Brain and Behavior
gregladen | November 27, 2007Genes determine basic behavior, like the behavior associated with being a predator. Or avoiding being eaten by a predator. This we know to be true because millions, zillions, of years of evolution must have shaped genes ... especially in mammals with with their whopping big brains and all ... to have genetically coded behaviors.http://www.bloggingwv.com/love-everybody-even-the-squirrelly-ones/
Or, perhaps not. Perhaps we need a slightly different view of behavioral genetics. (click on the picture to see the whole story..)
lua yar | November 27, 2007Researchers at Cambridge conducted a study that measured cognitive function and analyzed images of the brain in individuals with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) was used to capture images of each participants' brain, and computerized tests were given to study the ability of the individual to stop repetitive behaviors. Also included in the study were healthy family members of the individuals with OCD, and healthy, unrelated individuals used as a control. The family members were included so that the genetic link behind OCD could be explored.
The…
oracknows | November 27, 2007If you've been a regular reader here, one thing you know about me is just how much I detest Holocaust denial. What I detest even more, however, is when a Holocaust denier wraps his Nazi apologia and anti-Semitism in the cloak of free speech, particularly when he tries to claim martyr status while doing it. The ever-odious David Irving is particularly good at this, particularly when he flaunts the law of another country and enters it, knowing that there is a warrant for his arrest for denying the Holocaust, and then is shocked--shocked, I say!--that the police actually arrested him and that…
clock | November 26, 2007Yup, it's Monday evening:
Light Activates Output from Evening Neurons and Inhibits Output from Morning Neurons in the Drosophila Circadian Clock:
Living organisms have evolved circadian clocks that anticipate daily changes in their environment. Their clockwork is fully endogenous, but can be reset by external cues. (Light is the most efficient cue.) The circadian neuronal network of the fruit fly (Drosophila) brain perceives light through the visual system and a dedicated photoreceptor molecule, cryptochrome. Flies exhibit a bimodal locomotor activity pattern that peaks at dawn and dusk in…
purepedantry | November 26, 2007
You look away from a field for two seconds, and they get all crazy on you... I used to do only molecular biology focusing primarily on neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. Since I moved to a lab that studies behavior, I haven't been keeping up with the literature of Alzheimer's as much as I should so I was struck with how clever this paper is.
Sagare et al. look at a new way to lower the A-Beta levels in Alzheimer's disease by putting a recombinant protein into the blood that binds it. A-Beta is the protein in Alzheimer's disease that forms plaques and causes the pathology by…
apalazzo | November 25, 2007I woke up yesterday, made myself a cup of coffee and sat down with the New York Times, and a left over piece of corn bread from Thanksgiving.
It was a beautiful morning and I was at peace.
Then I read this (I will try to be polite) by Paul Davies.
Apparently scientists operate on faith. Faith that the world is rational and non-changing. Apparently scientists are no different than theists. Apparently science is distributed as theistic dogmas which are never to be questioned.
My morning went from a 10 to a 2. I've been grumbling for 2 days now. But I need to get this off my chest. And so ...…
clock | November 24, 2007There are 56 days until the Science Blogging Conference.
Before I return to highlighting some of the people who will be there, let me finish with this Thanksgiving series of posts about the Friday pre-conference events - leaving the best for last, perhaps. If you look at the Program, you will see that Friday afternoon (after the Blogging101 session and before the Friday dinner) is reserved for Lab Tours.
As all the Lab Tours are occurring simultaneously, you have to choose only one - and what choices!
Duke Immersive Virtual Environment is a totally cool thing - you walk inside a big cube…
clock | November 23, 2007Well, I certainly like it very much when a reader checks out my Amazon wish list and picks out a present for me. I like presents!
But this morning I got a LARGE package, full of books from the Wish List, a variety and quantity sufficient to keep me excitedly reading for quite a while:
Quantico by Greg Bear
An Inconvenient Truth DVD by Al Gore
The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes: The Complete Short Stories (2 Vol. Set) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
The Hungry Tide by Amitav Ghosh.
The Sibley Guide to Bird Life & Behavior by David Allen Sibley.
Another Day in the Frontal Lobe: A Brain Surgeon…
gregladen | November 21, 2007The male and female human brains are different. Some of the better documented differences are similar to differences seen in other mammals. They are hard to find, very small, and may or may not be of great significance. Obviously, some are very important because they probably relate to such things as the ability ... or lack thereof ... to bear offspring. But this is hardly ever considered in the parodies we see of these differences.
[Repost from Gregladen.com]
You have all seen the sometimes funny, sometimes not cartoon depictions of these differences, for example this one:
Obviously,…
clock | November 20, 2007There are 34 articles published in PLoS ONE this week. As always, look around, read, rate, comment, annotate.... Here are my picks for the week (no need to repeat the dinosaur paper here, of course):
A Viscoelastic Deadly Fluid in Carnivorous Pitcher Plants:
Carnivorous pitcher plants supplement their nutrient intake by trapping and digesting insects in what were thought to be passive pitfall traps. But in this study, the authors show that the pitchers of plants Nepenthes rafflesiana in fact employ highly specialized secretions to doom their victims. They show that this fluid, even when…
oracknows | November 20, 2007I'm not sure what to think of Michael Siegel. I'm really not. Even now, I remain of two minds on him.
Dr. Siegel first came to my attention back in July, around the time I was getting into online tussles with a certain opponent of indoor smoking bans, before which I had never heard of him. He's a Professor in the Social and Behavioral Sciences Department at Boston University School of Public Health who's made quite a reputation for himself casting a skeptical eye on what he considers to be extreme exaggerations, bad science, and even lies about the risks of tobacco and secondhand smoke. My…
sporte | November 19, 2007Sexual attraction is all in your brain. At least if you're a nematode.
Ricardipus has a great image if you want to see a nematode picture.
I always thought worms were hermaphrodites (both male and female) but the story, as usual, turns out to be a bit more complex. Researchers at the University of Utah have found that worms have definite preferences for one sex or the other. And, if they kill off certain kinds of cells, the preference for one sex or another can change.
From the University of Utah:
"They look like girls, but act and think like boys," says Jamie White, a postdoctoral…
pharyngula | November 18, 2007Wilkins is about to review a new paper on sociobiology by Wilson and Wilson, but he hasn't quite done it yet. I'll be looking forward to it, though.
Wilkins calls himself an unflinching sociobologist. I'm more of a lapsed sociobiologist with a fairly positive view of the field. The book Sociobiology was actually my very first serious introduction to the depth of biology — I picked it up when I was an undergraduate, way back in 1975, and read it all the way through. I was impressed in my naive fashion, and was baffled by the sociobiology wars that raged for a time — I was particularly…
purepedantry | November 16, 2007
I wrote before about how there has been a bit of a debate about whether the hippocampus is involved in encoding spatial maps or is involved more generally in relational memory. Well, the argument for general relational memory just got a big boost. Johnson and Redish published a paper in the Journal of Neuroscience showing that rats mentally project forward to parts of a maze they haven't visited yet. It is solid evidence for prospective coding in the hippocampus.
Just to recap that a little bit, for many years we have known that the hippocampus is involved in encoding new memories…
neurotopia | November 15, 2007Abel over at Terra Sigillata got is writ in a tinger over bad grammar and was concerned that Alzheimer's Disease had been tied to risky sexual behavior. His conclusion was that he got a poorly worded email notice about two separate problems that were linked inappropriately by a semicolon. So everything's fine, all clear, right? He's free to engage in risky sexual behavior without fear of getting Alzheimer's Disease (AD) later in life!
That's not entirely true.
We've known that inflammation plays a huge role in the Alzheimer's disease process. Unfortunately, inflammation is caused by a…
neurophilosophy | November 14, 2007
An individual ant is quite insignificant, but a large group of ants can do quite remarkable things. Likewise, neurons evolved to communicate with each other, and are quite useless except when connected to a network of other neurons.
I've always liked to use the ant colony as an anology for brain function. According to this article about swarm intelligence by Carl Zimmer, it may be more than just an anology:
By studying army ants -- as well as birds, fish, locusts and other swarming animals -- Dr. Couzin and his colleagues are starting to discover simple rules that allow swarms to work so…
clock | November 13, 2007As always on Monday nights, there are new articles published in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine. My picks:
Professional Uncertainty and Disempowerment Responding to Ethnic Diversity in Health Care: A Qualitative Study
In a qualitative study published this week in PLoS Medicine, Joe Kai and colleagues have identified opportunities to empower health professionals to respond more effectively to challenges in their work with patients from diverse ethnic communities. A related perspective showcases the challenges that physicians face in providing culturally appropriate care.
Omnidirectional…
dmunger | November 13, 2007Yesterday we discussed several experiments offering converging evidence that exposure to the color red, even for brief periods before taking a test, can result in lower achievement. It's startling research, but as my daughter suggested at breakfast this morning, maybe people are just intimidated by the color red because that's the color that's always used for grading.
Aren't we just conditioned to see red as threatening? That might be part of it, but in nature red also frequently suggests danger. Many poisonous plants and animals are red. Blood is red. Hot coals and lava are red. It's…
gregladen | November 12, 2007You can now read the Krause et al (2007) paper from Current Biology regarding the FOXP2 variant found in Neanderthals in an open-access on-line form at Current Biology Online.
Here is the summary of the article:
Although many animals communicate vocally, no extant creature rivals modern humans in language ability. Therefore, knowing when and under what evolutionary pressures our capacity for language evolved is of great interest. Here, we find that our closest extinct relatives, the Neandertals, share with modern humans two evolutionary changes in FOXP2, a gene that has been implicated in…
clock | November 10, 2007How Well Do Dogs See At Night?:
A lot better than we do, says Paul Miller, clinical professor of comparative ophthalmology at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Why Quitting Smoking Is So Difficult:
New findings clarify the brain mechanisms that explain many aspects of dependency on nicotine, the addictive substance in tobacco. Among them: Individual differences in brain chemistry can have a profound effect on a person's susceptibility to addiction, and smoking may predispose adolescents to mental disorders in adolescence and adulthood. In addition, researchers have identified a potential…