Brain and Behavior
Category archives for Brain and Behavior
Why Do Men Hunt and Women Shop?
Posted by Greg Laden on November 27, 2012 The title of this post is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the “evolutionary psychology” argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The Pleistocene with today’s behavior in the modern predator-free food-rich world. And, it is a very sound argument. If, by “sound”…
Kurzweil: How to create a mind
Posted by Greg Laden on November 14, 2012 How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed is Ray Kurzweil’s latest book. You may know of him as the author of The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Kurzweil is a “futurist” and has a reputation as being one of the greatest thinkers of our age, as well as being…
No new nose neurons?
Posted by Greg Laden on May 26, 2012 
Elizabeth Norton has an interesting write-up in Science Now. Some years ago, after a long period of suspicion, it was seemingly demonstrated that neurogenesis (the formation of new neurons) happened in the human nose. This research was based on the identification of proteins that would be associated with the early formation of baby neurons. Therefore,…
Name the actor and the show
Posted by Greg Laden on May 25, 2012 
I just happen to come across this interesting cameo and snapped this fair use impromptu screen shot… Who is it, what show is this, and if you are that good, what episode! ___________ posted from my iPad
IQ Varies with Context
Posted by Greg Laden on January 25, 2012 In a very interesting way. As a regular reader of this blog, you know that IQ and similar measures are determined by a number of factors, and for most “normal” (modal?) individuals, one’s heritage (genes) is rarely important. Putting it another way, variation across individuals in IQ and other measures have been shown again and…
The argument that different races have genetically determined differences in intelligence
Posted by Greg Laden on December 26, 2011 This post started out as a comment that would have gone here, but it became sufficiently long and possibly interesting that I figured it would make a good, if somewhat rough, blog post.
A map of the brain
Posted by Greg Laden on November 12, 2011 How can we begin to understand the way the brain works? The same way we begin to understand a city: by making a map. In this visually stunning talk, Allan Jones shows how his team is mapping which genes are turned on in each tiny region, and how it all connects up.
Brain response to facial expression in autistic individuals and their siblings
Posted by Greg Laden on July 13, 2011 Siblings of those diagnosed with autism are more than 20 times as likely as members of the general population to also have autism. Some of these siblings also show evidence of autism-like but less marked cognitive and social communication problems. This suggests that autism has either an environmental cause typically found in all siblings during…
How Do You Get Sexual Orientation and Gender in Humans?
Posted by Greg Laden on July 8, 2011 Humans appear to have a reasonable amount of diversity in their sexual orientations, in what is often referred to as “gender” and in adult behavior generally. When convenient, people will point to “genes” as the “cause” of any particular subset of th is diversity (or all of it). When convenient, people will point to “culture”…
Driving The Patriarchy: Demonic Males, Feminism, and Genetic Determinism
Posted by Greg Laden on July 7, 2011 Behaviors are not caused by genes. There is not a gene that causes you to be good, or to be bad, or to be smart, or good at accounting, or to like bananas. There are, however, drives. “Drives” is a nicely vague term that we can all understand the meaning of. Thirst and hunger are…
“Monkeys on our backs” by Richard Tokumei will not even make good toilet paper
Posted by Greg Laden on May 29, 2011 Richard Tokumei has written a book that is so bad he is ashamed to put his own name on it. “Richard Tokumei” is the pen name of a ‘writer/editor in Southern California [with] degrees in Humanities and Phychology from the University of California Berkeley” and he has produced a book designed to anger everyone who…
How did humans get so smart?
Posted by Greg Laden on April 17, 2011 There is no evidence that they did, but abundant evidence that they didn’t. One example of this is found in how business in the US handle the inevitability of future rising costs of energy, and along with this collection of individual behaviors, the way the free market, the most intelligent and powerful of human activities,…
Falsehoods: Human Universals
Posted by Greg Laden on January 26, 2011 There are human universals. There, I said it. Now give me about a half hour to explain why this is both correct and a Falsehood. But first, some background and definition.
What is the most important human adaptation?
Posted by Greg Laden on October 22, 2010 Human infants require more care than they should, if we form our expectations based on closely related species (apes, and more generally, Old World simian primates). It has been said that humans are born three months early. This is not accurate. It was thought that our body size predicted a 12 month gestation, and some…
Why do women shop and men hunt?
Posted by Greg Laden on October 12, 2010 Or, when the hunting season is closed, watch teh game (the guys), or when there are no sales, admire each other’s shoes (the gals)? This is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the “evolutionary psychology” argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The…
Persistent ethnic differences in test performance may be entirely an artifact of the method used to ‘adjust’ the test
Posted by Greg Laden on August 4, 2010 It is well established among those who carry out, analyze, and report pre-employment performance testing that slope-based bias in those tests is rare. Why is this important? Look at the following three graphs from a recent study by Aguinis, Culpepper and Pierce (2010):
The Oystercatcher and the Clam
Posted by Greg Laden on July 10, 2010 One of those really cool and useful “evolution stories” gets verified and illuminated by actual research. And blogging!
Terry Deacon on Evolutionary Play
Posted by Greg Laden on January 1, 2010 Where Blacks, Whites and Orientals Fall on Various Traits
Posted by Greg Laden on December 29, 2009 This is Chart 1 from Race, Evolutoin and Behavior by J. Philippe Rushton, originally published in the Unabridged Edition of same.
Why Human Brains Vary
Posted by Greg Laden on December 28, 2009 Many people assume human brains vary genetically and genetic variation maps to races. But the races are not real and genetic variation can’t explain brain differences. Because, dear reader, brains don’t work that way. Let’s look just at the brain part of this problem.
The argument that different races have genetically determined differences in intelligence
Posted by Greg Laden on December 22, 2009 This post started out as a comment that would have gone here (but would have done just as well here). But it became sufficiently long and possibly interesting that I figured it would make a good, if somewhat rough, blog post.
Drop everything! Drop everything!
Posted by Greg Laden on December 2, 2009 As pointed out moments ago by DrugMonkey, the brain of HM is at this very moment being cross sectioned at The Brain Observatory. Here
The Touch of the Phantom: When left is right and right is left
Posted by Greg Laden on September 20, 2009 If you watch a fake hand standing in for your right hand, and it is touched with a brush while at the same time your left hand, hidden from view, is similarly touched, you feel your right hand being touched. This spooky finding is called “phantom touch” and was reported in a recent issue of…
Acting for the survival of the species (a falsehood)
Posted by Greg Laden on September 2, 2009 Today’s falsehood is the idea that individual animals act for the benefit of their own species.
Women are smarter than men (well, duh!) UPDATED
Posted by Greg Laden on June 7, 2009 
Who is smarter, men or women? Any college teacher (at least in the social sciences and life sciences) who has ever paid attention to their own stats know that women do better than men in college classes. OK, women are smarter. But why? There are all kinds of post hoc explanations given for this like…
More emotional intelligence = more orgasms
Posted by Greg Laden on May 12, 2009 According to a study just coming out in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, “variations in emotional intelligence–the ability to identify and manage emotions of one’s self and others–are associated with orgasmic frequency during intercourse and masturbation.”
When Your Genes Turn Bad …
Posted by Greg Laden on May 9, 2009 Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother’s BoyfriendWhen I first received this book to review, I thought “Oh, great, another one of these pop evolutionary psychology books by some academic with a large mortgage payment” (or words to that effect). But then I read it and my…
Does Lithium in Drinking Water Reduce Suicide Rates?
Posted by Greg Laden on May 3, 2009 Lithium has long been used as a psychotherapeutic drug, and treatment with lithium demonstrably reduces incidence of suicide. Lithium also occurs naturally in groundwater to varying degrees. This study explores the relative amount of Lithium in groundwater and suicide in 18 municipalities in Oita prefecture, Japan over a period running from 2002 to 2006. There…
The curious case of penile vaginal intercourse and depression in women
Posted by Greg Laden on March 6, 2009 I’m starting to worry that the last few Friday Weird Science write-ups by Scicurious (who seems, these days, to be the primary blogger at Neurotopia) have been of papers that I happen to have read. Just so you know: Thousands of papers are published per week across the diverse sciences, and although Scicurious tends to…
Understanding Michele Bachmann in the context of Human Evolution
Posted by Greg Laden on February 27, 2009 This barking dog is not very smart. But it could make a good Republican. The only thing harder to understand than Michele Bachmann is the Republican Party. Bachmann is hard to understand in this way: How can a person with her mind be an elected member of congress?!?!??? The Republican party is hard to understand…
, which is now available for the 
