White Matter

NPR:

If you could look into this part of the brain, which sits right behind your forehead, you would see two kinds of matter: gray and white. Gray matter is the groups of brain cells that process information. Most neuroscience studies focus on gray matter. But nearly half the brain is composed of connective tissues that carry electrical signals from one group of neurons to another. This is white matter. Roughly, gray matter is where the processing happens, and white matter connects different parts of the brain, helping us to bring different ideas together.

The liars in Yang's study had on average 22 percent to 26 percent more white matter in their prefrontal cortex than both the normal and antisocial controls.

More Connections

Yang speculates that the increase in white matter means that people who lie repeatedly and compulsively are better at making connections between thoughts that aren't connected in reality — like, say, "me" and "fighter pilot."

Tables Turned on Tuxedo Suiciders

Jay Rosen, attempting to fathom the moral equivalence of the White House Correspondent's Association dinner, exchanges letters with a New York Times employee:

Watching the dinner on C-SPAN, I found it impossible to decide: Are the press people sitting there with Bush sitting there as professionals who….

* previously understood and corrected for their most egregious failure in 50 years?

* remain in general denial about their most egregious failure in 50 years?

* persist in ironic detachment from this debacle, so as to return things as smoothly as possible to Normal?

* are completely deluded about the current state of the watchdog press and our basis for trusting it?

* aren’t worried at all because the bloggers and “activists” who say things like that have an ax to grind?

The press is now subjected to the same objectification and analysis as the institutions and officials it writes about. At first, the press imagined it was invisible, and this was not contested, because what it produced was "objective." Objective product. Therefore the producer could be anyone. Any professional. The product remained unblemished by subjectivity of the producer.

But now that we have another data set - the press itself, seen through the axgrinding bloggers - the tables are turned. To be in that audience, enduring Rich Little's dead presidents, is to have left the world of the invisible craftsman of objective reality, and entered Blogworld.

Now the surround of data is inescapable. Before, the dinner would be "covered" by the press however it wished. Now it's merely more data, inserted into a seething mass of information. Laughter and clinking glasses, riots, suiciders, displacement of the voices of those doing the laughing, Katrina victims -- Colbert's "report" brought into the room what is all around it, a resonant realm of metadata that situates the press within a context which it apparently cannot conceive or exclusively determine.

The denial Rosen mentions is more general than just having to do with one giant error. The press is in denial that it is no longer invisible. The grammar of the world that it manufactured for our consumption is no longer entirely at its service. The tools and skills that were its province are now more widely shared. Attending that dinner is the last gasp of a peerage being consumed by its king, to the general delight and disgust of the people it has failed.