Brain and Behavior

If there's one thing I've learned during the last seven years about the antivaccine crowd invested in the idea that vaccines cause autism, it's that it reacts with extreme hostility to any sort of studies that cast doubt upon their pet idea that vaccines cause autism. That's somewhat understandable, given how much of their identity so many members of the antivaccine movement have invested in their idea, but not all studies that fail to support the central dogma of the antivaccine movement (i.e., that vaccines cause autism and are in general evil) are created equal, at least not with respect…
No one credits heavy drinking with making people smarter - the mind-numbing effects are well documented. Odds are that if you haven't experienced this personally, you've witnessed it in the foolish antics of others. The clear correlation between rapidly diminishing intelligence and rising alcohol consumption is no secret. But the long-term effects may go deeper than a morning headache or a need to wear sunglasses inside. A new study conducted at Brookhaven National Laboratory reveals that genetic factors can make some individuals more susceptible than others to lasting neurological damage…
I wrote last month about the role of chronic diseases in healthcare-cost growth, so I was excited to see a new report from the Institute of Medicine called Living Well with Chronic Illness: A Call for Public Health Action. When I think of chronic illness, diabetes and heart disease are what leap to my mind -- in part because they're so tied to the lifestyle factors of smoking, inadequate exercise, and poor nutrition, and in part because they cost our health system so much money. The IOM report notes that chronic illness represents 75% of the $2 trillion the US spends each year on healthcare…
Diffusion MRI Tractography in the brain white matter. Some drugs work well because they are designed to hit a single, well understood target. Consider penicillin. In a simplified sense, penicillin destroys a single enzyme that bacteria need to divide and to infect you, thereby killing the harmful bacteria. But what about psychiatric drugs? Is there a comparable, single target in the brain to treat depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorder (ADD)? No. So, it is no wonder that the popular drug Ritalin, used to treat ADD for millions of children and adolescents is, by some standards,…
In a very interesting way. As a regular reader of this blog, you know that IQ and similar measures are determined by a number of factors, and for most "normal" (modal?) individuals, one's heritage (genes) is rarely important. Putting it another way, variation across individuals in IQ and other measures have been shown again and again to be determined by things like home environment, diet and nutrition, and even immediate social context. Here's another finding supporting this: Our cognitive abilities and decision-making skills can be dramatically hindered in social settings where we feel…
Down Syndrome's Dolls. One of this year's top finalists in the Intel Science Talent Search is a High School student studying self image of children with Down's Syndrome, using dolls. Such creativity gives me hope for our next generation of scientists. This competition has launched many careers, including my own when I was a finalist in the then Westinghouse Science Talent competition {my topic was not as interesting, in retrospect.} Below are the top 40 finalists. I love the diversity of topics! California Arcadia Li, Jiacheng (Arcadia High School) Algorithm-Based Fault Tolerance for…
Another list for your reading, gift-giving and collection development pleasure. Every year for the last bunch of years I've been linking to and posting about all the "year's best sciencey books" lists that appear in various media outlets and shining a bit of light on the best of the year. All the previous 2011 lists are here. This post includes the following: Booklist Online Editors' Choice. The Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President By Candice Millard Becoming Dr. Q: My Journey from Migrant Farm Worker to Brain Surgeon By Alfredo Quiñones-…
The very first sign Judy Mikovits was not just a little 'off-her-rocker' kook-coo, but full on 'off-the-rocker-set-it-on-fire-and-dancing-around-the-flames-nude-while-using-feces-as-war-paint' kook-coo, was this comment she made about XMRV, vaccines, and autism, before her shit paper was even published:"On that note, if I might speculate a little bit," she said, "This might even explain why vaccines would lead to autism in some children, because these viruses live and divide and grow in lymphocytes -- the immune response cells, the B and the T cells. So when you give a vaccine, you send your…
Dr. Nicholas Grahame and colleagues at Indiana University-Purdue University in Indianapolis have selectively bred mice that prefer drinking alcohol and apparently binge drink. Until now, other mice would choose water over alcohol. These inebriated mice are the first model of severe human alcoholism that not only models the blood alcohol levels, but also the behavior. Researchers are using these mice to try to understand the mechanisms driving the mice to drink and the pathology of alcoholism in the brain. The goal is to develop therapies to treat alcoholism in humans. It is a good thing…
The presumption being examined here is that humans are divisible into different groups (races would be one term for those groups) that are genetically distinct from one another in a way that causes those groups to have group level differences in average intelligence, as measured by IQ. More exactly, this post is about the sequence of arguments that are usually made when people try to make this assertion. The argument usually starts out noting that there are dozens of papers that document group differences in IQ. I'll point out right now that most of those papers are published in journals with…
This is a rewrite and amalgamation, into one post, of a series of earlier posts written for non-geeks just starting out with Linux. The idea is to provide the gist, a few important facts, and some fun suggestions, slowly and easily. At some level all operating systems are the same, but in some ways that will matter to you, Linux is very different from the others. The most important difference, which causes both the really good things and the annoying things to be true, is that Linux and most of the software that you will run on Linux is OpenSource, as opposed to proprietary AND it is…
J. Freedom du Lac reports in the Washington Post that Army Spec. David Emanuel Hickman, killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad on November 14th, was the 4,474th US servicemember to be killed in Iraq. With all the US troops now gone from Iraq, Hickman's death may well be the last servicemember fatality directly attributed to this conflict. The number of Iraqi deaths is much higher and much less precise; the Iraq Body Count website puts it between 104,122 and 113,700. And as a 2009 American Public Health Association policy statement points out, the consequences are greater than death alone. Here'…
Last week, I applied a little not-so-Respectful Insolence to a movie about a physician and "researcher" named Stanislaw Burzynski, MD, PhD, founder of the Burzynski Clinic and Burzynski Research Institute in Houston. I refer you to my original smackdown for details, but in brief Dr. Burzynski claimed in the 1970s to have made a major breakthrough in cancer therapy through his discovery of anticancer substances in the urine that he dubbed "antineoplastons," which turned out to be mainly modified amino acids and peptides. Since the late 1970s, when he founded his clinic, Dr. Burzynski has been…
This week's new Weizmann science stories are on ants and bats. Two different models for investigating human behavior? Yes, but not exactly in the ways you might imagine, and so much more than that. Dr. Ofer Feinerman, the "ant scientist," is a new member of the Physics Faculty. In his graduate research under Prof. Elisha Moses in the Physics of Complex Systems Department, Feinerman created artificial circuits out of neurons. Now he has turned to investigating the complexities of ant societies. What, you might ask, do neurons and ant colonies have to do with physics? The answer is: They…
I've been thinking about the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch. You remember the Holy Hand Grenade, don't you? It was in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where a cleric goes on and on about how "three shall be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, neither count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three." Yesterday, I counted two and am now proceeding to three. I figured that, after spending two posts on how Burzynski's minions and shills (in particular a man named Marc Stephens) have been making baseless legal threats…
If you read only one book this holiday season, make it all of the following twenty or so! But seriously ... I'd like to do something today that I've been meaning to do, quite literally, for years. I want to run down a selection of readings that would provide any inquisitive person with a solid grounding in Behavioral Biological theory. At the very outset you need to know that this is not about Evolutionary Psychology. Evolutionary Psychology is something different. I'll explain some other time what the differences are. For now, we are only speaking of fairly traditional Darwinian…
Billie Bainbridge is four years old, and she has an inoperable brain tumor, and her prognosis is not good. Her family is desperate, and has been frantically trying to raise money from the community to cover the costs of a treatment they've been told might cure her. They need £200,000. They are asking the public to contribute. Unfortunately, the treatment they want to give her is antineoplaston therapy: it's pure bunk. The clinic that is trying to suck large sums of money away from the family of a dying child is the Burzynski clinic. So in addition to being a quack, Burzynski is now a vampire…
Kitties experience pain and suffering, which turns out to be a theological problem. If a god introduced pain and death into the world because wicked ol' Eve was disobedient, why is god punishing innocent animals? It seems like a bit of a rotten move to afflict the obedient along with the disobedient — shouldn't god have just stricken humanity with the wages of sin (or better yet, just womankind)? William Lane Craig has an answer. His answer involves simply waving the problem away — animals don't really feel pain — and he drags in science to prop up his claim. Basically, Craig is playing the…
Hand in hand togetherWe shall not be moved "We Shall Not Be Moved," Trad. civil rights song On Wednesday, November 2, the people of Oakland peacefully, politely, closed downtown Oakland and the Port of Oakland – the nation's fifth busiest port. It's hard to say how many people spent at least part of their day at the intersection of 14th Street at Broadway. Broadway was closed for two long blocks, the side streets were, too, and all were filled with people. The plaza in front of City Hall was filled as well, with tents, with free food, with DJs, with silkscreening stations, with…
The very first red flag that something was very, very wrong with the 'XMRV=CFS' paper went up before the actual paper was published. On the woo-rag Huffington Post, the anti-vaxer David Kirby posted a very, very odd comment from the lead researcher on the paper, Judy Mikovits:And then Dr. Mikovits dropped a bombshell that is sure to spark controversy. "On that note, if I might speculate a little bit," she said, "This might even explain why vaccines would lead to autism in some children, because these viruses live and divide and grow in lymphocytes -- the immune response cells, the B and the T…