Letters Remain

Author: Lloyd Morgan

  • Sergey Brin’s Search for a Parkinson’s Cure

    After discovering that he held the LRRK2 mutation on his twelfth chromosome (indicating that his lifetime risk of developing Parkinson’s disease is 30-75% rather than the typical 1%), Google co-founder Sergey Brin became one of the first philanthropists to fund research into a disease based on the results of a genetic test. In Thomas Goetz’s…

  • Derek Sivers’ Book List

    Derek Sivers’ book recommendations continue to be some of the most well matched to my own tastes. Infrequently updated, Derek Sivers’ book list provides a tiny summary of his recent reads, followed by extensive notes he has taken from each: somewhat similar to my current process, now that Amazon’s Kindle has completely transformed my reading…

  • Embodied Cognition and How Objects Influence Our Perceptions

    The physical properties of objects we interact with can substantially influence our opinion of unrelated items and people. Through a number of novel experiments, MIT’s Joshua Ackerman has clearly shown how the texture, weight, and other physical properties of objects we touch affect our judgements and decisions (neatly summarised by Ed Yong): Weight is linked…

  • An Expert’s an Expert Only When We Agree

    In the face of information that is contradictory to our beliefs, not only do we reinforce our position, but we also question the credibility of the source itself. In a study showing that we only agree that there is scientific consensus if that consensus agrees with our viewpoint, researchers from the Cultural Cognition Project also…

  • Corrections and When They Work

    A correction only serves its purpose (to correct our falsely-held beliefs) if we are predisposed to believe the correction itself. If we disagree with the correction, however, it instead acts to actually reinforce our incorrect beliefs (the “backfire effect”). That’s the conclusion drawn from research conducted by Brendan Nyhan, looking at how we avoid cognitive…

  • Mundane Decisions and Premature Deaths

    Deaths in the United States resulting from “fairly mundane personal decisions” have risen from a rate of around 10% of all premature deaths a century ago to 44.5% today*. This shift suggests that by improving our decision-making abilities, we can dramatically reduce a main cause of premature death: ourselves. 44.5% of all premature deaths in…

  • Sedentary Lifestyle? Exercise Isn’t Helping

    A somewhat sedentary lifestyle combined with regular exercise is turning us into what physiologists are calling ‘active couch potatoes’–and that exercise, no matter how vigourous, doesn’t appear to be counteracting the negative effects of that sedentary lifestyle. In rats, this lifestyle was found to produce “unhealthy cellular changes in their muscles” and increase insulin resistance…

  • Recognising Bad Advice and Expertise Failure

    Why do we blindly follow experts when their advice is so often so wrong*? How can we differentiate between good advice and bad? These are just two of the questions David Freedman attempts to answer in Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us (a book that sounds like it could be a nice complement to Kathryn…

  • Recognising Drowning and Surviving Cold Water

    Drowning does not look like drowning, and without flotation you will not live long enough to die from hypothermia if you fall into cold water. These are just two warnings from Mario Vittone–long-serving U.S. Navy and Coast Guard expert on maritime safety–writing in the maritime and offshore news site, gCaptain. In the first of two…

  • Sweetness and the Problem with Diet Sodas

    The link between the sweetness of a food and its caloric content may be a trait that our bodies have evolved to recognise. By disrupting what could be a “fundamental homeostatic, physiological process” by using artificial sweeteners, we could be promoting obesity. That’s the conclusion Jonah Lehrer draws from a study that looks at how…