neuroscience
cortex | October 11, 2006More tales of hilarious heuristics that lead us astray and make us fat:
An appalling example of our mindless approach to eating involved an experiment with tubs of five-day-old popcorn. Moviegoers in a Chicago suburb were given free stale popcorn, some in medium-size buckets, some in large buckets. What was left in the buckets was weighed at the end of the movie. The people with larger buckets ate 53 percent more than people with smaller buckets. And people didn't eat the popcorn because they liked it, he said. They were driven by hidden persuaders: the distraction of the movie, the sound of…
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…
clock | October 9, 2006The brand new edition of Encephalon is up on Cognitive Daily. Could you be accepted to attend Encephalon University?
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 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 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 | September 28, 2006Special K - active ingredient ketamine - is an illegal club drug that was originally used as a medical anesthetic. But now scientists are reporting that it might be a useful ally in the fight against depression:
Researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health announced a study recently in which 18 chronically depressed patients infused with low dosages of ketamine improved within two hours. Seventy-one percent improved within a day, and nearly 30 percent were depression-free by that time. In 24 hours! These were people who had been dealing with depression from three to 47 years. They…
clock | September 28, 2006Beauty And The Brain:
Experiments led by Piotr Winkielman, of the University of California, San Diego, and published in the current issue of Psychological Science, suggest that judgments of attractiveness depend on mental processing ease, or being "easy on the mind."
"What you like is a function of what your mind has been trained on," Winkielman said. "A stimulus becomes attractive if it falls into the average of what you've seen and is therefore simple for your brain to process. In our experiments, we show that we can make an arbitrary pattern likeable just by preparing the mind to recognize…
cortex | September 28, 2006I'm fascinated by the fashions of mental illness. Every few decades, there is an epidemic of a new brain affliction, while an old disease quietly fades away. Mother's Little Helper (aka Valium) is replaced by the polite contentment of SSRI's. (I'm afraid we are still in the era of Prozac and Ritalin. In other words, we are both depressed and hyperactive. I shudder to think what future anthropologists will make of this.) Of course, this doesn't mean that mental illness is a social construction - sorry, Foucault, you're wrong - but it does mean that our descriptions of mental illness often are…
purepedantry | September 26, 2006So I am sititng in a movie theater the other day, and some teenagers sitting behind me are talking. Of course, they are talking. They are ALWAYS talking behind me. And what particularly irks me is that it is a Tuesday night during the school year, and I only come to movies at 10 pm on Tuesday nights during the school year for the slim chance of avoiding talking teenagers.
Why, I ask you? Surely, there is some explanation for this behavior?
One theory is that teenagers are actually from a separate barbarian race. However, I suspect that there is also an underlying neurological reason…
cortex | September 25, 2006Go to Yale for free.
Yale University said on Wednesday it will offer digital videos of some courses on the Internet for free, along with transcripts in several languages, in an effort to make the elite private school more accessible.
While Princeton University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and others already offer course material online without charge, Yale is the first to focus on free video lectures, the New Haven, Connecticut-based school said.
The 18-month pilot project will provide videos, syllabi and transcripts for seven courses beginning in the 2007 academic year. They…
cortex | September 25, 2006It's a shame that exaggerating the extent of brain differences between men and women can be such a boon for book sales. (Call it the Mars and Venus phenomenon.) This publishing truism has been most recently demonstrated by Louann Brizendine, a researcher at UCSF who wrote The Female Brain. But now the backlash has begun. The Boston Globe
ran a nice column dismantling Brizendine's oft cited claim that women use 20,000 words per day while men only use 7,000. It turns she stole that ridiculous fact from a self-help book.
cortex | September 25, 2006If anxiety is the new depression, then weed might be our next miracle drug. And no, this isn't the same seedy crap you get from your local delivery service. I'm talking about medically targeted spliffs, designed to only affect your amygdala (the neural source of fear and anxiety). Over at the new NY Inquirer, I make a case for the future of medical marijuana:
Despite the fact marijuana was first cultivated almost 10,000 years ago, modern medicine has yet to find a pharmaceutical equal. No other substance melts away our fears with such slick efficiency. But that may soon change. A cadre of…
cortex | September 23, 2006William James would have loved this paper. Then again, maybe he'd be dissapointed:
Neuroscientists investigating a young woman with epilepsy believe they have stumbled on an explanation why some people feel a ghostly presence nearby or develop paranoia or persecution.
The 22-year-old woman was being assessed for brain surgery for epilepsy but was otherwise psychologically healthy.
Part of this evaluation was to pinpoint the area needed for surgery, using thin electrodes implanted into a region of the brain.
Reporting the case in tomorrow's issue of Nature, the weekly British science journal,…
cortex | September 22, 2006Ever since David Hume - our first great psychologist - it has been a well known fact that causation is a figment of our imagination. Although we perceive event A as causing event B, this perception is an illusion: necessary causation is not inherent in nature. As Hume wrote:
"We have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects, which have been always conjoin'd together, and which in all past instances have been found inseparable. We cannot penetrate into the reason of the conjunction. We only observe the thing itself, and always find that from the constant conjunction the…
cortex | September 20, 2006Porn is a big business. Every year, Americans spend $4 billion on video pornography, which makes the industry larger than the N.F.L., the N.B.A. or Major League Baseball. When you include Internet Web sites, porn networks and pay-per-view movies on cable and satellite, phone sex, and magazines, the porn business is estimated to total between $10 billion and $14 billion annually. As Frank Rich notes, "People spend more money for pornography in America in a year than they do on movie tickets, more than they do on all the performing arts combined." Sex sites are estimated to account for up to…
clock | September 17, 2006It's looking good. Certainly much smaller than the roomful of metal we are used to seeing in hospitals.
Do you remember when computers used to fill entire rooms? Now take a look at your cell phone. Now think MRI in 10-20 years...
See what I'm getting at?
I am patiently waiting for the time when MRIs are small and light enough to be mounted on heads of freely behaving animals (in the wild or in captivity), at least large animals like elephants, dolphins, horses, crocs or sharks... Then you use radiotelemetry to get the info loaded on your computer and you observe the brain activity in…
cortex | September 15, 2006David Buller's book, Adapting Minds, is in the news again. I agree with Mixing Memory that many of Buller's specific debunkings - such as his full-throated attack on the cheater module - seem flimsy. (And trust me, I was prepared to believe...In my humble opinion, too much evolutionary psychology seems unrigorous , unempirical, and designed for the express purpose of selling bad books.)
That said, I still think Buller's tome made an important point. While most critics of evolutionary psychology continue to borrow from Lewontin and Gould's old playbook - the debate includes an unwieldy amount…
clock | September 14, 2006Nicotine Lessens Symptoms Of Depression In Nonsmokers:
Nicotine may improve the symptoms of depression in people who do not smoke, Duke University Medical Center scientists have discovered.
The finding does not mean that people with depression should smoke or even start using a nicotine patch, the researchers caution. They say that smoking remains the No. 1 preventable cause of death and disability in the United States, and that the addictive hazards of tobacco far outweigh the potential benefits of nicotine in depression.
But the finding suggests that it may be possible to manipulate…