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At The Frontal Cortex Jonah Lehrer has a post on marathon running and memory. Stress, like the stress from running for 4 hours, is known to disrupt memory -- but all memory isn't disrupted equally. The study found that after a marathon, runners had reduced "explicit" memory (ability to remember specific words, facts, numbers, etc.) but improved "implicit" memory (the ability to remember actions, motions, processes, etc.).
Fascinating! As someone who has run -- oh, is it 5? -- marathons I definitely felt a deterioration in my cognitive abilities as the races progressed. My ability to do simple math (like calculating mile splits) withered away. But it wasn't because I couldn't add anymore -- I could do that just fine. It was always because I couldn't remember what my watch said one mile earlier. That's a distinctly "explicit" memory function.
Jonah Lehrer on how art heightens natural stiumlus-response. He uses this Picasso quote: "Art is the lie that reveals the truth." -- or, as neuroscience shows, art isn't a complete lie, but a deliberate exageration.
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Through careful distortion, he found a way to intensify reality. As Picasso put it, "Art is the lie that reveals the truth."
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What's surprising is that such distortions often make it easier for us to decipher what we're looking at, particularly when they're executed by a master. Studies show we're able to recognize visual parodies of people—like a cartoon portrait of Richard Nixon—faster than an actual photograph. The fusiform gyrus, an area of the brain involved in facial recognition, responds more eagerly to caricatures than to real faces, since the cartoons emphasize the very features that we use to distinguish one face from another. In other words, the abstractions are like a peak-shift effect, turning the work of art or the political cartoon into a "super-stimulus."
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This blog post from Jonah Lehrer is an ode -- or anti-ode, as in this case they amount to the same thing -- to the McGriddle and the greasy, fatty, energy-filled satisfaction it brings mankind. He quotes Elizabeth Kolbert's recent round-up in the New Yorker of obesity books and research (http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/07/20/090720crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=all which I read yesterday...) and adds in a Duke study.
The money quote:
"Let's imagine, for instance, that some genius invented a reduced calorie bacon product that tasted exactly like bacon, except it had 50 percent fewer calories. It would obviously be a great day for civilization. But this research suggests that such a pseudo-bacon product, even though it tasted identical to real bacon, would actually give us much less pleasure. Why? Because it made us less fat. Because energy is inherently delicious. Because we are programmed to enjoy calories."
I want to go there.
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He describes, for instance, the research of Rüdiger Wehner, a Swiss scientist who glued tiny stilts made of pig hair to the limbs of desert ants. Because the insects with longer legs consistently overshot the nest and got lost, Wehner demonstrated that ants have an internal odometer: they carefully count their steps when searching for food.
An update on the science of traffic jams, with some cool solid liquid phase-change metaphors interesting ideas about traffic's inherent ability to infuriate us:
"According to the calculations of Fey and Stutzer, a person with a one-hour commute has to earn 40 percent more money to be as satisfied with life as someone who walks to the office."
"Long commutes make us unhappy because the flow of traffic is inherently unpredictable. As a result, we never adapt to the suffering of rush hour. (Ironically, if traffic were always bad, and not just usually bad, it would be easier to deal with.) As the Harvard University psychologist Daniel Gilbert notes, 'Driving in traffic is a different kind of hell every day.'"
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