Brain and Behavior
tfk | December 30, 2008Several of the blogs have pointed to the Disco. Inst.'s shameful abuse of the suicide of Jesse Kilgore in an end-of-year fundraising pitch. Kilgore, a college student who had recently returned from military service in Iraq, had been challenging aspects of his upbringing, and his father (a fundamentalist pastor) concluded that reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion inspired Jesse to kill himself. The Disco. Inst. decided that the best thing to do was to glom onto that father's grief in order to drum up end-of-year donation.
Given that the suicide rate for Iraq veterans keeps rising, I'd…
gregladen | December 4, 2008"Henry G. Molaison, 82, of Windsor Locks, CT died on Tuesday. He is known in the medical and scientific literatures as "the amnesic patient, H.M." He was born in Manchester, CT and graduated from East Hartford High School. In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation at the Hartford Hospital to relieve his seizure disorder. Immediately after the operation, Mr. Molaison showed a profound amnesia, which became the topic of intense scientific study for more than five decades....he is the most widely studied and famous case in the neuroscience literature of the 20th and 21st centuries.…
gregladen | December 3, 2008Everybody's talking about the Body Swap Illusion. So why should I bother. Here's what you need to know:
The original paper is here, at PLoS.
Here are some blog posts on the topic:
Neurophilosophy: The Body Swap Illusion
Not Exactly Rocket Science: The Quantum Leap effect.
gregladen | November 18, 2008Just when you think you should not go back into the water, something like this comes along and tells you....
You were absolutely right to not want to go back into the water.
That was a Gordian worm sliding out of a cricket.
And this is a Zombie Snail Parasite:
gregladen | November 15, 2008Atheists are smarter than Calvinists in Dutch Study. But, the Calvinists are quicker at identifying small shapes than the Atheists.
Despite the abundance of evidence that human perception is penetrated by beliefs and expectations, scientific research so far has entirely neglected the possible impact of religious background on attention. Here we show that Dutch Calvinists and atheists, brought up in the same country and culture and controlled for race, intelligence, sex, and age, differ with respect to the way they attend to and process the global and local features of complex visual…
grrlscientist | November 14, 2008tags: ravens, Bernd Heinrich, genius bird, National Geographic, streaming video
This interesting National Geographic video shows how Bernd Heinrich designed an experiment to test the intelligence of ravens [2:07].
gregladen | October 13, 2008 A very good day of grunting worms. Credit: Ken Catania So-called Gene-Culture Co-Evolution can be very obvious and direct or it can be very subtle and complex. In almost all cases, the details defy the usual presumptions people make about the utility of culture, the nature of human-managed knowledge, race, and technology. I would like to examine two cases of gene-culture interaction: One of the earliest post-Darwinian Synthesis examples addressing malaria and sickle-cell disease, and the most recently published example, the worm-grunters of Florida, which it turns out is best explained…
gregladen | October 4, 2008Constructivism. Determinism. It is all a bunch of hooey.
A recent paper published by PLoS (Culture Shapes How We Look at Faces) throws a sopping wet blanket on widely held deterministic models of human behavior. In addition, the work underscores the sometimes spooky cultural differences that can emerge in how people see things, even how people think.
The following is from a PLoS press release:
Because face recognition is effortlessly achieved by people from all different cultures it was considered to be a basic mechanism universal among humans. However, by using analyses inspired by…
gregladen | July 24, 2008A recently published study seems to indicate that adult brain volume is reduced in individuals with significant lead exposure during childhood. While this study may lead to important findings linking lead to reduced cognitive function, it is important to note that observed effect is very small, very hard to link to specific outcomes, and may not exist. But it is worth a further look.
The study in question is summarized below and, as an Open Access publication, is totally accessible for you to read. The upshot is that individuals who were part of a long term study (also discussed here)…
gregladen | July 10, 2008Well, I can't answer that question. But in a related matter, Koelsch et al. ask, in a new paper published in PLoS ONE, Why Musicians Make Us Weep and Computers Don't? ... obviously, they have not met my computer.
The study investigates the somatic effects of "...unexpected chords of piano sonatas as they were originally arranged by composers, and as they were played by professional pianists." This was compared with rote non-emotional playing of the music. The somatic effects investigated included event-related brain potentials (ERPs), skin conductance responses (SCRs) and heart rate (HR…
tfk | June 26, 2008My high school buddy James Grimmelmann unleashes on Newsweek:
Tony Dokoupil manages to write 1,200 words in Newsweek about professional psychics without once telling his readers the single most relevant fact: Psychic powers don’t exist. Would Newsweek run an interview with the Easter Bunny? Would it let Jane Bryant Quinn suggest investing in perpetual motion machine startups? Would it print travel tips for hitching a ride on a flying saucer to Neptune? But here it is, an article whose sum and substance is that hiring a psychic could do wonders for your business.
This article is professional…
gregladen | June 20, 2008Blood flow in the brain is linked to neuronal activity. Therefore, various 'brain scanning' techniques can be used to observe neuronal activity in the brain. This has led to an astonishing revolution in knowledge of how the brain works. Of course, you knew that already.
Also astonishing is that the reason for changes in blood flow in relation to what neurons are doing is unknown! We know this system works, but we don't know why!
Until now...
It turns out that it is the glia cells. There a different kinds of glia, and they are very important in brain function. Glia do a lot of…
gregladen | June 17, 2008Check it out:
Emma McGrattan, the senior vice-president of engineering for computer-database company Ingres-and one of Silicon Valley's highest-ranking female programmers-insists that men and women write code differently. Women are more touchy-feely and considerate of those who will use the code later, she says. They'll intersperse their code-those strings of instructions that result in nifty applications and programs-with helpful comments and directions, explaining why they wrote the lines the way they did and exactly how they did it.
The code becomes a type of "roadmap" for others who might…
gregladen | May 17, 2008Hacker and writer Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows. (Notice the gleam of intelligence in their little black eyes?) After a long amateur study of corvid behavior, he's come up with an elegant machine that may form a new bond between animal
(repost)
gregladen | May 13, 2008There is an interesting and important follow up related to a TED Talk that a lot of readers of this blog found interesting (Sherwin Nuland: A history of electroshock therapy) at The Corpus Callosum:
Grappling With Stigma: Influence of Social Media
A while back, Gred Laden and Dr. Shock independently linked to a remarkable video. In it, a famous author-surgeon-professor reveals that he had had an episode of severe depression. Moreover, he underwent treatment with electroconvulsive therapy. It worked, he got back to work, and went on to have a distinguished career. The video can be seen…
gregladen | May 7, 2008Your brain ... to explore the nature of the conscious mind.
You are the teacher, and you've got a classroom full of reasonably well behaved students.
Tell them: "I want you to close your eyes, and I'm going to ask you a question. ...
Quietly work out the answer to the question and keep your eyes closed until I tell you to open them.... Do not say the answer to your question out loud ... and keep your eyes closed."
When they have their eyes closed, say: "in your apartment or home .... where you live ... how many windows are there? Keep your eyes closed."
Now, watch them as they work…
gregladen | April 25, 2008Life is complex. The way a living system works can be described in a series of increasingly refined models, each fleshing out details of the previous model. Typically, description at one level raises questions about what is happening at the finer level. These questions induce hypotheses which drive experimental work which produces ever more detailed knowledge.
A paper about memory, just published, is an example of one incremental step in this process. In short, this research works out some of the fine detail at the molecular level for the process of forming visual memories.
In mammals…
gregladen | April 5, 2008Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.
gregladen | March 18, 2008SciBarCamp is a gathering of scientists and others, in an effort to create connections across diverse interests, and, wherever possible, annoy the heck out of Larry Moran.
Larry was at SciBarCamp and had a run in with a couple of other dozen people, finding himself as the ONLY person in the room with a particular viewpoint, and getting very little sympathy for it.
According to Moran:
At one point there was a group of us talking about a number of different things when the topic of consciousness arose. One member of the group happened to mention that humans were special because they are "…
gregladen | March 13, 2008Blowflies. They are nearly impossible to swat dead, because they are so good at getting out of the way, and they are very very fast. For this reason, the blowfly, while an annoying creature, is an excelent model for research into rapid sensory information processing.
A team of scientists from Indiana University, Princeton University and the Los Alamos National Laboratory recently gained new insight into how blowflies process visual information. The findings, published in an article in the Public Library of Science Journals, show that the precise, sub-millisecond timing of "spikes" from…