Brain and Behavior
jgoldman | July 5, 2010I am quite full from the last minute Fourth of July dinner that my brother and I threw together - featuring grilled chicken-apple sausages, roasted pork tenderloin with lemon-pepper dry rub, and chocolate peanut butter cookies. Too full to blog. Instead as I'm working my way through season six of Buffy on Netflix, I've got something different for you today.
Instead of the usual Monday fare, I want you all to go over and say hello to The Dog Zombie.
She describes herself thusly:
The Dog Zombie studies dog brains by pursuing DVM and MS degrees. She is currently in her research year, between…
emjohnson | July 2, 2010The latest issue of the journal Science has an essay by Greg Miller looking at the explosion of research into epigenetics and what this work could suggest about human society.
In 2004, Szyf and Meaney published a paper in Nature Neuroscience that helped launch the behavioral epigenetics revolution. It remains one of the most cited papers that journal has ever published. The paper built on more than a decade of research in Meaney's lab on rodent mothering styles.
Rat moms vary naturally in their nurturing tendencies. Some lick and groom their pups extensively and arch their backs to make it…
cortex | July 1, 2010Brendan Koerner has a really fantastic article in the latest Wired on Alcoholics Anonymous (AA). It's a fascinating exploration of the organization, from its hallucinogen inspired birth (Bill Wilson was tripping on belladonna when he found God in a hospital room) to the difficulty of accurately measuring the effectiveness of AA:
The group's "cure rate" has been estimated at anywhere from 75 percent to 5 percent, extremes that seem far-fetched. Even the most widely cited (and carefully conducted) studies are often marred by obvious flaws. A 1999 meta-analysis of 21 existing studies, for…
lborkowski | July 1, 2010It's Zombie Day on ScienceBlogs! Scicurious at Neurotopia kicked things off, and Joseph of Ataraxia Theatre (whose other projects include the GearHead roleplaying game) provided the cool zombie illustrations.
Thanks to the DC Department of Health's excellent disease surveillance system, a recent outbreak of zombies in the nation's capital was detected quickly enough to allow for capture and isolation of all cases, and no further transmission of the zombie virus has been observed. All state and local health and law enforcement departments have been alerted to the outbreak and instructed on…
mikethemadbiologist | July 1, 2010(from here)
Now, by 'zombie bank', you probably think I'm referring to banks that have more liabilities than assets, and are basically waiting for the plug to be pulled. Nope. At this point, the only rational explanation for many banks' behavior is that they have actually been taken over by zombies.
Consider the following:
1) Banks have been acting as if they are brain dead. Maybe they are brain dead.
(from here)
2) Banks are behaving voraciously towards their customers, showing very poor impulse control. Sounds like zombies to me.
3) Banks are set in their ways, and reacting very…
pharyngula | July 1, 2010Christina Pikas is a zombie doing reference searches.
Sharon Astyk is a zombie wondering about zombie infrastructure.
Greg Laden has always been a zombie, but now he's a zombie with bugs on his brain.
Grrlscientist has discovered that zombies like turtles.
Vince LiCata has determined that university administrators are zombies. Come back when you have something new to report, Vince.
The zombie PalMD has a surprising ally in Jenny McCarthy — she's fighting efforts to end the zombie pandemic. The obvious McCarthy joke has already been made.
Coturnix warns us that zombies are arrhythmic, so…
clock | July 1, 2010Blame 'Night of the Living Dead' for this, but many people mistakenly think that zombies are nocturnal, going around their business of walking around town with stilted gaits, looking for people whose brains they can eat, only at night.
You think you are safe during the day? You are dangerously wrong!
Zombies are on the prowl at all times of day and night! They are not nocturnal, they are arrhythmic! And insomniac. They never sleep!
Remember how one becomes a zombie in the first place? Through death, or Intercision, or, since this is a science blog and we need to explain this scientifically,…
jgoldman | July 1, 2010Imagine with me, for a moment, that the zombie invasion has begun. You try to escape, but the zombies are just too much to handle. You can't run fast enough. They're everywhere. Your favorite science bloggers have been turned into zombies and they're coming for you.
Figure 1: Thanks to Joseph Hewitt of Ataraxia Theatre for providing us with these awesome illustrations of zombified sciblings! Left to right: Christie, Sci, Bora, me, & Peter and Travis. Click on each to embiggen.
I'm sure you've always wondered what would happen as a zombie ate through your brain. How would it feel? What…
emjohnson | July 1, 2010
Credit: Revenant MagazineThe origin of zombies (Genus: Zumbi) is well understood today, but this wasn't the case when they were first discovered in the early 1800s. Charles Darwin was the first to recognize that zombie "reproduction" results in a process of descent with modification in a way analogous to that of non-undead species. Darwin's insight was that, even though zombie's don't reproduce sexually, random mutations in hereditary material can be passed along after a zombie bite. Each "daughter zombie" then inherits the traits of their parent and pass those traits along to their…
cpikas | June 30, 2010
How do zombies seek and use information? What are their information needs?
Their information needs primarily consist of finding brains. They pretty much search by geographic proximity and pattern matching. The type of browsing they do doesn't seem to be well supported by information systems.
How should a reference interview with a Zombie go? No studies have been published on walk-up reference, but there are some ideas on doing phone or virtual reference. The zombies aren't really good with a mouse, so in virtual reference it's best to send images. In telephone reference, screaming doesn…
pharyngula | June 30, 2010Important clarification: CAH is a real and serious disease. There are no objections to pediatricians treating the physiological disorders in utero. However, lesbianism, traditionally masculine career choices, and disinterest in having children are not diseases…and the problem in this work is that the doctors involved clearly think they are, and are interested in using the drug dexamethasone to modify behavioral choices. That's the scary part.
Ladies, are you independent, stubborn, or mildly aggressive in your social interactions? Are you perhaps less interested in having sex with men than…
oracknows | June 29, 2010With the aging of the population, one of the most feared potential manners by which more and more of us will leave this earth is through Alzheimer's disease or other forms of dementia. And it is a scary thing, too. Having valued my intelligence all my life and in particular enjoying the intellectual stimulation that I derive from my job, not to mention from blogging and contemplating science outside my realm of expertise, like many people I fear Alzheimer's disease at least as much as cancer or heart disease, possibly more. Imagining the slow decline in my faculties to the point where I can…
pharyngula | June 28, 2010My brain has been blasted by the confident inanity of Ron Rosenbaum. He's a chipper flibbertigibbet who is proudly agnostic (no problem with that) and as dumb as they come (which is a problem). He has written an essay on Slate titled "The Rise of the New Agnostics" which has a few little quirks. No such movement exists, which he admits, it's strikingly unoriginal to invent a 'new' epithet for your nonexistent movement by appropriating a three letter modifier from the "New" Atheists which we all detest and groaningly disavow over and over again, it is a remarkably incoherent manifesto, and he…
sb admin | June 28, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: Thanks to commentators Liz Borkowski, Karen Starko, Steve Schoenbaum, and Mark Rosenberg for their thoughtful posts, though it appears that Mark Rosenberg's post got cut off after his first-paragraph query asking why anyone would go into the field of public health. I will wait to respond to his post once I see him answer his own question! In the meantime, there is much to talk about. I (Mark Pendergrast) will respond to parts of what Liz, Karen, and Steve wrote in order, along with other blogger comments.
Let me respond first to a blog comment from John Willis, who…
mpendergrast | June 28, 2010Mark Pendergrast writes: Thanks to commentators Liz Borkowski, Karen Starko, Steve Schoenbaum, and Mark Rosenberg for their thoughtful posts, though it appears that Mark Rosenberg's post got cut off after his first-paragraph query asking why anyone would go into the field of public health. I will wait to respond to his post once I see him answer his own question! In the meantime, there is much to talk about. I (Mark Pendergrast) will respond to parts of what Liz, Karen, and Steve wrote in order, along with other blogger comments.
Let me respond first to a blog comment from John Willis, who…
cortex | June 28, 2010The intelligence test is badly named. The main problem is that we should be talking about intelligence tests in plural, so that the IQ test is merely one of the many measures we use to assess our innate mental skills.
Unfortunately, despite the best efforts of Howard Gardner, Robert Sternberg and others, the IQ test remains the singular test of individual cognitive ability. The mysterious entity that it measures - g, for general intelligence factor - is still seen as the dominant variable in determining the intellectual performance of our brain. (G was first coined, in 1904, by the…
ddobbs | June 28, 2010Research Digest has posted an q&a interview with me as part of their The Bloggers Behind the Blog series. Here are a few key tidbits. Do read the rest there, as well as the other interviews already run and to come.
On why I write about psychology, psychiatry, and other behavioral sciences:
Science constitutes our most serious and rigorous attempt to understand the world -- and psychiatry, psychology, and now neuroscience make great material partly because they so often and starkly show science's power and pitfalls. These disciplines are hard. The people who work in them, whether…
oracknows | June 24, 2010Remember Boyd Haley?
He's the Professor and former Chairman of the Department of Chemistry at the University of Kentucky whose formerly respectable career tanked because he fell into pseudoscience. For whatever reason, a while back he became enamored first of dental amalgam quackery to the point where he became involved in organizations like Consumers for Dental Choice (a.k.a. "Toxic Teeth"), whose expressed raison d'etre is to "work to abolish mercury dental fillings"). From that position, he promoted the idea that mercury-containing dental amalgams are horrifically toxic, helping to spread…
cortex | June 24, 2010I was a stuttering child. Whenever I got the slightest bit nervous, I had an annoying tendency to run out of air on vowel sounds, so that beginning a phrase with "A" or "eee" or "I" was all but impossible. I would choke and sputter, my eyes blinking in mad frustration. This minor affliction led me to become extremely self-aware of my speech. Before I said anything out loud, I would consider the breathy weight of the words, and mentally rehearse all those linguistic speed bumps and stop signs. If the phonetics seemed too dangerous, the sentence would be rewritten in my head, edited down to the…
agelman | June 23, 2010Maggie Fox writes:
Brain scans may be able to predict what you will do better than you can yourself . . . They found a way to interpret "real time" brain images to show whether people who viewed messages about using sunscreen would actually use sunscreen during the following week.
The scans were more accurate than the volunteers were, Emily Falk and colleagues at the University of California Los Angeles reported in the Journal of Neuroscience. . . .
About half the volunteers had correctly predicted whether they would use sunscreen. The research team analyzed and re-analyzed the MRI scans to…