Brain and Behavior
jdupuis | October 16, 2009And I'm not talking about students the morning after a pub night!
It seems that the University of Florida has actually added zombie invasions to their campus emergency plans.
You should watch, for example, for "increasing numbers of gruesome unexplained deaths and disappearances, especially at night" and listen for "lots of strange moaning." The guide includes an "Infected Co-Worker Dispatch Form" for Florida employees to let superiors know when a colleague exhibits signs of zombie behavior, with a checklist of such behaviors, including "references to wanting to eat brains," "recently dead…
gregladen | October 15, 2009Constructivism. Determinism. It is all a bunch of hooey.
A recent paper published by PLoS (Culture Shapes How We Look at Faces) throws a sopping wet blanket on widely held deterministic models of human behavior. In addition, the work underscores the sometimes spooky cultural differences that can emerge in how people see things, even how people think.
A Repost
The following is from a PLoS press release:
Because face recognition is effortlessly achieved by people from all different cultures it was considered to be a basic mechanism universal among humans. However, by using analyses…
razib | October 14, 2009Reading the papers on Ardipithecus ramidus which just came out in Science one of the take-home points that jumps out at me is that extant apes may be very misleading analogs to extinct hominins. Here is Owen Lovejoy:
In retrospect, clues to this vast divide between the evolutionary trajectories of African apes and hominids have always been present. Apes are largely inept at walking upright. They exhibit reproductive behavior and anatomy profoundly unlike those of humans. African ape males have retained (or evolved, see below) a massive SCC and exhibit little or no direct investment in their…
dmunger | October 14, 2009I've just read an engrossing report about some very promising research in a an exciting field. The researchers combined fMRI research with genetic analysis to see if they could identify a genetic basis for anger. And they actually found something quite interesting.
If I was writing for the New York Times, the headline might read something like this: "Researchers identify gene responsible for regulating anger." For the Washington Post, it could be "Is there an anger gene?" For the New York Post, perhaps simply "RAGE GENE FOUND."
But those headlines, while they are in some ways accurate, don't…
oracknows | October 14, 2009As I mentioned on Friday, I'm in Chicago right now attending the American College of Surgeons annual meeting, where I'll be until Wednesday afternoon, and may not be able to post anything new before Thursday afternoon or Friday. If there are any of my readers who happen to be surgeons attending the meeting, drop me a line and maybe we can get together. In the meantime, here's a blast from the past from the past. This post first reared its ugly head almost exactly three years ago; so if you haven't been reading at least three years, it's new to you.
It seems like only yesterday that I was…
clock | October 13, 2009There are 23 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:
Chimpanzees Help Each Other upon Request:
The evolution of altruism has been explained mainly from ultimate perspectives. However, it remains to be investigated from a proximate point of view how and in…
clock | October 12, 2009Lots of interesting articles in PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and 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:
The Perfect Family: Decision Making in Biparental Care:
Previous theoretical work on parental decisions in biparental care has emphasized…
pharyngula | October 9, 2009Perhaps I was too quick to declare that previous article the worst one yet on Ardipithecus…now the Family Research Council has weighed in. Would you believe that Ardi supports their anti-gay stance?
the article describes what C. Owen Lovejoy, an anthropologist at Kent State University, says about the social organization of this species:
The males, he argues, pair-bonded with females. Lovejoy sees male parental investment in the survival of offspring as a hallmark of the human lineage.
So, how long has marriage (i.e., "pair-bonding") been a male-female union? About four million, four…
emjohnson | October 9, 2009In Aztec cosmology, Venus was associated with the god Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli (Nahuatl for "Lord of the Dawn"). In the mythic tale Legend of the Suns, Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli attempted to shoot the sun with an arrow, but he missed and shot himself instead. The Aztecs had a sophisticated science of astronomy that focused on the movements of Venus and were among the first in the world to calculate that Earth's nearest neighbor orbited the Sun thirteen times every eight years.
Thirteen Venus cycles ago, then-President Bush shot his own arrow in the form of his Afghanistan invasion and it has now…
crowdfavorite | October 8, 2009In today's polarized world, the conflict between atheism and religion is shaping up to be the fight of the century. In this corner, the new atheists, flexing their muscles with books such as God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. In that corner, the religious fundamentalists, who are responsible for 9/11, the Christian takeover of America, polluting the minds of their children, and numberless other atrocities. It's science and reason against dogmatism and blind faith, making it obvious who the enlightened liberal should root for.
Well, not quite. The…
pharyngula | October 7, 2009I was looking for a Hallmark card with that on the cover (and also, preferably, a sad-eyed puppy dog) to send to Josh Rosenau and Chris Mooney, but they didn't have one, so I had to settle for a blog post. Here's the sad puppy, at least.
Oh, Internet, you are like a giant greeting card store that is always well-stocked with lovely cliches.
What seems to have scrambled their brains is that Richard Dawkins said, in an interview for Newsweek, that "there are many intelligent evolutionary scientists who also believe in God" and accepts that "there is that compatibility". Shock! He must have…
oracknows | October 7, 2009As you may have noticed, I've fallen into a groove (or, depending on your point of view, a rut) writing about anti-vaccine lunacy. The reason is simple. While I was busy going nuts over Bill Maher's receiving the Richard Dawkins Award, the anti-vaccine movement has been busy, and there are some things I need to address that had backed up while I was distracted. There's one more thing I need to address before I move on to other topics.
Over the last couple of months, I've noticed something about the anti-vaccine movement. Specifically, I've noticed that the mavens of pseudoscience that make up…
grrlscientist | October 5, 2009tags: Scientia Pro Publica, Science for the People, biology, evolution, medicine, earth science, behavioral ecology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, blog carnival
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est (And thus knowledge itself is power)
-- Sir Francis Bacon.
As you know, the first full week of October is Nobel Prize week, the week when new discoveries and innovations that benefit humanity are celebrated on the worldwide stage. In short, this is the one week of the year when scientists get to be international "rock stars"! So in honor of the Nobels, I think it is appropriate to celebrate science…
oracknows | October 5, 2009...and, no, I don't mean Orac, his last few posts notwithstanding.
No, don't worry, this post is most definitely not about Bill Maher. Rather, it's how, while doing searches for that craziness, I found even more disturbing craziness. Even though I was disappointed in him on this one issue and even though I often don't agree with him on religion, never let it be said that I don't still have considerable admiration for Richard Dawkins. That's why, when I came across some truly over-the-top attacks on Dawkins, I thought it would be worthwhile to mention them, as a little wafer to cleanse the…
palmd | October 2, 2009Of course you know what my answer will be. It was predictable that the death of a girl shortly after receiving an HPV vaccine to prevent cervical cancer would attract the immoral agents of the anti-vaccine movement. Like zombies to brains, they descend on the tragedy, ready to consume it and gain strength. And just as zombies will eat anything cerebral, even Dana Ullman's brains, the fact that the vaccine didn't cause the death won't slow them down a bit. (Have I finished straining the zombie analogy? Maybe...)
The media certainly loves this story. What could be better than a poor,…
ddobbs | October 2, 2009Notables from the last 24:
Over at Gene Expression, Razib casts a skeptical eye on a study of the neuroanatomical variability of religiosity.
The brain areas identified in this and the parallel fMRI studies are not unique to processing religion [the study states], but play major roles in social cognition. This implies that religious beliefs and behavior emerged not as sui generis evolutionary adaptations, but as an extension (some would say "by product") of social cognition and behavior.
May be something to that, Razib says â but it would be nice "get in on the game of normal human…
cortex | October 1, 2009I've written before about the powerful mental benefits of communing with nature - it leads to more self-control, increased working memory, lower levels of stress and better moods - but a new study by psychologists at the University of Rochester find that being exposed to wildlife also makes us more compassionate. Nature might be red in tooth and claw, but even a glimpse of greenery can make us behave in kinder, gentler ways.
The study consisted of several experiments with 370 different subjects. In each experiment, people were exposed to either natural settings (pristine lakes, wooded…
ddobbs | September 29, 2009At Gene Expression, Razib casts a skeptical eye on a study of the neuroanatomical variability of religiosity.
The brain areas identified in this and the parallel fMRI studies are
not unique to processing religion [the study states], but play major roles in social
cognition. This implies that religious beliefs and behavior emerged not as sui generis evolutionary adaptations, but as an extension (some would say "by product") of social cognition and behavior.
May
be something to that, Razib says -- but it would be nice "get in on the
game of normal human variation in religious orientation
(as…
razib | September 28, 2009Neuroanatomical Variability of Religiosity:
We hypothesized that religiosity, a set of traits variably expressed in the population, is modulated by neuroanatomical variability. We tested this idea by determining whether aspects of religiosity were predicted by variability in regional cortical volume. We performed structural magnetic resonance imaging of the brain in 40 healthy adult participants who reported different degrees and patterns of religiosity on a survey. We identified four Principal Components of religiosity by Factor Analysis of the survey items and associated them with regional…
clock | September 28, 2009There are 30 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:
Performance of Humans vs. Exploration Algorithms on the Tower of London Test:
The Tower of London Test (TOL) used to assess executive functions was inspired in Artificial Intelligence tasks used to test…