Jonah Lehrer's Blog, page 15
November 17, 2009
The Tiger Woods Effect
Success is intimidating. When we compete against someone who's supposed to be better than us, we start to get nervous, and then we start to worry, and then we start to make stupid mistakes. That, at least, is the lesson of a new working paper by Jennifer Brown, a professor at the Kellogg school.
Brown demonstrated this psychological flaw by analyzing data from every player in every PGA tournament from 1999 to 2006. The reason she chose golf is that Tiger Woods is an undisputed superstar...
November 16, 2009
Expertise
The WSJ discovers the unreliability of wine critics, citing the fascinating statistical work of Robert Hodgson:
In his first study, each year, for four years, Mr. Hodgson served actual panels of California State Fair Wine Competition judges--some 70 judges each year--about 100 wines over a two-day period. He employed the same blind tasting process as the actual competition. In Mr. Hodgson's study, however, every wine was presented to each judge three different times, each time drawn from...
November 13, 2009
Dopamine and Future Forecasting
Ed Yong has a typically excellent post on a new paper that looks at how manipulating dopamine levels in the brain can change our predictions of future pleasure:
Tali Sharot from University College London found that if volunteers had more dopamine in their brains as they thought about events in their future, they would imagine those events to be more gratifying. It's the first direct evidence that dopamine influences how happy we expect ourselves to be.Sharot recruited 61 volunteers and...
November 10, 2009
Orchid Genes
David Dobbs has a fantastic new article on behavioral genetics at The Atlantic. He adds an important amendment to the vulnerability hypothesis, which holds that certain genes make people more vulnerable to psychiatric disorders. While these snippets of DNA aren't deterministic per se, when they are combined with traumatic childhood events, or a stressful few months, they can lead to serious mental illness. It's the old genes plus environment story, and it's typically cast in a negative...
November 9, 2009
Smell and Memory
A new paper by scientists at the Weizmann Institute documents the primal connection between whiffs of smell and episodic memory. This nasal nostalgia is mediated by the hippocampus, the manufacturer of long-term memory in the brain. Here's the abstract:
Authors, poets, and scientists have been fascinated by the strength of childhood olfactory memories. Indeed, in long-term memory, the first odor-to-object association was stronger than subsequent associations of the same odor with other...
November 6, 2009
Crying Babies
This is absolutely fascinating, yet another reminder that the structure of language infects everything. Here's Nell Greenfieldboyce, at NPR:
The distinctive sounds of a newborn's first cries may be influenced by the mother tongue of its parents.A new study of over a thousand recorded cries from 30 French newborns and 30 German newborns found differences in the cries' melody patterns. French cries tended to have a rising melody, while the German cries tended to have a falling melody.
The...
November 4, 2009
Sleep
As a chronic insomniac, I'm always a little disturbed when I learn about the lingering cognitive effects of a bad night sleep:
In a study at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in 2003, for example, scientists examined the cognitive effects of a week of poor sleep, followed by three days of sleeping at least eight hours a night. The scientists found that the "recovery" sleep did not fully reverse declines in performance on a test of reaction times and other psychomotor tasks...
November 3, 2009
The Gay Animal Kingdom, Part 2
This is excellent news. Dan Delong will be back in the classroom today. I'm so relieved.
Read the comments on this post...
Good News
This is excellent news. Dan Delong will be back in the classroom today. I'm so relieved.
Read the comments on this post...
Temptation
Why are we so dishonest? Why do we bad things, even when we know we're doing something bad? Ever since Adam and Eve ate that apple, we've assumed that there is something inherently tempting about sin. If left to our own devices, we'd all turn into men at a Vegas bachelor party, indulging in sex, drugs and slot machines. We'd loot and pillage and lie. Immorality feels good, which is why it's so hard being moral.
Some people, of course, are made of stronger stuff, which is why they stay on...
