism. I don't agree with all of her points, but it's worth reading the whole thing. Here's an interesting excerpt: Certainly one of the first things I thought about as a maturing child was “Why is there polio? Why are there diseases?” If there is a good God why are there these things? The answer of the religious person is “God has a plan we don’t understand.” That wasn’t enough for me. There are people who don’t know anything about science. One of the reasons I recommend Richard Dawkins’s book, The God Delusion, is that…

pfffft... PFFFFT... *snort*.... AAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

*collapses in a pile of giggles* If you dont want to read more blag drama, move along. This post is strictly for the lulz. Chris Mooney is Not My Friend Anymore In addition, Mooney and Kirshenbaum offer no practical suggestions for how to acquire the target audience. People with no interest in science will not tune in to Science Idol on Fox, even if Fox were to pick up such a show. After I read the article, I posted the following comment on Chris's Facebook profile link to the article: I must say, I am very disappointed and somewhat insulted. Blaming scientists for scientific illiteracy…

Paul Cohen Dead at 72

Paul Cohen, one of the giants of twentieth century mathematics, has died of lung disease at 72. Cohen's major claim to fame was his resolution of the Continuum Hypothesis. Here are the basic ideas: Suppose you have two finite sets and you want to show they contain the same number of elements. You might try to do that by counting the number of elements in each set. But another method would be to pair up elements of one set with elements of the other. If the sets run out at the same time, then you know they have the same number of elements. As an example, suppose you have a group of…

The Internet Exists Because of (Schrödinger's) Cats

I'm working on some short pop-quantum explainers for reasons that I'll be a little cagey about. In casting around for a novel way to introduce Schrödinger's cat states, I hit on something that probably works, but illustrates the problems inherent in being both a professional physicist and a pop-science writer. The hook, as I mentioned on Twitter a little while back (early on a weekend morning, so nobody read it) is that you have Schrödinger's cat to thank for the computer you're reading this on. The core idea of the infamous cat paradox is that it's both alive and dead at the same time,…

Struggling With Sincerity

In October 1988, I trashed my parents' basement in order to get into college. OK, the causal connection is a little indirect, but it's there. I was applying to college that fall, and needed to write an essay to go with my application. I've always been able to write stuff with very little effort, so I banged out something that I thought was adequate, and showed it to my guidance counselor, who said "No way." My parents backed her up on this, and I had to go write another one. The problem was that while what I had written was reasonably polished, it was also glib and superficial-- because I'm…

Food Takes Time

Kevin Drum and Aaron Carroll report on a new study of the effect of new grocery stores opening in "food deserts" in poor neighborhood. The study is paywalled, so I can't speak to the whole thing, but both of them quote similar bits making the same point: no statistically significant effects on the BMI of people in the neighborhood, and very few signs of healthier eating in general. This is one of those studies that probably belongs in the Journal of "Well, Yeah...", because it doesn't surprise me a bit. Not for reasons that can be addressed via policy measures-- Drum quotes the study saying "…

On Blogging, Aleph-Nought in a Series

It's been a banner week for blogging advice, between John Scalzi's thoughts on comments and Bee's advice on whether to write a science blog. Both of them are worth a read, and I don't have a great deal to add, but writing the stuff I'm supposed to be writing this morning is like pulling my own teeth, so throwing in a couple of brief remarks is much more enjoyable. First, Bee's introduction raises an important issue: I used to think there should really be more scientists blogging. That’s because for me science journalism not so much a source of information but a source of news. It tells me…

Admissions and Hiring: Faculty Are Students in a Funhouse Mirror

In one of those Information Supercollider moments, two very different articles crossed in my social media feeds, and suddenly seemed to be related. The first was this New York Post piece by a college essay consultant: Finally, after 15 or so years of parents managing every variable, there comes the time when a student is expected to do something all by herself: fill out the actual application. Write an essay in her own voice. By this point, our coddled child has no faith in her own words at all. Her own ideas and feelings, like a language she has not practiced, have fallen away. Her parents…

Photons Are Here to Stay, Deal With It

I spend a lot of time promoting Rhett Allain's Dot Physics blog, enough that some people probably wonder if I get a cut of his royalties (I don't). I'm going to take issue with his latest, though, because he's decided to revive his quixotic campaign against photons, or at least teaching about photons early in the physics curriculum. We went through this back in 2008 and 2009 (though Rhett's old posts are linkrotted away, so you only get my side of the story...). I'm no more convinced this time around, even though he drags in Willis Lamb and David Norwood for support. There are basically two…

Accommodationism and All That

The evolution blogosphere has lately been abuzz over the question of compatibility between science and religion. Jerry Coyne got the ball rolling with this post, criticizing the accommodationist views of the National Center for Science Education. He writes: Here I argue that the accommodationist position of the National Academy of Sciences, and especially that of the National Center for Science Education, is a self-defeating tactic, compromising the very science they aspire to defend. By seeking union with religious people, and emphasizing that there is no genuine conflict between faith…

"Must-Read" SF Novels

Via a bunch of people, but most directly Matt Ruff, the Guardian has published a list of "1000 Novels Everyone Must Read". Which has triggered the usual flurry of procrastinatory blog posts indicating which books from the science fiction and fantasy sub-list one has and hasn't read. I have other things I really ought to be doing, so of course, I had to follow suit. Below the fold is my list, following Matt's convention of marking in bold face those books that I've read all the way through, and putting an asterisk (*) after books I've started or skimmed, but never fully read. The Hitchhikers…

Official Neil B Quantum Measurement Thread

I'm a little cranky after a day of reviewing grant proposals, so it's possible that I'm overreacting. But commenter Neil B has been banging on about quantum measurement for weeks, including not one, not two, but three lengthy comments in Tuesday's dog post. For that reason, I am declaring this post's comments section to be the Official Neil B. Quantum Measurement Thread. Until such time as I declare the subject open again, this is the only thread in which I want to see comments about quantum measurement. Attempts to bring the subject up in comments to other posts-- even other posts having to…

Genetically-Modified Mosquitoes To Control Disease?

American Scientist has href="http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/50767?fulltext=true&print=yes">an article about the potential for controlling mosquito-borne diseases, by genetically modifying the insects to make then inhospitable to malaria and dengue.  (Most of their articles are subscription-only, but this one is openly accessible.) I mention this article, because it is interesting for three reasons.   For one, mosquito-borne illnesses are a major world health problem, and anything that holds promise for defeating them is a matter of interest.  Second,…

What Ever Happened to Psychotherapy?

What Ever Happened to Psychotherapy? Or rather, what is happening to psychotherapy? Here, I am picking up on a  comment thread at Mad Melancholic Feminista, under href="http://melancholicfeminista.blogspot.com/2006/06/prozac-doesnt-get-anorexics-eating.html">the post that Aspazia did about href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2006/06/drug_treatment_of_anorexia.php">my post on pharmacotherapy of href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anorexia_Nervosa" rel="tag">Anorexia Nervosa.   The question is one that comes up a lot, and the answers, by SteveR (no URL given) are…

Bob Enyart and Will Duffy, partners in idiocy

We've got another chittering weasel of a creationist raving in the comments, a fellow going by the name YesYouNeedJesus. He's also sending me email. PZ, I first heard about you on Bob Enyart's radio show about the fact that you turned down an offer to debate Bob. I must say that my first impression of you is that you are smarter than most evolutionists. Smarter because the evolutionists that debate Bob get absolutely destroyed every time. Every evolutionist that I spoke to who was at the debate between Bob Enyart and Reasons to Believe willfully admitted that their side (evolution) lost. Bob'…

Animal rights terrorists reportedly behind UCSC faculty home invasion

I just received this news from Americans for Medical Progress with a link to the Santa Cruz Sentinel reporting on the home invasion last evening Sunday of a UC-Santa Cruz breast cancer and neurological disease researcher: UCSC researcher targeted in attack - animal rights activists believed to be behind home invasion 26 February 2008 0645am Eastern The news is disturbing, and if indeed the violent fringe of the animal rights movement is behind the attack, it represents a serious and criminal escalation in its tactics used to harass researchers. AMP joins others in the research community in…

Mantis shrimps have a unique way of seeing

Eagles may be famous for their vision, but the most incredible eyes of any animal belong to the mantis shrimp. Neither mantises nor shrimps, these small, pugilistic invertebrates are already renowned for their amazingly complex vision. Now, a group of scientists have found that they use a visual system that's never been seen before in another animal, and it allows them to exchange secret messages. Mantis shrimps are no stranger to world records. They are famous for their powerful forearms, which can throw the fastest punch on the planet. The arm can accelerate through water at up to 10,000…

I am getting a very poor impression of astrobiology

I received email from one of those astrobiologists, the people behind the Journal of Cosmology, in this case Carl H. Gibson. I was…amused. Dear Professor Meyers: I understand you have some problem with our interpretation of Richard Hoover's article proposed for the Journal of Cosmology. I certainly hope you will write up your comments for publication in a peer review, along with the article. Attached is an article that might interest you on the subject of astrobiology. Have you written anything in this area? Regards, Carl Ah. He understands that I had some problem with Hoover's…

Oh those poor whales

The plight of just two humpback whales that got themselves lost up the Sacramento River has got the nation transfixed. This sort of thing happens every few years. Back in 1988, it was three gray whales trapped in the ice on the north slope of Alaska. It's curious how we, as in news directors, get all worked up about two members of the species, while Japan's plans to kill 50 of them deliberately garner almost no attention. Not that we're hypocrites, of course... In fact, the United States has consistently opposed Japan's plans to kill 50 humpbacks, which are listed by the IUCN as still…

Rewriting fearful memories by bringing them back to mind

Bringing an old memory back to mind would, you might think, strengthen it. But not so - when memories are recalled, they enter a surprisingly vulnerable state, when they can be reshaped or even rewritten. It takes a while for the memory to become strengthened anew, through a process called reconsolidation. Memories aren't just written once, but every time we remember them. This system allows us to rapidly update our memories with new information, for a more flexible and adaptable brain. It also means that the very act of remembering provides a valuable window of opportunity, during which…

Steve Martin and Nanotechnology

[Category explanation: this post overlaps with so many of our Scienceblogs category options that I ended up just dumping it in philosophy of science as a default location.] The ETC Group - dedicated, they say, to supporting "socially responsible developments of technologies useful to the poor and marginalized and it addresses international governance issues and corporate power" -- recently held a contest for the design of a new nanotechnology warning sign. But they should've put in a Steve Martin-related bit as one of the contenders. They had 400 entries reviewed by a panel of judges. The…

Do testosterone and oestrogen affect our attitudes to fairness, trust, risk and altruism?

Some people go out of their way to help their peers, while others are more selfish. Some lend their trust easily, while others are more suspicious and distrustful. Some dive headlong into risky ventures; others shun risk like visiting in-laws. There's every reason to believe that these differences in behaviour have biological roots, and some studies have suggested that they are influenced by sex hormones, like testosterone and oestrogen. It's an intriguing idea, not least because men and women have very different levels of these hormones. Could that explain differences in behaviour between…

There are two types of scientists...

Assigning any group to one of just two categories is usually little more than an exercise in stereotyping. What do you do with someone like Francis Collins, for example? On the one hand, he's a brilliant genome sequencer, on the other he confuses (as Bob Park aptly writes) a "hormone rush" with "an encounter with God." But every now and then, plotting attitudes on an x-y grid and dividing the Bell curve into left and right halves can be a useful way of looking at a problem. NASA climatologist Gavin Schmidt essentially does this in an interview with Salon's Peter Dizikes, and in doing so helps…

The fundamental cowardice of creationists

The Geological Society of America is the major national professional organization for geologists, and they recently had a meeting in Denver where, in addition to the usual scientific meeting stuff, they did what geologists do for fun: they took organized field trips to look at local rocks. Among these trips was a tour of the Garden of the Gods Natural Landmark in Colorado Springs, which sounds quite nice, except for one thing: it was organized by a team of young earth creationists who were attending the meeting, and they didn't tell anyone. They were quite careful to hide their agenda. Many…

I get email

I am infested with the fleas of a thousand camels. One unfortunate side-effect of this trip to Ireland and the UK is that I have publicly engaged with Muslim creationists — there's a bit of a dearth of them in Morris, Minnesota, and the few Muslims I have met there are there for the university, and are educated and intelligent — but now I'm on their radar, and my inbox has a new, exotic stench to it. Here is a sample. Dear Dr. Myers, In your recent exchange with Hamza you asserted that Quran contain no specifics when it comes to science. I will let you be the judge: [The disbelievers are]…

New Supersolid Helium Experiments

There's some interesting new work out on supersolid helium, a subject of great interest and controversy. The work was performed by John Beamish and James Day at the University of Alberta and is reported in this weeks Nature (Day, J. & Beamish, J. Nature 450, 853-856 (2007). Article here, Perspective here.) As a refresher for what supersolid helium is, there is an old post I wrote on the subject back in 2005: Yesterday I went to a condensed matter seminar on "super solid Helium" by Greg Dash. What, you ask, is super solid Helium? Well certainly you may have heard of superfluids. When you…

Francis Collins: The Angry Atheists Do Not Speak for Us

On the eve of Expelled premiering in theaters across the country, Pew offers a wide ranging Q&A with Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project. The full interview is more than worth reading, but a particular exchange is revealing. How can scientists - especially scientists who are religious believers, like yourself - do a better job of reaching out to these people and convincing them that these findings are not a threat to their faith? That's a very difficult challenge. And I don't think we should underestimate just how threatening it is to someone who has been raised in a…

When Readers Comment (1/6/08) -- CAM edition

My rant last Friday about Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM) promoted a vigorous discussion, and I am happy about that. That ambivalence about CAM in even the scientific community is an interesting issue in and of itself. Several commenters criticized my piece on the grounds that I was being inexact or extreme. For example, jope had this to say: While agree that in many cases individuals put far too much faith (and investment) in CAM, it is my opinion that you are going too far in making a blanket statement. While the majority of CAM probably does boil down to placebo effect (at…

Article on exercise and cognition has correct facts, wrong interpretation

NYTimes Science section, why do you make me so mad? Gretchen Reynolds published an article in the Times on cognitive improvements associated with exercise, and I would like to use it to make a point about how science journalism often gets the facts right but the interpretation wrong. It begins with the following incorrect statement: The Morris water maze is the rodent equivalent of an I.Q. test: mice are placed in a tank filled with water dyed an opaque color. Beneath a small area of the surface is a platform, which the mice can't see. Despite what you've heard about rodents and sinking…

Daniel Lazare on the Atheist Diasphora

Daniel Lazare, writing in the Nation, has an interesting article about differences of opinion even among atheists: This is the problem, more or less, confronting today's reinvigorated atheist movement. For a long time, religion had been doing quite nicely as a kind of minor entertainment. Christmas and Easter were quite unthinkable without it, not to mention Hanukkah and Passover. But then certain enthusiasts took things too far by crashing airliners into office towers in the name of Allah, launching a global crusade to rid the world of evil and declaring the jury still out on Darwinian…

Inhaled anesthesia increases plaque burden in mouse model of Alzheimer's

We all know that inhaled anesthesia is over the short-term impairs neurological function; that is sort of the point using it for surgery. However, a debate exists about whether inhaled anesthetics have long-term neurological consequences as well. In light of that debate Bianchi et al, publishing in the journal Neurobiology of Aging, have shown that in a mouse model of Alzheimer's disease some anesthetics increase histological measures of severity. Before you get excited though, let me tell you that the results are mixed. Background An important point to understand in this paper is that…

Deliberate Skepticism of Obama's Inauguration

I am the type of person who is pretty skeptical of broad claims made by anyone.  I am a scientist after all. But I am especially skeptical of all statements made by politicians. If there is anything the past 8 years has taught me is that whenever everyone is rapt in enthusiasm, that is the time when you have to be the most skeptical. So I try to temper my optimism about Obama with a deliberate skepticism. I do see his promise.  I see his commitment to something approaching sane and honorable government. I see a man committed to what most would consider reasonable governance. Further, he…

Game Theory and The Dark Knight

I suspect that many of you got a chance to see The Dark Knight movie this weekend. Just as an aside, I will say that I thought that the movie was sweet. Definitely the best Batman movie, maybe one of the best superhero movies ever made. Heath Ledger is terrifyingly good throughout. Aaron Eckhart and Christian Bale give excellent performances as well, and Maggie Gyllenhaal is a hell of lot better than Katie Holmes. Anyway, there is a scene in the movie that got me thinking about game theory, and that is what I want to talk about. Beware, if you haven't seen the film, this discussion…

Brain mechanisms of hypnotic paralysis

THE term 'hypnosis' was coined by the Scottish physician James Braid in his 1853 book Neurypnology. Braid defined hypnosis as "a peculiar condition of the nervous system, induced by a fixed and abstracted attention of the mental and visual eye". He argued that it was a form of "nervous sleep", and tried to distinguish his theory from that of the mesmerists, who believed that the effects of hypnosis were mediated by a vital force, or animal magnetism. Because of mesmerism, and its association with stage entertainment and charlatanry, hypnosis was regarded with skepticism for much of its…

Confabulatory hypermnesia, or severe false memory syndrome

What did you do on March 13th, 1985? People with hyperthymesia (which has been characterized only recently, and of which just a handful of cases have so far been reported) would likely provide a vivid account of what happened on that day. And if this particular date has personal significance for you - if, for example, it was your wedding day, or the birth date of one of your children - then you will probably remember it quite well. But for most of us, the answer to this question is likely to be "I don't know". In the journal Cortex, researchers describe the case of a patient with severe…

Memories are made of molecular motors

Learning and memory are widely thought to involve long-term potentiation (LTP), a form of synaptic plasticity in which a neuron's response to the chemical signals it receives is enhanced. This leads to a strengthening of the neuronal circuit, so that the memory encoded in the circuit can persist for long periods of time. One of the mechanisms by which this synaptic strengthening occurs is an increase in the density of receptors in the membrane of the neuron receiving the signals. This process, which involves trafficking of receptors within cells, is implicated not only in learning and…

Pleistocene Medicine for Battling HIV

Last November, scientists announced they had revived a virus that had been dead for millions of years. The virus belongs to a special class that multiply by inserting their genetic code into the genome of their host cell. When the cell divides, it makes a new copy of the virus's genes along with its own DNA. Once it has installed itself in a genome, the virus can liberate itself from time to time, creating new copies. These copies can infect the same cell again, or wander out of the cell to infect another one. Some of these viruses, known as human endogenous retroviruses, may be harmless,…

Enhancing The Magnitude and Speed of Neural Activity - And Suppressing It?

By many current theories, we accomplish control over behavior by using the prefrontal cortex to "bias" the competitive dynamics playing out in the rest of the brain. By some models, this bias is positive - it helps the goal-relevant representations win the competition. By other models, the bias is also negative - it can help the goal-irrelevant representations lose the competition. Regardless, this "prefrontal biasing" is usually considered in terms of the amount of activity in a particular area (higher when that area is under a positive bias, and lower when under a negative bias). But…

Caffeine: A User's Guide to Getting Optimally Wired

Caffeine is the most widely used stimulant in the world, but few use it to maximal advantage. Get optimally wired with these tips. 1) Consume in small, frequent amounts. Between 20-200mg per hour may be an optimal dose for cognitive function. Caffeine crosses the blood-brain barrier quickly (owing to its lipid solubility) although it can take up to 45 minutes for full ingestion through the gastro-intestinal tract. Under normal conditions, this remains stable for around 1 hour before gradually clearing in the following 3-4 hours (depending on a variety of factors). A landmark 2004 study…

The Anterior Frontier: Prefrontal Cortex

Although much progress has been made since neurologist Richard Restack called the brain one of science's last frontiers, the functions of some brain areas remain mysterious. Foremost among these is prefrontal cortex (PFC), a region that is much reduced in size in most other primates, is among the last areas to develop in human children, and yet is active in almost every cognitive task. In general, prefrontal cortex is associated with higher-order cognition, such as those processes involved in planning, strategizing, self-monitoring, self-regulation, and more generally, the coordination of…