Brain and Behavior
bright_lights | November 10, 2007We've been talking quite a bit about how information is processed in our brains so that a specific reflexes and cognitive actions can be produced. It's also the end of the cross country season and my mind has been mixing the two. Take Steve Prefontaine (one of the greatest American long distance runners of all time) for example. I was watching a video clip of Prefontaine running and paused it right as he was putting his foot down and picking his other leg up. He doesn't extend his leg out very far. Instead, he lifts his knee up so that he can drive his pronated foot into the ground just under…
pharyngula | November 9, 2007The New Humanist has an article on genetic modification of human beings, addressing some of the reservations of critics. John Harris is primarily taking on Jurgen Habermas, who seems to think genetic engineering is yucky.
Habermas has two objections to letting prospective parents tinker with their child's genes:
The child doesn't have the opportunity to give consent — "the power of those living today over those coming after them, who will be the defenceless objects of prior choices made by the planners of today". I don't see the objection, myself. Every parent makes lots of choices in which…
j7uy5 | November 7, 2007A recent study indicates that the lifetime cost of medical
care for
Iraq and Afghanistan veterans will be greater than the cost of the war
to date. We really have no choice, but it is going to cost
us. A lot. Of course, the ones really paying are
the troops themselves. From Medscape (free registration
required).
href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/565407">High
Rate of PTSD in Returning Iraq War Veterans
Bob Roehr
November 6, 2007 (Washington, DC)
—
Estimates of the rate of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) among
veterans returning from Iraq range from 12% to 20%. With…
developingintelligence | November 7, 2007Speech recognition remains a daunting challenge for computer programmers partly because the continuous speech stream is highly under-determined. For example take coarticulation, which refers to the fact that the auditory frequencies corresponding to a given letter are strongly influenced by the letters both preceding and following it - sometimes interpreted to mean that there is no invariant set of purely auditory characteristics defining any given letter. Thus it's difficult to recover the words that a person is saying, since each part of that word is influenced by the words surrounding it…
gregladen | November 7, 2007[A repost from gregladen.com, unmodified]
There is a ceremonial burial in Britain .. ceremonial because it has some red stuff smeared on bone ... that has now bee dated to a few thousand years earlier than previously thought (to ca 25,000 years old).
Age of earliest human burial in Britain pinpointed from PhysOrg.com
The oldest known buried remains in Britain are 29,000 years old, archaeologists have found - 4,000 years older than previously thought. The findings show that ceremonial burials were taking place in western Europe much earlier than researchers had believed.
[...]
Some have…
bushwells | November 6, 2007Are you pondering what I'm pondering?
One of my favorite sites, Technovelgy: Where Science Meets Fiction, entertained in 2005 with Mouse With Human Brain May Live. (If you're not accustomed to seeing nude mice with xenografts, be cautioned when you open this link).
Excerpted from the article:
Now, Stanford University has given famed researcher Irving Weissman permission to create a mouse-human hybrid. The intent is to inject human brain cells into the brains of developing mice to see what happens. The National Academy of Sciences will unveil guidelines on chimera and stem cell research this…
j7uy5 | November 6, 2007
href="http://www.researchblogging.org/">
alt="Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research"
src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png"
height="50" width="80">The
researchers did fMRI
of brains of persons with
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Borderline_personality_disorder"
rel="tag">Borderline Personality Disorder, before
and after psychotherapy. This was a small study, using a
design that would be difficult to use routinely, but it is
provisionally interesting. Difficult, because the patients
received 12 weeks of inpatient therapy (perhaps…
mixingmemory | November 4, 2007
So there's a Behavioral and Brain Sciences paper in press on the cognitive differences between human and nonhuman animals that is related, in some ways, to my own work (it even cites me twice... yay, the citation count for that paper just jumped to, like, 4). The paper is sure to be controversial for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the title, but I'm fairly convinced by its arguments. But I'm not really writing this post to talk about the article. When it's published, with all its peer commentaries (BBS publishes target articles and then a bunch of peer commentaries, along…
developingintelligence | November 4, 2007A first-hand report of caloric vestibular stimulation - to treat Body Integrity Identity Disorder, in which patients often desire to have large parts of their bodies amputated.
Ambien, a sleep drug recently discovered to awaken some people from comas is also linked to strange behavior: one woman paints her frontdoor - in her sleep.
Altruism as an identifying characteristic of intelligence - "friendly intelligence," at least.
Isaac Asimov asks "What Is Intelligence Anyway?"
Brian Mingus asks if we'd recognize it if we saw it.
Can you extract the "ball" from each image based on motion cues…
j7uy5 | November 2, 2007
rel="tag">Anhedonia
is one of the most important symptoms of depression. I wrote
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/03/basic_concepts_anhedonia.php">a
post about it a while back, so I won't go into the definition
in this post, other than to summarize by saying that it is the
inability to experience pleasure in response to activities or events
that otherwise would be pleasurable.
It is difficult to do studies on the brain mechanisms involved in the
genesis of individual symptoms. Progress has been made, but
it has been slow.
When I was in residency, toward the end…
purepedantry | November 2, 2007
Every so often, I encounter a technical advance that is simply so crazy-cool that I have to talk about it. Dombeck et al. publishing in Neuron offer such an advance.
They found a way to image the activity of whole fields of neurons using two-photon fluorescent microscopy -- a technique that I will define in a second. They can do this with in mice that are actually behaving by mounting the mouse in an apparatus that lets the mouse run on a track ball floating on air -- just like air hockey. (I want to meet the person who came up with that. There had to be high-fives all-around.)…
denialism | November 2, 2007The latest pathetic assault on a scientist came from ALF against UCLA scientist Edyth London. Using a garden hose they flooded her home, causing tens of thousands in damage. However, rather than intimidating her out of performing research in addiction she has written an article for the LA Times, defending animal research.
For years, I have watched with growing concern as my UCLA colleagues have been subjected to increasing harassment, violence and threats by animal rights extremists. In the last 15 months, these attempts at intimidation have included the placement of a Molotov cocktail-type…
oracknows | November 2, 2007In retrospect, I feel a little guilty about last week's edition of Your Friday Dose of Woo. As a couple of commenters pointed out, the guy responsible for the woo seems as though he's a bit disturbed, as evidenced by the ransom note-style literature on his website and the news story that mentioned how his family didn't take him seriously and he was divorced. On the other hand, the woo was truly top notch. As I pointed out, it also illustrated how a woo-meister can take a single erroneous idea about human physiology and run with it far beyond what anyone would think possible. Such woo can be…
denialism | November 1, 2007 The question this month is "Which parts of the human body could you design better?"
This is a great question, because a lot of aspects of the human body represent what worked well enough for survival, not necessarily what works best. Therefore the engineering ends up being rather ramshackle, and convoluted, and sometimes, downright terrible.
For instance, who can look at this image - an anatomical model of human pregnancy at term, and not think this is really, really stupid engineering.
(image via wikipedia)
The very first thing I would change would be the female reproductive system.…
cortex | November 1, 2007The latest issue of Science has a special section devoted to decision-making. Alan Sanfey, best known for his influential study of the Ultimatum Game, has written a thorough review (available for free) about recent progress in the field. The takeaway lesson is that the experimental methods of neuroeconomics (Game Theory plus fMRI with a dash of electrophysiology) can help us better understand the neural source of our social decisions:
A common criticism of economic models is that observed decision behavior typically deviates, often quite substantially, from the models' predictions. Most…
developingintelligence | October 31, 2007Several high-profile studies have shown that bilingual children outperform their monolingual peers in terms of several cognitive abilities - including tests of verbal and nonverbal problem-solving, selective attention, flexibility (e.g., task-switching) and others. These studies have captured the public imagination and probably guided many moms to expose their kids to a second language.
But a new article in Developmental Science suggests that these impressive results may be somewhat overblown: bilingual children may be likely to come from wealthier families than monolingual children (EDIT:…
jstemwedel | October 29, 2007The 2007 DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge is in its last few days, which means there may be enough data to start identifying trends as to which ScienceBlogs readers are the most generous:
By scientific discipline:
Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles is our lone full-time physical sciences blogger with a challenge this time around. He's more than halfway to his goal, but if you physics, astronomy, chemistry, and math types think you can do better vote with your donations and give Chad a boost.
Two of the brain and behavior blogs that mounted challenges actually met them (Retrospectacle and Omni…
sb admin | October 29, 2007On both sides of the Atlantic, new research into lead and crime is attracting attention. The New York Times and The Independent both reported on a new study by Amherst College economist Jessica Wolpaw Reyes, who found a correlation between blood lead levels and violent crime rates. Jascha Hoffman explains in the New York Times:
After moving out of an old townhouse in Boston when her first child was born in 2000, Reyes started looking into the effects of lead poisoning. She learned that even low levels of lead can cause brain damage that makes children less intelligent and, in some cases, more…
katie glasrud | October 28, 2007A friend of mine has a badger preoccupation. It was his expertise I consulted for last week's blurb on badger culling. Between speaking with him and trying to plan a mad dash to Madison for its famous Halloween party, I've had badgers on the brain all week, so for this week's post, I decided to couple "badger" and "neurobiology" in a literature search.
I found a delightful 2001 article on "Daily Activity Budgets of the Taiwan Ferret Badger (Melogale moschata subaurantiaca) in Captivity" by Kurtis Jai-Chyi Pei. It turns out ferret badgers spend most of their awake time traveling about followed…
bright_lights | October 26, 2007Hello again, it's been a while so I thought I'd drop in a comment or two about what I've found recently in the news about neurobio. I've lately been reading about neurotransmitters and how they bind to sites in specific neurons, instigating depolarization across the membrane of the neuron and allowing for an action potential to communicate to hundreds of thousands of other neurons. This communication between neurons in the central nervous system is relayed into actions in the peripheral nervous system resulting in behavior. But how is this synchronized? What neuron does what? What must be…