Brain and Behavior
cortex | March 22, 2010Over the weekend, I had a little essay in the Times on some new research on why dream at night.
When I can't sleep, I think about what I'm missing. I glance over at my wife and watch her eyelids flutter. I listen to the steady rhythm of her breath. I wonder if she's dreaming and, if so, what story she's telling to herself to pass the time. (The mind is like a shark -- it can't ever stop swimming in thought.) And then my eyes return to the ceiling and I wonder what I would be dreaming about, if only I could fall asleep.
Why do we dream? As a chronic insomniac, I like to pretend that our…
clock | March 22, 2010There are 32 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services (CiteULike, Mendeley, Connotea, Stumbleupon, Facebook and Digg) with just one click. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Laetoli Footprints Preserve Earliest Direct Evidence of Human-Like Bipedal Biomechanics:
Debates over the evolution of hominin bipedalism, a defining human characteristic, revolve around whether early…
cortex | March 17, 2010The world is a confusing place. Correlation looks like causation; the signal sounds like the noise; randomness is everywhere. This raises the obvious question: How does the human brain cope with such an epistemic mess? How do we deal with the helter-skelter of reality? One approach would be to ground all of our beliefs in modesty and uncertainty, to recognize that we know so little and understand even less.
Needless to say, that's not what we do. Instead of grappling with the problem of induction, we believe in God. Instead of applying Bayesian logic, we slip into rigid ideologies, which…
neurophilosophy | March 17, 2010SNAKES have a unique sensory system for detecting infrared radiation, with which they can visualize temperature changes within their immediate environment. Using this special sense, they can image the body heat radiating from warm-blooded animals nearby. This enables them to track their prey quickly and with great accuracy, even in the dark, and to target the most vulnerable parts of the prey's body when they strike. It also warns them of the presence of predators, and may be used to find appropriate locations for building dens.
Infrared detection is known to be mediated by a specialized…
cortex | March 16, 2010Here's a moral scenario:
A man is sitting near the side of the road when he sees a truck speeding along. It is headed towards a group of five men, who do not hear or see it, and if nothing appears in the road, it will certainly hit and kill them. Across the road is another man sitting in front of his house. If the man who is sitting by the road calls out to the man by his house and says 'come here,' the man will walk into the road in the path of the truck, be killed, and stop it from continuing on toward the five, saving them. If the man sitting by the road says nothing, the truck will travel…
revere | March 16, 2010If there's one thing I have a zero tolerance policy for, it's zero tolerance policies. We see too many incredibly stupid implementations of rigid and mandatory policies (including mandatory sentencing), no matter how reasonable they sound when first advocated, to believe there should ever be policies that provide absolutely no flexibility. The world is a messy place and not everything fits into pre-envisioned boxes.
The latest miscarriage of common sense and humane behavior comes to us from those good people at WalMart, who fired a long time, loyal and effective employee because he failed a…
cwilcox | March 15, 2010Octopuses* and their cephalopod relatives are some of the smartest animals on the planet. Accordingly, many scientists want to understand how their mind works. To gain insights into the complex minds of cephalopods, researchers have been studying behavior in individual animals for years by presenting different animals with various visual stimuli. But many of the methods have downsides - for example, if you want to see how an octopus reacts to another octopus, you can add an octopus to the tank, but doing so introduces other variables. There may be variation in response based on how the…
cortex | March 15, 2010Now that the social web is maturing - the platforms have been winnowed down to a select few (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) - some interesting commonalities are emerging. The one shared feature that I'm most interested in is also a little disturbing: the tendency of the social software to quantify our social life. Facebook doesn't just let us connect with our friends: it counts our friends. Twitter doesn't just allow us to aggregate a stream of chatter: it measures our social reach. LinkedIn has too many damn hierarchies to count. Even the staid blog is all about the metrics, from page…
thusspakezuska | March 14, 2010Over at the mansplaining thread, you can read literally hundreds of hilarious, annoying, frustrating, heartbreaking stories of how women are constantly subjected to intrusive, incessant, insensitive, inane mansplaining. Interspersed you will also find comments from d00dly d00ds whinging away about how awful it is that women are talking so MEAN about men, and their mansplanations about how mansplaining doesn't exist. Then some douche tried to coin the phrase femsplaining.
Femsplaining, as best I can tell, is a phenomenon that arises in the following manner:
(1) A woman points out an…
edyong | March 12, 2010This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
For all the millions that are poured into electoral campaigns, a voter's choice can be influenced by the subtlest of signals. Israeli scientists have found that even subliminal exposure to national flags can shift a person's political views and even who they vote for. They managed to affect the attitudes of volunteers to the Israeli-Palestine conflict by showing them the Israeli flag for just 16 thousandths of a second, barely long enough for the image to consciously register.
These results are…
edyong | March 8, 2010Ever wonder if acts of kindness or malice really do ripple outwards? If you give up a seat on a train to a stranger, do they go onto "pay it forward" to others? Likewise, if you steal someone's seat, does the bad mood you engender topple over to other people like a set of malicious dominoes? We'd all probably assume that the answers to both questions were yes, but James Fowler and Nicholas Christakis think they have found experimental evidence for the contagious nature of cooperation and cheating.
The duo analysed data from an earlier psychological experiment by Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter…
tfk | March 6, 2010Attention conservation notice: This post should have been broken into about three parts, but it's written now and I don't care. Read it at your risk. Consists of points I've made before to little avail, thinly veiled disdain for people I respect, and cartoons.
As I've said before, reading anti-accommodationists is bad for the health and bad for the brain. It was a habit I kicked, and getting back to it, even slightly, has not been a cheering experience.
It reminds me of the reason I don't write about Israel/Palestine. One side commits some atrocity, and this leads the other side to commit…
oracknows | March 4, 2010Now that's what I'm talking about! This is what we need to see more of! A father whose child underwent the quackery that is the Defeat Autism Now! (DAN!) protocol is suing the doctors who administered it for malpractice:
The father of a 7-year-old Chicago boy who was diagnosed as a toddler with autism has sued the Naperville and Florida doctors who treated his son, alleging they harmed the child with "dangerous and unnecessary experimental treatments."
James Coman and his son were featured last year in "Dubious Medicine," a Tribune series that examined risky, unproven treatments for autism…
cortex | March 4, 2010The ultimatum game is a simple experiment with profound implications. The game goes like this: one person (the proposer) is given ten dollars and told to share it with another person (the responder). The proposer can divide the money however they like, but if the responder rejects the offer then both players end up with nothing.
When economists first started playing this game in the early 1980s, they assumed that this elementary exchange would always generate the same outcome. The proposer would offer the responder approximately $1â¯a minimal amountâ¯and the responder would accept it. After…
omnibrain | March 4, 2010Here's a snippet of some of the relevant text from the article describing the model below:
show attribute/state-oriented functions.
Type7. [Useful Attribute/State]: 2.3) Change of structure or object
directly make a useful "attribute" including "ability".
Type8. [Attribute/State]à Interactionà [Useful State]: 2.4) Change of
structure or object makes interaction between its "attribute/state" and the
other "attribute/state" which makes up a useful "state".
show
And now for the actual model:
Any guesses? Head past the break for the big reveal. Trust me - you'll be surprised.
Got it yet?
No?…
goodmath | March 1, 2010 In my post yesterday, I briefly mentioned the problem with simulations
as a replacement for animal testing. But I've gotten a couple of self-righteous
emails from people criticizing that: they've all argued that given the
quantity of computational resources available to us today, of course
we can do all of our research using simulations. I'll quote a typical example
from the one person who actually posted a comment along these lines:
This doesn't in any way reduce the importance of informing people about
the alternatives to animal testing. It strikes me as odd that the author of
the…
cortex | February 28, 2010I'm a terrible sleeper, which is perhaps why I got invited to contribute to a NY Times group blog on "insomnia, sleep and the nocturnal life". Here is my first contribution, which focuses on the work of Dan Wegner:
My insomnia always begins with me falling asleep. I've been reading the same paragraph for the last five minutes -- the text is suddenly impossibly dense -- and I can feel the book getting heavier and heavier in my hands. Gravity is tugging on my eyelids.
And then, just as my mind turns itself off, I twitch awake. I'm filled with disappointment. I was so close to a night of sweet…
grrlscientist | February 26, 2010tags: Tilikum, Tillikum, Tilly, Orcinus orca, Killer Whale, SeaWorld, Sea World, Orlando, Florida, whales, animals, news, behavior, streaming video
Are orcas too brainy for captive life? Should they all live only in "the wild"? This video is only the beginning of the debate .. what do you think?
clock | February 26, 2010Listen to the podcast, post comments, ask questions - the new forum is now live and will go on for the next week:
How the Hidden Brain Controls Our Lives
We like to think of ourselves as conscious, rational beings.
But human behavior is largely driven by unconscious attitudes.
These attitudes reside in the deep recesses of the brain, and we ignore them at our own peril.
So says Washington Post journalist Shankar Vedantam.
Vedantam is the author of a new book, The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and Save Our Lives.
Vedantam explores how the…
oracknows | February 25, 2010As much as I hate to bring more attention than I did a couple of days ago to the truly evil animal rights extremist website run by a truly despicable animal rights terrorist wannabe Camille Marino, a website whose very title, Negotiation Is Over (NIO) tells you everything you need to know about the attitude of the loons running the site, especially given their targeting of researchers' children for harassment, I can't help but notice that the efforts of fellow science bloggers and myself have been noticed, both at NIO and another animal rights site Thomas Paine Corner.
Good.
The reaction of…