The Frontal Cortex : The Aging Brain (2)
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Jonah Lehrer none@example.com (40)
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I had an article this weekend in the Washington Post looking at the recent spate of "age defiance" - Dara Torres, Madonna, John McCain, etc. - and some recent neuroscience research: A s a 27-year old science writer who still gets carded at bars, I often find discussions of the aging process pleasantly abstract. I'm more likely to use Clearasil than anti-wrinkle cream. But the spectacle of Torres's competing and McCain's campaigning has rekindled an ...
The Frontal Cortex : Free Will and Ethics (2)
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Over at Mind Matters, we've got an interesting article on how believing in free will can affect our ethical behavior: In a clever new study, psychologists Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler at the University of California at Santa Barbara tested this question by giving participants passages from The Astonishing Hypothesis, a popular science book by Francis Crick, a biochemist and Nobel laureate (as co-discoverer, with James Watson, of the DNA ...
The Myth of the Undecided Voter (3)
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The Frontal Cortex (73)
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I've often suspected (based on a highly unsystematic series of conversations with classic New Hampshire independents) that most undecided voters are really just low-information voters, who have actually made a decision but don't quite know how to explain their decision. If you prod, you'll typically find that they're "leaning" in one direction or another, or that they "like" one candidate a little bit more, but they can't articulate the reasons behind their choice. As a ...
Sweet and Salty [The Frontal Cortex] (1)
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Over at the Times website, Harold McGee takes a question on salt and baking: Q: Is there any truth to the old cook's adage that adding a pinch of salt brings out the sweetness in sugars? If so, can you please explain the science behind it? Harold McGee replies: I'm not sure that salt makes sugar taste sweeter, but it fills out the flavor of foods, sweets included. It's an important component of taste in ...
The Anatomy of Basketball Expertise [The Frontal Cortex] (2)
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There's a very cool study in the latest Nature Neuroscience that looks at how professional basketball players make predictions about whether or not a shot will go in. Obviously, this is a key skill, as being able to anticipate the position of a basketball gives players additional time to jostle for a rebound. The experiment went like this: 10 basketball players, 10 coaches and 10 sportswriters, plus a group of complete basketball novices watched a ...
Total Amnesia [The Frontal Cortex] (1)
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It's a nightmarish scenario: after a car crash, a man is brought into a hospital with a severe injury to his frontal lobes. When he wakes up, the doctors realize that their patient is missing one crucial mental faculty: his memory has been erased. He has no idea who he is, or even where he came from. "There was a bundle of clothing that came in with him when he entered the hospital, and in ...
A New State of Mind (2)
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My profile of Read Montague and the dopamine prediction-error hypothesis is now online. I wanted to write this article for two main reasons. First of all, I think the dopamine story is incredibly exciting and remains one of the best examples of how subtle shifts in neural firing rates can allow the brain make sense of the real world. Yes, I know there are caveats, but the prediction-error hypothesis is still a very powerful paradigm. ...
Excessive Choice (2)
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Sheena Iyengar has done some very cool studies on the debilitating effects of excessive choice. In one experiment, she ushered some undergraduates into a room with a variety of Godiva chocolates on a table. The students were then given vivid descriptions of each candy. They learned, for example, that the "Grand Marnier Truffle" consists of a "luxurious milk chocolate butter cream with a hint of liquor, housed in a dark chocolate shell and rolled in ...
Vegetarian Sausages and Subjectivity [The Frontal Cortex] (4)
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Do you scoff at those pale Tofu dogs in the health food aisles of the supermarket? Are you one of those people who taunt vegans by talking about Big Macs? A new study suggests that you should think about biting your tongue: According to the researchers, how we feel about a sausage, regardless of whether it's soy-based or beef, says more about our personal values than about what the sausage actually tastes like. In fact, ...
The Number Four [The Frontal Cortex] (1)
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Look up charming in a dictionary and I'm pretty sure you'll see this video: Because we like to link everything to the brain over here at the Frontal Cortex, it's worth mentioning that the number four also represents the outer limits of our numerical brain. Here's Stanislas Dehaene, a leading researcher on the neuroscience of math: Dehaene conjectured that, when we see numerals or hear number words, our brains automatically map them onto a number ...
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Magic (5)
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A new paper in one of my favorite journals, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, tries to reverse-engineer the tricks of magicians to learn about the blind spots of the brain. Wired Science explains: Magic tricks may look simple, but they exploit cognitive patterns that scientists are only beginning to understand. Now some psychologists are considering how they can use magic to advance our understanding of the brain -- and perhaps help inoculate us against advertising. "For ...
Deliberate Practice (5)
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This kid is a poster child for deliberate practice: Marc Yu, a 9-year-old piano prodigy from Pasadena, Calif., recently played at a benefit for victims of the earthquake in Sichuan, China. And he didn't play "Row, Row, Row Your Boat." He played a piece that Chopin wrote for victims of the Polish-Russian war, the composer's "Nocturne in C Minor." "My legs are long enough for the pedal, but still my legs aren't straight," Marc says. ...
The Neuroscience of Insight [The Frontal Cortex] (2)
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I've got an article in the latest New Yorker (not online) on the neuroscience of insight. I begin the article with the harrowing story of Wag Dodge and the Mann Gulch fire, before describing the research of Mark Jung Beeman, John Kounios and Earl Miller: There is something inherently mysterious about moments of insight. Wag Dodge, for instance, could never explain where his idea for the escape fire came from. ("It just seemed the logical ...
The Frontal Cortex : Rational Voters? (4)
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« Me at Google Main Rational Voters? Category: Brain & Behavior Posted on: July 18, 2008 5:59 PM, by Jonah Lehrer Whenever I happen to watch some talking heads on a cable news channel - usually while stuck in an airport - I'm always impressed by how mistaken the basic premise of the conversation is. The pundits will waste lots of words on how Obama's pivot on FISA might turn off his liberal base, or ...
Buying the Wrong House (11)
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One way to understand the collapse of the real estate bubble (and our current financial mess) is as a massive case of bad decision-making. The mistakes, of course, were made by many different people and organizations: the investment banks who bought subprime debt, the credit rating agencies who gave that debt high ratings, the mortgage brokers who gave out shady loans to people with bad credit, etc. But, in the end, the bubble really began ...
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Colin said:
The dangers of thinking too much about a decision
Cheap Wine (3)
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Steven Levitt writes about the difficulty of judging wine: On Tuesday afternoons we had wine tastings. I asked if I could be allowed the opportunity to conduct one of these wine tastings "blind" to see what we could learn from sampling wines without first knowing what we were drinking. Everyone thought this was a great idea. So with the help of the wine steward I selected two expensive bottles from the wine cellar and then ...
Music and Math (4)
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The latest Seed has a very interesting article on the complicated geometry underlying Western music, and the intuitive mathematical understanding demonstrated by composers: The shapes of the space of chords we have described also reveal deep connections between a wide range of musical genres. It turns out that superficially different styles--Renaissance music, classical and Romantic music, jazz, rock, and other popular forms--all make remarkably similar use of the geometry of chord space. Traditional techniques for ...
The Genetics of Mental Illness [The Frontal Cortex] (2)
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Nature has a really interesting article on the sheer difficulty (impossibility?) of finding the genetic underpinnings of mental illness: Finding genes involved in psychiatric conditions is proving to be particularly intractable because it is still unclear whether the various diagnoses are actually separate diseases with distinct underlying genetics or whether, as the DISC1 [a gene implicated in shcizophrenia] story suggests, they will dissolve under the genetic spotlight into one biological continuum. Indeed, some researchers suggest ...
Reading Yourself [The Frontal Cortex] (1)
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Zadie Smith, writing in The Believer, offers future novelists some advice: When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second - put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year of more is ideal - but even three months will do. Step away from the vehicle. The secret to editing your ...
