Brains and minds
ddobbs | March 3, 2009Carl explains this:
After death, brains that do not simply disappear sometimes get smaller. In this particular fish, Sibyrhynchus denisoni the brain must have gotten a lot smaller. Check out this image, in which the braincase is in red, and the brain is in yellow. (The scale bar is 5 millimeters.)
The subject is a paper in PNAS that's available to journalists but no one else so far, yet not still embargoed ... a policy I sort of like for selfish reasons but still can't figure out. This means this link to the paper won't work for a few more days. Paper is on a 3M-year-old fossilized brain,…
ddobbs | February 27, 2009I drove up to Montreal yesterday, and amid visits with anthropologist and Somatosphere founder Eugene Raikhel, anthropologist Allan Young, and Suparna Choudhury, talked about (among other things) the emerging new area of study they're calling "critical neuroscience."
What the heck is critical neuroscience? Well, one definition calls it
the attempt to assess and inform neuroscientific practice from a rich interdisciplinary perspective, and to categorize, evaluate and (begin to) manage the various risks resulting from neuroscience and its results and applications
.
Daniel Lende, one of the…
ddobbs | February 20, 2009A roundup of wonderful stuff I won't get to. Then again, many of these need no help:
"Come tomorrow and sort this hell hole out. Dinner and drinks, 4 p.m. Bring wine and caviar only.". Woman emails party invitations while asleep. Hat tip: BoingBoing
Obviously, the drug and medical device industry is not looking forward to independent research that compares expensive new drugs or procedures to older and less expensive treatments. Alison Bass on objections to (and spirited attacks on) the stimulus bill's funding of comparative effectiveness studies -- a subject I hope to write more about soon…
ddobbs | February 13, 2009
In a wonderful post at Mind Hacks, Vaughn, writing on "The myth of the concentration oasis" makes an argument that rather challenges my resistance to it:
The 'modern technology is hurting our brain' argument is widespread but it seems so short-sighted. It's based on the idea that before digital communication technology came along, people spent their time focusing on single tasks for hours on end and were rarely distracted.
The trouble is, it's plainly rubbish, and you just have to spend time with some low tech communities to see this is the case.
He's been doing just that -- spending time in…
ddobbs | February 13, 2009Dangerous concept; successful execution: From the mediea team at Small Mammal, a cute video story that deconstructs a cute YouTube video to look at the science of cuteness.
Somebody run tell Liz Spikol!
ddobbs | January 27, 2009It's Mozart's birthday. We've been indulging in some Don Giovanni here amid (but inside, protected from) the snow. But for multimedia instead of fireside consumption, I thought this effortlessly electric encore by Heifetz would serve nicely. Wonderful how relaxed he is; how much he gets done doing so little with either hand. Nothing extra, nothing unnecessary -- but a ton of music.
Sci/med significance: Music is good for you.
ddobbs | January 25, 2009
The book opens so thrillingly -- a plane crash, a last-second Super Bowl victory, and a first chapter that comfortably reconciles Plato and Ovid with Tom Brady and John Madden -- that it spawns a worry: Can the book possibly sustain this pace?
"How We Decide" delivers. Jonah Lehrer, -- author of "Proust Was a Neuroscientist," blogger at Frontal Cortex, and (full disclosure) an online acquaintance and sometime colleague of mine for a couple years now (I asked him to take over editorship of Scientific American's Mind Matters last year, and we share blogging duties at VeryShortList:Science)…
ddobbs | January 20, 2009One theory about antidepressants is that they relieve depression by encouraging neurogenesis -- the creation of new neurons. Neuroskeptic reviews a study that argues against this idea.
the neurogenesis hypothesis has problems of its own. A new paper claims to add to what seems like a growing list of counter-examples: Ageing abolishes the effects of fluoxetine on neurogenesis.
The researchers, Couillard-Despres et. al. from the University of Regensburg in Germany, found that fluoxetine (Prozac) enhances hippocampal neurogenesis in mice - as expected - but found in addition that this only…
ddobbs | January 13, 2009Someone finally did a review study on TV -- including "educational DVDs" -- and infants. Among results that should not surprise ...
Watching TV programmes or DVDs aimed at infants can actually delay language development, according to a number of studies. For example, a 2008 Thai study published in Acta Paediatrica found that if children under 12 months watched TV for more than two hours a day they were six times more likely to have delayed language skills. Another study found that children who watched baby DVDs between seven and 16 months knew fewer words than children who did not.
is at…
ddobbs | January 6, 2009From Mind Hacks: Deodorants boost sexiness by getting men in the groove:
I keep running into fascinating articles that The Economist ran over the Christmas period and this one is no exception - it covers research that suggests that men's deodorants do increase sexual attractiveness, but by increasing confidence and hence the behaviour of the wearer. The smell alone seems to have little impact on women.
ddobbs | January 6, 2009Yikes. "Creepy" only starts to get at it. Will Saletan at Slate describes a program DOD hopes to develop that will give the children of soldiers sent away a sort of avatar parent to replace the one Uncle Sam is busy using:
For ages, we've been telling children that ghosts aren't real. But DOD has just put out a request for proposals to create what are, in effect, virtual ghosts. Another truism of parenting is about to become untrue.
The announcement, from the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury, requests "a highly interactive PC or web-based…
ddobbs | January 5, 2009
With this post, and with pleasure, I bring the blog formerly known as Smooth Pebbles -- now Neuron Culture (mark your RSS readers!) -- back to Scienceblogs.
Seventeen months ago I said farewell to this Scienceblogs home, at least for a time, because I had not found blogging a comfortable fit. Since then, however, as I blogged off in the hinterland, I've come to better see how this slippery but flexible form can hold a valuable place in both my own writing and in the changing world of journalism.
I've been particularly swayed by the work of bloggers innovatively exploiting the immediacy,…
ddobbs | December 16, 2008Is there such a thing as internet addiction? Mind Hacks says the debate should be over:
A study just published in the journal CyberPsychology and Behavior has reviewed all of the available scientific studies on internet addiction and found them to be mostly crap. And not just slightly lacking, really pretty awful.
To quote from the research summary:
The analysis showed that previous studies have utilized inconsistent criteria to define Internet addicts, applied recruiting methods that may cause serious sampling bias, and examined data using primarily exploratory rather than confirmatory…
ddobbs | December 16, 2008Good stuff from Zimmer:
You go for a swim, and you don't even notice the tiny worm that burrows into your skin. It slips into a vein and surges along through the blood for a while. Eventually it leaves your blood vessels and starts creeping up your spinal cord. Creep creep creep, it goes, until it reaches your head. It curls up on the surface of your brain, forming a hard cyst. But it is not alone%u2013every time you've gone for swim, worms have slithered into you, and now there are thousands of cysts peppering your brain.
And they are all making drugs that are seeping into your neurons.…
ddobbs | December 15, 2008How did I miss this for 24 hours? From the Times Magazine's 8th Annual Year in Ideas issue - Vending Machine for Crows:
In June, Josh Klein revealed his master's-thesis project to a flock of crows at the Binghamton Zoo in south-central New York State. The New York University graduate student offered the birds coins and peanuts from a dish attached to a vending machine he'd created, then took the peanuts away. Klein designed the machine so that when the crows searched for the missing peanuts, they pushed the coins out of a dish into a slot, causing more peanuts to be released into the dish.…
ddobbs | December 15, 2008As time goes on, it seems the benefits offered by modern antidepressants seem to drop while the downsides seem to expand. A story in today's Boston Globe -- excerpted below -- suggests that up to half of people who take SSRIs suffer significant sexual side-effects.
Sexual "numbness." Lack of libido. Arousal that stalls.
Such sexual symptoms have long been known side effects of the popular Prozac class of antidepressants, but a growing body of research suggests that they are far more common than previously thought, perhaps affecting half or more of patients....
Current warnings on the labels…
ddobbs | December 10, 2008
Boing boing spots Virgin Mary in MRI
Bird flu round-up, from Great Beyond touches a few stories reporting some unsettling human deaths from bird flu. I think people are scared to cover bird flu these days: There was so much about it 2-3 years ago, then the epidemic didn't come (we're so impatient!), and now a lot of journalists feel they were out shouting wolf. Maybe wolf is still out there.
Jonah Lehrer on Governor "Show Me the Money" Blagojevich, greed, and a version of the ultimatum game called -- I love this -- the dictator game. "When the dictator cannot see the responder - they are…
ddobbs | December 9, 2008Over at Neurophilosophy, Mo gracefully describes an elegant and insightful study of fear by Joan Chiao:
The amygdala's response to fearful facial expressions is automatic, and the ability to detect any sign of imminent danger in the environment is of equal importance to all people. Some have therefore argued that the amygdala's response to fearful facial expressions will not affected by culture. Others suggest that the amygdala's response will be enhanced for the fearful expressions of those from the same culture, because a threat to someone from the same cultural group might be a more…
ddobbs | December 9, 2008
There's been a lot of buzz on the Net* about the Nature commentary on cognitive enhancement I blogged about yesterday, in which I noted that you need only think about coffee to realize what a slippery slope the cog enhancement issue presents.
If you want to experience first-hand just how slippery, take this survey, which reader Michael Lanthier kindly drew my attention to. It starts with a question about coffee and pulls you inexorably, um, downhill from there.
It's hard to take that survey without concluding the issue of enhancement offers no bright lines. if someone knows of a rigorous…
ddobbs | December 8, 2008This time had to come: A group that includes some serious neuro-heavyweights, such as neuroscientists Michael Gazzaniga and Ronald Kessler and the highly prominent and influential neuroethicists Hank Greely and Martha Farah, has published in Nature an essay "Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy."
In this article, we propose actions that will help society accept the benefits of enhancement, given appropriate research and evolved regulation. Prescription drugs are regulated as such not for their enhancing properties but primarily for considerations of safety and…