Brains
loom | August 1, 2007There's been a small, but stunning, step forward in the quest to help people who have suffered consciousness-impairing injuries. Scientists inserted electrodes into the brain of a man in a minimally conscious state. They used the electrodes to stimulate parts of the brain believed to be crucial for binding together the brain into an aware state. As the doctors hoped, the stimulation made the man more responsive. He was able to name objects and to hold a cup to his lips. The details of the experiment appear in this week's issue of Nature.
One experiment on a single subject is a far cry from a…
loom | July 30, 2007The article I wrote for Scientific American in 2005 on the self has been anthologized in a new book: The Best of the Brain from Scientific American: Mind, Matter, and Tomorrows' Brain. Check out the book's line-up, which Oliver Sacks calls, "an irresistible guide to this new territory."
loom | July 9, 2007Larry Moran passes on the rules of the game: go to the Wellcome Library's new image bank and find your favorite scientific image. Here's my pick: the first good picture of the brain, drawn by Christopher Wren in 1664 for Thomas Willis, the first neurologist. (More on Willis and Wren here.)
[Credit: Wellcome Institute, Creative Commons License.]
loom | April 2, 2007You may have read not long ago about birds that can plan for the future. The occasion was a paper that came out in the journal Nature detailing some experiments on scrub jays. I found the paper fascinating, not just for the results themselves, but for the many other studies on mental time travel that are going on these days dealing with other animals--rats, pigeons, monkeys, and us. Instead of simply reporting on one experiment, I took some extra time and took a survey of the past and future of mental time travel. It appears in tomorrow's New York Times.
For those who crave more, here are…
loom | December 25, 2006All I want for Christmas is a lying frog and a bubble-sniffing mole.
For those who want to head for the original papers, check out:
1. "Why Animals Lie: How Dishonesty and Belief Can Coexist in a Signaling System" (free full text)
2. "Underwater 'sniffing' by semi-aquatic mammals"
Happy Holidays!
UPDATE 12/26: Forgot to mention yesterday that I also talk about the dishonesty article on this week's edition of the Times Science podcast.
loom | September 19, 2006Congratulations to the new crop of Macarthur genius grant winners, including Ken Catania, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University whose muse is the star-nosed mole. It turns out that a single strange animal can reveal a lot about how nervous systems develop and evolve. For more on Catania's work, see my blog post from last year and my article on some of Catania's recent work for the New York Times.
loom | September 13, 2006Before 1833 there were no scientists.
It was in that year that William Whewell, a British philosopher, geologist, and all-around bright bulb, coined the word scientist. His mentor, the poet Samuel Coleridge, thought the English language needed a term for someone who studied the natural world but who did not inhabit the lofty heights of philosophy (like Coleridge).
There are plenty of people who lived before 1833 that most of us would call scientists--Isaac Newton, Antoine Lavoisier, Edmund Halley, Carol Linnaeus to name just a few. But the word would have been meaningless to them. The closest…
loom | August 1, 2006John Noble Wilford has a long, interesting article in today's New York Times on the rehabilitation of the alchemist. Once the icon of the bad old days before the scientific revolution, alchemy has been emerging in recent years as more of a proto-science. Indeed, a fair number of the heroes of the scientific revolution were dyed-in-the-wool alchemists. Robert Boyle, one of the founders of chemistry, wanted to reform alchemy, not destroy it. He chased after the philsopher's stone for his whole life. Many of his papers were destroyed in the eighteenth century because they were loaded with…
loom | May 5, 2006It's always great to hear senior scientists talk about the bad old days, when one computer could fill an entire room and no one could say what genes were made of. Eric Kandel of Columbia has been studying memory since the 1950s, and won the Nobel Prize in 2000 for his work. These days he's observing genes switching on and off at the junctions between neurons. But when he started out, he had to content himself with sticking electrodes into crayfish (chosen for their fat neurons). To observe their neurons, scientists would hook up the electrodes to amplifiers and loudspeakers, and the crackle…
loom | March 23, 2006I have a fondness for collecting brain lore--memes about the wonders of the human brain that race around the world for decades. The classic of brain lore is the "ten-percent myth." As I wrote here, people often claim we only use ten percent of our brain, implying that we'd be supergeniuses if we could just switch on the rest. But that's just based on a misinterpretation of some studies in the 1930s. Actually, the energy consumed by the cortex is only enough to power one percent of its neurons at any time.
In a press release descibing the work of Stanford bioengineer Kwabena Boahen, I…
loom | October 25, 2005Back in the 1600s, when neurology was born, it wasn't scientists who were looking at brains. The word scientist didn't exist. Instead, those visionary folks would have called themselves natural philosophers. As I researched this chapter of scientific history for my book Soul Made Flesh, I was struck by the way philosophers--and philosophical questions--are now making their way back into the scientific study of the brain. Last year in Discover I wrote about the work of the philosopher/neuroscientist Joshua Greene, who studies how we make moral judgments. But it turns out that neuroscientists…
loom | October 5, 2005If you live in the New Haven area, I hope you'll consider joining me tomorrow at 5 pm for a talk at the Yale Medical School about my book Soul Made Flesh.
The talk will be at 5 pm, Thursday October 6, in the Beaumont Room at the Sterling Hall of Medicine, 333 Cedar Street. It is free and open to the public. If you need directions, here's a map.
I can promise lots of cool images to accompany my talk, of stuff like excorcisms, miraculous resurrections of murderers, and alchemy. All the normal things you'd expect from a seventeenth-century powerpoint.
loom | July 12, 2005I've got an article in today's New York Times about one of my perennial fascinationsmusical hallucinations. One of the reasons that I find this condition so interesting is that it gives us a look under the neurological hood. Our brains do not simply take in objective impressions of the world. They are continually coming up with theories, and they test them against perceptions every moment of our waking lives. It would be impossible to test them against a complete picture of reality, because the world is simply too complex and ever-changing. Instead, the brain makes quick judgments on scraps…
loom | July 5, 2005How long can an idea stay tantalizing?
Back in 2003, I blogged about an experiment that suggested, incredibly enough, that our long-term memories are encoded by prions the misfolded proteins that are generally accepted to be the cause of mad cow disease. The evidence came from studies of a protein (known as CPEB) that plays a key role in laying down memories in neurons. Scientists found that it had a structure much like prions. When a normal protein misfolds and becomes a prion, it acquires the ability to lock onto other proteins and force them to misfold in the same way. The misfolding can…
loom | May 10, 2005Blogging will be light for a few days because my hard drive devoured itself last night. I just wanted to mention a couple brain-related items. First off, I've got a profile in today's New York Times of Michael Gazzaniga, one of the most fascinating people involved in science today. His research on the split minds of people with split brains would be fascinating enough, but now he's trying to use these insights to make sense of the confusing choices that bioethics now forces us to make. (Gazzaniga's a feisty member of the President's Council on Bioethics.)
For another take on the brain and our…
loom | May 2, 2005Evolutionary psychologists argue that we can understand the workings of the human mind by investigating how it evolved. Much of their research focuses on the past two million years of hominid evolution, during which our ancestors lived in small bands, eating meat they either scavenged or hunted as well as tubers and other plants they gathered. Living for so long in this arrangement, certain ways of thinking may have been favored by natural selection. Evolutionary psychologists believe that a lot of puzzling features of the human mind make sense if we keep our heritage in mind.
The classic…
loom | April 11, 2005I've got an article in tomorrow's New York Times about a startling new way to control the nervous system of animals. Scientists at Yale have genetically engineered flies with neurons that grow light-sensitive triggers. Shine a UV laser at the flies, and the neurons switch on. In one experiment, the scientists were able to make decapitated flies leap into the air by triggering escape-response neurons. In another, they put the trigger in dopamine-producing neurons, and the flash sent healthy flies walking madly around their dish. (You can read the paper for free at Cell's web site.)
In working…
loom | February 8, 2005Scientists studying people in minimally conscious states have published the results of brain scans showing that these people can retain a surprising amount of brain activity. The New York Times and MSNBC, among others, have written up accounts.
I profiled these scientists for a 2003 article in the New York Times Magazine, when they were at an earlier stage in their research. Things certainly have changed since then. When my article came out, hardly anyone had heard of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman in a permanent vegetative state who is at the center of a battle between her parents, who…
loom | November 10, 2004Soul Made Flesh made Amazon.com's Editor's Pick list of the ten best science books of 2004. It's an honor, although it seems a little premature to call 2004 over!
loom | September 20, 2004I am sure that in 50 years, we are going to know a lot more about how the mind works. The fusion of psychology and genetics will tell us about how our personality is influenced by our genes, and they'll also show exactly how the environment plays a hand as well. The preliminary evidence is just too impressive to seriously doubt it. Likewise, I am sure that we will have a deeper understanding how our minds have evolved, pinpointing the changes in DNA over the past six million years have given us brains that work very differently than apes. Again, the first results can't help but inspire a lot…