Jonah Lehrer's Blog, page 11

Too Many Fastballs

One of the lingering questions in decision science is the extent to which game theory - an abstract theory about how people can maximize their outcomes in simple interactions - is actually valid. It's a lovely idea, but does it actually describe human nature?

As usual, the answer depends. With few exceptions, lab tests of game theory find that real human beings sharply deviate from the predictions of game theory. We don't maximize gain, often because of misperceptions about risk. But people ...

Loss Aversion

The amygdala is an almond shaped chunk of flesh in the center of your brain. It's long been associated with a wide variety of mostly negative emotions and behaviors, from the generation of fear to the memory of painful associations. (There's some suggestive evidence that sociopaths have a broken amygdala. Because they can't learn from the moral mistakes, they don't comprehend morality.)

And now there's solid evidence that the amygdala also underlies one of the most potent human biases...

ChatRoulette

Sam Anderson, in New York Magazine, takes on ChatRoulette, that strange new site that connects you, via webcam, with a stream of strangers:

The site was only a few months old, but its population was beginning to explode in a way that suggested serious viral potential: 300 users in December had grown to 10,000 by the beginning of February. Although big media outlets had yet to cover it, smallish blogs were full of huzzahs. The blog Asylum called ChatRoulette its favorite site since YouTube...

Borges Was A Neuroscientist

The neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga has written a lovely appreciation of Jorge Luis Borges in the latest Nature (not online). Quiroga focuses on Borges interest in neuroscience, which led him to write his classic short story Funes the Memorious, about a man who cannot forget:

In the story of Funes, Borges described very precisely the problems of distorted memory capacities well before neuroscience caught up...In a study using electrodes to probe the hippocampus in epileptic patients...

The Isolated Mind

Megan O'Rourke has a really eloquent and important article on the history of grieving in the New Yorker. She spends a lot of time on the life and death of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who invented the five stages theory of human grief. (It turns out the stages don't really exist.) But I was most interested in this paragraph on the death of public funeral rituals - we no longer grief with others, unless we're grieving over Princess Diana or Michael Jackson - and how it was driven, at least in part, ...

Prozac

Sharon Begley has an excellent Newsweek cover story on the rise and fall of anti-depressant medications, or how a class of drugs that were once hailed as medical miracles are now seen as barely better than placebos:

In just over half of the published and unpublished studies, Kirsch and colleagues reported in 2002, the drug alleviated depression no better than a placebo. "And the extra benefit of antidepressants was even less than we saw when we analyzed only published studies," Kirsch...

The Blue Brain

Via Vaughan at MindHacks, comes this link to a preview of a documentary-in-progress on The Blue Brain, that epic attempt to create a conscious supercomputer.

I was fortunate enough to profile the Blue Brain in 2008:

In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows. Together they form the processing core of a machine that can handle 22.8 trillion operations...

Sex Ed

Ross Douthat reflects on the recent news that teenage birthrates inched upward during the Bush era, after more than a decade of decline:

The new numbers, declared the president of Planned Parenthood, make it "crystal clear that abstinence-only sex education for teenagers does not work."

In reality, the numbers show no such thing. Abstinence financing increased under Bush, but the federal government has been funneling money to pro-chastity initiatives since early in Bill Clinton's...

Musical Predictions, Redux

In response to my recent post on the neuroscience of musical predictions, Alex Rehding, the Fanny Peabody Professor of Music at Harvard, wrote in to offer a musical theorist perspective. He makes several excellent points, and complicates the neuroscience in useful ways, so I thought I'd reproduce the relevant parts of his email below:

The point you raise in your latest posting -- about expectation and prediction -- is one that has fascinated music theorists pretty much for the last 200...

Self-Control and Peer Groups

For the most part, self-control is seen as an individual trait, a measure of personal discipline. If you lack self-control, then it's your own fault, a character flaw built into the brain.

However, according to a new study by Michelle vanDellen, a psychologist at the University of Georgia, self-control contains a large social component; the ability to resist temptation is contagious. The paper consists of five clever studies, each of which demonstrates the influence of our peer group on our ...