Brains and minds
ddobbs | December 8, 2008A few that rolled away with the tide ...
PsychCentral not impressed with Outliers
Look Who's in the Operating Room
From the Deutches Museum, tractors as core culture
And from Boing Boing, a Studley tool chest. And I was all excited to get my little canvas toolbag yesterday.
-
Technorati Tags:Malcolm Gladwell, Medtronics, Deutsches Museum, Wildlife
ddobbs | November 28, 2008
Jerome Kagan, a highly prominent developmental psychologist, weighs in the Dana Foundation's Cerebrum on the roots of the skyrocketing rates of diagnosis of childhood bipolar disorder, autism, and ADHD. "[it] is important ... to ask," he writes
whether this troubling [increase] reflects a true rise in mental illness or is the result of changes in the definition of childhood psychiatric disorders. The latter explanation is likely because the concept of psychopathology is ambiguous, and physicians have considerable latitude when they classify a child as mentally ill. Because a diagnosis of…
ddobbs | November 26, 2008If you liked the Grifters, you'll love this: Watch Skeptic editor Michael Shermer participate in a classic con called the pigeon drop. Beautiful stuff.
ddobbs | November 25, 2008More wheels coming off the bus.
Research Center Tied to Drug Company - NYTimes.com:
By GARDINER HARRIS
Published: November 24, 2008
When a Congressional investigation revealed in June that Dr. Joseph Biederman, a world-renowned child psychiatrist, had earned far more money from drug makers than he had reported to his university, he said that his interests were "solely in the advancement of medical treatment through rigorous and objective study."
But e-mail messages and internal documents from Johnson & Johnson made public in a court filing reveal that Dr. Biederman pushed the company to…
ddobbs | November 24, 2008Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa
As the Times reported Friday, Senator Charles Grassley's pharma-money sweep has taken down another huge player in psychiatry: Grassley revealed that Fred Goodwin, a former NIH director who has long hosted the award-winning NPR radio show "The Infinite Mind," which frequently examined controversies about psychopharmacology, had taken in over $1.3 million consulting and speaking fees from Big Pharma between 2000 and 2007 and failed to report that income to the show's listeners and, apparently, to its producers. (For rundowns on this, see Furious Seasons,…
ddobbs | November 21, 2008
This one hits close to home, as I live in Vermont. As Daniel Carlat notes, Vermont is one of the few states to actually require drug companies to disclose drug-company payments to MDs, but the state allowed exception for payments related to 'trade secrets.' The companies apparently made the most of this.
The Carlat Psychiatry Blog: How Drug Companies Hid Millions in Physician Payments in Vermont:
Vermont is one of a handful of states that requires drug companies to disclose their payments to physicians. But the law contains a loophole as big as the Ritz%u2014companies are allowed to…
ddobbs | November 7, 2008
For those in or near NYC, a notable event: Fear researcher Joseph LeDoux, whom I profiled a while back in Scientific American Mind, will lecture about fear -- and then, fearlessly, play with his R&R band, 'The Amygdaloids.' (The amygdala is the brain's fear center.)
I can't make it, much to my chagrin, but having met LeDoux -- who is highly enjoyable company and has done Nobel-Prize-level work defining fear's neuralogical pathways -- I know this will be a highly fascinating, fun, and funny evening.
at the NY Academy of Sciences
7 World Trade Center
(250 Greenwich St @ Barclay), 40th…
ddobbs | November 4, 2008
As an avid tennis player (though it's been a while), I had to love this and do: The busy bloggers at Neurophilosophy bring their usual lucidity to a paper by David Whitney, of the University of California, Davis, on how inherent dynamics of visual perception make line-call errors by tennis referees virtually inevitable.
Check it out at You cannot be serious! Perceptual errors by professional tennis referees:
The Men's Final of the 1981 Wimbledon Tennis Championships is one of the most memorable events in sporting history. John McEnroe, who was playing against Bjorn Borg, famously challenged…
ddobbs | October 18, 2008The good folks at Neuroanthropology drew my attention to a pair of videos showing how chimpanzees work together to corral, kill, and then eat colubus monkeys. Amazing stuff.
The embedded video below shows a hunt from the rather chaotic point of view of cameramen chasing the chase at jungle-floor level. Impressive enough in itself:
Even more riveting, however, is the second video, which can't be embedded but which can be seen on YouTube. It mixes from-the-ground footage with aerial shots taken with infrared cameras to show how a team of five chimps -- a driver, three blockers, and an…
ddobbs | October 17, 2008In "The Gregarious Brain," my NY Times Magazine story last year about Williams syndrome -- in which a genetic accident causes an intriguing combination of cognitive deficits and hypersociability colored by a lack of social fear and (to some extent) savvy -- I devoted some space to the "social brain" theory," which holds that we humans developed our big brains -- and perhaps language itself -- primarily to manage the complex social dynamics that went with living in large groups. By this figuring, managing social relationships is the most demanding task we face -- and gossip is our primary…
ddobbs | September 26, 2008This week's Science is particularly rich in stories, it seems. These stories require a paid subscription, alas -- but the write-ups here, in Science's weekly mailing, make pretty good reading on their own for those without a subscription. My favorites:
From the Minds of Babes
I became fascinated with baby cognition when I did a story on Liz Spelke's work with infants while also raising a couple. Spelke and others have focused on the wee'ns's innate or very early powers of cognition, including numerosity and early logic and perception. Here, though, is an interesting study that proposes that…
ddobbs | September 9, 2008The evidentiary landscape regarding antidepressant efficacy seems to grow ever more slippery. Now comes a study, drawn to my attention by the busy-eyed Philip Dawdy at Furious Seasons, that finds that the beneficial effects of placebo treatment of depression last longer than generally thought.
As the study's authors note, "The assumption that the placebo response in depression does not endure is widely held and often stated in writing." In particular, many seem to assume that placebo effects fade while effects of actual medications persist -- another argument for antidepressants.
The point…
ddobbs | September 8, 2008
Hi Readers.
Wanted to clue you in to a couple web pleasures. One is Edge: GIN, TELEVISION, AND COGNITIVE SURPLUS A Talk By Clay Shirky, in which Shirky talks about how society's "cognitive surplus" -- the time and brain power contained in the free time created by the Industrial Revolution and the 40-hour work week -- has moved from building cultural infrastructure (libraries, democracies, museums) in the 19th century to TV in the post-War 20th century and the Internet (at least for many people) in the 21st century.
The benefit of this last move, Shirky argues, is that the Internet can…
ddobbs | September 5, 2008You want mail, write about cell phones and DNA.
Earlier today, when I posted a heads-up to a Science story about questions raised about data-tampering in what Science called "The only two peer-reviewed scientific papers" showing strong links between cell phone use and DNA mutations, I noted I was surprised at the lack of press coverage about this, given how heavily most papers on the subject are reported. Two hours later I got a note from Louis Slesin, who blogs on such issues at Microwave News, asserting that the Science story oversimplified the situation. Slesin pointed me to his Sept 3…
ddobbs | June 18, 2008
Nothing like that first cup of the day
Personally I am glad to read this:
First came the fine news that red wine may help prevent Alzheimer's. Now a 20-year study (admittedly a bit flabby) of 125.000 health-care in Spain found that drinking 2 or more cups of java a day may help prevent heart disease. I find this a good thing to contemplate as I drink my first cup today.
Catch it in the abstract of the paper by Esther Lopez-Garcia and colleagues in the Annals of Internal Medicine, a news story by Ewen Callaway at NewScientist, or the skeptic's take at Dana Blankenhorn's ZDNet Healthcare…
ddobbs | May 28, 2008
For Claudius Conrad, a 30-year-old surgeon who has played the piano seriously since he was 5, music and medicine are entwined — from the academic realm down to the level of the fine-fingered dexterity required at the piano bench and the operating table.
C.J. Gunther for The New York Times
IN TUNE Dr. Conrad, a pianist and surgeon, says that he works better when he listens to music and that music is helpful to patients.
“If I don’t play for a couple of days,” said Dr. Conrad, a third-year surgical resident at Harvard Medical School who also holds doctorates in stem cell biology and…
ddobbs | May 26, 2008
A Chopin Nocturne...
from Derek Bownds' MindBlog by noreply@blogger.com (Deric)Bownds blogs on neuro matters -- and, each week, posts a video of him playing a bit of classical music on his piano. Gotta like it.
FDA To Mine Big Databases For Safety Problems
from Pharmalot
The effort, called Sentinel Initiative,will be the first time the FDA will have an opportunity to monitoralmost immediately how drugs are affecting the public. To do so, theagency will mine databases of more than 20 million patients who receivetheir drugs through Medicare. The idea, of course, is to catch sideeffects…
ddobbs | May 21, 2008My (very short) story on a new omnidirectional treadmill for spatial cognition research is up at the Wired site:
An Omnidirectional Treadmill Means One Giant Leap for Virtual Reality.
...This April, a team based at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen, Germany, unveiled the CyberWalk, an omnidirectional treadmill designed to serve as a VR-capable movement platform.
Treadmills have been tried in VR before, of course, but early models were unconvincing -- either too small to keep goggled wanderers on the platform or too slow, bouncy, or gap-ridden to feel the least…
ddobbs | May 9, 2008In a nifty bit of reporting, veteran health reporters Shannon Brownlee and Jeanne Lenzer revealed in "Stealth Marketers," a story on Slate, that a "Prozac Nation: Revisited," a radio piece on antidepressants and suicide that ran on many public radio stations recently, "featured four prestigious medical experts discussing the controversial link between antidepressants and suicide" who all reportedly have financial ties to the makers of antidepressants -- as does the radio series, known as "The Infinite Mind," that produced the show.
As the story notes, the extent of the financial ties are…
ddobbs | May 6, 2008That our brains account for 20 percent of our calorie use tends to amaze people, as it did me. Now it appears that about a third of that is devoted to brain maintenance rather than electrical signaling. The full dish here:
Link: Why Does the Brain Need So Much Power?: Scientific American.
It is well established that the brain uses more energy than any other human organ, accounting for up to 20 percent of the body's total haul. Until now, most scientists believed that it used the bulk of that energy to fuel electrical impulses that neurons employ to communicate with one another. Turns out,…