Brain and Behavior
oracknows | September 1, 2010The comment thread for my post last week about how philosophical vaccine exemptions in California are endangering herd immunity is rapidly approaching 500 comments as I write this and may well surpass that number by the time this post "goes live" in the morning. I mention this because buried in the comment thread are a number of comments by our old "friend," that anti-vaccine-sympathetic pediatrician to the stars, Dr. Jay Gordon doing what Dr. Jay does best and basically making a fool of himself on matters of vaccine science through his preference for anecdote over sound epidemiology and…
gregladen | August 27, 2010A recent paper provides the groundwork to establish a way for exercise to diminish appetite. Or, more likely, for sedentary behavior to increase appetite.
It is well known that exercise burns calories. Personally, I think that's overrated: Strength building raises your metabolic demand, and THAT burns calories. But that is not the main topic at hand. New research indicates that exercise also increases the sensitivity of neurons that are related to the control of the feeling of satiation. Therefore, you feel full rather than hungry sooner and/or more often.
In rodents. So far.
The…
pharyngula | August 21, 2010This is revoltingly narrow-minded and stupid behavior by our military. We've got a Christian kook, a Major General James Chambers, who has mistaken morale and discipline for indoctrination in the Christian faith. He's running a program called the Spiritual Fitness (whatever the hell that means) Concert Series at army posts in Virginia. This program brought in a Christian rock group to perform, which is annoying enough, but then attendance was optional in name only. At least one company was marched to the doors of the event, and then told they had a choice: attend or be disciplined.
Those of…
oracknows | August 19, 2010At the risk of once again irritating long time readers who've hear me say this before, I can't resist pointing out that, of all the various forms of "alternative medicine" other than herbal medicines (many of which are drugs, just adulterated, impure drugs), acupuncture was the one treatment that, or so I thought, might actually have a real therapeutic effect. Don't get me wrong; I never bought magical mystical mumbo-jumbo about "meridians" and "unblocking the flow of qi" (that magical mystical life energy that can't be detected by scientists but that practitioners of woo claim to be able to…
developingintelligence | August 13, 2010There are a few fascinating papers to come out recently that I won't have time to cover in detail, but which people may find interesting. References and abstracts after the jump:
Watson & Strayer (2010). Supertaskers: Profiles in extraordinary multitasking ability. Psychon Bull Rev.
Abstract: Theory suggests that driving should be impaired for any motorist who is concurrently talking on a cell phone. But is everybody impaired by this dual-task combination? We tested 200 participants in a high-fidelity driving simulator in both single- and dual-task conditions. The dual task involved…
jgoldman | August 7, 2010Dear friend of the blog and frequent commenter the Dog Zombie just got her masters!!!!! She studies dog brains by pursuing DVM and MS degrees. One degree down, and two to go!
She writes (via email) that she was
a little worried that people would think "why do I care about something touchy-feely like whether hospitalized dogs are stressed?" But people did show up, and asked really good questions, so I gather that they were listening and absorbing. A lot of people told me I did a good job, so I presume that I did. Actual defense went fine. Really glad to be done :)
Personally I think it is…
oracknows | August 4, 2010Of all the bizarre forms of antivaccine autism quackery, one of the strangest has to be Mark and David Geier's "Lupron protocol." I've written about it many times, dating back to 2006 and, more recently, when the Chicago Tribune provided the first coverage I'm aware of of the Geiers' quackery in a major newspaper, thanks to Trine Tsouderos. If you want the details, feel free to click on the links, but I'll boil it down for purposes of this post.
Basically, the father-and-son team of autism woo-meisters who operate out of the basement of the father's Silver Spring, MD house, Mark and David…
jgoldman | August 3, 2010Here are my Research Blogging Editor's Selections for this week:
"Touch imagery has always been a useful storytelling tool," says Livia Blackburne of her eponymous blog. "We talk about warm smiles, slippery personalities, getting caught between a rock and a hard place." But does touch imagery serve a larger purpose, perhaps helping give structure to human thought?
"The idea that mirror neurons support action understanding is by far the dominant interpretation of the function of these cells in the monkey motor system. However, it is not the only interpretation," according to Greg Hickock of…
jstemwedel | August 2, 2010With this post, I say goodbye to ScienceBlogs.
Am I leaving because of the fiasco with the PepsiCo blog? Not directly.
That's not to say that there weren't serious issues raised by the whole incident. Many of these lie in the realm of journalistic ethics, at least as understood by people you might regard as affiliated with old school journalistic outlets (notwithstanding the fact that many such outlets currently have a significant online presence). The analyses by Paul Raeburn, Curtis Brainard, and John Rennie all do a nice job setting out the central issues in case, so do click through to…
oracknows | August 2, 2010About six months ago, I applied my usual brand of not-so-Respectful Insolence to what I termed unforgivable medical errors. These are errors that are so obviously harmful and lethal that there is no excuse for not putting systems into place to prevent them or so egregiously careless that there is, quite simply, no excuse for them to occur. As I mentioned before, there are a handful of such "unforgivable" errors in surgery. Although not all surgeons would necessarily agree on the specific identities of all of them, there are some upon which nearly all surgeons would agree. Examples such as…
cagapakis | July 30, 2010
I have a very weak constitution. It doesn't take much time on a moving vehicle of any type to make be barf, and I've hurled all over gorgeous coastal areas in tourist destinations around the world. There was that one time in Italy, snapping photos of the incredible shoreline caves (now dubbed barf grottos), that one time scuba diving in Belize (after I had made it to the surface, thankfully), and in lobby trashcans of various finally stationary destinations (the video is of me, my sister, and my fiancé inadvisedly spinning around while at an archeological site in Greece earlier this summer…
jgoldman | July 29, 2010Have you heard about NCBI ROFL? It's a previously-independent blog that has been incorporated into "Discoblog," one of the blogs at Discover Magazine. What they do is find amusing or funny abstracts by searching Pubmed (which is run by the NCBI - National Center for Biomedical Information) and just post the abstracts. No commentary, no interpretation, just the text of the abstract. A lot of times I actually find the abstracts that they choose to post amusing. It is amusing that someone has decided to use superglue to remove objects that are stuck in peoples' ears, or that wooden kitchen…
oracknows | July 29, 2010Funny how everything old is new again, isn't it?
Yes, if there's one thing I've learned over nearly six years of blogging, it's that, sooner or later, everything is recycled, and I do mean everything. At least, that was the thought going through my mind when I came across PZ's discussion of a clueless wonder who appears to be advocating a science section in that cesspit of anti-vaccine quackery and quantum woo, The Huffington Post, whose proclivities for pseudoscience have led its activities to be characterized as a war on medical science. It's actually more than just a war on medical science…
oracknows | July 23, 2010Even after having been at this skeptical medical blogging game for nearly six years, every so often I still come across woo about which I had been previously unaware. It's hard to believe, but it's true. In fact, I'm beginning to think that, even if I were to keep blogging until I drop dead (hopefully at least thirty or forty years in the future), as I type out my last extra cantankerous bit of not-so-Respectful Insolence (my cantankerousness merely increasing with advancing age, of course), I would come across some new and spectacular form of woo that somehow had been missed during my forty-…
developingintelligence | July 23, 2010Decisions can be hard: the conflict you face in any decision can be increased if option A is not that much better than option B, or if option A is newly worse than option B. And then there are are just bad decisions, maybe hard only in retrospect. As illustrated by a 2009 J Neurosci article from Mitchell, Luo, Avny et al it seems that dorsal areas of the prefrontal cortex might help guide us in making tough decisions, whereas a ventrolateral prefrontal area might just alert us only after a bad decision was made.
To show this, they administered a reinforcement learning task to subjects…
developingintelligence | July 22, 2010Recent work has leveraged increasingly sophisticated computational models of neural processing as a way of predicting the BOLD response on a trial-by-trial basis. The core idea behind much of this work is that reinforcement learning is a good model for the way the brain learns about its environment; the specific idea is that expectations are compared with outcomes so that a "prediction error" can be calculated and minimized through reshaping expectations and behavior. This simple idea leads to exceedingly powerful insights into the way the brain works, with numerous applications to…
gregladen | July 22, 2010Remember Evolutionary Psychology? The theory?
It's over.
I think I've told the story elsewhere of having been at the birth of Evolutionary Psychology, down in room 14A in the Peabody Museum. If not, remind me some time and I'll tell it.
Evolutionary Psychology is a particular theory of how the mind works, how evolution has shaped that mind in certain predictable and testable ways, bla di bla di bla and so on and so forth. And, although there is something in there ... something in that theory ... that is useful, it is mostly not really very close to what happens when humans behave. Or…
grrlscientist | July 20, 2010
Unless you've been living under a rock, or you are the CEO of Seed Media Group (SMG), you are well aware that Bora Zivkovic left ScienceBlogs 24 hours ago. Shockingly, despite this important loss, Adam Bly, CEO of SMG, has not communicated with any of us who remain at ScienceBlogs about this loss either by telephone, email, text, twitter, carrier pigeon or even with smoke signals. As far as I am concerned, ScienceBlogs is now ZombieBlogs, the undead, a heartless and soulless brain-eating monster that once was a beautiful living ideal.
A significant number of us have been planning a strike,…
jgoldman | July 18, 2010From the archives...Figure 1: Does Mickey feel empathy?
It probably depends on how you define empathy. Empathy, by any definition, implies emotional sensitivity to the affective state of another. Sometimes the empathy response is automatic or reflexive, like when babies start to cry upon hearing another baby crying. Sometimes a strong cognitive component is required, such as for compassion. A more specific understanding of empathy requires similarity between the affective states of the observer and the observed, with an understanding that the observer feels a certain way because he has…
jstemwedel | July 16, 2010Dr. Free-Ride: I know you have some views, maybe, or questions, or something, about the American Academy of Pediatrics recommendations about children, adolescents, and television. Although it's not actually just television, it's other screens, too. So, first off, can I get your general reaction to the fact that your pediatrician even has a view about what you should be doing with respect to screen time?
Elder offspring: (Piteous wailing.)
Dr. Free-Ride: That's rather inarticulate.
Elder offspring: (Poses like the figure in "The Scream")
Dr. Free-Ride: While this shows that you've been…