Brain and Behavior
neurophilosophy | September 4, 2007
In the 1880s, Francis Galton described a condition in which "persons...almost invariably think of numerals in visual imagery." This "peculiar habit of mind" is today called synaesthesia, and Galton's description clearly defines this condition as one in which stimuli of one sensory modality elicit sensations in another of the senses.
There are several different kinds of synaesthesia, and the condition is now known to be far more common than was previously thought. Galton was describing a specific type of synaesthesia, called grapheme-colour synaesthesia, in which printed numbers or letters…
clock | September 3, 2007
Inside The Brain Of A Crayfish:
Voyage to the bottom of the sea, or simply look along the bottom of a clear stream and you may spy lobsters or crayfish waving their antennae. Look closer, and you will see them feeling around with their legs and flicking their antennules - the small, paired sets of miniature feelers at the top of their heads between the long antennae. Both are used for sensing the environment. The long antennae are used for getting a physical feel of an area, such as the contours of a crevice. The smaller antennules are there to both help the creature smell for food or mates…
thusspakezuska | September 2, 2007It's late summer, and the harvest is bountiful, and so with the contributions to Scientiae. Thanks to all of you who submitted such fabulous posts. Some of you even wrote two posts! It must be that back-to-school enthusiasm.
As you know, this month's theme for Scientiae is "Unleashed", chosen by moi. I wrote about furious women the other day, which will tell you a little about where "unleashed" came from (and just how long it's been fermenting in my brain). But I have to give a hat tip to Karmen at Chaotic Utopia for inspiring me to make it the theme of the carnival, in the course of…
voltagegate | August 31, 2007It's nice when you stumble across some scientific literature that answers a question that's been bugging you. Well, in this case, maybe half of a question.
I've always wondered if there was some connection between an organism's intelligence and its ability to manipulate objects with hands or some analog, and if there would be a way to quantify either attribute effectively. In my mind, cephalopods (squid, octopus) and primates are prime examples of intelligent manipulators, though this connection breaks down as soon as you browse the cetaceans (whales, dolphins).
In my search for literature…
dmunger | August 30, 2007When Greta and I were married, we had to go through a series of interviews with the pastor. For the most part, these were benign, but there was a bit of a moment of tension when he asked these questions:
Pastor: Who's more intelligent?
Greta and Dave: We're the same. [So far, so good]
Pastor: Who's more emotional?
Dave: She is. [Oops!]
The pastor and I chuckled, but Greta gave me a rather icy stare. Was I just confirming the "women are more emotional" stereotype, or was I making a real observation about her behavior? Perhaps more importantly, was I dooming our relationship to failure,…
purepedantry | August 29, 2007Gene Expression has 10 Questions with Gregory Clark, author of A Farewell to Alms:
Clark also provides archival evidence that in medieval Britain (and to a lesser extent in China and Japan) the wealthy-who presumably had those "middle class" skills in abundance-raised more children than the average person. If you put these pieces together-a system that rewards a new set of abilities, plus greater reproductive success for those who have those abilities-then all you need to get some form of selection is one more link: A transmission mechanism. On the nature of the mechanism, Clark leaves the…
oracknows | August 26, 2007Vacation time! While Orac is gone recharging his circuits and contemplating the linguistic tricks of limericks and jokes or the glory of black holes, he's rerunning some old stuff from his original Blogspot blog. This particular post first appeared on July 25, 2005 . Although the Undead Führer himself has made only one appearance, but the concept is there, and this forms the basis for what the monster became. Enjoy!
As for all the Hitler Zombie reruns, don't worry. I decided to do that over the weekend, and now I'll change to reposts of different topics for a while.
In the most recent issue…
purepedantry | August 22, 2007NYTimes Science section, why do you make me so mad?
Gretchen Reynolds published an article in the Times on cognitive improvements associated with exercise, and I would like to use it to make a point about how science journalism often gets the facts right but the interpretation wrong.
It begins with the following incorrect statement:
The Morris water maze is the rodent equivalent of an I.Q. test: mice are placed in a tank filled with water dyed an opaque color. Beneath a small area of the surface is a platform, which the mice can't see. Despite what you've heard about rodents and sinking…
retrospectacle | August 22, 2007Before I became interested in hearing research, I thought I was going to spend my career studying Alzheimer's disease (AD), and worked at the Roskamp Institute for Neurodegenerative Disorders at USF. AD is a major enigma in medicine due to the many contributing factors: genetic, lifestyle, and environmental; as well as differing times of onset (early and late) and varying symptoms among affected individuals. The end result is clear though: AD is fatal and affects the brain in drastic ways. AD is characterized by a few pathological hallmarks at the neural level. One is the presence of amyloid-…
pharyngula | August 20, 2007If it existed, it might also be profoundly autistic and … diabetic? So science cannot disprove the existence of a soul, but one thing we're learning is how much valued human properties such as love and attachment and awareness of others are a product of our biology — emotions like love are an outcome of chemistry, and can't be separated from our meaty natures.
The latest issue of BioEssays has an excellent review of the role of the hormone oxytocin in regulating behaviors. It highlights how much biochemistry is a determinant of what we regard as virtues.
Anyone with a little familiarity with…
dmunger | August 20, 2007I go for a run nearly every day. I wouldn't consider myself a fitness buff; mainly I run so that I don't gain weight. But according to an article in the New York Times, running might have another benefit -- improving my brain's health:
Scott Small at Columbia, for instance , likes nothing better than a strenuous game of tennis. "As a neurologist," he explains, "I constantly get asked at cocktail parties what someone can do to protect their mental functioning. I tell them, 'Put down that glass and go for a run.' "
The basis for this claim was first found in research on mice: mice with exercise…
mikethemadbiologist | August 13, 2007Sometimes in blogging timing is everything. I had this post about Karl Rove all ready to go, and then he goes and resigns on me. Oh well. Anyway, this is a response to an excellent post by Maha about Karl Rove's vaunted political acumen not being so, erm, acumeney. Maha writes:
Another factor: I've thought many times that the Bush White House has a weird inability to respond to unexpected events. Whenever something happens that was not on the schedule -- like 9/11 or the tsunami or Hurricane Katrina or Dick Cheney's hunting "accident" -- they are flummoxed. Often they are slow to…
cortex | August 13, 2007There is wonderful, disturbing, and extremely graphic article in last week's New Yorker (not online) about Lesch-Nyhan syndrome, a mysterious disorder characterized by excessive amounts of uric acid and a dangerous tendency to injure oneself. In its bleakest incarnation, Lesch-Nyhan turns victims into their own worst enemy, as their can't help but chew off their lower lip, or bite of their own fingers, or curse at a loved one. (For Lesch-Nyhan patients, aggression and hateful speech are a sign of love.)
What biological mistake could cause such a tragic behavioral disorder? The problem…
pharyngula | August 7, 2007It's that time of the summer again, when classes loom all too near, and enthusiastic students start asking for the reading ahead of time so that they can both find the books from a cheaper source than our bookstore and get a jump on the material. So to handle all those requests at once, here is a list of my fall term classes:
If you're an incoming freshman biology major, you'll be taking Biology 1111, Fundamentals of Genetics, Evolution, and Development (FunGenEvoDevo, for short), either in the fall or the spring term. This course is primarily a qualitative introduction to the basic…
developingintelligence | August 7, 2007Having just returned from a 3 week vacation to purchase (and then move into) a new home, I am finally now able to get back to posting. Here's just a very small subset of the best in brain-blogging while I was away:
Fundamental limitations in predicting individual differences: the margin of error in predictive algorithms of individual behavior (as used, for example, by the UK Department of Health to determine whether an individual is fit for release from a psychiatric institution, and much more widely in marketing and finance) may be so high as to render some of these algorithms unusable.…
cortex | August 7, 2007History tends to make even the most unlikely revolutions seem inevitable. Looking backwards to the 18th century, it's easy to conclude that the Industrial Revolution was bound to happen, that the forward march of modernity was predestined.
But what this fatalistic view of history overlooks is just how unlikely it is that a nomadic band of hunter-gatherers would one day settle in big cities, develop some startling new technologies, and escape the Malthusian trap. Starting in the 18th century, a few select human populations (such as Great Britain) managed to increase their economic…
dmunger | August 6, 2007It would be difficult to come up with a more frequently confused concept in psychology than reinforcement and punishment. In fact, "reinforcement" and "punishment" aren't difficult to understand on their own: Reinforcement simply means any means of increasing or encouraging the designated behavior; punishment is any means of inhibiting or decreasing the designated behavior.
It was only when B.F. Skinner devised the "positive" and "negative" descriptors that he became the bane of college students for generations to come. Rather than "positive" and "negative," things would have been much…
razib | August 5, 2007Gene For Left-handedness Identified in ScienceDaily. The original paper is LRRTM1 on chromosome 2p12 is a maternally suppressed gene that is associated paternally with handedness and schizophrenia:
Left-right asymmetrical brain function underlies much of human cognition, behavior and emotion. Abnormalities of cerebral asymmetry are associated with schizophrenia and other neuropsychiatric disorders. The molecular, developmental and evolutionary origins of human brain asymmetry are unknown. We found significant association of a haplotype upstream of the gene LRRTM1...with a quantitative measure…
j7uy5 | August 5, 2007At
least in mice, that is: rendering the
href="http://neuro.fsu.edu/%7Emmered/index.htm">vomeronasal
organ inactive by deleting the gene
href="http://www.informatics.jax.org/searches/accession_report.cgi?id=MGI%3A109527">TRPC2
(transient receptor potential cation channel, subfamily C, member 2)
results in profound behavioral changes. This was reported on Nature
News:
href="http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070730/full/070730-13.html">Nose
goes, gender bends. They include a video (link
below the fold) of mouse sexual behavior (which may not be safe for
work, depending on the…
bcohen | August 2, 2007By Guest Blogger: Oronte Churm.
World's Fair friend, the venerable, unparalleled Mr. Churm, is our guest for the day, contributing the post below. He is the author of a top notch blog over at InsideHigherEd.com (called "The Education of Oronte Churm") and one of my favorite sub-features at McSweeney's, "Dispatches From Adjunct Faculty at a Large State University." Of the 15 dispatches, I might highlight #10, On Repose, as a personal favorite. If it isn't clear from those references, Mr. Churm is in fact a real-deal writer who teaches in the English department at a big state university. He…