“Reading Minds” with fMRI

By: | October 13, 2011

Some of you, I suspect, have read in Time, Slate, NPR, Popular Science, Wired, or dozens of other news outlets that scientists have figured out how to read minds. I hate to always be the neuro–tech downer, but that claim is just false. Laughably false.

That’s not to say that the study behind all of the commotion, published late last month in Current Biology, isn’t impressive and worth talking about. But, as happens all too often with brain imaging studies, this one was hyped, big time. Few reporters* bothered to look for critical, or even thoughtful, comments from experts outside the research team. And so their stories wound up with headlines like, “Scientists Can (Almost) Read Your Mind,” and “Soon Enough, You May Be Able to DVR Your Dreams.”
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Bed Bug Bugaboo

By: | October 12, 2011


New Yorkers don’t scare easily. They are blasé about crime, absurdly aggressive behind the wheel, and generally indifferent to even the biggest rats. Even vampires don’t inspire fear. I once saw a pair on the N train in Queens, and no one (but me) batted an eyelash. Blood sucking insects, however, are an entirely different matter. Bed bugs will strike terror in the heart of even the most stalwart New Yorker.

New York City is on the front lines of the war against bed bugs. And its inhabitants are in the grip of full-on bed bug paranoia. Local lore has it that many New York movie theaters are infested. So one of my friends now refuses to see films within the city limits. When her husband returns from the cinema, she forces him to strip down at the door. His clothes go immediately into a plastic bag and then into the washer. Full cycle. Extra hot. Continue reading →

The Children’s Hour

By: | October 11, 2011

There is something rare and elusive on the ceiling of Rouffignac Cave in southern France, something that at first looked like etchings of undulating snakes or bending waterways or even strangely shimmying humans, but that now turn out to be something far more ephemeral and wondrous to my eyes—works of art by very young apprentices: giggling, squirming, skittering Ice-Age children.

Rouffignac’s dark fingering passageways extend more than five miles into the limestone bedrock of the Dordogne region. Thirteen thousand years ago, Paleolithic humans held torches aloft as they penetrated deep into the cave,  exploring its dark twisting passages and chambers. In the flickering light, these ancient cavers saw the raking claw marks of cave bears on the walls and stepped over scatterings of animal bones and gleaming flint nodules on the floor. Continue reading →

From Freud to Feynman: Curious Thoughts of Curious Minds

By: | October 10, 2011

I wonder why. I wonder why.

I wonder why I wonder.

I wonder why I wonder why

I wonder why I wonder!

 The poet: Richard P. Feynman. The occasion: an undergraduate philosophy term paper at MIT. A great work of poetry? Perhaps not. An example of profound thinking and the ability to render a complex process in a way that is engaging, easy to follow, and evoking of an I could do that, too feeling? Absolutely. And that, in a nutshell, is the great man’s genius.

Richard P. Feynman was the physicist who could, it seems, also be anything else he chose to be: a musician (who played the frigideira in a Brazilian samba group and even performed during Carnaval), a composer (who co-wrote and performed music to an award-winning modern ballet), an artist (who, as Ofey, had a one-man show), a specialist on Mayan hieroglyphics (who lectured on the codexes of the ancients and could spot a fake before the experts themselves)—and most of all, always, a profound thinker, who wondered not only about the world around him but about the him the world was around. Who not only wondered why, but then immediately, why he wondered why, and then, why he wondered that. How did his mind work? How did it get to wherever it traveled, and could he find a way to trace it? Continue reading →

Dr. Jim Beam, DDS

By: | October 7, 2011

 

One of the advantages of working at home is that I have more opportunities to talk to my neighbors, who often stop by with interesting news. The other day, a bear got into someone’s chicken coop; not long before that, a stray bull was wandering around in the adjoining field. But the most intriguing recent tidbit came from a neighbor who told me that he gargles with bourbon instead of mouthwash.

“You what?” I said.

“Well,” he said, “I was looking at the mouthwash in the store a while ago, and I thought, ‘Hey, this stuff is basically expensive alcohol with a bunch of weird additives. Why not just buy a bottle of whiskey and be done with it?’”

Now here was an appealing proposition. First of all, how often does one get to combine the pleasures of hard liquor with virtuous feelings about personal hygiene? Secondly, as the overcommitted parent of a toddler, the prospect of drinking while accomplishing something else sounded like the highest form of efficiency.

I should say that my neighbor has a Ph.D. in biology and is, as far as I can tell, eminently sane. He’s also a teetotaler, so he spits out the bourbon. (Seeing my disappointment, he added, “But I don’t see why you’d have to.”) And he doesn’t rinse in the morning, especially if he has to talk to other people. (“Wouldn’t make a good impression.”) He figures his nightly swishes beat mouthwash on several counts: cheaper, no weird additives, and as good or better at killing bacteria.

Sounds too good to be true. Is it? In our efforts to serve you better, the Last Word On Nothing Consumer Affairs Division decided to investigate.

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Breast Cancer’s false narrative.

By: | October 6, 2011

Here we go again. Another October, another flood of pink ribbons. Don’t get me wrong. I hate breast cancer. I want it gone. Three of my aunts have breast cancer, and the disease killed a dear friend of mine. So it pains me to see the science of breast cancer so often misreported by the media.

The problem starts with the basic narrative. As I wrote last year in Miller-McCune:

For years, women were taught the necessity of early detection for breast cancer based on the notion that breast cancer is a relentlessly progressive disease that will inevitably kill you if you don’t remove it in time. That story about breast cancer — call it the “relentless progression” mind model — is easy to grasp, makes intuitive sense and offers a measure of comfort: Every cancer is curable as long as you catch it in time.

But it turns out that this mental model of breast cancer is wrong. Science has shown breast cancer to be far less uniform than the relentless progression model suggests, says H. Gilbert Welch of the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice in Lebanon, N.H., and author of Should I Be Tested for Cancer? A more accurate description might be called the “uncertain future” model. Instead of starting small and gradually growing and becoming more dangerous, cancers can behave in a variety of unpredictable ways.

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Science vs. Tradition

By: | October 5, 2011

After more than five years in the Canadian North, I’m preparing a move south to Toronto, before the next winter descends. Writing about science up here has been the best gig of my career – there’s just so much science here and so few science journalists.

In my research in this part of the world, one issue has nagged me throughout, and I hesitate even to write about it, because I have yet to get a firm grip on it. The question is what role, if any, the traditional knowledge of local aboriginal people should play in scientific inquiry.

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