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READING FILE

READING FILE; On Friedan, a Feminist Critique

Correction Appended

In The Guardian, Germaine Greer took critical measure of a fellow feminist, Betty Friedan, the author of "The Feminine Mystique," who died on Feb. 4 at 85.

In its time, "The Feminine Mystique" was a book that spoke to American women loud and clear. It was based on a questionnaire Betty sent out to the women who were at college with her in the 1950's, all "happily" married and bringing up kids in the suburbs. Betty, who was in the same boat, was feeling restless and dissatisfied. To her immense relief and considerable surprise, she found that just about all the women in the same situation who replied to her questionnaire were feeling the same. Betty was not one to realize that she was being lifted on an existing wave; she thought she was the wave, that she had actually created the Zeitgeist that was ready and hungry for her book.

Panning for Terrorists

In "Of Wiretaps, Google Searches and Handguns," on ABCNews.com, the mathematician John Allen Paulos took a statistical look at government electronic surveillance, arguing that widespread wiretapping programs produce so much information that it is essentially impossible to follow up on the leads generated.

Even if an accurate profile of potential terrorists is drawn, the fact that such a vanishingly small percentage of us are terrorists means that the vast majority of the people investigated will be innocent. Even if the probability that the purported terrorist profile is accurate were an astonishing 99 percent (if someone has terrorist ties, the profile will pick him or her out 99 percent of the time, and, for ease of computation, if someone does not have such ties, the profile will pick him or her out only 1 percent of the time), most of the hits would be false positives.

For illustration, let's further assume that one out of a million American residents has terrorist ties -- that's approximately 300 people -- and the profile will pick out 99 percent, or 297 of them. Great. But what of the approximately 300 million innocent Americans? The profile will also pick out 1 percent of them, "only" three million.

Your Brain on Super Bowl Ads

Edge.com has an article titled "Who Really Won the Super Bowl?" by Marco Iacoboni, a neuroscientist at the U.C.L.A. Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center. Dr. Iacoboni and his colleagues used fast magnetic resonance imaging technology to observe brain responses to commercials shown during the Super Bowl.

The overwhelming winner among the Super Bowl ads is the Disney-NFL "I am going to Disney" ad. The Disney ad elicited strong responses in orbito-frontal cortex and ventral striatum, two brain regions associated with processing of rewards. Also, the Disney ad induced robust responses in mirror neuron areas, indicating identification and empathy. Further, the circuit for cognitive control, encompassing anterior cingulate cortex and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, was highly active while watching the Disney ad.

The three biggest flops seem to be the Burger King ad, the FedEx ad, and the GoDaddy ad. Three quite interesting features that come out of this instant study are the following: first, people -- when interviewed -- tend to say what they are expected to say, but their brain seems to say the opposite. For instance, female subjects may give verbally very low "grades" to ads using actresses in sexy roles, but their mirror neuron areas seem to fire up quite a bit, suggesting some form of identification and empathy. Second we saw strong habituation effects, such that the second time around the commercial induces much weaker responses. Third -- and this is probably interesting to neuroscientists -- among brain regions associated with complex social behavior, we observed a mix of activation and de-activation.

READING FILE Correction: February 19, 2006, Sunday An excerpt in the Reading File column last Sunday from an article about brain responses to Super Bowl advertisements misidentified the Web site that carried the full article. It is edge.org, not edge.com.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section 4, Page 5 of the National edition with the headline: READING FILE; On Friedan, a Feminist Critique. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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