Brains and minds:
From the Never Thought You'd See This Department comes the one-person play Big Pharma, in which writer-director-actor Jennifer Berry apparently skewers said industry. How many plays get reviewed by both the LA Weekly and PLOS Biology? At least one. As the PLOS Biology review notes, Anyone who has experienced the assault of the pharmaceutical industry's marketing campaigns would appreciate Jennifer Berry's one-person play Big Pharma: The Rise of the Anti-Depressant Drug Industry and the Loss of a Generation. Since the mid-1990s, spending on drug promotion has grown steadily, reaching $21 billion in 2002. Berry explores the fallout of this expanded...
Posted on April 17, 2007 11:21 AM • •
Here's a pretty picture worth a look: a spinning 3-D view of populations of new neurons in a rat hippocampus. Check it out atThe Scientist : Brain Cell Video Needs a fast connection, so take a pass if you're using dial-up....
Posted on April 16, 2007 11:26 AM • 3 Comments •
The studies in question find that bigger, more interesting cages and fatherhood both spurred growth of dendritic spines -- the neuron's info receivers -- in marmosets. I was quite interested to read this, since two years ago I moved into a bigger, funner house and soon after had
another kid. The marmoset in me should be a lot smarter than it was a while back. Whether it is ... well, I'm not sure I'm smart enough to tell.
But this is fascinating stuff, and I recommend it highly. My intro to the posts (from the Mind Matters site) is below, or you can go
straight there from here.
Posted on February 13, 2007 4:01 PM • •
I had half-written a post drawing attention to a fascinating new paper on consciousness ... when I discovered that Jonah Lehrer had beat me to it. I won't try to improve on his offering about this truly clever and fascinating paper, which covers some Oliver Sacks-like ground gracefully Check it out at: The Frontal Cortex : Betting on Awareness:...
Posted on February 6, 2007 2:31 PM • •
I finally got a chance to write about Patrick O'Brian's splendid
Aubrey-Maturin novels. Captain Jack Aubrey, the hero of those Dickensically rich novels, provides a model of decision-making relevant to the paper reviewed in this week's
Mind Matters,, the weekly blog seminar on mind and brain I edit at sciam.com. This week's topic is whether big, complicated decisions -- buying a car, going to war -- can be reliably made with little deliberation. The
paper under review argues that you can. Our
Mind Matters reviewers, psychologists Alex Haslam and George Loewenstein, differ decisively.
Posted on February 6, 2007 12:57 PM • 2 Comments •
Mind Matters, the "blog seminar" I edit at sciam.com, this week hosts
a debate (which readers can join) about a) how best to estimate the prevalence of post-traumatic stress syndrome (PTSD) in Vietnam veterans and b) ultimately, how to calculate the cost-benefit ratio of war. ...
Check it out at Mind Matters. And feel free to chime in with comments or questions via the usual link at the bottom of the column there.
Posted on February 1, 2007 10:40 AM • •
I'm wondering why I don't write about sex more often, now that I've done it and found it so pleasing.
Scientific American just published online a piece I wrote -- brief but gratifying, I pray -- about pacing in rat sex: "
Good Sex is Not a Rat Race."
The study in question seems to contradict many previous findings and much conventional wisdom about male rat (and human) preferences, namely that it's the natural way of things for males to X and run.
Posted on February 1, 2007 10:37 AM • •
The beauty of spatial cognition was long lost on me. But lately I've found nothing, other than my children's antics and my wife's voice, so absorbing. At its most basic, spatial cognition simply refers to the neural mechanisms by which we understand and navigate space: How we learn routes, extrapolate maps, orient ourselves when lost. These mechanisms are fascinating in their own right. But they are made trebly absorbing by the many suggestions that the mechanisms that we use for finding our way around underlie our broader, more abstract powers of memory, cognition, and even emotion -- that we navigate life, in short, much as a rat does a maze.
Posted on January 24, 2007 4:54 PM • 1 Comments •
In my preceding post, about
Eli Lilly pressing primary-care physicans to prescribe the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa for elderly dementia, I meant (but forgot) to mention a blog that is following the much wider Zyprexa saga of which this "Dementia is the message" scandal is only a small part.
Posted on December 21, 2006 10:56 AM • 1 Comments •
That's my head, scanned by
Joy Hirsch and Steven Thomas at Columbia University's and then digitized, burned onto a CD and mailed to me. I mashed it through the lovely, open-source Mac program
Osirix, which allows me to imagize my brain, which I'm finding much different than imagining it, though the former does call the latter into play. Makes your head spin.
Posted on November 29, 2006 9:31 PM • 1 Comments •
Stroke damage in a human brain _____________________________________________ Horrors: I've forgotten to post several articles I wrote about findings presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference last week. I'll work my way backwards, I suppose, so here's the latest, about a University of Milan discovery that blocking a certain cell-wall gate in the hour after stroke (in a lab rat) could prevent almost all damage. Check it out at Scientific American....
Posted on October 24, 2006 2:37 PM • 2 Comments •
W.A. Mozart -- just another hard-working genius ___________________________________________ A few hours ago I received this email: your article in "new scientist" sept 16-22 06 is pure B S . you should dedicate it to the extreme liberal intelligensia. The writer, one Kenneth Rubin (nice meeting you, Mr. Rubin) refers to a New Scientist feature I wrote about genius, talent, and expertise (subscription required -- though you can get a 4-week one for $4.95), which was just published today. Mr. Rubin didn't elaborate, so I can't say what his particular complaint is. (As a critique, Mr. Rubin's "B S," though...
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Posted on September 15, 2006 9:48 PM • 5 Comments •
I opened my feature on mirror neurons for Scientific American Mind by telling how my son Nicholas imitated me sticking out my tongue in his first hour. I regret I can offer you no film of that. Thanks to PLOS Biology, however, I can now offer you videos of a baby macaque monkey essentially doing the same -- that is, imitating lip-smacking and sticking-out-of-the-tongue -- in these video clips from "Neonatal Imitation in Rhesus Macaques" in PLOS Biology. Monkey see, monkey do. On the left, imitation of mouth-opening; on the right, of "tongue protrusion" ______________________________________________ The photos above (not much,...
Posted on September 11, 2006 10:32 PM • 2 Comments •
"Errant Behaviors," a video and sound installation by Shawn Decker and Anne Wilson. In response to my post on "Music, Mood, and Genius (not) -- or RockNRoll meets neuroscience," one Shawn Decker, a music professor and composer at the Chicago Art Institute (and a former classmate and ultimate-frisbee teammate of mine from college), wrote asking whether I knew of any studies testing the notion -- popular among the Chicago electronic music crowd, says Decker -- that similar talents or brain areas may underlie both musical composition and computer programming. Writes he, [I]n many labs doing electronic media around Chicago,...
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Posted on August 26, 2006 10:21 PM • 4 Comments •
I've been interested in music and science since taking a physics of music class back in college (20 years later, amazingly, I discovered my violin teacher of 2000,
Kevin Bushee, was married to the daughter of the
professor who taught that class), so I was intrigued to find this Wired piece in which neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, formerly a rock producer, talks about
the neuroscience of music.
Posted on August 23, 2006 3:33 PM • 4 Comments •
Among the many wonders of neuroscience -- and central to the discipline -- is the brain's plasticity, its ability to rework synapses and networks to respond to new challenges and experiences. In this dynamic lies the physical explanation of the fluid nature of experience, thought, and consciousness. This is why I find so fascinating the work of those who proposed and discovered the mechanisms underlying this plasticity, such as Ramon y Cajal, Donald Hebb, and Eric Kandel. These and other researchers showed the fundamentals of how changing synapses allow our brains to learn new lessons and behaviors or change old...
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Posted on August 15, 2006 2:27 PM • 3 Comments •
My profile of Emory neurologist Helen Mayberg is out now in Scientific American Mind. You can read either a text-only version at my website, or get the full published version, with photos and such, at the Scientific American Mind site (free to subscribers, $5 for the article for non-subscribers). Mayberg made headlines last year when she, psychiatrist Sidney Kennedy, and neurosurgeon Andres Lozano, as the story put it, cured eight of 12 spectacularly depressed individuals ... by inserting pacemaker-like electrodes into a spot deep in the cortext known as Area 25....
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Posted on August 6, 2006 9:47 PM • 4 Comments •
No sooner had I noted that mouse pups seem to handle stress better when near their mothers than I found a study of some 9000 British kids showing that breastfeeding seems to make kids more resilient to stress even well after they've stopped breastfeeding. As the press release puts it, Breastfed babies cope better with stress in later life than bottle fed babies, suggests research published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood The findings are based on almost 9000 children, who were part of the 1970 British Cohort Study, which regularly monitors a sample of the...
Posted on August 3, 2006 4:28 PM • 2 Comments •
One of the pleasures of following science is seeing how researchers use old, simple tools to test new questions. In a nice piece of work published in Nature Neuroscience, University of Oklahoma researchers Stephanie Moriceau and Regina Sullivan used learned-fear association in mice to reveal how the stress of maternal abandonment raised rat pups' sensitivity to threats. As ScientificAmerican.com describes the experiment,. Moriceau and Sullivan tested how baby rats responded to the pairing of an unfamiliar odor--peppermint--and a weak electric shock to their tails. The charge-laced scent attracted the youngest pups without exception while repelling their older siblings of 21...
Posted on August 1, 2006 9:07 PM • 1 Comments •
Several bloggers have commented on Paul Bloom's Seed plaint about brain imaging studies receiving too much attention and a certain false credibility. (See the posts at Cognitive Daily , Mixing Memory and — in refutation — Small Gray Matters, as well as other citing blogs via Technorati or BlogPulse.) Bloom has a point: Both popular and science media show an outsized fondness for brain imaging studies, inspiring much work more diverting than informative. The most overhyped of these studies and stories suggest that in some busy brain area lies the locus of love, the center of empathy, or the key...
Posted on July 4, 2006 9:29 PM • •
Now here's a provoking notion: PTSD in elephants .In an arresting article in Seed, Gay Bradshaw, a professor at Oregon State University, describes the implications of several studies of elephant groups in which wayward youngsters went a-wilding, essentially, murdering rhinos and creating mayhem. The young male elephants were from social groups that had been fragmented and lost the social structure that most elephants grow up in. Bradshaw speculates that the loss of that social structure gave the rogue elephants what amounts to post-traumatic stress syndrome. This offers plenty of interest on its face. It also suggests some intriguing philosophical implications....
Posted on June 21, 2006 9:25 PM • •
My Scientific American Mind article on mirror neurons is out, and includes some amusing and apt photographs and art. Mirror neurons, as the story explains, are motor neurons that fire not only when we perform an action (like reaching for an apple) but when we see someone else perform an action -- or even, as it turns out, when we read, think, or hear about someone performing that action. This mechanism, discovered about a decade ago, seems to underlie much motor, social, and even cultural learning. You can read the story here or buy the digital version online via Scientific...
Posted on May 25, 2006 9:13 PM • 1 Comments •
Author and journalist 
