Shelley Batts is a Neuroscience PhD candidate at the University of Michigan. She studies hair cell regeneration in the cochlea, and is trying to finish that quixotic quest called 'thesis.' She lies awake at night pondering how science intersects with politics, culture, policy, money, medicine, and religion in an attempt to be more than just a niche scientist sitting in the oh-so-lovely ivory tower. Follow me and my parrot, Pepper, on our quest to finish my PhD, land a post-doc, and stay sane.
The Omnibrain is a psychology graduate student at an online university. He hopes that the three weeks and $29.95 that he is spending on his Ph.D. will get him a job at a Tier 1 research university. Do online universities have postdocs? Ok...just kidding, he is really a Ph.D. Candidate in Psychology studying high level vision. You know... stuff like scene & object perception.
While not an official contributer to 'Of Two Minds,' Shelley's sidekick is an African Grey parrot named Pepper. His heros are Irene Pepperberg, Alex, and Rachel Carson. He spends his time learning Mandarin and writing the Great American novel.
"Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life." ~Rachel Carson
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In the never ending quest for death gadgets Mercedes has come up with a specialized screen that will show the driver one thing and the passenger another. Just think, now in addition to a driver watching a movie while they are going 70 mph they will be leaning all the way over into the passenger seat to see it. Unfortunately Mercedes hasn't created a system to keep stupid drivers from doing stupid things... like driving off a cliff while following the GPS directions on the screen they're allowed to see. Ok.. I jest - this seems like a pretty damn cool system and I totally want one. I'm just jealous of the rich folk - stupid grad school :(
Well anyway here's the all exciting details straight from Mercedes:
I've always joked around about girls who would walk into a tattoo parlor and ask for a Chinese character that means something to them... like love, hope, or faith. Of course the tattoo artists don't know one damn character in Chinese so they just pick a random character from the internet and the girl ends up with something that actually says slut, pink slippery Christmas tree, or something else random. I never imagined a scientific magazine would fall prey to something absolutely ridiculous like this.
Science journal mistakenly uses flyer for Macau brothel to illustrate report on China.
A respected research institute wanted Chinese classical texts to adorn its journal, something beautiful and elegant, to illustrate a special report on China. Instead, it got a racy flyer extolling the lusty details of stripping housewives in a brothel.... There were red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany's top scientific institutions, the Max Planck Institute, after it ran the text of a handbill for a Macau strip club on the front page of its latest journal.
Oh pareidolia. I mean I understand seeing something that maybe looks like something else in the clouds or one time I accidentally peeled an orange that looked like a penis. But thinking that there is something actually significant and spiritually meaningful in seeing a pattern in randomness is ridiculous. This is my favorite example so far. It was only a matter of time until someone saw something like Jesus or in this case the Virgin Mary in an MRI scan. After all the Hippocampus is named after the sea horse since it vaguely looks like one.
Anyway here's the image - and if you want you can bid on it @ ebay (obviously).
Evidently you can make anything you want become a physical reality in your brain by just thinking about it a lot:
Latrimore, a 42-year-old wife and mother without insurance, hadn't ever really looked at the results of a 2002 MRI scan of her brain. So she didn't know what her Catholic sister-in-law was talking about a few weeks ago when she said, "Oh my gosh, Pam, you have Mother Mary in your head."
But then she looked.
And it did look like Mary, the bent head a dark spot nestled between the two hemispheres of the brain. Lightened areas look like wings of light rising on either side of her.
"I know this is where it sounds crazy," Latrimore said. "But I pray, I'm fighting for my life, so every time I go into these machines I pray."
A sports magazine writer asked me about the different techniques one could use to distract an athlete... here's what I said:
About a year ago another graduate student and I were planning on doing some research in my lab to determine what the best way of distracting a free throw shooter was. We have a pretty cool motion tracking system that would allow us to track arm and ball position as well as project distractions onto a wall - either real world video or computer generated distractions. But this is as far as we got since I saw some other research with a similar goal that didn't seem to be able to find an effect - and if you want to take research from a lab and put it into the real world you have to have a very clear and powerful result. But here were our thoughts behind the research:
There seem to be two distinct ways that people could try to distract a free-throw shooter (or really any athlete trying to make a precise ballistic motion toward a target) the first is by some sort of brut force distraction that will cause them to be more variable in their performance. This could be taunting (In h.s. we used to find out the other teams mothers and gf's names), having a large semi-naked person dancing, random noise (visual or auditory) with thunder sticks, or really anything. It really doesn't matter what the source of the 'noise' is as long as it somehow increases the workload for the athlete and forces them to filter out irrelevant stimuli and therfore perform their primary task with less efficiency. All of these techniques would probably work very well on a young child up into their teenage years. But getting this to work on an adult (who is a master of filtering irrelevant things - their prefrontal cortex is fully developed) much less a professional athlete is a bit far fetched. You know... maybe under the right circumstances a fan taunt or a well placed bit of random noise might work sometimes - say if the athlete was having a bad day or was feeling under the weather. But to get this to work a significant amount of time is a long shot. I was at a basketball game last year where during the entire game whenever one particular player (who backed out of playing for our team) got taunted by the whole stadium with "F*#% you ______" I think it might have worked for a little while but we did end up losing.
The second way of distracting a player is by using some sort of impenetrable visual bias. What I mean is that there are certain basic properties of the visual system that no matter how much you know about them or how much you think about them, you cannot change your behavior when encountering them. Of course in reality you can figure out how to get around many of these (and we do - pilots for example would crash all the time if they couldn't ignore their sense of balance). In anycase, there was a paper in Nature a few years ago that demonstrated that when there is constant motion behind a target people were biased to reach out in whatever direction the motion was going instead of right toward the target. (See: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v423/n6942/abs/nature01693.html). So both fans and researchers figured they could do something similar and create some sort of motion to one side of the basket (instead of random waving sticks) forcing the freethrow shooter to shoot to the side of the basket. A guy wrote an article in Slate about this idea (http://www.slate.com/id/2111939/) and how he tried it with Marc Cuban.
So we figured we'd try this in the lab - but we got beat to the punch by a few months - which in this case was a good thing since they didn't find any positive results (http://journalofvision.org/8/6/1044/). At this point I kind of figured that if something obvious like this didn't work in a very controled setting there was no way it could possibly work in a basketball game. My reasoning is this.. When you get ready to plan a movement like a freethrow it takes a only a few milliseconds, after that you start executing a movement which takes even less time, and then finally you follow through with the movement. At only small portion of this time are you gathering the visual information needed to execute a movement and then only for a tiny tiny amount of time can you alter your movement once it has began. At some point your movement cannot be altered - well at least for a ballistic motion like throwing something, punching something, or pointing. So for a hundred or thousand some fans (or even just 2) to coordinate a sudden and coordinated movement that is perfectly timed with the couple hundred milliseconds that a player is planning and executing a freethrow is a little bit hard to imagine. There are a number of other avenues for research to find ways of altering people's shots or throws or whatever. However, the holy grail of finding something that works in a real world situation a significant amount of time is probably a long shot - and anyway it would be banned in sports nearly immediately.
Of course every fan thinks that their taunting works since they only remember the times when it did work - think of all the crazy superstitions athletes have themselves.
Arguably the most important and certainly the most famous single case study patient in Psychology and Neuroscience passed away on Tuesday December 2nd. H.M. as he was known to probably every student of Psychology can now be revealed as Henry G. Molaison, 82, from Windsor Locks, CT.
HM was a man with no memory (well... at least episodic). Early in his life he developed epilepsy which left him very much incapacitated, he would have numerous small and large seizures a day. After nearly lethal doses of drugs that sought (unsuccessfully) to control the seizures, doctors, namely William Scoville, decided on a drastic course of action. They would remove the source of the seizures. So after some exploration into HM's brain they discovered that the source of all his problems lay in and around the hippocampus. Melville and his team of surgeons went in a short time later and removed a majority of his medial temporal lobe and thankfully the seizures stopped. Unfortunately though, something just as debilitating replaced them - HM had no memory. He could remember some things prior to the surgery but he could form no new ones.
H.M. is the basis for nearly everything we now know today about the neural basis of memory. People have continued research with him up until his recent death at the ripe old age of 82. I believe he lived his life as a professional research subject ;)
A State Legislature proclaimed an amazing thing recently which has just so made my day! They took time out of their busy schedule of shutting down state parks and getting in a fiduciary pissing match to proclaim that this week is grad student week or some such garbage. Here's the official proclamation:
WHEREAS, Graduate Schools play an important role in enhancing the nation's economic competitiveness and innovation; and
WHEREAS, the National Science Foundation cites State universities for attracting $5.4 billion in federally sponsored grants and contracts, over the past five years; and
WHEREAS, State Graduate Schools play a vital role in developing the best and brightest domestic and globally recruited talent, evidenced by the fact that 46% of the State legislature have received an advanced degree from an State university, and 48% of certified elementary and secondary school teachers in State have earned graduate degrees; and
WHEREAS, National laboratories in State are dependent on graduate students and faculty from State graduate schools; and
WHERAS, Graduate Education is inextricably linked to the global economy, evidenced by State's #1 ranking in the Somewhere in the US as a destination for foreign investment, State's ability to attracted over 5,800 foreign businesses that employ more than 335,000 State citizens, and State Graduate Schools' ability to attract over 25,600 international students; and
WHERAS, the State Association of Graduate Schools (IAGS), which represents private and public institutions statewide: 1) provides a forum for communication and develop a spirit of cooperation among graduate schools, graduate colleges, and graduate divisions of the colleges and universities of the State of State; 2) plans and implements various mechanisms, consortia, and resource sharing to the benefit and best interests of graduate education, and the people of the State of State; 3) serves in an advisory capacity, if so requested, to any State of State agency or commission on matters relating to graduate education; and 4) aims to improve graduate education in the State of State;
THEREFORE, I, Big Man, Governor of the State of State, do hereby proclaim October 20-24, 2008 as GRADUATE EDUCATION WEEK in Illinois and urge all citizens to recognize Graduate Deans and the State Association of Graduate Schools for all that they do to promote graduate education and contribute to the public good.
Awesome! They finally realize that we're important. But wait... I can't seem to find the section in here where they treat us like real employees and offer us real health insurance and retirement benefits. Hmm... maybe if I look harder I can find that part that says something about only being paid for 20 hours a week when I'm working more than 60 teaching hundreds of students and doing research and not even really taking classes that 'costs' the university money. Maybe there's a little bit in there somewhere about giving us more money or benefits?
Wait... there's not?! that's odd. Why did they draft this thing then?
Can someone explain to me what the purpose of a 'proclamation' is?
So I'm teaching Psychology 100 this semester for the first time and part of the whole thing is that we're supposed to do certain things to get a graduate teaching certificate (which I think is the schools attempt at giving us grad students some teaching training as opposed to the norm of none). One of the requirements is to have a mid-term student and faculty evaluation and then write a little pageish thing on what it taught us. Here's mine... Hey if I have to do something I might as well make it entertaining ;)
What the midterm evaluation taught me.
1. Be specific with your language.
If you have a whole lot of foreign students who don't really understand the intricacies of your language things that you take for granted will be lost on them. If you write in your evaluation form, "Your instructor is...," They might just take you literally and write your name (the same goes for the text book title). This also made me realize that probably a full 90% of my humor is falling on deaf ears (no matter what country they are from. On the other hand if you cater to the person who only speaks basic English and can't understand the intricacies of the language the rest of the class will be bored so much so that they might decide that napping in class is a much better use of time than enjoying the lectures. I imagine that those who don't speak great English are also learning all sorts of interesting things about American culture.
2. Student evaluations are not that useful
I don't think people will actually be mean on an evaluation when they have to actually write something down as opposed to just choosing a number. Some of the comments are constructive, such as "slow down" or "more detail" but comments like "Steve is cool" or "Steve is a sharp dresser" only serves to stroke my already abnormally large ego and turn me into a raving egotistical teaching maniac who thinks his lectures and classroom/courtroom management skills are only equaled by Clarence Darrow. It would be really helpful if students could be prompted to be much more critical of me and my teaching style/skills. On the other hand one could wonder whether students really have any idea of what they actually need to do well and learn. Perhaps evaluations are not as useful for people who fool the class into thinking things by charisma alone as opposed to strict info only tutelage. Perhaps I should try to be more boring and see what happens?
3. Evaluations by an experienced instructor are ultimately more helpful than anything that can come from students.
I mean really, an experienced instructor isn't getting a grade from you and is in a different social position. It makes sense that they would be straight with you and have helpful ideas. When you dislike their comments it also makes you defend your own methods and figure out whether your own methods really make much sense to begin with. All in all I'm not sure I changed my teaching methods all that much from these rounds of evaluations - The most I'm learning about teaching is from the confused stares of the students when I try to explain the difference between two concepts that I barely understand the difference between. I think the next time around teaching and maybe even the next round of evaluations should really help me figure out what needs to improve since the things that obviously didn't work (that I totally know about) will be completely different.
According to a recent National Geographic article primates pay a lot of attention to their friends asses. But not only that, they can actually identify them based on their fabulous booties. In humans facial recognition is based on a region coined as the Fusiform Face Area (FFA) and I believe a similar region has been found in primates. There is also an area of the human cortex dedicated to processing the body, call the Extra Striate Body Area (EBA). The big question here is whether primates have a particular area of the brain dedicated to only ass processing or they are using one of these other areas for the recognition. Isabel Gauthier could possibly make a case for the face area doing the ass processing since she believes that the fusiform gyrus participates in visual processing of expert categories and I'm sure you could make a case for the primates being experts in the ass. On the other hand... perhaps Nancy Kanwisher would make a case through recognition in the EBA of the primates (do they have EBA's?). In any case - Chimps like asses even more than humans.
Anyway... here's some of the details of the study:
In a recent experiment, captive primates were able to identify photos of their acquaintances' rears and match them with the right faces. The ability suggests that the animals possess mental "whole body" representations of other chimps they know.
Each participating chimp was flashed a picture of another's bum, with visible genitals, then shown the face of the derriere's owner and another face of the same gender.
Both males and females were successful in this anatomical match game, pairing faces and posteriors with much greater frequency than chance alone--but only if the photos showed chimps they already knew.
"Many animals look at parts of the body, the voice, the hands, as separate entities and don't wholly integrate them," said study co-author Frans de Waal of the Yerkes National Primate Research Center at Atlanta's Emory University.
On a related note, I know a professor who I guess I shouldn't mention by name who thinks that men have a breast related area. I'm not sure what evidence she has of this but I might be convinced.
WATERBURY, Vt. -- People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals sent a letter to Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, cofounders of Ben & Jerry's Homemade Inc., urging them to replace cow's milk they use in their ice cream products with human breast milk, according to a statement recently released by a PETA spokeswoman.
"PETA's request comes in the wake of news reports that a Swiss restaurant owner will begin purchasing breast milk from nursing mothers and substituting breast milk for 75 percent of the cow's milk in the food he serves," the statement says.
PETA officials say a move to human breast milk would lessen the suffering of dairy cows and their babies on factory farms and benefit human health.
Hmm.. I'm feeling a great business plan coming on here that shouldn't cause any problems whatsoever... I'm going to be impregnating women and then artificially keep them lactating all the while confining them to cages in order to harvest their breast milk. If that doesn't work I guess I can just open up a milking center at the mall so that I can get new mothers to stop by for a few minutes while I milk them. I could even offer them.. well lets see I could probably extract less than a gallon at a time...so at current rates - maybe offer them 10 cents for their time? I'll bet I could get at least enough milk from 100 malls to maybe provide enough ice cream for 1 mall.
Does anyone want to invest in my idea? All I need... a few trucks, a few refrigerators, and a whole shit load of breast pumps.
"I guess a lot of you already know that "liberel" isn't a real word. But it sure was news to me! And now my face is as red as a mooseburger cooked up rare and painted in lipstick!" haha....
Let me first start by saying that if your doctor tells you that praying is your last hope of your loved ones survival GET A NEW DOCTOR. Now that I've said that let me show you part of this ridiculous article from CNN's medical correspondent, who is clearly in the wrong specialty of journalism (don't they have a religion or faith section?!)
Christopher was just a few days old and had a rare blood infection and fungal meningitis, a brain infection.
"I could tell in their eyes they had no hope for my son," Gorman said. "They told me to prepare for his death. They told me he might not make it through the night."
Gorman never believed the doctors. In fact, she did something she thinks annoyed these men and women of science: She prayed. She prayed all the time.
"They made me feel ridiculous for praying so much and so hard and leaving it up to God," said Gorman, who lives in Idaho Falls, Idaho. "But I told them my son not surviving was not an option."
When he was a month old, Christopher left the hospital. He's been healthy ever since, she says. He turns 3 next month.
"It was a miracle," she said. "There are just things doctors can't explain. Doctors are not in control of everything. There's stuff that happens every day that they can't explain."
A new study finds that many Americans have that same kind of faith. In the study, 57 percent of randomly surveyed adults said God's intervention could save a deathly ill family member even if physicians said treatment would be futile.
However, just under 20 percent of doctors and other medical workers said God could reverse a helpless outcome.
The study was published last month in Archives of Surgery and is one of many to show a "faith gap" between doctors and patients.
I get a little confused by studies like this. They are always made out in the press to sound like they are actually showing a relationship between praying and miracle healing or whatever. But all that they show is that a small number of people have ridiculous beliefs about medical miracles at the hand of God. A more informative study would be to correlate these people's beliefs and their reasoning ability as well as some measure of how good doctors are that believe that miracles could cure their patients. I don't think I want my doctor praying for my dying father when instead he could be working to actually save his life.
I'm also a little confused on the reporting. If you ARE going to report something like this you might want to at least write something to the effect that miracles=woo and that a single case does not science make.
Are you concerned that you are just sleeping with waaaay too many people? Do you want to avoid getting STD's? Do your neighbors give you dirty looks in every morning when a new person comes waltzing out of your apartment? Just place this wonderful pez like condom dispenser on your nightstand table. Not only will it ensure that you have safer sex - it will ensure that you have NO sex. When your prospective partner see's it they will realize that you probably carry many many diseases that they simply do not want.
But hey... it's only 28$ I'm not sure how you can afford to NOT get one!
Alice Pawley of Sciencewomen fame is heading down to Champaign on September 27th to help me throw a millionth comment bash. We'll even buy you a round of booze and perhaps some yummy foods thanks to some wonderful financing by ScienceBlogs! We have tentatively planned on meeting at the Blind Pig or Jupiters Pizza (it's a bar too - don't worry!)
We look forward to meeting all you ScienceBlogs fans here in Champaign-Urbana. Home of.... uhh... the University of Illinois and uhh... corn?
There was a request for a Millionth Comment party here in Champaign-Urbana Illinois... I would totally be up for getting together with a bunch of like minded folk and throwing a few down.... say at the Blind Pig?
Anyone else up for meeting up for some beers? (Or Soda... or I guess even water)
Thanks to a reader, Daniel Keogh, we have a wonderful video detailing what the Imperial March from Star Wars would taste like to one particular synaesthete who has some particularly odd sensation pairings.
Check it out:
The Professor Funk also has a whole bunch of other entertaining looking videos about other aspects of science. We give them 4 thumbs up. I never did understand why Ebert, et. al. could only ever give a single thumbs up. After all there were two people with four total thumbs. Meh whatever, not everyone can be as awesome as Shelley and I.
So... my girlfriend studies categories and concepts and her adviser wanted her to show a video for her first year project. Of course I went out to youtube and tried to find something sensible since I'm procrastinating right now on my psych 100 syllabus - and of course I found something absolutely ridiculous (hey... it IS youtube). Here is how to categorize all the Alien Species that have been wandering around the earth since our first contact with our galactic overlords at Roswell:
If I like what I see, I'll receive 5 more issues (6 in all) for just $19.95. If I'm not completely satisfied, I'll simply write "cancel" on the invoice and owe nothing. The free issue is mine to keep.
The Omnibrain is a psychology graduate student at an online university. He hopes that the three weeks and $29.95 that he is spending on his Ph.D. will get him a job at a Tier 1 research university. Do online universities have postdocs? Ok...just kidding, he is really a Ph.D. Candidate in Psychology studying high level vision. You know... stuff like scene & object perception.
While not an official contributer to 'Of Two Minds,' Shelley's sidekick is an African Grey parrot named Pepper. His heros are Irene Pepperberg, Alex, and Rachel Carson. He spends his time learning Mandarin and writing the Great American novel.
In the never ending quest for death gadgets Mercedes has come up with a specialized screen that will show the driver one thing and the passenger another. Just think, now in addition to a driver watching a movie while they are going 70 mph they will be leaning all the way over into the passenger seat to see it. Unfortunately Mercedes hasn't created a system to keep stupid drivers from doing stupid things... like driving off a cliff while following the GPS directions on the screen they're allowed to see. Ok.. I jest - this seems like a pretty damn cool system and I totally want one. I'm just jealous of the rich folk - stupid grad school :(
H.M. is the basis for nearly everything we now know today about the neural basis of memory. People have continued research with him up until his recent death at the ripe old age of 82. I believe he lived his life as a professional research subject ;)
