The Gregarious Brain: The genetic and evolutionary roots of sociability

In New York Times Magazine, July 2007:

If a person suffers the small genetic accident that creates Williams syndrome, he’ll live with not only some fairly conventional cognitive deficits, like trouble with space and numbers, but also a strange set of traits that researchers call the Williams social phenotype or, less formally, the “Williams personality”: a love of company and conversation combined, often awkwardly, with a poor understanding of social dynamics and a lack of social inhibition. The combination creates some memorable encounters. Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and author, once watched as a particularly charming 8-year-old Williams girl, who was visiting Sacks at his hotel, took a garrulous detour into a wedding ceremony. “I’m afraid she disrupted the flow of this wedding,” Sacks told me. “She also mistook the bride’s mother for the bride. That was an awkward moment. But it very much pleased the mother.”

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The Pain Gate: A rare disorder opens a window on pain

In Scientific American Mind, April/May 2007:

For most of the 140 years since it was named, the disorder known as Burning Man Syndrome has operated in near-total obscurity. Even today perhaps 200 to 500 people have it in all of North America, a few thousand worldwide. Until about three years ago, pretty much all medical knowledge about it was contained in its name, erythromelalgia, which translates as "painful red extremities." Few doctors knew of it, only a handful had seen it, and none knew what caused it or how to treat it. The few thousand people who had it at any given time suffered its torment -- searing heat in the feet and lower legs, sometimes the hands — without understanding why. Most thought they were completely alone. 

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How To Be a Genius: It really is 99 percent sweat

My mother, rest her merry, brainy soul, convinced me early on that I was - as she liked to put it, quoting the cartoon character Yogi Bear - "SMARRR-ter than the average bear!" I happily assumed that my Yogi-like intelligence would ensure great things. My sense of entitlement grew when I easily won good marks in school, then grew some more when three different college professors told me I had a talent for writing. Rising to the top, I gathered, was a matter of natural buoyancy. The reality check came in my twenties, when nearly a decade of middling effort failed to cast the glow of my writing genius much beyond my study walls. By my early thirties I saw the obvious: my smarts and "talent" - above average or not - would count for little unless I outworked most of the other writers. Only when I started putting in some extra hours did I get anywhere. About the time I had my epiphany, a growing field of scholarship was more rigorously reaching the same conclusion. It seems the ability we're so fond of calling talent or even genius arises not from innate gifts but from an interplay of fair (but not extraordinary) natural ability, quality instruction, and a mountain of work. This new discipline - a mix of psychology and cognitive science - has now produced its first large collection of expert reviews, the massive Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. The book essentially tells us to forget the notion that "genius", "talent" or any other innate qualities create the greats we call geniuses. Instead, as the American inventor Thomas Edison said, genius is 99 per cent perspiration - or, to be truer to the data, perhaps 1 per cent inspiration, 29 per cent good instruction and encouragement, and 70 per cent perspiration. Examine closely even the most extreme examples - Mozart, Newton, Einstein, Stravinsky - and you find more hard-won mastery than gift. Geniuses are made, not born.

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Turning Off Depression: Profile of neurologist Helen Mayberg

In Scientific American Mind, August/Sept. 2006:

Given her background, curiosity, and energy, Helen Mayberg seems destined from girlhood to do what she's doing now, despite that what she's doing now was then inconceivable. Her father, having flirted with studying neurosurgery, practiced family medicine in Los Angeles County. Her uncle, enamored of machines that see through bodies and theories that jump across disciplines, used X-rays and other nuclear medicine tools to research biochemistry. Now Mayberg, a professor of psychiatry and neurology at Emory University, peers into brains to see mood networks — and, lately, in one of the most startling experimental depression treatments in decades, rework them with electrodes. By combining her father’s bedside dedication with her uncle’s technical curiosity, she is changing neuroscience. 

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Forensics Under Fire: DNA'S accuracy puts traditional forensics on trial

In Popular Mechanics, July 2006:

On May 30, 1997, patrolman Gregory Gallagher got out of his squad car in Boston's Roxbury neighborhood and approached a young man who appeared to be acting suspiciously. The man started running, and Gallagher chased him down an alley and over a fence. When he landed on the other side, the man grappled with him and took his pistol, opening fire as Gallagher scrambled back over the fence. One round bounced off Gallagher's bulletproof vest; another found flesh, hitting him in the leg. The assailant then jumped a couple more fences into another backyard, entered the house and demanded a glass of water from the terrified occupants. 

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A Revealing Reflection: Mirror neurons, talk, walk, and culture

In Scientific American Mind, April 2006:

Sometime just before my second child was born, I read that if you stuck your tongue out at a newborn, he’d do the same. So in young Nicholas’s first hour, even as my wife was still in the O.R. getting stitched up (40-hour labor, C-section, epic saga), I tried it. Holding the gooing, alert young lad before me in my hands — he was no bigger than a ball of pizza dough —  I stuck my tongue out at him. He immediately returned the gesture. I hadn’t slept in 40 hours. I laughed till I cried. 

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A Depression Switch? An experimental brain surgery raises hope, and lots of questions

In New York Times Magazine, April 2006:

Deanna Cole-Benjamin never figured to be a test case for a radical new brain surgery for depression. Her youth contained no traumas; her adult life, as she describes it, was blessed. At 22 she joined Gary Benjamin, a career financial officer in the Canadian Army, in a marriage that brought her happiness and, in the 1990's, three children. They lived in a comfortable house in Kingston, a pleasant university town on Lake Ontario's north shore, and Deanna, a public-health nurse, loved her work. But in the last months of 2000, apropos of nothing — no life changes, no losses — she slid into a depression of extraordinary depth and duration.

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Avian Flu: Tracking the Spread in Wild Birds

In Audubon, March 2006:

When avian flu killed more than 6,000 geese and gulls last spring at China's remote Qinghai Lake, ornithologists knew for certain that the virus devastating Asian poultry farms was a threat to wild birds, too. Less clear, and hotly debated since, is whether migratory birds might spread the flu to people—and what, if anything, to do about that possibility.

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Sunken Treasures of the Mediterranean: Mapping Bronzes Age Trade Routes

In New Scientist, March 2006:

It's not every day someone toasts a robot with ouzo, rare indeed that they do so aboard ship beneath Mediterranean stars. This July, however, a team of Greek and American archeologists, oceanographers, and engineers, giddy after completing a 10-day archeological expedition that wildly succeeded beyond their fondest hopes, stayed up deep into the night on the deck of the 62-meter Greek research vessel Aegaeo toasting each other, a clever autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) named SeaBED, and what they believe will is a new era in underwater archaeology. In just three days working over a Roman-era shipwreck in 60 meters of water off the Greek island of Chios, SeaBED had taken photos, sonograms, and spectroscopic analyses that not only precisely mapped the ancient wreck but collected information of unprecedented detail and exactitude.

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Mastery of Emotions: Joseph LeDoux and the Discovery of Fear

In Scientific American Mind, Feb/March 2006:

One of the biggest fears Joseph LeDoux had when he was young — he’s 55 now, and a leading neuroscientist specializing in the study of fear — was of getting stuck in his hometown. Eunice, Louisiana, population 11, 499, sits among the creeks and rice fields of southwestern Louisiana, and a revival of the town’s Cajun country roots gives it a certain charm today. An old theater downtown hosts the weekly “Rendezvous des Cajun” radio show, a yipping, Frenchified version of Prairie Home Companion, only with dancing, which you can enjoy for a mere $5 (small children free), and you can’t swing a ‘possum without hitting a good gumbo place. But when LeDoux was coming of age in the 1960s, he found the place too sleepy. He he did some radio disc jockeying in high school, and the era’s music, along with his own inquisitiveness, drew his attention to the wider world. His parents, however — his father was a butcher, and Joseph did his first neural explorations digging through cow brains to extract the bullets that had dispatched them so his father could sell the brains — envisioned him as a leading local businessman. They conditioned college tuition payments on his studying business – and no further away than Baton Rouge, 80 miles east, where LeDoux dutifully enrolled at Louisiana State University. 

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