cortex | February 21, 2009Over at Mind Matters, I recently interviewed Matthew Lieberman, a social neuroscientist at UCLA. The previous week I asked Ed Vul, lead author of the "Voodoo Correlations" paper a few questions, and I wanted to make sure I gave some of the scientists he criticized a chance to rebut the accusations. (Here's some excellent background reading on the Voodoo controversy.) I think Lieberman makes some excellent points:
The argument that Vul and colleagues put forward in their paper is that correlations observed in social neuroscience papers are impossibly high. There's a metric (the product of the…
cortex | February 19, 2009Being on book tour means that I watch way too much SportsCenter, since that's what I do when I can't sleep. And so, because it's mid-February, I've noticed that the ESPN anchors are already talking endlessly about March Madness, college basketball and brackets. (Of course, this is also because they have little else to talk about. Football season is over, baseball has yet to begin, and the NBA is mired in its mid-season lull.) What most impresses me about the college basketball analysts is that they act like they're actual analysts, that there's some logical structure to the college basketball…
cortex | February 17, 2009Paul Ekman, the eminent scientist behind micro facial expressions, dissects the unconscious tics of deceit used by A-Rod:
Ms. Couric asked Mr. Rodriguez if he had ever been tempted to use illegal drugs. He answered with a simple "No" accompanied by what might be a microfear expression, according to Dr. Ekman - a horizontal stretching of the lips that is often an effort to conceal fearfulness.
"The fear of being disbelieved is the same as fear of being caught," Dr. Ekman said. "He is afraid that we're not going to believe it."
Mr. Rodriguez's lips stretch in a similar way when he talks of his…
cortex | February 16, 2009The brain is like a Swiss Army knife, stuffed full of different mental tools that are well suited to different situations. Sometimes, we want to flex the prefrontal cortex, and really exert our rational muscles. And then there are other situations (like picking a strawberry jam) where thinking too much can be a real problem, and we should rely instead of the subtle signals emanating from the emotional brain.
It's no surprise that how we think - the particular mode of thought that we lean on at any given moment - can be influenced by our surroundings. For instance, when men are shown revealing…
cortex | February 16, 2009Self-promotion alert! If you're allergic to self-aggrandizing blog posts, then you'll probably want to stop reading now. But just a quick note to remind interested people that I'll be in the Bay Area this week, talking about decision-making, before returning to the East Coast and holding events in NYC and Boston next week. Also, there have been some nice reviews of How We Decide in recent days. In the San Francisco Chronicle, Robert Burton (author of the excellent "On Being Certain) says:
Lehrer offers real substance by going short on agenda and overreaching simplifications and being long on…
cortex | February 11, 2009One of the perverse pleasures of spending too much time in airports is getting to people watch. I put on my "anthropologist from Mars" glasses and pass the time by staring at strangers, watching what they eat, read and how they struggle to nap in uncomfortable positions. This morning, while waiting on a very delayed plane in the Portland airport, I watched a woman perform yoga by the gate.
But if I really were an anthropologist from Mars I'd be most puzzled by something else that people in airports do: drink lots of diet soda. I write this in the San Francisco airport, where I'm sitting on a…
cortex | February 9, 2009Over at the always wonderful blog Neurophilosophy, Mo has an excellent summary of a recent experiment that investigated the impressive prescience of our unconscious recognition memory:
12 healthy participants were presented with kaleidoscopic images under two different conditions. In one set of trials, they paid full attention to the images, and were then asked to decide whether or not they had seen each of them before. In the other condition, they were made to perform a working memory task whilst the initial first set of images were presented to them - they heard a spoken number and were…
cortex | February 8, 2009Over at Global Post, a new international news service, there's an interesting article on tennis greats and age. I didn't realize that tennis talent - at least when measured by Grand Slam victories - basically drops off a cliff at the age of 28, which is why Federer can no longer beat Nadal. According to Mark Starr, the early start of Nadal - he started winning as a teenager - means that he'll go down as the greatest player of all time.
Sampras won only two Grand Slams after turning 28, one that year and a last-gasp triumph at the U.S. Open when he was 31 and headed for retirement. And…
cortex | February 7, 2009One of the case studies I use in How We Decide when discussing the dangers of information overload concerns the diagnosis of back pain. Before the introduction of MRI's in the late 1980s, doctors were forced to rely on X-rays when diagnosing back pain. X-rays provide doctors with a limited amount of information, since they only reveal the bones and spinal column. As a result, back pain remained a mostly mysterious phenomenon, and most patients were prescribed bed rest. Nevertheless, this simple treatment plan was still extremely effective. Even when nothing was done to the lower back, about…
cortex | February 6, 2009Just a quick note about some of the upcoming events on the book tour, which kicks off this Monday in Seattle. I hope to see you there!
February 9, Seattle Town Hall, 7:30 PM
February 10, Powell's Books, Portland 7:30 PM
February 11, UCSB, 7:30 PM
February 12, Los Angeles Public Library, 7 PM
February 16, Art Center College of Design, 1 PM
February 16, The Book Works, Del Mar, 7 PM
February 17, West Portal Bookstore, San Francisco 7 PM
February 18, International House, UC Berkeley
February 19, Commonwealth Club, San Francisco 6:30 PM
February 21, Barnes & Noble, Manchester, NH 3 PM…
cortex | February 6, 2009That was fun!
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The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Jonah Lehrer
Colbert Report Full EpisodesPaul McCartney Appearance
Funny Political VideosMore Funny Videos
A few random notes:
1) I can't bring myself to watch the clip. Which reminds me of my brilliant idea for an fMRI experiment: show people videos of themselves in a scanner and see what brain areas turn on. Presto: you've found the neural correlates of self-loathing. I'm betting on the insula.
2) It was totally surreal being on the set of a show you watch every night. Like walking into your television or falling…
cortex | February 5, 2009Sorry for the radio silence: I've been traveling and promoting the new book. (More on all my tour events in the near future, except to note that I'll be in Seattle on Monday, then Powell's Books on Tuesday!)
And set your Tivos: I'll be on the Colbert Report tonight, trying not to make an ass out of myself.
In the meantime, enjoy this youtube clip that I can't stop watching. It's a home video of a 7 year old shortly after experiencing nitrous oxide (?) at the dentist for the first time.
His epistemological confusion reminded me of two things: 1) my own encounters with lysergic things and 2…
cortex | February 3, 2009In the last few months, American consumers have undergone a profound shift in their shopping habits. We've transitioned from being incessant consumers - the spendthrifts of the world - to reluctant savers. Here's the Times:
American consumers and businesses are embarking on an era of thrift as the recession deepens, saving more money as they cut spending on purchases as varied as sweaters, new homes and office towers.
Department of Commerce Report on Personal Income and Spending
That was the picture painted by two government reports released on Monday. One showed that Americans cut their…
cortex | February 2, 2009I came of age in the Ritalin generation, which meant that plenty of my classmates in elementary school went to the nurse's office for their little dose of drug. At the time, I remember being jealous of these kids, who not only got to miss 10 minutes of instruction but got to have a real, genuine medical affliction. (I was one of those confused children who, for a brief period, thought it would be awesome to have braces and/or a big cast on my arm.)
In retrospect, I can appreciate the complexities of the ADHD debate. On the one hand, ADHD is a real syndrome, with identifiable neural…
cortex | February 1, 2009In the latest Seed, there's an interesting dialogue between political scientist James Fowler and physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi. I was particularly intrigued by their ruminations on the network dynamics of Facebook:
JF: When we move from five friends in real life to 500 on Facebook, it's not the case that we are having a close, deep relationship with each of those 500 friends. In fact, one of the intriguing things I've noticed about these online networks is that they have a property that's different from realworld social networks. As you know, in the real world, popular people tend to be…
cortex | January 31, 2009Over at the Economist, a number of economists have been speculating on the possibility of an economic "placebo" that would boost consumer confidence without actually triggering a massive spike in government spending. In other words, it would be a Keynsian bump without the cash, akin to giving someone a sugar pill and telling them it's Prozac. Here's Tyler Cowen:
To the extent that the real problem is fear, this militates in favour of placebo policies. By that I mean initiatives which appear bold and have great symbolic value, but which don't necessarily cost us very much.
Sounds great, right…
cortex | January 30, 2009Melinda Wenner has an excellent article on the benefits of unstructured playtime - play without any rules - in the latest Sciam Mind. The article reminded me of that great Auden quote, which he adapted from Nietzsche: "Maturity - to recover the seriousness one had as a child at play."
Play actually appears to make kids smarter. In a classic study published in Developmental Psychology in 1973, researchers divided 90 preschool children into three groups. One group was told to play freely with four common objects--among the choices were a pile of paper towels, a screwdriver, a wooden board and a…
cortex | January 29, 2009I've got an interview with Ed Vul, the lead author of the recent paper on "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience," over at Scientific American. Since the paper hit the web, it has provoked a flurry of rebuttals and responses. If you'd like a balanced perspective on the issue - and it's worth pointing out that this issue isn't unique to social neuroscience, but has implications for fMRI research in general - I'd suggest reading the interview and then perusing this eloquent and fiery response by Matthew Lieberman, Elliot Berkman and Tor Wager.
LEHRER: Your paper has prompted a great deal…
cortex | January 29, 2009I've got a long article in Nature this week on Jeff Lichtman (of Brainbow fame) and the birth of connectomics, which seeks to construct a complete wiring diagram of the brain:
At first glance, Jeff Lichtman seems to be hanging long strips of sticky tape from the walls of his Harvard lab. The tape flutters in the breeze from the air-conditioner. But closer inspection reveals that this is not tape: it is the brain of a mouse, rendered into one long, delicate strip of tissue and fixed onto a plastic film. When the film is tilted to the light, the tissue becomes visible, like the smear of a…
cortex | January 28, 2009Via Marginal Revolution, comes this interview with Warren Buffett, where he makes the case for the current stimulus package. I highlight this excerpt not to argue for the bill, but to highlight one of Buffett's many excellent mental habits, which we should all attempt to imitate:
SG: But there is debate about whether there should be fiscal stimulus, whether tax cuts work or not. There is all of this academic debate among economists. What do you think? Is that the right way to go with stimulus and tax cuts?
WB: The answer is nobody knows. The economists don't know. All you know is you throw…