Brain and Behavior
cortex | October 3, 2006Neuroscience now knows that chronic stress and impoverished environments - the two hallmarks of human poverty - are debilitating to the primate brain. Stress releases glucocorticoids which, if they hang around long enough, turn into poison, while impoverished environments diminish the growth and density of our dendrites. As I wrote in my profile of Elizabeth Gould:
The social implications of this research are staggering. If boring environments, stressful noises, and the primate's particular slot in the dominance hierarchy all shape the architecture of the brain--and Gould's team has shown…
dmunger | October 2, 2006Today's Zeitgeist points to a cute editorial cartoon.
The cartoon's joke is that all the studies that have been done connecting violent media to real youth violence, or soda consumption to childhood obesity, are just a big waste of money because it's obvious these things are connected. Now I have to agree that these things all seem quite obvious to me, but given the huge number of comments our posts on the impact of violent media always seem to generate, clearly this isn't a cut and dried topic.
We've also discussed some violent games which don't appear to lead to violent behavior. If all…
sporte | October 1, 2006Welcome to the fourth edition of Bio::Blogs!
This is the carnival where we explore topics at the intersection of computing, biology, and sometimes a bit human behavior.
In this edition, we consider issues with annotation, agonize over standards, explore the question of whether or not it's possible to tame those wild and wooly computational biologists and make them laugh their way into writing programs that other people can use, give the Perl fans something to do while waiting for that program to run, and much, much, more.
Today, we'll begin on the biology side of spectrum and work our way…
oracknows | September 28, 2006It was a late night in the O.R. last night; so I didn't get to spend my usual quality blogging time. However, it occurred to me. In honor of being called a "pharma moron" on Whale.to, coupled with all the antivaccination lunacy that's been infesting the comments of this blog, only to be tirelessly countered by certain regulars here, I thought I'd repost a blast from the past that I somehow missed reposting when I was on vacation last month. Yes, it's my piece about the "pharma shill" gambit. It appeared originally on August 11, 2005. I think its reappearance now is particularly appropriate,…
goodmath | September 27, 2006Just for fun, I've been doing a bit of poking around lately in evolutionary algorithms. It's really fascinating to experiment, and see what pops out - the results can be really surprising.
There is one fascinating example for which, alas, I've lost the reference, but here's the summary. Several groups have been looking at using evolutionary algorithm techniques for hardware design. (A good example of this is [Alexander Nicholson's work](http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/nicholson00evolution.html) .) A year or so ago, I saw a talk given by a group which was doing some experiments with EA for…
cevans | September 26, 2006Or, In which two primary concepts of modernity are introduced, batted around, and compared, without much of a resolution to speak of.
In the year 2000, Stephen Hawking wrote that the "next century will be the century of complexity." Of course, he wasn't referring to political quagmires or environmental degeneration, although he might as well have been, because all that shit is getting brambly. "Complexity" is a theoretical term, referring to systems whose behavioral phenomena cannot be easily explained by any conventional analysis of their constituent parts. Buckminster Fuller called it "…
cortex | September 22, 2006Ever since David Hume - our first great psychologist - it has been a well known fact that causation is a figment of our imagination. Although we perceive event A as causing event B, this perception is an illusion: necessary causation is not inherent in nature. As Hume wrote:
"We have no other notion of cause and effect, but that of certain objects, which have been always conjoin'd together, and which in all past instances have been found inseparable. We cannot penetrate into the reason of the conjunction. We only observe the thing itself, and always find that from the constant conjunction the…
cortex | September 20, 2006Porn is a big business. Every year, Americans spend $4 billion on video pornography, which makes the industry larger than the N.F.L., the N.B.A. or Major League Baseball. When you include Internet Web sites, porn networks and pay-per-view movies on cable and satellite, phone sex, and magazines, the porn business is estimated to total between $10 billion and $14 billion annually. As Frank Rich notes, "People spend more money for pornography in America in a year than they do on movie tickets, more than they do on all the performing arts combined." Sex sites are estimated to account for up to…
clock | September 18, 2006In this post from April 06, 2006, I present some unpublished data that you may find interesting.
Understanding the role of serotonin in depression has led to development of anti-depressant drugs, like Prozac. Much of the research in this area has been performed in Crustaceans: lobsters and crayfish. The opposite behavioral state of depression, something considered a normal state, could possibly best be described as self-confidence.
Self-confidence is expressed differently in different species, but seems to always be tied to high status in a social hierarchy. In crayfish, self-confidence is…
cevans | September 17, 2006
These days, few things are as commonplace in the landscape of scientific research than the perpetual yowl of opposition. Despite the fact that huge announcements in the sciences often aren't, off the bat, that thrilling ("two galaxies a million light years away collided and we aren't sure where the mass went!"), there still always seems to be someone that's up in arms. Most of the time, it's the usual suspects -- Baptists, the Bush administration, pro-lifers, and school boards in the midwest -- people whose interests are threatened, ideologically, by the potential of specific knowledge.…
ksharpe | September 12, 2006Respectful Insolence
Categories: Medicine, Philosophy of Science
Orac is a pseudonymous surgeon/scientist, and an ardent skeptic. He holds both MD and PhD degrees, and he is board certified as a general surgeon. He's also the proprietor of the Skeptic's Circle, a blog carnival dedicated to skepticism and critical thinking. On Respectful Insolence, he blogs about surgery, biomedical research, critical thinking, Holocaust denial, and--naturally--skepticism.
Retrospectacle
Categories: Brain & Behavior, Academia
A neuroscience PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, Shelley Batts grew…
clock | September 11, 2006
Here is the second post on the topic, from March 28, 2006. A couple of links are broken due to medieval understanding of permalinks by newspapers, but you will not miss too much, I hope....
Health Journal: Doctors probe why it's hard for many kids to get up (also Night Owls: Disorder may cause teens to sleep less):
"The parents get stigmatized as not having control over their kids when they can't get them to school in time," says James Wyatt, co-director of the sleep-disorders center at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago who is conducting research looking for ways to better diagnose…
purepedantry | September 11, 2006I talked earlier this year about a patient who recovered from a coma after 20 years. In that post, I discussed how -- with respect to the diagnostic criteria -- the difference between a persistent vegetative state and a minimally conscious state is the difference between someone who has only autonomic nervous activity and episodic conscious activity. In this way, someone who is in a minimally conscious state -- as that patient was -- still has the possibility for recovery even if recovery is very rare.
Here is another case of a woman in a persistent vegetative state discussed in the…
oracknows | September 11, 2006Today is the fifth anniversary of September 11. There will be a whole lot of verbiage put forth into the blogosphere, spanning the gauntlet from blaming all Muslims for the attack, to blaming America for bringing it upon itself, to the idiotic 9/11 conspiracy mongers who will claim that George Bush and/or the Mossad were responsible for blowing up the towers or that the planes that hit the tower were remote controlled. (Who knows? Perhaps the Masons and the Illuminati were involved as well, all as part of a plan to produce the dreaded One World Government.) Given all this verbiage, I wasn't…
pharyngula | September 7, 2006I was reading a review paper that was frustrating because I wanted to know more—it's on the evolution of complex brains, and briefly summarizes some of the current confusion about what, exactly, is involved in building a brain with complex problem solving ability. It's not as simple as "size matters"—we have to jigger the formulae a fair bit to take into account brain:body size ratios, for instance, to get humans to come out on top, and maybe bulk is an inaccurate proxy for more significant matters, such as the number of synapses and nerve conduction velocities.
There's also a growing amount…
cortex | September 6, 2006Over at Slate, Gregg Easterbrook proposes an audacious hypothesis: the rise of television viewing among infants is responsible for the current autism epidemic.
The idea is wholly speculative. No scientist has shown a link between autism and television, but so far as I could determine no scientist is working on this question, either--and maybe someone should be. Beginning in about 1980, TV watching in early childhood began to rise, coincident with the proliferation of affordable VCRs and cable channels offering nonstop cartoons and kids' shows. The child's brain is self-organizing in the first…
purepedantry | September 5, 2006My suspicion is that the people who know about neuroscience read the title of this and said: "Wow, Jake, there's a shocker. Tell us something we didn't know." Everyone else probably said: "Guh?" Therefore, I should probably explain why I think this finding is cool.
LTP or Long Term Potentiation is an experimental paradigm that is believed to simulate learning in vivo. In the paradigm, an exciting electrode and a recording electrode are placed into the brain of the animal, usually into an area called the hippocampus. The electrodes are position such that the action of the excitation…
clock | September 4, 2006Chris Chatham of Developing Intelligence blog wrote an excellent summary of the controversy over dolphin intelligence and adds his own thoughts on the matter, with which I agree:
In conclusion, there are countless reasons to doubt that dolphins are "dumber than goldfish," or indeed that popular musings about dolphin intelligence have been inaccurate. Of course, as Cognitive Daily points out, it is clear that they don't have human-level intelligence - whatever that may mean. On the other hand, Manger has developed a new theory about the evolution of the dolphin brain; unfortunately, any…
clock | September 4, 2006From November 28, 2005, a post about teaching...
There has been literally an explosion of new knowledge about malaria in the last ten years or so. It is an amazing disease. Looking at all the new findings coming out almost every week makes me salivate because of...teaching! Malaria is a fantastic case-study to keep mentioning over and over again throughout the course. Let me backtrack for a moment....
I teach general biology to adult non-science majors at a community college. It is a speed course, lasting only eight weeks. In eight meetings, one has to deliver an enormous amount of material…
clock | September 1, 2006What?....
There is a slang phrase in Serbo-Croatian that means "doing nothing; being idle; wasting time", and it is "hladiti jaja", which means "cooling (one's) balls". So, if you see a guy just sitting there, clutching a beer bottle and gazing into the distance, you may ask him "Hey, man, whatcha doin'?" and he may reply " 'ladim jaja", i.e., "I'm coolin' me balls".
Well, this slang phrase, indicating a thermoregulatory behavior, has its origin in the real theromoregulatory physiology. Yes, mammals have to cool their balls. That is why mammalian testes are located outside the body inside…