Brain and Behavior
voltagegate | September 28, 2007I've been tagged!
It's cool, it's about animals and I've only got an hour to blog this morning before work, so let's do it.
An interesting animal I had
All of the animals I've made friends with over the years have been a bit weird in their own way, I suppose. When you get the chance to get to know something with such a different brain, you're bound to be surprised by its behavior.
About five years ago, I took my friend's tarantula under my care since he had been "joking" about letting it go in his suburban backyard. Tarantella is a Chilean rose-haired tarantula, fairly commonplace as far as…
dmunger | September 27, 2007
Yesterday, we discussed sex differences at the highest levels of achievement and found that there are some significant differences between males and females. But despite these observations, it's still unclear why the disparity exists, and what can or should be done about it.
Sex differences in brain structure
One possibility is that the physical structure of the brain is different for males and females. MRI imaging shows that males do have larger brains than females on average. But women have a higher proportion of "gray matter" -- the part of the brain where most cognitive activity is…
thescian | September 26, 2007 Evolution is directed blindness, a muddling-through in the direction of survival and procreation. Very early on, evolution acquired a shopping bag: the Skin. A piece of astonishing molecular engineering that is protective, flexible, regenerative, self-healing, vitamin manufacturing, and porous to a precise degree. But, there is one catch. It is colored: we call it black, white (colorless, actually), brown, and various shades in between. Unlike a shopping bag which is deliberately colorful to attract buyers, the color of our skin has little to do with consumer behavior (there's some sexual…
neurophilosophy | September 24, 2007
Echolocation - or biological sonar - can be thought of as an auditory imaging system that is used by organisms in environments where vision is ineffective. It involves the emission of vocalizations by the animal, and the detection of the echoes of those sounds, which are used to produce three-dimensional information about the environment.
Echolocating organisms understand the world largely via the interpretation of the acoustic reflections, and possess specialized neural circuitry that performs the computations necessary for the perceptual organization of auditory information. This…
grrlscientist | September 24, 2007tags: encephalon, brain, behavior, cognition, neurobiology, blog carnival
The last frontier: The brain.
Orphaned Image. Contact me so I can provide credit and linkage.
Several months ago, I was invited to host Encephalon, probably because I send so many submissions to this blog carnival and possibly also because I am fairly good at sending traffic to the contributors of those blog carnivals that I host. Unfortunately, I have not had wifi for the past two days, so I hope that you appreciate my modest efforts on behalf of this blog carnival. So, without further ado, I present to you the 32nd…
developingintelligence | September 21, 2007The word "noise" comes from the latin nausea, meaning disgust or annoyance. But in the phenomenon known as stochastic resonance, noise can actually be a good thing: it can serve as a signal amplifier in thresholded systems.
This phenomenon is not nearly as arcane as it sounds. The image above (borrowed from Stein, Gossen & Jones, 2005), clearly shows how two very weak signals can look very similar (top row), but with additional noise, the characteristics of these signals can be more easily dissociated (bottom row; now you can see one signal is generated by a sine, and one generated by…
clock | September 20, 2007A post-doctoral position is available in the laboratory of Dr. Tosini to investigate the cellular and molecular mechanisms that control circadian rhythms in the mammalian retina [Tosini et al., (2007) Faseb J.; Sakamoto et al., (2004). J. Neuroscience 24: 9693-9697; Fukuhara et al., (2004) J. Neuroscience 24:1803-1811; Tosini G., Menaker, M. (1996) Science, 272: 419-421).The position is funded by a grant from the National Institute of Health.
The work will focus on the characterization of newly developed transgenic mice using physiological (ERG), molecular (Q-PCR and Laser Capture…
mixingmemory | September 18, 2007Why are so many people convinced that we only use 10% of our brains, or that Eskimos have n words for snow, where n is as high as you need it to be for the desired rhetorical effect? Or more seriously, why have some people, particularly Fox News viewers (no, really), persistently believed in Saddam Hussein's involvement in 9/11? Why does that used car salesman who waves at you as you drive by the dealership on the way to work every morning look so trustworthy, even though you know used car salespeople are never, ever, under any circumstances to be trusted? And why do you dig Henri Matisse's "…
dmunger | September 17, 2007David Amodio and his colleagues have taken a lot of heat across the internet for their recent brief report on brain and behavior correlation with political views (see here for one of the more strident pundit reactions). The Neurocritic was able to track down Amodio himself and get his responses to some more serious criticism:
People have complained that there were more liberals the conservatives in the sample. True, in an absolute sense. But this is typical in political psychology: Americans are more conservative on average, and so more extreme conservatives usually rate themselves as…
grrlscientist | September 17, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, bipolar disorder, manic-depressive illness, unipolar depressive disorder, clinical depression, seasonal affective disorder, SAD, circadian clock, light therapy
"Starry Night" (1889) is an oil painting by Dutch post-impressionist artist Vincent van Gogh. It was added to the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York City in 1941. [wallpaper size].
According to a "NewsFocus" article that appeared in last Friday's Science, there is a move afoot to use light therapy and sleep deprivation to help the body's circadian clock reset and maintain…
neurophilosophy | September 14, 2007From my inbox:
Scientific American.com recently launched a brand new podcast called 60-Second Psych, which runs every Thursday for a one-minute commentary on the latest studies in brain and behavior...Though only a couple of episodes old, this podcast is already the #2 ranked podcast on Apple iTunes in the Science and Medicine category.
cortex | September 14, 2007David Brooks makes a really smart macro point today about one of the big themes of modern neuroscience. His op-ed (Times $elect) is about the decline of IQ as a general metric of intelligence:
Today, the research that dominates public conversation is not about raw brain power but about the strengths and consequences of specific processes. Daniel Schacter of Harvard writes about the vices that flow from the way memory works. Daniel Gilbert, also of Harvard, describes the mistakes people make in perceiving the future. If people at Harvard are moving beyond general intelligence, you know…
developingintelligence | September 14, 2007The claim that language processing can be carried out by purely "general purpose" information processing mechanisms in the brain - rather than relying on language-specific module(s) - may seem contradicted by a slew of recent neuroimaging studies demonstrating what appears to be a visual "word form" area in the left fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe. By all appearances, this region is highly specialized for word processing. But this evidence causes a predicament for more than just domain-generalists; those who advocate an evolved language module may also be challenged by these results,…
denialism | September 13, 2007So I was thinking. It isn't really enough to merely react constantly to anti-scientific behavior which seems to permeate the media, the interwebs, and policy discussions on Capitol Hill these days.
It used to be, for about 20 years (from 1974 to 1995), there was an office on the Hill, named the Office of Technology Assessment, which worked for the legislative branch and provided non-partisan scientific reports relevant to policy discussions. It was a critical office, one that through thorough and complete analysis of the scientific literature gave politicians common facts from which to…
dmunger | September 11, 2007
A recent report in Nature Neuroscience has gotten a lot of press. The headlines proclaim that "left-wing" brains are different from "right wing" brains. Are our brains literally hard-wired to be conservative or liberal? The article in the L.A. Times sure seems to suggest it:
Sulloway said the results could explain why President Bush demonstrated a single-minded commitment to the Iraq war and why some people perceived Sen. John F. Kerry, the liberal Massachusetts Democrat who opposed Bush in the 2004 presidential race, as a "flip-flopper" for changing his mind about the conflict.
Really?…
omnibrain | September 10, 2007A torture manual created by psychologists in the 1950s entitled The Manipulation of Human Behavior is freely available online. Included are these scary sounding chapters:
1 The Physiological State of the Interrogation Subject
as it Affects Brain Function 19
Lawrence E. Hinkle, Jr.
2 The Effects of Reduced Environmental Stimulation
on Human Behavior: A Review 51
Philip E. Kubzansky
3 The Use of Drugs in Interrogation 96
Louis A. Gottschalk
4 Physiological Responses as a Means of Evaluating
Information 142
R. C. Davis
5 The Potential Uses of Hypnosis in Interrogation 169
Martin T.…
grrlscientist | September 10, 2007tags: blog carnivals, encephalon, cognition, learning
I suppose it goes without saying that I have been interested in learning about brain and behavior for most of my life, and many of my interests have focused on all aspects of the development of birdsong and bird food caching behavior. Additionally, since I have lived with parrots for nearly my entire life as well, I am of course very interested in understanding how they learn their behaviors and how to speak. So, as a result, I have been invited to host the next edition of the blog carnival, Encephalon, two weeks from now on 24 September…
cortex | September 10, 2007There are so many stupid studies of the gendered brain that it's easy to conclude that good research into psychological sex differences is impossible. But that would be a mistake. I think one of most interesting recent investigations into the cognitive differences of men and women comes from a clever neuroeconomics experiment, designed by Colin Camerer and Read Montague. It's called the trust game, and it goes like this: at the start of each of 10 rounds, an "investor" is given an imaginary stake of $20. They can keep it all, or "invest" some of it with a "trustee". Any money that gets…
mixingmemory | September 10, 2007Reading an article in the LA Times today, I learned something exciting: political differences in thought happen in the brain. At least that's what a new study published in Nature Neuroscience(1) purports to show, though I hear that the next issue of the journal will contain critical responses from Descartes, Malenbranche, and Eccles.
Seriously though, the paper by Amodio et al. takes as its launching point the large body of evidence that political conservatives and liberals differ on personality dimensions related to openness to experience, tolerance of uncertainty, and cognitive complexity…
neurophilosophy | September 7, 2007The Manipulation of Human Behavior, a manual for psychological torture techniques written by leading psychologists and psychiatrists, is now available online.
Published by John Wiley & Sons in 1961, the 323-page book was edited by Albert D. Biderman of the Bureau of Social Science Research and Herbert Zimmer, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, and funded by the U.S. government.
The editors' introduction reads:
This book represents a critical examination of some of the conjectures about the application of scientific knowledge to the manipulation of…