Culture
sheril | September 12, 2007It's certainly no wonder lots of folks seem confused over the significance of climate change. I recently discussed media driven alarmism, but there's an equally relevant modern pressure that has enormous implications on our individual and collective attention span.
At the touch of a laptop, iphone, or blackberry, we are exposed to a limitless sea of information without the proper time to process it all. We've developed into an extremely fast-paced society that has the tremendous capacity to quickly exchange ideas at rates never before experienced by our species. Welcome to the…
cortex | September 12, 2007Boy, was Descartes wrong. His philosophy of duality divided our being into two distinct substances: a holy soul and a mortal carcass. The soul was the source of reason, science and everything nice. Our flesh, on the other hand, was "clocklike," just a machine that bleeds. With this schism, Descartes condemned the body to a life of subservience, a power plant for the brain's light bulbs.
One of the great themes of modern neuroscience is that Descartes was utterly wrong. (I discuss this theme in my Walt Whitman chapter of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Whitman's mantra, after all, was that "the…
razib | September 11, 2007A comment on another weblog asked why the United States might have a confrontation with China at some point in the future. They pointed out, correctly, that Chinese imperialism has been weak tea in comparison to the world-striding European form. That is, the Middle Kingdom asserted a pretense of being the universal empire, but engaged in little projection of imperialism outside of its traditional sphere of influence (e.g., Korea, Vietnam and the Tarim Basin). That is the past, and it should inform our perception of the course of the future. But prior information needs to be updated with…
sheril | September 11, 2007September 11, 2007
Dear New York,
We've been together a long time and although I'm terribly unfaithful, you always welcome me back with open arms because you know no matter how many states I've slept in, I'm yours. And truth be told, I love you. You're my city - center of the universe - and there will never be another to take your place in my heart. DC and Maine were fun, North Carolina's been good to me, and I'll never forget the college years in Boston.. but New York - you ROCK my world! You'll always be home.
Two years ago I composed an OpEd to commemorate the fourth anniversary of…
cortex | September 10, 2007There are so many stupid studies of the gendered brain that it's easy to conclude that good research into psychological sex differences is impossible. But that would be a mistake. I think one of most interesting recent investigations into the cognitive differences of men and women comes from a clever neuroeconomics experiment, designed by Colin Camerer and Read Montague. It's called the trust game, and it goes like this: at the start of each of 10 rounds, an "investor" is given an imaginary stake of $20. They can keep it all, or "invest" some of it with a "trustee". Any money that gets…
razib | September 9, 2007Recently I've been reading a fair amount of material in economics. In addition to popular books on specific economic topics aimed such as Farewell to Alms and Knowledge and Wealth of Nations, I've been hitting texts such as Hal Varian's Intermediate Microeconomics.
As I told a friend of mine who is an economist the learning curve is definitely a bit gentler because the formalism in much of low level economics isn't that different from evolutionary biology, as attested by the parallel developments of game theory within the two fields in the mid-20th century. Mathematical tools from…
cortex | September 7, 2007Yawning is famously contagious. Except that is, if you're autistic. Here's Mindhacks:
The study showed that children with autism were far less likely to yawn in response to watching others do the same.
Often, autistic social difficulties are put down to a problem with 'theory of mind' the ability to understand other people's beliefs, intentions and desires, but it's not clear that contagious yawning relies on this.
The researchers don't have any easy answers for why yawn contagion is reduced in autism, but suggest, without committing, that known differences in viewing faces, possible…
cortex | September 7, 2007From Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz:
Sooner of later, everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealizable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable. The obstacles preventing the realization of both these extreme states are of the same nature: they derive from our human condition which is opposed to everything infinite.
Needless to say, this quote is neurochemically accurate. The brain is an equilibrium machine.
cortex | September 7, 2007In my post on warm milk and sleepiness - the dairy acts like a placebo - a commenter made an astute point:
what does "placebo" mean in that context? If you have developed the pathways that insist on Warm Milk = Time to Sleep, that effect is very real...
Whether purely conditioned, or based on some real effect we still don't understand...is seems to me to go beyond what we typically called placebo.
Was Pavlov's dog suffering from Placebo effect each time he salivated?
From the perspective of the brain, the placebo effect is simply a specific pattern of brain changes that make us feel better.…
cortex | September 6, 2007From Tyler Cowen:
1. In Danish data, if a CEO's child dies, the value of that CEO's company falls by one-fifth in the following two years.
2. If a CEO's wife dies, the value of that CEO's company falls by fifteen percent.
3. If a CEO's mother-in-law dies, the value of that CEO's company rises slightly.
The moral is simple: grief is debilitating, or at least distracting. Read the original paper here.
cortex | September 6, 2007Is it bad if your favorite philosophy comes in aphorism form? This is why I've always enjoyed Wittgenstein: his writing has the density of plutonium, since it's just pre-digested quotes. I can read it without having to remember what anomalous monism is. Now Colin McGinn, who's one of my favorite philosophers of mind, has entered the blogosphere. One of his first posts is a list of 79 meditations on laws, causality and the nature of reality. And if you find consciousness studies interesting, be sure to check out The Mysterious Flame, which practically invented new mysterianism.
14. Could God…
cortex | September 6, 2007Chemistry gets short shrift. Theoretical physics and neuroscience and molecular biology get all the sexy press, while chemistry departments slowly wither away. In many respects, this is just because chemistry has been so successful: there don't seem to be any great unknowns or theoretical gaps left within the field. It's not like neuroscience (which can't even begin to explain consciousness, Alzheimer's, etc.) or modern physics (which still can't reconcile the theory of relativity with quantum mechanics).
Of course, the unfortunate fate of every successful science is to become a branch of…
cortex | September 6, 2007So tax breaks for philanthropy increase inequality:
For every three dollars they give away, the federal government typically gives up a dollar or more in tax revenue, because of the charitable tax deduction and by not collecting estate taxes.
[snip]
The charitable deduction cost the government $40 billion in lost tax revenue last year, according to the Joint Committee on Taxation, more than the government spends altogether on managing public lands, protecting the environment and developing new energy sources.
I think it's pretty tough to defend tax deductions for cultural organizations. As…
cortex | September 5, 2007One of the innate limitations of every intelligence test is that the test is forced to conflate the measurable aspects of intelligence with a general definition of intelligence. What can't be quantified is ignored. And what can be easily quantified is privileged. The end result is a woefully distorted view of learning, g, and education. Programs like No Child Left Behind only exacerbate this trend, since they turn K-12 education into one long test. Good teaching is confused with successful measurement.
Occasionally, we get depressing glimpses of what this "rigorous" view of education is…
cortex | September 5, 2007My own experience tells me that a glass of warm milk is a potent sedative. All it takes is a few ounces of heated dairy before my eye lids start getting real heavy.
It turns out, though, that warm milk is just a placebo. It works because I think it works.
According to age-old wisdom, milk is chock full of tryptophan, the sleep-inducing amino acid that is also well known for its presence in another food thought to have sedative effects, turkey.
But whether milk can induce sleep is debatable, and studies suggest that if it does, the effect has little to do with tryptophan.
To have any…
sb admin | September 5, 2007I haven't read the study— it would take some digging to find, after all!— only the CNN Article, but the title sums up half of the results: "Men want hot women, study confirms."
In a nutshell, the study found that in a speed-dating test, men, despite what they said they were looking for, almost always went for the most physically attractive women (measured I am not sure how). Women, meanwhile, went for a man whose "desirability" (again, measured I am not sure how) matched their own assessment of how attractive they are.
The conclusion the article claims is that humans, despite high-minded…
cortex | September 4, 2007I'm a big fan of Mad Men, the new HBOesque drama about 1960's advertising executives on AMC. It's basically an extended melodrama about why the Ike years actually sucked, and neatly punctures that lame American nostalgia for the "simpler" times of the middle twentieth century.
One of the subplots in the show concerns the "neurotic" (probably depressed) housewife of the lead character. She starts to visit a shrink to help her cope with her moods. What amazes me is that her husband will occasionally call her therapist and get updates on her condition. The confessions of the wife are promptly…
cortex | September 2, 2007Saw Bill and Hillary today. I'll spare you my political commentary, except for two brief observations:
1) Hillary's biggest applause line came when she declared that, once she's President, she'll "listen to what scientists say and stop being so anti-science". Much to my surprise, the crowd loved it. (The applause from the science line exceeded just about everything save for a reference to civil unions in New Hampshire.) Mooney would have been proud.
2) I've seen Bill Clinton in person a couple times now, and his charisma never ceases to amaze me. The Elvis cliches are all true. I'm sure that…
cortex | August 31, 2007The new Honda Accord comes out next month and, like virtually every new car, it boasts a bigger frame and bigger engine than last year's model. So I thought it might be worth revisiting some of the earlier generation Accords. It turns out that they were signifcantly more fuel efficient. For example, the 1982-1985 model got an extremely respectable 29/40 mpg. (In contrast, the four-cylinder engine in the new Accord comes in at 21 city, 31 hwy. The 6 cylinder gets 19/29.) The bad news is that the 1982 Accord only had 86 horsepower.
Here's my question: do consumers really want/need such big…
cortex | August 30, 2007Two examples of blinkered thinking:
1. Jeff Lewis, the incredibly entertaining lunatic at the center of Flipping Out, the real-estate reality television show on Bravo, fires his psychic because she wasn't doing a good job of predicting the future. So what does he do? He goes and hires a different psychic. I'm fascinated by this thought process. On the one hand, Jeff's empirical enough to realize that his psychic sucked. But he never even flirts with the possibility that all psychics suck. I know that we all have our rational blind spots, but rarely are they so elegantly captured on television…