Brain and Behavior
grrlscientist | September 13, 2008tags: bipolar disorder, manic-depression, mental health, mental illness, behavior
Image: Gerald Slota, The New York Times Magazine.
A couple days ago, I heard an interview with Jennifer Egan on WNYC about her upcoming article in tomorrow's New York Magazine about bipolar disorder, often known as manic-depressive illness, "The Bi | Polar Puzzle." It's long but well-written and definitely worth reading. In this touching and informative piece, Egan primarily addresses several questions; whether bipolar disorder exists in children, what it looks like and whether children with undiagnosed/…
clock | September 13, 2008Male-specific Neurons Directly Linked To Gender-specific Behaviors:
New research identifies a few critical neurons that initiate sex-specific behaviors in fruit flies and, when masculinized, can elicit male-typical courtship behaviors from females. The study, published by Cell Press in the September 11th issue of the journal Neuron, demonstrates a direct link between sexual dimorphism in the brain and gender differences in behavior.
My, What Big Teeth You Had! Extinct Species Had Huge Teeth On Roof Of Mouth:
When the world's land was congealed in one supercontinent 240 million years ago,…
signout | September 12, 2008From the Department of the Maximally Self-Righteous comes this delightful little piece of scholarship, a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) that describes a survey of internal medicine interns on the subject of professionalism. In it, participants were asked to rate their participation in and perception of "unprofessional behaviors" related to residency. The survey* was created based on the input of third-year medical students, residents, and faculty, and was administered in the first three months of the subjects' intern years.
Among behaviors rated as most…
clock | September 11, 2008There are 11 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Practice Makes Imperfect: Restorative Effects of Sleep on Motor Learning:
Emerging evidence suggests that sleep plays a key role in procedural learning, particularly in the continued development of motor skill learning following initial acquisition. We argue that a detailed examination of the time course of performance across sleep on the finger-tapping…
ejohnson | September 11, 2008In this post: the large versions of the Medicine & Health and Brain & Behavior channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week.
Brain & Behavior. From Flickr, by Kyknoord
Medicine & Health. From Flickr, by riot jane
Reader comments of the week:
On the Medicine & Health channel, Revere of Effect Measure poses the question, Who uses alternative medicine and for what? The most recent Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report released by the CDC revealed that over 15 percent of adults in the U.S. use some form of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (…
oracknows | September 11, 2008There are some days when I just don't feel like posting the usual stuff, and September 11 is just one of those days. So today there'll be no woo-bashing, no evisceration of postmodernist nonsense, no sarcastic assaults on antivaccinationists. In a more serious vein, there won't be any analyses of scientific papers, clinical studies, or the usual prolonged discourses on medicine, surgery, or science. There won't even be any discussions of Holocaust denial, although a Holocaust denier is mentioned in the post that is to follow.
Instead, I'll do what I've taken to doing every year or two and…
clock | September 9, 2008There are 12 new articles in PLoS ONE today. I guess picking all 12 would not really be 'picking'? But all 12 are interesting to me! OK, here are six, and you go and look at the other six as well. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers.
Social Waves in Giant Honeybees Repel Hornets:
Giant honeybees (Apis dorsata) nest in the open and have evolved a plethora of defence behaviors. Against predatory wasps, including hornets, they display highly coordinated Mexican wave-like cascades termed 'shimmering'. Shimmering…
purepedantry | September 9, 2008Over at Economics of Contempt, there is an argument that liberal media bias has to exist because there is evidence that partisanship changes the way that our brains process information. (This is not his only evidence, but it is part of it.)
Now, I don't want to get into a discussion about the existence or nonexistence of a liberal (or conservative) media bias. What I take issue with is the particular study that Economics of Contempt cites as evidence of this bias. I think that he is misapplying the results of that study.
Economics of Contempt cites the results of Westen et al. 2006.…
gregladen | September 5, 2008Read the following text. As you read it, try to empty your mind. When you encounter grammatical errors or jargon that is impossible to understand, do not try to translate what you are reading. Rather, become one with the obscurity. Read slowly, thoughtlessly, with emptiness of purpose, as though the words were entering your eyes, traveling through your head, and leaving through your ears. The ultimate understanding will be achieved when you reach the end of the abstract and have understood nothing:
Recent neuroimaging studies have identified a set of brain regions that are metabolically…
neurophilosophy | September 5, 2008
In this clip from The Simpsons, Homer explains why he wouldn't benefit from an adult education course: "How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain."
As you watched the clip, multiple brain regions were engaged and acted in parallel to generate a coherent conscious experience. For example, the visual cortical in the occipital lobes process the stream of information entering the eyes; the auditory regions in the temporal lobes process the sound entering the ears; and cells in the hippocampus encode…
ejohnson | September 5, 2008In this post: the large version of the Brain & Behavior and Technology channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week.
Technology. Radio telescope on the Plains of San Agustin, New Mexico. From Flickr, by Fort Photo
Brain & Behavior. Academician Andrei Sakharov. From Flickr, by dbking
Reader comments of the week:
On the Brain & Behavior channel, Jonah of The Frontal Cortex discusses the importance of Daydreams. In the age of television, he explains in an excerpt from his latest column in the Boston Globe, kids don't have "empty time" to let their…
sb admin | September 3, 2008So the alties hate real medicine. They come over here and bemoan modern medicine's failure to address behavioral changes that affect health, such as diet and exercise.
Then I write a long post about internists' duties viz public health and health behaviors, and the gun nuts think I want to disarm them and PRY TEH WEAPON OF GUNZ OUT OF OUR COLD DED HANDZ!!111!222!!!11!
I think of my writing as "reality-based". I have opinions, and where my opinions intersect with real-world activities, I try to back up my opinions with facts. I don't (usually) resort to wishful thinking, religion,…
clock | September 3, 2008Brain Imaging Links Chronic Insomnia To Reversible Cognitive Deficits Without Changes In Behavior:
A neuroimaging study has found that cognitive processes related to verbal fluency are compromised in people with insomnia despite the absence of a behavioral deficit. These specific brain function alterations can be reversed, however, through non-pharmacological treatment with sleep therapy.
Periodic Limb Movement During Sleep Is Less Common In African-Americans; Associated With Insomnia:
A new study objectively determined the prevalence of periodic limb movements during sleep (PLMS) in a…
clock | September 2, 2008There are 12 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Low Frequency Groans Indicate Larger and More Dominant Fallow Deer (Dama dama) Males:
Models of honest advertisement predict that sexually selected calls should signal male quality. In most vertebrates, high quality males have larger body sizes that determine higher social status and in turn higher reproductive success. Previous research has emphasised…
razib | September 2, 2008Over the years I've blogged a fair amount on the AVPR1A gene. Variation on this locus has been associated with differences altruism in humans and mating preferences in voles. Now a new paper is out in PNAS, at some point in the near future (not online, but will be here), which shows differences in martial behavior based on AVPR1A. From Study Links Gene Variant in Men to Marital Discord:
About 40 percent of men have one or two copies of the allele. Walum, a PhD student, said that men with two copies of the allele had a greater risk of marital discord than men with one copy, and that men with…
cortex | September 2, 2008You've got to feel very sorry for Bristol Palin. The poor teenager isn't running for political office and yet she's the subject of two front page stories in the NY Times today. All of a sudden, every talking head on the cable news is wondering how her pregnancy will influence the election. Is this what politics has become?
And yet, this teenage pregnancy is indicative of something: the pitiful failure of abstinence-only sex education. Governor Palin, of course, strongly supports abstinence-only education in the classroom. (She also believes in teaching creationism alongside evolutionary…
tqa | August 29, 2008
I'm sitting in the Faraday Theatre at the Royal Institution right now, at the Nature Network's Science Blogging 2008 conference. There are about 100 people in the room, 90% of whom I don't recognize at all. 90% of the people I do recognize are people I've met for the first time somewhere in the last two days. There's a list of the attendees and their blogs on the conference website. I'm ashamed to admit that I haven't had the chance to read all of those blogs yet.
At the same time, it's also great (in a way) that I don't know who most of the people are or where they blog. If nothing else…
purepedantry | August 29, 2008One of the problems brains must overcome to behave effectively is to discretely encode all the different responses that they can produce. Considering movement alone, you can move in a lot of different ways. Selecting which one is appropriate is troublesome in itself, but encoding all of them is a challenge. It is like trying to organize the Library of Congress so that you can instantly find exactly what you want. Your brain must come up with some way to encode each of these responses separately because if it didn't than you might engage in one response when you really meant another. How…
clock | August 29, 2008So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Strategies for Aspiring Biomedical Researchers in Resource-Limited Environments:
Countries struggling with global health challenges desperately need local biomedical researchers to find health care solutions to address the deadly diseases that affect their populations…
ejohnson | August 28, 2008In this post: the large versions of the Medicine & Health and Brain & Behavior channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week.
This week's Medicine & Health photo was kindly submitted by one of our own bloggers, the Neurophilospher.
Brain & Behavior. The blurred colors of plastic Easter eggs. From Flickr, by josef.stuefer
Medicine & Health. From Flickr, by Gaetan Lee
Reader comments of the week:
On the Medicine & Health channel, Orac discusses a contentious issue, sure to become more prominent as more parents buy into anti-vaccinationist…