Jonah Lehrer's Blog, page 14

The Middle Way

I found this minor anecdote, from Peter Baker's authoritative NY Times article on Obama's decision-making process for Afghanistan, to be quite fascinating:

On Oct. 9, Mr. Obama and his team reviewed General McChrystal's troop proposals for the first time. Some in the White House were surprised by the numbers, assuming there would be a middle ground between 10,000 and 40,000.

"Why wasn't there a 25 number?" one senior administration official asked in an interview. He then answered his own...

Science and Climategate

Jon Stewart on the stolen Climategate emails:

I have two responses to the release of these admittedly unflattering emails. Firstly, they shed virtually no light on the actual climate science. Tyler Cowen says it best:

I see science, including climate science, as very much a decentralized process, based on the collective efforts of thousands of researchers. The evidence for our current understanding of climate change also comes from a wide variety of disciplines, including chemistry...

Bubbles

The WSJ reports that the Fed is considering getting serious about popping financial bubbles:

Not so long ago, Federal Reserve officials were confident they knew what to do when they saw bubbles building in prices of stocks, houses or other assets: Nothing.

Now, as Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke faces a confirmation hearing Thursday on a second four-year term, he and others at the central bank are rethinking the hands-off approach they've followed over the past decade. On the heels of a burst...

Politics and Current Events

A new paper by Paola Giuliano, an economist at UCLA, and Antonio Spilimbergo, an economist at the International Monetary Fund, looks at how severe recessions, depressions and other "macroeconomic shocks" influence the political beliefs of young adults. Here's the abstract:

Do generations growing up during recessions have different socio-economic beliefs than generations growing up in good times? We study the relationship between recessions and beliefs by matching macroeconomic shocks during ...

Vince Young

There was no sentence in How We Decide that I regretted more than this one, which was first written in the fall of 2007, when Vince Young was the starting quarterback for the Tennessee Titans:

Vince Young ended up excelling in the pros.

I was discussing the statistical disconnect between a QB's score on the Wonderlic intelligence test - an abbreviated version of the IQ test - and their performance in the pros. The league requires that every player in the draft take the Wonderlic. The...

Lying and Creativity

Via Vaughan Bell, comes this wonderful essay by Tom Stafford on confabulation and creativity:

In those patients with frontal damage who do confabulate, however, the brain injury makes them rely on their internal memories--their thoughts and wishes--rather than true memories. This is of course dysfunctional, but it is also creative in some of the ways that make improvisation so funny: producing an odd mix of the mundane and impossible. When a patient who claims to be 20 years old is asked...

Reverse-Engineering

Last week, a team of computer scientists led by Dharmendra S. Modha announced what sounded like an impressive breakthrough for neuroscience-inspired computing:

Using Dawn Blue Gene / P supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Lab with 147,456 processors and 144 TB of main memory, we achieved a simulation with 1 billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses. This is equivalent to 1,000 cognitive computing chips each with 1 million neurons and 10 billion synapses...

The Reading Brain

I've got a review of Stanislas Dehaene's new book, Reading in the Brain, over at the Barnes and Noble Review:

Right now, your mind is performing an astonishing feat. Photons are bouncing off these black squiggles and lines -- the letters in this sentence -- and colliding with a thin wall of flesh at the back of your eyeball. The photons contain just enough energy to activate sensory neurons, each of which is responsible for a particular plot of visual space on the page. The end result is...

Luxury Goods

Saks and Barneys and the rest of those luxury retailers have discovered that nothing destroys a luxury brand like a sale:

All around Saks Fifth Avenue, merchandise is sold out. The $2,520 Marni shearling vest? Gone. The $5,295 Brioni leather bomber jacket? Only one left. The $1,995 over-the-knee Christian Louboutin boots?

The $1,995 over-the-knee Christian Louboutin boots at Saks have sold out, unless you can wear the only pair left -- a size 11. "All gone, except for this," said Nick...

Fourth Down

Bill Belichick has never been the most popular coach in the NFL, but his Sunday night decision to go for it on 4th and 2 on his own 28 with two minutes remaining in the fourth quarter has even his fans crying foul. I bring up this football decision not because I'm interested in a debate - as a Pats fan, the last five minutes of that game were excruciating - but because I think it illustrates the difficulty of making rational decisions, even when the evidence supports the call.

I've blogged a...