Jonah Lehrer's Blog, page 24

Emotional Perception

Mo, over at Neurophilosophy, has a fantastic summary of a new paper from scientists at the University of Toronto investigating the link between affective mood and visual perception. The basic moral is this: If you want to improve your peripheral vision, or become better at noticing seemingly extraneous details, then do something to make yourself happy:

Positive moods enhanced peripheral vision and increased the extent to which the brain encoded information in those parts of the visual field, to

Social Contagions

A fascinating YouTube video, from the Sasquatch Music Festival:

This reminds me of the classic Milgram study on social conformity. (No, I'm not talking about that Milgram experiment.) In this study, Milgram had "confederates" stop on a busy city street and look upwards at the sky. He demonstrated that when one person was looking up, 40 percent of passerby also looked up, just in case something interesting was happening. (There was nothing to look at, just sky and buildings.) When two people w

ADHD

Here's a question I get quite a bit, which usually goes something like this:

Is ADHD (Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) real? Or is it a made-up diagnosis for misbehaving kids?

The short answer is that ADHD (and its precursor, ADD) are absolutely real disorders. They have real neurological underpinnings (including a large genetic component) and real, consistent symptoms. That, I think, is the current scientific consensus.

That said, there is far more controversy over many other pertin

Daydreaming and Booze

What happens to the brain when we drink alcohol? In recent years, scientists have discovered that booze works by binding to and potentiating a specific GABA receptor subtype. (GABA is the main inhibitory neurotransmitter in the mammalian brain, which means it helps to regulate and quiet cellular activity.) While it remains unclear how, exactly, these chemical tweaks produce the psychological changes triggered by a beer or bourbon, a new study by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh (along

The World

I'm answering a few questions from readers over at PRI's The World. They've just started a new science forum, which aims to provide a sorely needed international perspective on science issues. Check it out.

Read the comments on this post...

Choice

Americans love alternatives. One of the benefits of modern capitalism, after all, is that we're free to consume products that perfectly match our preferences - if you want to wear skinny jeans with a Black Sabbath t-shirt, flip flops and a fedora (I saw such a person yesterday - he looked very satisfied with himself) then go right ahead. Gail Collins, while bemoaning the difficulty of reforming the college loan system, summarizes the American obsession with choice:

This is why my corner drugsto

Animal Research

Daniel Engber has a very interesting series of articles over at Slate on Pepper the Dalmation and the use of stolen pets in biomedical research. In 1965, the theft of Pepper from a Pennsylvania farm - she ended up dying in a Bronx lab, sacrificed so that scientists could experiment with cardiac pacemakers - created a media sensation:

The dog-napping of Pepper marked the beginning of the end of canine experimentation. Outrage over her demise, and the theft and killings of other family pets, woul

BS Syndrome

Over at Neurophilosphy, there's a wonderful post on "confabulatory hypermnesia," or severe false memory syndrome:

In the journal Cortex, researchers describe the case of a patient with severe memory loss who has a tendency to invent detailed and perfectly plausible false memories (confabulations) in response to questions to which most people would answer "I don't know", such as the one above. They have named this unusual condition confabulatory hypermnesia, and believe that theirs is the first

Judicial Empathy

Apologies for the radio silence - I've been traveling and away from a reliable internet connection. (Taking a break from Google is one of the true pleasures of travel. I'm afraid, however, that it's an endangered pleasure, like train travel. I'm always impressed by all the places, from airplanes to remote beach hotels, that are now wireless.*)

David Brooks has an excellent column today on the emerging neuroscience of morality and the "useful falsehood" of the rational judge:

In reality, decisi

Self-Control Questions

Over at the New Yorker website, I've answered a few questions from readers about the marshmallow task:

Do you think the future results of success would be different for a sample of kids born in the twenty-first century considering the decades of behavioral, economical changes in the society?
Hassan Patwary
San Jose, Calif.

I think it would be hard to replicate the marshmallow task now, if only because it's gotten much tougher to feed hundreds of preschoolers sugary snacks in the name of scie