Brain and Behavior
terrasig | February 12, 2008Last week, we discussed the cowardly terrorist act toward UCLA's Dr Edythe London which was then expanded upon quite forcefully by Mark Hoofnagle at his denialism blog.
While we spend a fair bit of time around these parts questioning the leadership of the US national health agency, this statement of response from NIH is quite good:
On Tuesday, February 5, an incendiary device ignited at the front door of the home of Dr. Edythe London, an NIH-supported senior scientist and professor in the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA. This domestic terrorist act against a scientist who has…
purepedantry | February 11, 2008In behavioral neuroscience, we use a lot of animal models. We assume that these animal models have features that are the same or similar to features of humans. However, it is always reassuring when someone gets around to proving that this assumption is accurate.
Talmi et al., publishing in the Journal of Neuroscience, show that a well-documented type of learning called Pavlovian-Instrumental Transfer (PIT) occurs in humans under identical experimental conditions to those we use to test animals.
Background
In order to understand this paper, I need to define some terms that you come across in…
gregladen | February 9, 2008I've not been commenting on the comments on this post about the Myers - Rue debate, but I have been reading them with great interest. The following, while not addressing most of the comments, arises from them.
In this post, I mentioned Loyal Rue's linear hierarchy of ... I'm not sure what he called it ... let's say certainty (in science). It ran something like this:
Facts
Laws
Theory
Hypothesis
Conjecture
Speculation
Absurdity
This is not exactly what he use, but close. Perhaps conjecture and speculation were reversed... but you get the idea. You think of something that might be true (…
terrasig | February 6, 2008I received a special missive this morning from the Foundation for Biomedical Research that reported the home of UCLA nicotine researcher, Dr Edie London, was vandalized/terrorized by a fire set to a "device" on her front porch. The story now appears at the Los Angeles Times:
London, a professor of psychiatry and bio-behavioral sciences and of molecular and medical pharmacology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, uses lab monkeys in her research on nicotine addiction.
FBI spokeswoman Laura Eimiller confirmed that officials with the Joint Terrorism Task Force were investigating the…
cortex | February 5, 2008I'm morbidly fascinated by the massive losses recently incurred by the French Bank Societe Generale. My fascination is partly rooted in the sheer scale of the disaster, a scale that's essentially incomprehensible. (I have no idea what a $7,000,000,000 loss really means.)
But I'm also interested in how, exactly, a trader could lose so much money and not get noticed. It now appears that the risk-taking culture of Societe Generale is partly to blame:
The 144-year-old bank allowed a culture of risk to flourish, creating major flaws in its operations that enabled the rogue trader's activities to…
purepedantry | February 4, 2008How is tool use encoded in the brain?
Most movements involving tools involve the complex manipulation of objects in space, and it is possible that they could represented in the brain in this way -- i.e. as objects in space. On the other hand, the purpose of tools is to extend the range of motions available to the body, so it is also possible that tool use could be encode as an extension of the body representation onto the tool.
Some cunning work by Umilta et al. at the University of Parma shows the second option is the case. The brain represents tools by incorporating them into…
retrospectacle | February 4, 2008
Along with Shelley, I am a graduate student in the Neuroscience Program at UM. The last three years my friends and I have made a trilogy of satirical neuroscience posters (see the first one here) poking mild fun at the mystical art of brain science. Also in any spare time remaining I have punished myself with some rather difficult neural engineering experiments.
Year 1, on the Stock Market and Rat Neurons, is already posted on Shelley's blog here.
Year 2, on "How many Neurons Must One Man Have, before You Call Him a Man" will be posted shortly, as the story is unfinished on that bit of…
awild | February 1, 2008My early bug photos, the ones I don't show anyone anymore, are poorly-exposed affairs that now sit hidden in my files. If I had to put my finger on the single biggest problem with these embarrassing first attempts, I'd say that I lacked an eye for composition. I was so intent on getting the bug in focus somewhere in the LCD that I paid no attention to what else ended up sharing the frame. Turns out, all sorts of extraneous crud. Bits of grass. Dust. My finger. Many of these images are so crowded that it just isn't clear what I ought to be looking at.
Understanding why busy compositions…
clock | February 1, 2008New Species Of Giant Elephant-shrew Discovered:
When Francesco Rovero first saw the image captured by one of his automatic cameras in a remote Tanzanian forest, he knew he'd never seen anything quite like it. It was the size of a small dog, covered in orange and gray fur, and had a long snout like an elephant. Its markings and general appearance suggested it was a member of the elephant-shrew family, called a sengi in Swahili. Today, the Journal of Zoology reports that Rovero discovered a new species of giant elephant-shrew.
Anne-Marie has more.
Cats' Family Tree Rooted In Fertile Crescent,…
developingintelligence | January 31, 2008Phil Stearns has constructed a 45 "neuron" network of electronic parts which responds to lights and tones with a (rather cute) squealing sound. A picture of the components for this strange device:
Each "neuron" consisted of analog electronics corresponding to each of 6 functions: Input, Summing, Threshold, "Offset," "Output," and "Structure" (not sure about those latter three). The connectivity was determined by hand.
Phil states that the sculpture is not intelligent, but rather "some kind of squid baby."
Neural networks have great potential for contributing to the arts. For example, JP…
sciencetolife | January 30, 2008
Andrea Gawrylewski from "The Scientist" has written a nice blog post describing new research that addresses whether adult brains learn by neurogenesis (the birth of new neurons).
In the blog she writes:
While researchers agree that the birth of new neurons plays an important role in the adult brain, they have long debated to which aspects of learning, memory and behavior the process contributes. A new study published today (January 30) in Nature has used a gene knockout approach to link adult neurogenesis to spatial learning. The paper showed that adult mice that were deficient for a…
gregladen | January 30, 2008Color is funny. Anthropologists have long known that different cultures have different relationships, linguistically and in day to day practice, to the color spectrum. For example, the Efe Pygmy Hunter-Gatherers of the Ituri Forest describe things as white, black, or red, and that's it. They live in a world of green. Going with the model for "Eskimos" having a hundred words for snow because snow is so important in their environment, one would expect that the Efe would have a hundred words for green. On the other hand, the Efe Hunter-Gatherers must have a fairly primitive culture,…
purepedantry | January 30, 2008I was distressed to read this at Wired because usually I feel like they are more on top of things. This is by Thomas Hayden:
Even worse, those same cortexes that invented science can't really embrace it. Science describes the world with numbers (ratio of circumference to diameter: pi) and abstractions (particles! waves! particles!). But our intractable brains evolved on a diet of campfire tales. Fantastical explanations (angry gods hurling lightning bolts) and rare events with dramatic outcomes (saber-toothed tiger attacks) make more of an impact on us than statistical norms. Evolution gave…
razib | January 29, 2008Chapters read:1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7.
Booyah! Over 10% of the way through The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. Unfortunately, I'm still in heavily exegetical territory. Personally I much prefer Richard Elliott Friedman when it comes to textual interpretation of ancient works, but I knew what I was getting into. In any case, in chapter 2 Stephen Jay Gould mentions the Bible and Shakespeare considerably less, though his verbosity keeps on a truckin'. Instead of an exposition of Gould's own view of evolutionary theory he recapitulates and interprets Charles Darwin's argument in Origin of…
clock | January 29, 2008Today's crop of new articles published in PLoS ONE is an emebarassment of riches. It's hard to make just a couple of picks out of 39 papers, but I'll try to restrain myself and you go and look around for the rest of them....
Chimpanzee Autarky:
Economists believe that barter is the ultimate cause of social wealth--and even much of our human culture--yet little is known about the evolution and development of such behavior. It is useful to examine the circumstances under which other species will or will not barter to more fully understand the phenomenon. Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) are an…
jrice | January 28, 2008For your weekly viewing pleasure, here are the large-scale versions of this week's channel photos.
(Have a photo you'd like to send in? Email it to photos@scienceblogs.com, or assign the tag "sbhomepage" to one of your photos on Flickr. Note: be sure to assign your photo an "attribution only" or "share and share alike" Creative Commons license so that we can use it.)
First photo here, the rest below the fold.
Life Science. From Flickr, by David Prior
Physical Science. From Flickr, by darkpatator
Environment. From NSF, via pingnews.com
Humanities & Social Science. From Flickr, by…
j7uy5 | January 27, 2008Several days ago, I saw
href="http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/blogs/editor/2008/01/expensive-wine.html">an
article about some research on the relationship between the
price of wine, the subjective experience of taste, and the effect of
wine on brain function as assessed by
title="Wikipedia: Functional magnetic resonance imaging"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMRI" rel="tag">fMRI.
The research is part of the growing body of work that pertains to the
study of neural effects of marketing:
href="www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/etc/neuro.html"
rel…
j7uy5 | January 25, 2008Usually I cringe when I see yet another newspaper article about
suicide. But I always read them. This time, I did
cringe, but needlessly. The article turned out to be OK.
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/washington/24fda.html?ei=5090&en=69952ee3ab69a7b3&ex=1358917200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print">F.D.A.
Requiring Suicide Studies in Drug Trials
By
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/gardiner_harris/index.html?inline=nyt-per"
title="More Articles by Gardiner Harris">GARDINER HARRIS
January 24, 2008
src…
clock | January 22, 2008There is a lot of new stuff published this week in PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and PLoS ONE.
Molecular Studies in Treponema pallidum Evolution: Toward Clarity? is an Expert Commentary on last week's (widely reported) study On the Origin of the Treponematoses: A Phylogenetic Approach (the paper that suggests that Columbus brought syphilis from the New World back to Europe).
Looking at the 33 new articles on PLoS ONE, here are a few titles I found intriguing:
Seasonal Changes in Mood and Behavior Are Linked to Metabolic Syndrome:
Obesity is a major public…
razib | January 22, 2008Variation in neural V1aR predicts sexual fidelity and space use among male prairie voles in semi-natural settings:
Although prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) are socially monogamous, males vary in both sexual and spatial fidelity. Most males form pairbonds, cohabit with one female, and defend territories. Wandering males, in contrast, have expansive home ranges that overlap many males and females. In the laboratory, pairing is regulated by arginine vasopressin and its predominant CNS receptor, vasopressin 1a receptor (V1aR). We investigated individual differences in forebrain V1aR…