Brain and Behavior
mixingmemory | December 21, 2006I'm traveling today, so I'm posting something I wrote along time ago instead of offering anything new. This one's from the blogs early days, so I really hadn't gotten used to this blogging thing when I wrote it. Also, in the time between its original posting and now, I've learned a bit more about the study of humor in cognitive science. Maybe at some point in the future, I'll write a new post on the topic. For now, though, here's the post, originally from 11/27/04.
Cognitive Science of Humor
Much like creativity in general, the cognitive aspects of humor haven't been widely studied. While…
mixingmemory | December 20, 2006I'm going to be traveling tomorrow, so I'm spending today getting ready. Instead of a long post about research, I thought I'd link you to a paper Stephen E. G. Lea by in press at Behavioral and Brain Sciences. For those of you who don't know, Behavioral and Brain Sciences has a target article (the linked paper is a target article), followed by peer commentaries on that article, and then the target article's author's response to those commentaries. The discussion of this paper should be pretty interesting. Here's the abstract:
Money as tool, money as drug: The biological psychology of a strong…
clock | December 19, 2006If you really read this blog 'for the articles', you know some of my recurrent themes, e.g., that almost every biological function exhibits cycles and that almost every cell in every organism contains a more-or-less functioning clock. Here is a new paper that combines both of those themes very nicely, but I'll start with a little bit of background first.
Daily Rhythms in Sensory Sensitivity
If almost every biochemical, physiological and behavioral function exhibits daily cycles, it is no surprise that such rhythms have been discovered in sensory sensitivity of many sensory modalities -…
cortex | December 19, 2006The purpose of dreaming is learning. While you are sleeping, your brain is digesting the day, deciding which new experiences to consolidate into long-term memory. That's the implication of Matthew Wilson's latest paper, which documented the neural activity in the brains of dreaming rats. Here's the Times:
The finding, reported on the Web site of the journal Nature Neuroscience by Daoyun Ji and Matthew A. Wilson, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, showed that during nondreaming sleep, the neurons of both the hippocampus and the neocortex replayed memories -- in repeated…
mixingmemory | December 19, 2006One of the more sophisticated theories in embodied cognition is Lawrence Barsalou's perceptual symbol systems theory (which I've talked about before, here). Starting from the premise that cognition is for action, it argues that concepts are represented in the same brain systems that directly serve perception and action. In the realm of memory, Arthur Glenberg put it this way1:
Suppose that memory and conceptualization work in the service of perception and action. In this case, conceptualization is the encoding of patterns of possible physical interaction with a three- dimensional world. These…
j7uy5 | December 16, 2006Ambidextrous More Likely To Be Bisexual; Why Do We Care, Anyway?
A new study coming from the
href="http://www.uoguelph.ca/" rel="tag">University
of Guelph.
href="http://www.psychology.uoguelph.ca/d_faculty/peters.html">Dr.
Michael Peters, a neuropsychologist, analyzed a survey of
about 255,000 people, and come up with some interesting findings about
human sexuality. Among them, is the observation that
bisexuality was significantly more common in ambidextrous
persons:
href="http://www.uoguelph.ca/atguelph/06-12-06/featureshand.shtml">On
the Other HandStudy refutes…
oracknows | December 16, 2006Here's an interesting little tidbit of a study:
Newswise -- Lead chelation therapy -- a chemical treatment to remove lead from the body -- can significantly reduce learning and behavioral problems that result from lead exposure, a Cornell study of young rats finds.
However, in a further finding that has implications for the treatment of autistic children, the researchers say that when rats with no lead in their systems were treated with the lead-removing chemical, they showed declines in their learning and behavior that were similar to the rats that were exposed to lead.
Chelating drugs,…
dmunger | December 14, 2006Clinician Dr. Louann Brizendine is quoted in the New York Times as saying that she doesn't do research because "I don't want to give patients a placebo. It's cruel." The interviewer pushes her on the issue, pointing out that in the long term, controlled studies are necessary in order to determine the efficacy of treatments. Her reply: "I am glad someone does it, but I'd rather help each female brain that walks into my clinic walk out in better shape."
Adam Kolber wonders if something might have been lost in the transcription of the interview, but I don't doubt that Brizendine's sentiments may…
clock | December 11, 2006How does that work? (April 03, 2005)
-------------------------------------------------Alcohol 'binges' in rats during early brain development cause circadian rhythm problems
Rats are nocturnal animals and normally begin their activity slightly after darkness sets in. The rats that had been exposed to alcohol began activities slightly before darkness set in.
When normal rats - or for that matter, humans and other animals - are in situations without environmental cues about day and night, the body's circadian clock generally drives behaviors on a cycle slightly greater than 24 hours.…
dmunger | December 7, 2006Very few of us can avoid stereotyping others. When we're actively trying to avoid racial stereotyping, we often end up looking ridiculous. But the very fact that we can try to avoid it suggests that there's something more to racial stereotypes than a "stereotype center" in the brain. If stereotyping was completely automatic, we'd be no more able to resist stereotypes than we are able to stop seeing.
So if we can try to resist stereotyping, why doesn't resisting always work? The article I just linked points to a study showing that people -- even police officers -- are more likely to mistakenly…
clock | December 6, 2006This is an appropriate time of year for this post (February 05, 2006)...
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So, why do I say that it is not surprising the exposure to bright light alleviates both seasonal depression and other kinds of depression, and that different mechanisms may be involved?
In mammals, apart from visual photoreception (that is, image formation), there is also non-visual photoreception. The receptors of the former are the rods and cones that you all learned about in middle school. The receptors for the latter are a couple of thousand Retinal Ganglion…
jstemwedel | December 4, 2006There are two features of games that have always appealed to me. First, the good ones put you in a place where you are explicitly thinking out different ways the future could play out -- the possibilities that are more or less likely given what you know (and what you don't know). Second, many of them let you drag someone else (whether your opponent or your teammate) into thinking through these situations, too.
Any game where you have to make choices about what to do involves some sort of strategy, and formulating or refining strategies is a work-out for your brain. This means that games,…
dmunger | November 30, 2006An article in ScienceDaily proclaims Success A Family Affair? Willingness To Take Risks And Trust Others Are Inherited, Study Suggests.
Actually, the study suggests the opposite: C only that children have similar risk profiles to their parents. This indicates that risk-taking behavior isn't inherited, but learned. I This study can't show whether the trait was inherited, learned, or acquired through a combination of both. For example, if it was inherited, then it might be the case that sometimes kids would be riskier than their parents, and sometimes less risky -- just like brunette parents…
mixingmemory | November 27, 2006I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go.
Once the sin against God was the greatest sin; but God died, and these sinners died with him. To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing, and to esteem the entrails of the unknowable higher than the meaning of the earth...
What is the greatest experience you can have? It is the hour of the great…
mixingmemory | November 22, 2006We all know that there are gender differences in neuroanatomy, as well as in some cognitive tasks (females tend to do better on memory and verbal tasks, men on spatial tasks) and both cognitive and emotional development, though it's not clear how the cognitive/behavioral/developmental differences relate to the differences in neuroanatomy. Research on gender differences is often plagued by confounding variables such as sociological factors that are damn near impossible to control for. Jumping into the gender-differences game takes a lot of guts, or extreme naivete, then, because not only is…
retrospectacle | November 21, 2006By now, much of academia has heard about the goings-on at MIT. Susumu Tonegawa, head of the prestigious Picowar Institute at MIT and Nobel Laureate, is stepping down from his position following a university review which found he "behaved inappropriately when he tried to discourage a young female scholar from accepting a job offer from MIT." He was accused by 11 other faculty memebers of stating that he would not interact with her if she accepted the position, and that her presence would make for an uncomfortable situation for the neuroscience institute due to perceived academic competition…
purepedantry | November 21, 2006I am getting on a plane today, so here is some interesting reading from throughout the web to tide you over til tomorrow:
The Neurophilosopher has a fascinating article on how parasites affect the behavior of their hosts, sometimes even burrowing into their brains -- just like pod people!!!
The Scientist on a scientific approach to diversity programs.
The Economist on the floundering European climate change abatement program, and an appeal for the legalization of kidney sales.
Science Fiction Book Club has the top 50 best science fiction books of the last 50 years.
thusspakezuska | November 20, 2006Following up on my entry on Joanna Russ's book, How to Suppress Women's Writing, and its application to women in science and engineering...
In discussing "prohibitions", Russ notes"
First of all, it's important to realize that the absence of formal prohibitions against committing art [or science] does not preclude the presence of powerful, informal ones.
These include poverty and lack of leisure, the latter arising from overwhelming duties to family and home. Even our heroines had to overcome this latter prohibition:
Marie Curie's biographer, her daughter Eve, describes her mother's…
purepedantry | November 20, 2006Women are more susceptible to Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) even when the type of the stressful event is controlled for:
Males experience more traumatic events on average than do females, yet females are more likely to meet diagnostic criteria for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), according to a review of 25 years of research reported in the November issue of Psychological Bulletin, published by the American Psychological Association (APA).
The authors reviewed 290 studies conducted between 1980 and 2005 to determine who is more at risk for potentially traumatic events (PTE) and…
neurontic | November 19, 2006I'm angry with my science teachers. I wish I could track them all down and give them a good tongue-lashing. They allowed me to get all the way through 12th grade believing that science was the domain of left-brainers: People who enjoyed computations and categorizations. People who seemed bent on bleeding life of all its color and distilling it down to a series of sterile "laws." They never gave me any indication that learning the periodic table, the laws of physics, or the basics of evolution was just the grunt work--the equivalent of practicing scales so that you could go on to tackle Bach…