Four researchers compared the effectiveness of a cell phone equipped with a GPS receiver to traditional paper maps and to "direct experience" (first walking through a route with a guide, then trying it alone). They asked 66 participants to each walk six different routes, finding their way each time using one of the three navigational aids, and later to sketch from memory the routes they had taken. The GPS users traveled longer distances, walked more slowly, and made more stops during the walk than the participants using the low-tech methods, and they made more directional errors and rated the overall experience as more difficult than did the direct experience groups. Perhaps because the GPS users were more focused on the information on their small screens than on their surroundings, the maps they drew showed a less accurate recollection of their routes.
I'm always impressed by how people will completely ignore common sense when listening to that robotic voice telling them to turn left or turn right. A few months ago, I was taking a taxi to the airport and the driver, who had probably driven to the airport hundreds of times, decided to use his brand new GPS unit. (If memory serves, it had been a Christmas present.) Anyways, he kept on saying stuff like "This is an interesting route" and "Wow, I never would have gone this way" and "I wonder why we're going north when the airport is south". After about 25 minutes of driving in the wrong direction, the driver eventually realized that he'd plugged in the wrong address. But he was willing to believe an obviously deluded machine for a disconcertingly long time. I almost missed my flight.
The moral, I guess, is that we should trust our hippocampal place cells.
Sorry about the light posting - I've been traveling. As far as I'm concerned, the best thing about air-travel (besides the safety aspect) is that I get to read novels. For some reason, I've decided that I can't work or sleep on planes, so I always make sure that my carry-on bag is stuffed full of fiction. On my last flight, I consumed Unaccustomed Earth, by Jhumpa Lahiri. I won't bore you with my praise, but it's a remarkable collection of short stories. The sheer fluidity and poise of her writing is, as a fellow writer, somewhat depressing. She makes it look so easy. I'm really curious about her early drafts, and how she pares down her prose, so that it's so precise and taut.
Over at Mind Matters, my other site, we just posted a rather interesting article on the ways in which ordinary cell phones can alter your patterns of brain activity, and even interfere with sleep. Here's Doug Fields:
Hospitals and airplanes ban the use of cell phones, because their electromagnetic transmissions can interfere with sensitive electrical devices. Could the brain also fall into that category? Of course, all our thoughts, sensations and actions arise from bioelectricity generated by neurons and transmitted through complex neural circuits inside our skull. Electrical signals between neurons generate electric fields that radiate out of brain tissue as electrical waves that can be picked up by electrodes touching a person's scalp. Measurements of such brainwaves in EEGs provide powerful insight into brain function and a valuable diagnostic tool for doctors. Indeed, so fundamental are brainwaves to the internal workings of the mind, they have become the ultimate, legal definition drawing the line between life and death.
Brainwaves change with a healthy person's conscious and unconscious mental activity and state of arousal. Could the electrical signals coming from a phone affect certain brainwaves operating in resonance with cell phone transmission frequencies? After all, the caller's cerebral cortex is just centimeters away from radiation broadcast from the phone's antenna. Two studies provide some revealing news.
The first, led by Rodney Croft, of the Brain Science Institute, Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, tested whether cell phone transmissions could alter a person's brainwaves. The researchers monitored the brainwaves of 120 healthy men and women while a Nokia 6110 cell phone--one of the most popular cell phones in the world--was strapped to their head. A computer controlled the phone's transmissions in a double-blind experimental design, which meant that neither the test subject nor researchers knew whether the cell phone was transmitting or idle while EEG data were collected. The data showed that when the cell phone was transmitting, the power of a characteristic brain-wave pattern called alpha waves in the person's brain was boosted significantly. The increased alpha wave activity was greatest in brain tissue directly beneath to the cell phone, strengthening the case that the phone was responsible for the observed effect.
Don't panic: there's still no evidence that cell phones cause brain tumors or anything awful like that. Nevertheless, the modern world is suffused with electromagnetic signals and, since the brain is an exquisitely sensitive electrical machine, it makes sense that we'd be mildly affected by all those waves hurtling through space. The skull isn't a shield.
British papers are fun. The Daily Mail recently ran a deliciously nasty article on hippy-crites, those pious celebrities (like John Travolta, Chris Martin and Brangelina) who talk endlessly about global warming and yet still fly in lots of private jets. Travolta, for instance, recently few by himself from Europe to the United States in a Boeing 707, which can normally hold more than 100 people.
But this isn't just a problem for celebrities. A new paper in Conservation Biology looked at how the "environmental attitudes" of individuals affected the location of their home in the Teton Valley of Idaho and Wyoming. Ironically, the scientists found that the most environmentally conscious people - they also tended to be older and more educated - chose to live in the most natural areas, and thus had a greater environmental impact on the surrounding landscape. These are the same people who drive a Prius to the local Whole Foods, where they buy organic vegetables and grass-fed beef and carry everything home in a fashionable reusable bag (in other words, they are bougies like me). And yet, because we all want to commune with nature, to have enough land so that we can inefficiently grow our heirloom tomatoes, we end up taking up more land and consuming more resources. I would appreciate the irony if it didn't so effectively describe the life to which I aspire.
In recent years, there has been lots of speculation on the potential intersection of neuroscience and the legal system. Will brain imaging became a fool-proof lie detector? Are some violent offenders suffering from a defective emotional brain that's beyond their control? Should we replace the insanity defense with a less rationalist account of human morality? etc, etc. The assumption is that the latest tools of science can help us refine our squishy concepts of justice, which we've inherited from Plato, the Old Testament and the 18th century British legal system. Needless to say, Plato didn't have fMRI.
But this obsession with progress comes with a hidden cost. For starters, we tend to overestimate the accuracy and utility of the latest gadgets, so that even bad neuroscientific explanations (as long as they are filled with abstruse anatomical references generated by brain imaging) are seen, by non-experts, as valid. We are intimidated by the jargon so that, as a recent paper in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience put it, "Even irrelevant neuroscience information in an explanation of a psychological phenomenon may interfere with people's abilities to critically consider the underlying logic of this explanation."
And then there's this problem, which is even more pernicious. We assume that there is something inherently objective about statistics and technologically mediated forms of evidence, that they are less tainted by human bias. But that's not necessarily the case. The LA Times recently ran a great article on how DNA evidence ("the gold standard of evidence") is often willfully misinterpreted by prosecutors and crime labs:
Police found the naked body of Diana Sylvester near her Christmas tree.
The 22-year-old San Francisco nurse had been sexually assaulted and stabbed in the heart. She lay on her back, her neck laced with scratches and her mouth open as if frozen in a scream.
Man convicted in sex assault should be freed or retried, court rules
For more than three decades, Sylvester's slaying went unsolved. Then, in 2004, a search of California's DNA database of criminal offenders yielded an apparent breakthrough: Badly deteriorated DNA from the assailant's sperm was linked to John Puckett, an obese, wheelchair-bound 70-year-old with a history of rape.
The DNA "match" was based on fewer than half of the genetic markers typically used to connect someone to a crime, and there was no other physical evidence.
Puckett insisted he was innocent, saying that although DNA at the crime scene happened to match his, it belonged to someone else.
At Puckett's trial earlier this year, the prosecutor told the jury that the chance of such a coincidence was 1 in 1.1 million.
Jurors were not told, however, the statistic that leading scientists consider the most significant: the probability that the database search had hit upon an innocent person.
In Puckett's case, it was 1 in 3.
The case is emblematic of a national problem, The Times has found.
Prosecutors and crime labs across the country routinely use numbers that exaggerate the significance of DNA matches in "cold hit" cases, in which a suspect is identified through a database search.
Jurors are often told that the odds of a coincidental match are hundreds of thousands of times more remote than they actually are, according to a review of scientific literature and interviews with leading authorities in the field.
The Times recently had an article on the booming business of brain fitness:
Decaying brains, or the fear thereof, have inspired a mini-industry of brain health products -- not just supplements like coenzyme Q10, ginseng and bacopa, but computer-based fitter-brain products as well.
Nintendo's $19.99 Brain Age 2, a popular video game of simple math and memory exercises, is one. Posit Science's $395 computer-based "cognitive behavioral training" exercises are another. MindFit, a $149 software-based program, combines cognitive assessment of more than a dozen different skills with a personalized training regimen based on that assessment. And for about $10 a month, worried boomers can subscribe to Web sites like Lumosity.com and Happy-Neuron.com, which offer a variety of cognitive training exercises.
Alvaro Fernandez, whose brain fitness and consulting company, SharpBrains, has a Web site focused on brain fitness research. He estimates that in 2007 the market in the United States for so-called neurosoftware was $225 million.
It's a fine article, but I still wish there was mention of the fact that so many of these brain fitness products are utter nonsense. Last year, I wrote a short article for Seed on these over-hyped products:
It's a trend that began in Japan. In the summer of 2005, Nintendo introduced Japanese consumers to its Brain Age software for its handheld gaming system. Since then, it has sold more than four million copies worldwide. The conceit of the game is simple, if woefully unscientific: After assessing your initial "brain age" with a brief series of mental tasks, the program runs you through a gauntlet of basic exercises like reading comprehension and sudoku before measuring you again. I was happy to see that my improvement was nothing short of miraculous: After less than an hour with Nintendo's Brain Age, my own brain age had decreased by 20 years, from 65 to 45. Of course, when the science is pretend, great results are easy to come by.
Although Nintendo employs Ryuta Kawashima, a famous Japanese neuroscientist, to sell Brain Age, the company carefully avoids making any specific scientific claims. "We're in the entertainment business," says Perrin Kaplan, head of marketing for Nintendo's U.S. operations. But the company coats Brain Age in a veneer of neuroscience. Potential customers find colorful fMRI images and admonishments to "get the most out of your prefrontal cortex" on the game's promotional Web site. This entertainment is masquerading as neurology.
That said, there are some programs that come with real empirical proof. (Update: see some important qualifications in the comments.) PositScience, developed by UCSF neuroscientist Michael Merzenich, is damn expensive ($395!) and rather boring to play, but it has undergone some real testing:
In a recent PNAS paper, Merzenich's lab announced that PositScience was able to reverse "age-related cognitive decline" in a randomized and controlled study of 182 subjects. Of those trained with PositScience, 93 percent showed significant cognitive improvement. "We've demonstrated that you can take the brain of a 75-year-old," Merzenich says, "and make it function like the brain of a 35- or 40-year-old. It takes training, and some hard work, but it's possible." Preliminary results of a second trial study suggest that PositScience can even help stave off memory loss in the early stages of Alzheimer's patients. After just four weeks, senile patients showed significant cognitive improvement. The control group, on the other hand, continued to decline.
Merzenich has big plans for PositScience. He wants to launch programs that target the visual cortex, working memory, and executive control. With those goals in mind, he has partnered with the Mayo Clinic to conduct an expansive trial study. Moreover, Merzenich has begun studying the positive effects of PositScience on schizophrenic patients. The results so far have been "extremely encouraging": "If we got these same improvements with a pill," Merzenich says, "we'd be counting the money already. We'd have billions in sales. But this isn't a pill--it's much better than that."
It is, perhaps, the most nightmarish of neurological conditions: when the brain stem is selectively injured, a person can be perfectly self-aware and yet completely paralyzed, so that they lose control of virtually all voluntary muscles. The technical name of the syndrome captures the horror: "Locked-In Syndrome".
This weekend, I watched The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (newly released on DVD), which tells the true story of Jean-Dominique Bauby, a French journalist, who suffered a massive stroke that left him painfully cognizant of his complete paralysis. He ended up writing a memoir by blinking his left eye in response to the correct letter. (Needless to say, the writing process was slow and agonizing.)
Directed by the painter Julian Schnabel, the movie is lush and gorgeous. It's also an incredibly vivid portrait of what it's like to be "locked-in". Most of the movie unfolds from the limited perspective of Bauby's left eye, so that we see what he sees. When he blinks, the screen goes briefly blank, like a camera shutter. When a doctor sews his right eyelid shut - he couldn't blink that eye, so it was getting dry and infected - we see the needle thread the flesh, but we see it happen from the inside. Can you think of any other movies that are primarily rooted in the first-person perspective?
I completely agree with the sentiments voiced in this column, by William Rhoden:
Why do we keep giving thoroughbred horse racing a pass? Is it the tradition? The millions upon millions invested in the betting?
Why isn't there more pressure to put the sport of kings under the umbrella of animal cruelty?
The sport is at least as inhumane as greyhound racing and only a couple of steps removed from animal fighting.
It's hard to think otherwise after watching the brutal death of Eight Belles. And, of course, it's not just high-stakes races like the Derby that are so hazardous. A recent article in the Times on an equestrian event included this paragraph:
A top rider in the Olympic equestrian sport of eventing was seriously injured after her horse somersaulted over a fence Saturday at the Rolex Kentucky Three-Day Event, the nation's premier eventing competition. Her horse and another horse, after a separate fall, were euthanized.
The simple truth is that asking animals to perform inherently risky stunts is not entertainment: it is cruelty.
Razib has some thought-provoking, if incorrect, speculations on literature, literary audiences and modernity:
Here's the argument: contemporary mainstream fiction is very different from the storytelling of the deep past because of a demand side shift. Women consume most fiction today, and their tastes differ, on average, from those of men. How do they differ? To be short about it men are into plot, while women are into character. This means that modern literary fiction emphasizes psychological complexity, subtly and finesse. In contrast, male-oriented action adventure or science fiction exhibits a tendency toward flat monochromatic characters and a reliance on interesting events and twists. Over my lifetime I've read a fair amount; but the vast majority of the fiction has been science fiction & fantasy. Many males outgrow this bias, perhaps as they become more psychologically complex and nuanced, but I haven't (though I don't read much fiction in general at this point). I know many other males who are similar; we aren't dumb, and not all of us have Asperger's. We just aren't interested into characterization or character. We are people of exotic ideas, novelty of story arc and exploration of startling landscapes. Contemporary mainstream fiction, high, middlebrow and low, does not usually satisfy these needs.
[snip]
Why does any of this matter? For one, I think that it is somewhat peculiar that many of us find fiction from the past more engaging than popular contemporary works. Aupelius' Golden Ass gets my attention; most contemporary fiction does not. I am arguing here that this is partly due to the fact that in the past those who read copiously were, on average, much more like me than they were like the typical human. Not only were readers by and large men (usually of some means and comfort), but they were often also disproportionately eggheads who were eccentric by their nature. How many elite scholars were there such as Claudius who were not attracted to the public life of politics and do not appear in the annals of history? With the printing press, cheaper paper, and the rise of mass literacy, things changed, the distribution of taste shifted. And so did the distribution of genres.
Obviously, his theories about the differences between male and female readers are gross oversimplifications. In fact, they are so oversimplified as to be utterly meaningless. Philip Roth is most certainly a male, writing testosterone-laden fiction, and yet his work is defined by its characters. (Quick: summarize the plot of "Portnoy's Complaint"...)
But I do think Razib is mostly right to characterize modern literary fiction as more "psychologically complex" than, say, Virgil, Ovid and most ancient literature, with its emphasis on plot and memorable dramatic arcs. On the other hand, this generalization requires some lofty exceptions, so that Shakespeare, Cervantes, Euripedes, etc. are all classified as moderns.
And I'd also quibble with his theory of changes in demand driving a shift in literary content. His argument is that the female reading masses have propelled literature inwards, so that it's more interested in the mind than in, say, Martians and picaresque adventures set in space. (I happen to think that's a very good thing...But then I've never enjoyed science fiction, since most of the stuff I've read is bad science and even worse fiction. The only notable exception I can think of is Philip K. Dick.) Anyways, I think Razib's theory overlooks the fact that modernist literature - the first movement dedicated to "psychological complexity" - was an incredibly elite movement, with virtually no popular appeal. That's why Virginia Woolf needed her own printing press. Gertrude Stein's first novel sold 73 copies. Proust had to pay to get the first volumes of In Search of Lost Time printed. Joyce had a certain cult status, but that was largely because he was lewd enough to get banned. So I think it's wrong to blame the womanly masses for this movement away from manly plot.
So why did novelists begin exploring the interiors of the mind? I'd argue that the modernist experiments were largely a response to the success of modern science. By the start of the 20th century, you had scientists coming up with lucid and successful descriptions of the material world. Reality was being broken apart into its elemental parts. I think artists responded to this empirical assault by trying to carve out their own cultural space. If science dealt with the material world, then perhaps art dealt with the psychological side? As Woolf wrote to Katherine Mansfield, "Only thoughts and feelings...no cups and tables." Or as she famously wrote in her essay "Modern Fiction," "They [the eminent novelists of the time, like H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett] have looked at factories, at Utopias, even at the decoration and upholstery of the carriage; but never at life, never at human nature." In other words, Woolf wasn't interested in human nature because she wanted to sell lots of books to female readers. (Woolf was a tremendous snob, as her diary makes clear.) Rather, she was interested in human nature because she thought that the purpose of literature was to reveal the reality of the mind.
Now that the boomers are entering their sixties, the problem of age-related cognitive decline is going to become a serious mental health issue. The aged brain often suffers from a bevy of symptoms, from memory loss to problems with concentration. The question, of course, is what causes these symptoms?
Over at Mind Matters, we recently featured an interesting post on some recent research that tried to answer these pertinent questions. The short answer is that, over time, the different parts of the brain becomes less interconnected.
Jessica Andrews-Hanna and her colleagues at Harvard University, the University of Michigan and Washington University School of Medicine have explored the possibility that cognitive decline during aging results in part from a loss of coordination and communication among large-scale brain systems. They used magnetic resonance imaging to examine the brain activity of young (ages 18 to 34) and old (ages 60 to 93) subjects when they were either resting or engaged in certain tasks, such as classifying words into different categories. The researchers then analyzed the fMRI data to compare fluctuations in activity between brain regions in response to the experimental task, thus providing a measure of coordination between different systems in the cerebral cortex. The authors compared the strengths of these correlations with measures of cognitive performance based on several tests of intellectual fluency and memory.
The most important finding was a "dramatic reduction" in the functional correlation, or interaction, between two well-defined large-scale brain networks in the aged brain. The first network is associated with a resting "default" state of the brain, whereas the other network is responsible for the control of goal-directed behavior and "executive" brain functions, such as concentration on a particular task.
I'm particularly interested in the data on the default state, which is what your brain is doing when it's not doing anything. (The default state is often measured in an fMRI machine when people are told to not do anything.) Nobody is quite sure what less cortical interactions during the default state might mean for the brain - fewer daydreams? slower response times? - but it's an interesting take on what's sure to become an important societal issue.
So there's an acute fertilizer shortage. The big problem is a lack of nitrogen which, although it accounts for most of the atmosphere (78.1 percent), is notoriously tough to "fix," since it's got those pesky triple bonds. One of the unsung heroes of modernity is the Haber process, which makes nitrogen-rich fertilizer by heating, under high heat and pressure, nitrogen and hydrogen.
The Haber process now produces 100 million tons of nitrogen fertilizer per year, mostly in the form of anhydrous ammonia, ammonium nitrate, and urea. 3-5% of world natural gas production is consumed in the Haber process. This fertilizer is responsible for sustaining one-third of the Earth's population.
Ok, so the Haber process (which was originally invented to help Germany produce explosives during WWI) requires lots of energy to fix nitrogen. But here's my naive question (and keep in mind that I'm really ignorant when it comes to fertilizer and nitrogen fixation):
Lots of different prokaryotes fix nitrogen for us, most famously the legumes with their symbiotic bacteria. What's their enzymatic secret? Why can these single celled creatures break apart the strong bonds of nitrogen but we can't? (Unless we consume huge amounts of energy.) I mean, if we could find a way to emulate the genius of natural selection, we could instantly eliminate a significant share of natural gas consumption. That seems like a scientific breakthrough worth investing in.* So what's the stumbling block?
*Of course, I know it's much more important to give Americans a summer without a gas tax.
A calm and cool summary of the value of arts education in public schools:
What are "the habits of mind" cultivated in arts classrooms, they ask in their book "Studio Thinking: The Real Benefits of Visual Arts Education." As unsatisfied with wafty promises that arts learning inspires "creativity" as with pledges that it boosts scores, the Project Zero researchers videotaped several very different classrooms in two schools with intensive arts instruction. They watched teachers imparting techniques and introducing students to the world of the visual arts, and saw certain cognitive "dispositions" being elicited by the interactions: persistence in tackling problems, observational acuity, expressive clarity, reflective capacity to question and judge, ability to envision alternative possibilities and openness to exploration.
I haven't read "Studio-Thinking," but that summary sounds about right. The current obsession with measuring learning - quantifying the contents of young minds - certainly has some benefits (accountability is good), but it also comes with some serious drawbacks, since it diminishes all the forms of learning, like arts education, that can't be translated into a score on a multiple choice exam.
But I think that even this clinical evaluation of arts education misses the real benefit of such class time: self-expression. I shudder to think that second graders, at least in most schools, are never taught the value of putting their mind on the page. They are drilled in spelling, phonetics and arithmetic (the NCLB school day must be so tedious), and yet nobody ever shows them how to take their thoughts and feelings and translate them into an act of creation. We assume that creativity will take care of itself, that the imagination doesn't need to be nurtured. But that's bunk. I can barely do long-division anymore (sorry, Ms. Alpert), and yet I can still remember the teacher (Mr. Edelson) who made his fourth-grade students write a sonnet. My ten-year old self was surprised at how difficult it was to fit my ideas into a set number of syllables, cramming my lofty vision into a rigid form. I'm sure the sonnet was adorably awful, but isn't that the point? Creativity takes practice. Expressing oneself well is never easy.
First, the Hotel St. George Press, a really cool literary publishing group in Brooklyn (where else?) was kind enough to ask me a few questions:
Heather McCalden: Would you mind relaying a bit about your experiences in the lab, the kitchen, and the writer's desk - how they may have fed each other, for instance? Have the commonalities (assuming they exist) provoked any of the ideas in Proust was a Neuroscientist?
Jonah Lehrer: A few years before I started working in a lab, back when I was working as a weekend prep cook in a restaurant for gas money, I had this epiphany about chefs: they actually know what they're talking about. When you first start working in a kitchen, there are all these idiosyncratic rules that make no sense. You've got to chop the onion like this for this dish and like that for that dish. It all seemed so arbitrary. But then, over time, I realized that the culinary rules had a real logic to them. Even though the chefs couldn't explain why you needed to cut an onion this particular way - it probably has something to do with the breakdown of sulfuric acid and the carmelization of sugars - they had found the best possible technique. In other words, they were intuitive chemists. Even as a lowly prep cook, I was impressed by the way a body of culture could build up this implicit knowledge purely through experience and practice. So I guess I was prepared in advance for my insight about Proust being a neuroscientist, which I had while reading Proust in a lab. (I had developed the bad habit of reading novels while waiting for my experiments to finish. Before Proust, I had been on a six months-long Bellow jag.)
And then I recently had the pleasure of interviewing Gary Marcus about his elegant new book, Kluge:
LEHRER: What's been the most surprising thing you've found in your years as a scientist? What data didn't you expect?
MARCUS: It's just amazing how engaged babies are. Your average six-month-old human is--by comparison to your average two-day old elephant--pretty ineffectual [physically]. Humans simply don't get up and walk the moment they crawl out of the womb, unlike newborns of so many other species. But study after study has shown that baby humans know a heck of lot about how the world works. They have, for example, a fairly firm grasp of basic physics, and they're constantly looking around them trying to understand the world.
In my own lab, for example, we found that your average seven-month-old baby can learn a basic language-like grammatical rule in the space of two minutes; if we give a baby a series of sentences like la ta ta, mi na na; she can pick up the underlying grammar (ABB) structure right away; by now, several other labs have replicated this basic finding. And it's amazing; we're not paying the babies who are in these experiments, and two minutes is not a very long time, but the babies can't help themselves. They want to know what's going on, and they work hard at trying to figure it out.
The Times has an interesting review of two new books that discuss the oft cited link between mental illness and artistic creativity. It's all too easy to indulge in cliched overgeneralizations about the thin line separating madness and genius, but the reality is that true mental illness is rarely conducive to acts of creation. Virginia Woolf, for instance, couldn't write when she was experiencing one of her "episodes": the onset of depression was "like a death," she wrote. Nevertheless, as Woolf's journals make clear, her writing was still profoundly influenced by her mental illness. Here is I how describe Woolf in my book:
Woolf's writing style was deeply rooted in her own experience of the brain. She was mentally ill. All her life, she suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns, those horrible moments when her depression became suffocating. As a result, Woolf lived in fear of her own mind, exquisitely sensitive to its fevered "vibrations." Introspection was her only medicine. "My own psychology interests me," she confessed to her journal. "I intend to keep full notes of my ups and downs for my private information. And thus objectified, the pain and shame become at once much less. When all else failed, she used her sardonic humor to blunt the pain: "I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe; it will be exquisite by September." And while she complained to E.M. Forster and others about her doctors and their syrups, about the pain and torpor of being forced to lie in bed, she also acknowledged the strange utility of her illness. Her incurable madness--this "whirring of wings in the brain"--was, in some ways, strangely transcendental: "Not that I haven't picked up something from insanities and all the rest. Indeed, I suspect they've done instead of religion."
Woolf never recovered. Her constant state of reflection, her wariness for hints of the return of her devastating depression, left an indelible scar on her writing. "Nerves" is one of her favorite words. Its medical varieties--neurosis, neurasthenia, nervous breakdown, neuroasthenic--continually enter her prose, their sharp, scientific pang contradicting the suppleness of her character's internal soliloquies. In Woolf's diary, notes on form were always interwoven with comments on headaches.
In other words, Woolf's mental illness forced her to think about her mind, which fueled her modernist writing style. But the illness itself was an obstacle: she wrote in spite of it, not because of it.
That said, there are some interesting connections between schizotypal individuals - schizotypy is a mental condition that resembles schizophrenia, albeit with far less severe symptoms - and creativity, at least as measured in the psychology lab. Consider this study, which looked at schizotypy and insight problem solving. (Solving such problems requires people to "restructure the problem space," which is a genre of creative thought.) The researchers found that individuals with a high degree of schizotypy show better performance on a set of insight problems relative to individuals with low schizotypy, but not on a set of incremental problems that required focused goal-related thinking. In other words, a little bit of madness did lead to a more creative problem-solving process. (Other studies have linked schizotypy to a right-hemisphere bias...)
And then there's the audacious hypothesis of Robert Sapolsky, who argues that one of the sources of modern religion is schizotypy. (Personally, I've always found the obsessive-compulsive disorder explanation for religion a little more convincing. Martin Luther was clearly OCD - that's why he liked to wash his hands so much. Or look at Leviticus: that Biblical book contains one bizarre rule after another.) Anyways, here is Sapolsky, arguing that you have to be the right kind of crazy in order to see a burning bush, or believe that the loud voice in your head is actually the voice of God:
What you find with schizotypals is what is called metamagical thinking, a very strong interest in new-age beliefs, science fiction, fantasy, religion, but in a very concrete, literal form, a very fundamentalist style. Somebody walking on water is not a metaphor. Somebody rising from the dead is not a metaphor; this is reported, literal fact.
Now we have to ask our evolutionary question: "Who are the schizotypals throughout 99% of human history?" And in the 1930s, decades before the word "schizotypal" even existed, anthropologists already had the answer.
It's the shamans. It's the medicine men. It's the medicine women. It's the witch doctors. In the 1930s an anthropologist named Paul Radin first described it as "shamans being half mad," shamans being "healed madmen." This fits exactly. It's the shamans who are moving separate from everyone else, living alone, who talk with the dead, who speak in tongues, who go out with the full moon and turn into a hyena overnight, and that sort of stuff. It's the shamans who have all this metamagical thinking.
You probably thought this post was going to be about how Meredith Grey (or perhaps McDreamy?) is a neuroscientist, or how Shonda Rhimes (the creator of Grey's Anatomy) anticipated some surprising discovery of modern neuroscience. Alas, I have no such insights. Marcel Proust may have been a neuroscientist, but Grey's Anatomy is still just an entertaining and delightfully dumb primetime soap opera. To be perfectly honest, I'm always slightly ashamed at myself after I squander 42 minutes of my life on the randy residents of Seattle Grace hospital.
The most recent episode revolved around a patient with a tumor in his frontal lobes, which led this poor man to do all sorts of impulsive things. For instance, he decided to marry a waitress he'd only known for ten days and, while camping in the woods, he started to pet a bear cub. (The mother bear then mauled his older brother. The plot really was that silly.)
This is a long-winded way of getting to the point of this post, which is that frontal lesions and tumors can often cause bizarrely impulsive behavior. One of the most vivid examples of this concerns the case of the married, middle-aged Virginia schoolteacher who, rather suddenly, started frequenting prostitutes, downloading child pornography, and seducing young girls. (You can read the journal article here.) His behavior was so brazen that he was quickly arrested and convicted of child molestation. The day before his sentencing, he complained of blinding headaches and a constant urge to rape his neighbor. The man was sent to the emergency room, where he started to proposition the nurses. After a routine MRI, the doctors saw the source of the problem: he had a massive tumor lodged in his frontal cortex, specifically the right orbitofrontal area. After the tumor was removed, the deviant sexual urges immediately disappeared. The man was no longer a hypersexual monster. Unfortunately, this reprieve was brief, and the tumor started to grow back within a year. His frontal cortex was once again incapacitated, and the urges of pedophilia returned.
War Emblem, the 2002 Kentucky Derby winner, is one finicky horse:
By all accounts, he [War Emblem] is a happy horse -- gamboling through fields most of the day, showing the turn of foot that propelled him to lead every step of the way in America's greatest horse race.
In reality, however, War Emblem is in therapy.
He is isolated from the other studs at Shadai Stallion Station in the hope that he will feel safe and more confident in his sexuality. Mares surround him in an effort to revive a long-dormant libido.
"We know he is fertile, but he has no interest in mares," said Dr. Nobuo Tsunoda, the director of the farm.
In an industry that requires horses to breed the old-fashioned way, War Emblem's lack of interest has been costly, as well as another reminder that for the winner of this year's Kentucky Derby, which takes place Saturday, there are no guarantees. Shadai bought War Emblem for $17 million to replace another Derby champion, Sunday Silence, who had been Japan's lead sire. By conservative estimates, it has lost as much as $55 million in stud fees.
You'll be happy to know that War Emblem is now getting daily injections of testosterone, in order to help his libido. But what if War Emblem just isn't that into mares? As I noted in an earlier article on Joan Roughgarden, the Stanford biologist, homosexual behavior is common throughout the animal kindgom:
Male big horn sheep live in what are often called "homosexual societies." They bond through genital licking and anal intercourse, which often ends in ejaculation. If a male sheep chooses to not have gay sex, it becomes a social outcast. Ironically, scientists call such straight-laced males "effeminate."
Giraffes have all-male orgies. So do bottlenose dolphins, killer whales, gray whales, and West Indian manatees. Japanese macaques, on the other hand, are ardent lesbians; the females enthusiastically mount each other. Bonobos, one of our closest primate relatives, are similar, except that their lesbian sexual encounters occur every two hours. Male bonobos engage in "penis fencing," which leads, surprisingly enough, to ejaculation. They also give each other genital massages.
As this list of activities suggests, having homosexual sex is the biological equivalent of apple pie: Everybody likes it. At last count, over 450 different vertebrate species could be beheaded in Saudi Arabia. You name it, there's a vertebrate out there that does it.
I have no idea if similar behavior has been observed in horses, or if War Emblem really is just a picky male, but it seems like an idea worth exploring.
I'm no forager. Once, I took a foraging class in Brooklyn's Prospect Park and managed to find varieties of poisonous mushrooms that even the instructor had never encountered before. (They looked like porcini mushrooms to me.) Nevertheless, I've gotten very excited this year about the wild chives that grow in a nearby field. I trust myself to forage for these chives because their oniony reek is unmistakable, allowing me to easily distinguish between the chives and the interspersed leaves of grass that are there just to trick me. If I were smart, I'd sell my harvest in the Union Square Greenmarket as "baby ramps" and charge $30 a pound.
I cook these chives very simply. First, I put on a pot of boiling water. Then, I go read for twenty minutes. When the water is ready, I add some pasta. (Any long pasta will do, although I'm partial to the chewiness of bucatini.) Then, I get out my good olive oil (purchased from DiPaolo's Dairy, the greatest Italian food store outside of Italy) and saute three or four cloves of minced garlic. Don't let it burn. When the pasta is ready, I drain it from the pot and reserve a generous 1/4 cup of pasta cooking water. (That starch is precious!) I add the pasta to the pan and toss it with the garlicky oil. Then, I add all my wild chives, which I chop into half-inch lengths. I add some of the reserved pasta cooking water, some salt and pepper, and cook for another 15-30 seconds. The pasta is served with lots of salty pecorino romano cheese and final drizzle of olive oil.
PS. Don't have wild chives on hand? Move to rural New Hampshire! Or try a mixture of scallions, supermarket chives and parsley.
Razib calls my attention to this new Nature study on the genetic variation underlying the stress response. The researchers focused on neuropeptide Y, an endogenous anxiolytic (it's like an anti-anxiety drug naturally produced by the brain) which is released in response to stress. They focused on a single nucleotide polymorphism (aka SNP) which "alters NPY expression in vitro and seems to account for more than half of the variation in expression in vivo."
The pertinent question, of course, is how they measured variation in vivo. The researchers used a few different, and quite interesting, techniques. The first method (the Pittsburgh sample) involved showing people "threat-related facial expressions" and measuring amygdala activity with fMRI. They found that "amygdala activation was higher in individuals with the low-NPY expression," although it's worth pointing out that this only accounted for 9 percent of the variance in fMRI response.
The second test of stress involved measuring "endogenous opioid release" with PET in response to a painful stimuli. These results were quite interesting: "highly expressed NPY diplotypes predicted significantly higher levels of stress-induced opioid system activation" throughout the brain, so that 37 percent of the variance in opioid release in the posterior insular cortex was due to the NPY diplotype. In other words, the brains of the lucky people with this SNP released more painkillers in response to pain. In theory, at least, this means that the experience of pain was less stressful. (One thing I don't understand, however, is why these endogenous opioids didn't correlate with a reduced pain response: according to the data, the NPY diplotype only accounted for 3 percent of the variance in subjective pain.)
Obviously, this study has far-reaching ramifications. The regulation of stress is a critically important function of the brain, and the breakdown of this process has been linked to everything from depression to neurogenesis to PTSD. It's pretty astonishing to think that a significant amount of the variation of the stress response is tied to a few basepairs of DNA. The next step it to see if this slight genetic variation correlates with various types of mental illness. Are soldiers with low-expressions of NPY more likely to get PTSD? Does having lots of NPY in the brain make people less likely to choke under pressure? Are the different levels of NPY expression evenly distributed in various socio-economic strata? Etc, etc.
It sounds like one of those 1950's psychological experiments that scientific ethics boards no longer allow: Nicholas White was trapped in an elevator in New York City's McGraw-Hill building for forty-one hours. Just thinking about such an ordeal gives me shivers of claustrophobic anxiety. Forty-one hours! In a suspended box!
Thankfully, security cameras caught the whole thing on tape:
And then read the article, which is fascinating throughout.
Eliasson is entertaining, yet his central concern seems less a working of spectacular magic than an investigation of how spectacular magic works. He raises awareness of the neurological susceptibilities that condition all of what we see and may think we know. This can be humiliating, as it often is in encounters with the menacingly proportioned spaces, grim videos, and noise assaults of Bruce Nauman, the greatest of post-minimalist explorers, whose influence Eliasson is quick to acknowledge. But with Eliasson the experience of our perceptual frailties rewards simple, open-minded humility.
In addition to the Nauman/Duchamp influences, I also detect some thematic similarities between Eliasson and Cezanne. Both make art out of our epistemological frailties, forcing us to pay attention to the strange mechanics of our senses. (I think Eliasson does this most effectively in "I only see things when they move" and "360 room for all colours," which will teach you a lot about your photoreceptors.) What I wrote about Cezanne in my book is also, I think, true of Eliasson: "His art shows us what we cannot see, which is how we see."
Rebecca Solnit, author of some wonderfulbooks, astutely describes one of the worst side-effects of testosterone:
We were preparing to leave [a party in Aspen] when our host said, "No, stay a little longer so I can talk to you." He was an imposing man who'd made a lot of money in advertising or something like that.
He kept us waiting while the other guests drifted out into the summer night, and then sat us down at his grainy wood table and said to me, "So? I hear you've written a couple of books."
I replied, "Several, actually."
He said, in the way you encourage your friend's 7-year-old to describe flute practice, "And what are they about?"
They were actually about quite a few different things, the six or seven out by then, but I began to speak only of the most recent on that summer day in 2003, my book on Eadweard Muybridge, the annihilation of time and space and the industrialization of everyday life.
He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. "And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?"
So caught up was I in my assigned role as ingenue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the possibility that another book on the same subject had come out simultaneously and I'd somehow missed it. He was already telling me about the very important book -- with that smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority.
So, Mr. Very Important was going on smugly about this book I should have known when Sallie interrupted him to say, "That's her book." Or tried to interrupt him anyway.
But he just continued on his way.
I sometimes wonder if such assholery is a particular problem in the hard sciences. This isn't sexism in the traditional sense: it's more like an extreme form of condescension, where it's automatically assumed that the female grad student will need more hand-holding/reassurance/coddling/etc. Is this a problem? Ladies, please share your stories in the comments section.
Did you know that more than 53 percent of the prisoners in Federal prisons are serving time for drug offenses? That's crazy. When will our politicians realize that drug addiction is a mental illness, and that the War on Drugs is essentially a futile struggle against the dopamine reward pathway? Addicts need treatment, not incarceration.
This article remains one of the best things I've read on the failures of American drug policy.
Over at the wonderful World's Fair, Ben Cohen has an interview with Kelly Joyce, author of the forthcoming Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency. Here is how Joyce summarizes the main argument of her book:
In the United States, MRI is socially constructed as a sacred technology--one that represents progress, certainty, and good health care. The technique's sacred status is achieved in part because cultural ideas link anatomical pictures and mechanical reproduction to transparency and truth. But, it is also achieved because information about contexts and actors is often missing from popular discussions of MRI. In Magnetic Appeal, I bring those contexts and actors back in to examine why MRI is perceived the way it is, how technologists and physicians make sense of and use the technology in clinical work, and how advertising, fear of litigation, reimbursement policies, and research funding all contribute to MRI in practice.
I'm always struck by how even neuroscientists who work with fMRI everyday, and are acutely aware of the limitations of the technology (the 3-5 second time lag, the messy data, the difficulty of imaging certain areas, the fidgety subjects, etc.) still use the same metaphor of transparency. They talk about "looking at the inside of the brain," or how the brain scanner is like a "window," or how they can "see what's happening in real time". Of course, fMRI is an incredibly powerful and potent tool which allows us an unprecedented understanding of the mind at work, but I get a little tired of all these visual analogies. Before we can "see" anything with fMRI, someone has to perform a tremendous amount of statistical analysis.
One of my favorite examples of MRI gone awry involves the diagnosis of back pain. (I wrote a longish article on the psychology of back pain for Best Life.) When MRI technology first appeared, in the late 1980's, the medical profession hoped that the use of MRI would revolutionize the treatment of lower back pain. Since doctors could finally image the spine and surrounding soft tissue in lucid detail, they should be able to offer precise diagnoses, locating the aggravated nerves and structural problems that caused the pain in the first place. This, in turn, would lead to better medical care.
Unfortunately, MRI's haven't solved the problem of back pain. While X-rays can only reveal tumors or problems with the vertebrae, MRI's can image spinal discs - the supple buffers between the vertebrae - in meticulous detail. After the imaging machines were first introduced, the diagnosis of various disc abnormalities began to skyrocket. The MRI pictures certainly looked bleak: people with pain seemed to have seriously degenerated discs, which everyone assumed caused inflammation of the local nerves. Doctors began administering epidurals to quiet the pain, and, if the pain still persisted, would surgically remove the necessary disc tissue.
The vivid images, however, were misleading. Those disc abnormalities are seldom the cause of chronic back pain. An infamous 1994 study published in The New England Journal of Medicine imaged the spinal regions of ninety-eight people with no back pain or any back related problems. The pictures were then sent to doctors who didn't know that the patients weren't in pain. The end result was shocking: two-thirds of normal patients exhibited "serious problems" like bulging, protruding or herniated discs. In 38 percent of these patients, the MRI revealed multiple damaged discs. Nearly 90 percent of these patients exhibited some form of "disc degeneration". These structural abnormalities are often used to justify surgery and yet nobody would advocate surgery for people without pain. The study concluded that, in most cases, "The discovery by MRI of bulges or protrusions in people with low back pain may be coincidental."
Or consider this: A large study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) randomly assigned 380 patients with back pain to undergo two different types of diagnostic analysis. One group received X-rays. The other group got diagnosed using MRI's, which give the doctor a much more detailed picture of the underlying anatomy.
Which group fared better? Did better pictures lead to better treatments? There was no difference in patient outcome: the vast majority of people in both groups got better. More information didn't lead to less pain. But stark differences emerged when the study looked at how the different groups were treated. Nearly 50 percent of MRI patients were diagnosed with some sort of disc abnormality, and this diagnosis led to intensive medical interventions. The MRI group had more doctor visits, more injections, more physical therapy and were more than twice as likely to undergo surgery. Although these additional treatments were very expensive, they had no measurable benefit.
Medical experts are now encouraging doctors not to order MRIs when diagnosing back pain. In the latest clinical guidelines issued by the American College of Physicians and the American Pain Society, doctors were "strongly recommended...not to obtain imaging or other diagnostic tests in patients with nonspecific low back pain." In too many cases, the expensive tests proved worse than useless.
The point is that, as Kelly Joyce points out, the metaphor of MRI - it was like a transparent window - seduced doctors into thinking the pictures were more revealing than they actually were. They assumed that these newly visible details (such as the degenerated discs) were the cause of back pain. The reality, however, turned out to be far more complicated.
The natural impulse to stop holding your breath (typically within 30 seconds or a minute) is not because of an oxygen shortage but because of the painful buildup of carbon dioxide. Mr. Blaine said he began trying to overcome that urge when he was a child in Brooklyn and at age 11 managed to hold his breath for three and a half minutes.
In his current training, he said, he does exercises every morning in which he breathes for no more than 12 minutes over the course of an hour, and he sleeps in a hypoxic tent in his Manhattan apartment that simulates the thin air at 15,000 feet above sea level.
He has been concentrating on lowering his oxygen consumption by slowing his metabolism, partly through diet (he fasted for 18 hours before the breath-hold in the pool) and partly through relaxation. In a test by Dr. Potkin, Mr. Blaine on command quickly lowered his heart rate by 25 percent.
"David seems to have a phenomenal ability, like Buddhist monks, to control his body," Dr. Potkin said.
When Mr. Blaine began his breath-hold in the pool, his heart rate during the first minute fell to 46 from 81, a drop that was not entirely his own doing. Immersing the face in water produces a protective action in humans similar to that in dolphins, seals, otters and whales. Called the mammalian diving reflex, it quickly lowers the heart rate and then constricts blood vessels in the limbs so that blood is reserved for the heart and the brain.
By exploiting that reflex, free divers can remain active underwater for more than four minutes, and much longer if they remain still. The world-record holders have exceeded nine minutes after filling their lungs with ordinary air, and more than 16 minutes after inhaling pure oxygen.
One of the best paradigms for studying this sort of extreme cognitive control - Blaine is able to ignore one of our most fundamental instincts, which is the urge to breathe - is meditation. Richard Davidson, the director of the Waisman Brain Imaging Center at the University of Wisconsin, just published a really interesting review of his research in the latest Trends in Cognitive Science. Here is the abstract:
Meditation can be conceptualized as a family of complex emotional and attentional regulatory training regimes developed for various ends, including the cultivation of well-being and emotional balance. Among these various practices, there are two styles that are commonly studied. One style, focused attention meditation, entails the voluntary focusing of attention on a chosen object. The other style, open monitoring meditation, involves nonreactive monitoring of the content of experience from moment to moment. The potential regulatory functions of these practices on attention and emotion processes could have a long-term impact on the brain and behavior.
I was an Arts (English) and Psychology (Neuroscience) major, so I clearly didn't choose the most lucrative fields. (And I contemplated a philosophy minor...) For me, the most surprising aspect of the chart (and it's still not that surprising) was the payoff of practicality. The best paying sciences, like chemistry, computer science and engineering, are also the ones with the most direct applications to the real world. Clearly, the only reason to pursue the path of pure knowledge (aka basic science, comp lit and metaphysics) is for the sake of knowledge. Plus, it's more fun to get drunk as an undergrad and talk about Nietzsche than it is to discuss benzene rings and organic chemistry.
Speaking of the senses, it's always fascinating what happens when that sensory spigot is turned off, so that the cortex is suddenly filled with silence. Jad Abumrad, the co-host of Radio Lab (download their new season!), recently spent some time in an anechoic chamber, or a room designed to stifle soundwaves and erase echoes. The brain, it turns out, can't stand the quiet. When confronted with utter silence, it starts to hallucinate:
Deep in the bowels of a nondescript 1950's era government building is Bell Lab's very own anechoic chamber, no longer in use. The nice folks at Bell Labs agreed to open it up for me. It's a frightening room at first glance. The door is a thousand pounds, the walls ten feet thick, and everything - floors, ceilings, all surfaces - is covered in yellow acoustic baffling. Stranger still, the floor is made of a wire mesh grid and suspended ten feet off the ground (to prevent sound reflecting off the floor).
I remember thinking two things as I walked in. One: this place looks like a beehive. Two: I can't believe how much work it takes to keep out sound. Door closes. Lights off.
Consider: Every room, even the very quietest rooms, have a tone (in fact, in the radio business, we call this "room tone").
But this room had NO ROOM TONE. No sound at all.
And it's impossible to describe what true silence does to your ears. The moment the door went thwuck shut, my ear drums started to flutter. As if air was trying to force it's way out my ears in little puffs. Felt a wee bit nauseous. Crackling. Like shadow static. I think my ears were physically searching for sound.
After about five minutes... A brief, very vivid flash of bees buzzing, like a swarm zooming by my head, doppler style, en route to attack another hive. I'm no idiot. I know my mind invented the bees because 'bee-hive' was one of the last thoughts in my head before the lights went out. Regardless, the sound of bees in the dark was disconcerting.
After about twenty minutes, I began to hear a high pitched whine, which persisted. Not a hallucination, I'd later discover. According to the Bell Labbies, this was probably the sound of my circulatory system. I also heard the gentle thud of my heartbeat.
In honor of National Poetry Month, which always struck me as a very bizarre month (is poetry less essential in the other eleven months of the year? And why April?), I thought I'd post a selection of some poetry on brainy themes. Here, for instance, is the opening stanza of Franz Wright poem in the latest New Yorker, entitled "The World of the Senses":
What a day: I had some trouble
following the plotline; however,
the special effects were incredible.
I sometimes wonder if people have always had a sense of their senses being special effects, or if the modern age (and by modern I mean everything since the Enlightenment) is particularly conscious of the fact that, as Kant put it, "the imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself." I mean, Plato wrote about those flickering shadows on the cave wall, but that was more about Platonic forms than about the fallibility of our senses. And what about before Plato? Is there something about our sensory reality that makes us inherently suspicious? Or is that suspicion a by-product of modern skepticism and science? (I was surprised, the other day, to meet a first grader who knew all about visual illusions...His favorite was the dalmatian and the dots.) After all, we didn't always realize that our reality was merely an emanation of a trillion electrical neurons, which had been haphazardly engineered by natural selection. Perhaps we stopped trusting our senses when we stopped talking about the "soul"?
And here, because it's April, are the first and last stanzas of "You," one of my favorite Auden poems:
Really, must you,
Over-familiar
Dense companion,
Be there always?
The bond between us
Is chimerical surely:
Yet I cannot break it.
Oh, I know how you came by
A sinner's cranium,
How between two glaciers
The master-chronometer
Of an innocent primate
Altered its tempi:
That explains nothing.
Who tinkered and why?
Why am I certain,
Whatever your faults are,
The fault is mine,
Why is loneliness not
A chemical discomfort,
Nor Being a smell?
I've got a cockatiel with an inverted beak - it's a pretty funny looking underbite, but doesn't interfere with his eating - and I've often wondered if animals ever get self-conscious about their appearance. Does my cockatiel have any clue that he looks a little ridiculous? Does the chinese crested hairless dog realize that it's a hairless dog? This probably strikes you as a silly question - vanity, after all, can seem like such a human preoccupation - but the logic of sexual selection would imply that creatures, especially males, are actually exquisitely aware of how they look. That's why my cockatiel spends hours preening himself and gazing into his mirror.
That bit of theorizing was really an excuse to post this video, which holds out the tantalizing possibility that, at least for every other species, beauty really is on the inside:
Nicholas Kristof has an excellent column on rationalizing, partisan affiliation and the Clinton/Obama race:
If you're a Democrat, your candidate won in Wednesday night's presidential debate -- that was obvious, and most neutral observers would recognize that. But the other candidate issued appalling distortions, and the news commentary afterward was shamefully biased.
So you're madder than ever at the other candidate. You may even be more likely to vote for John McCain if your candidate loses.
That prediction is based on psychological research that helps to explain the recriminations between supporters of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- and the reasons why Senator McCain should be smiling as the Democratic campaign drags on.
To understand your feelings about Wednesday night's debate, consider the Dartmouth-Princeton football game in 1951. That bitterly fought contest was the subject of a landmark study about how our biases shape our understanding of reality.
Psychologists showed a film clip of the football game to groups of students at each college and asked them to act as unbiased referees and note every instance of cheating. The results were striking. Each group, watching the same clip, was convinced that the other side had cheated worse -- and this was not deliberate bias or just for show.
What's most interesting to me is how these minor acts of self-delusion are built into the brain at a very fundamental level. It feels good to be certain, to know for sure that your candidate is the best candidate. I'd argue that this desire is a dangerous side-effect of having so many competing brain areas inside the skull. After all, the default state of the brain is indecisive disagreement; our various mental parts are constantly insisting that the other parts are wrong. The amygdala might like McCain's tough foreign policy, but the NAcc prefers Obama's uplifting rhetoric. (Obviously, I'm making these details up, but you get the idea: the brain is one big argument.) The presence of certainty, however, imposes consensus onto this inner cacophony. We can now ignore those annoying fears and skeptical suspicions, those statistical outliers and inconvenient truths. Being certain means that we aren't worried about being wrong. And that feels oh so nice.
This is most poignantly demonstrated by split-brain patients. (These patients have had their corpus-callosum severed, so that the two hemispheres of their brain are disconnected.) A typical experiment goes like this: different sets of pictures are flashed to each of the split-brain patient's eyes. For example, the right eye might see a picture of a chicken claw and the left eye might see a picture of a snowy driveway. The patient is then shown a variety of images and asked to pick out the image that is most closely associated with what they have seen. In a tragicomic display of indecisiveness, the split-brain patient's hands will point to two different objects. The right hand will point to a chicken (this matches the chicken claw that the left hemisphere witnessed), while the left hand will point to a shovel (the right hemisphere wants to shovel the snow.) The contradictory reactions of the patients reveal our own inner contradictions. The same brain has come up with two very different answers.
But something interesting happens when scientists ask split-brain patients to explain their inexplicable response: they manage to come up with an explanation. "Oh, that's easy," one patient said. "The chicken claw goes with the chicken, a
