Brain and Behavior
clock | September 25, 2009There are 19 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:
Neuroanatomical 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…
developingintelligence | September 25, 2009A number of very smart people (and smart communities) seem like they might be under the impression that the "voodoo correlations" scandal in the neuroimaging community is somehow related to recent work by Bennett et al, who used fMRI to show task-related neural activity in a dead fish.
These two things have almost nothing to do with one another.
1) The Bennett work is, in the words of a friend, "a cute way to make a point" that every fMRI paper I've ever read has failed to explicitly acknowledge. The reason they've failed to acknowledge it is that it's standard to run equivalent statistical…
palmd | September 24, 2009I'm not a psychiatrist, and I won't guess what motivates someone like Doug Bremner. On his blog, he posted a picture showing the head of a cancer surgeon/researcher/blogger pasted onto a large beast. A little man is doing something to the beast.
An armchair psychiatrist might make silly suppositions based on the image of a little man bent over toward what looks like the genitalia of a large beast, but also like a little man eviscerating the beast with a big tool (which is not part of the little man...he's just holding it). But images probably don't mean anything anyway.
Bremner is a…
dmunger | September 23, 2009My column on SEEDMAGAZINE.COM today addresses the definition of "addiction." Does it make sense to lump all dependence on substances and even all habits under the umbrella of "dependence?" Here's a selection:
We often think of true addicts as street junkies who prostitute themselves or steal from others to support their habits, but in reality there's a wide variety of behaviors associated with abusing mind-altering substances. They can range from the casual drinker who sometimes has a few too many martinis, to the pothead who still lives in his mother's basement, to a talk-show host zoned out…
omnibrain | September 21, 2009
I was reading an article this morning that I found on fark (yeah yeah...) and for once I actually read the comments underneath the main article. I was pretty surprised on the consistency of the attribution errors that the religious folks were making and thought it would be something interesting to share here and get your thoughts.
For the setup here's the (really pretty amazing!) story:
On the hike, Cole started fooling around by walking in the water. It was not incredibly steep, but the water had lots of slippery algae and rocks.
To Johnson, it looked dangerous. She pleaded with her…
gregladen | September 10, 2009Read the following text. As you read it, try to empty your mind. When you encounter grammatical errors or jargon that is impossible to understand, do not try to translate what you are reading. Rather, become one with the obscurity. Read slowly, thoughtlessly, with emptiness of purpose, as though the words were entering your eyes, traveling through your head, and leaving through your ears. The ultimate understanding will be achieved when you reach the end of the abstract and have understood nothing:
... a repost ...
Recent neuroimaging studies have identified a set of brain regions that…
oracknows | September 8, 2009Dr. Mark Hyman is famous as the "founder" of a form of woo known as "functional medicine." This new form of woo is...well, I'm not sure what it is, and neither are Wally Sampson (1, 2, 3, 4). Suffice it to say that it appears to be a serious grab bag of various forms of woo that, according to Dr. Hyman's website itself, involve environmental inputs, inflammation, hormones, gut & digestive health, detoxification, energy/mitochondria/oxidative stress, and, of course, "mind-body," whatever that means. No woo would be complete without mind-body, you know. Actually, no self-respecting woo…
clock | September 4, 2009There are 15 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:
Parsing Social Network Survey Data from Hidden Populations Using Stochastic Context-Free Grammars:
Human populations are structured by social networks, in which individuals tend to form relationships based…
developingintelligence | September 2, 2009I've been busy writing up a new paper, and expect the reviews back on another soon, so ... sorry for the lack of posts. But this should be of interest:
The Dana Foundation has just posted an interview with Terrence Sejnowki about his recent Science paper, "Foundations for a New Science of Learning" (with coauthors Meltzoff, Kuhl & Movellan). Sejnowski is a kind of legendary figure in computational neuroscience, having founded the journal Neural Computation, developed the primary algorithm in independent components analysis (infomax), contrastive hebbian learning, and played an early…
oracknows | September 1, 2009For a change of pace, I want to step back from medicine for this post, although, as you will see (I hope), the study I'm going to discuss has a great deal of relevance to the topics covered regularly on this blog. One of the most frustrating aspects of being a skeptic and championing critical thinking, science, and science-based medicine is just how unyielding belief in pseudscience is. Whatever realm of science in which there is pseudoscience Orac happens to wander into, he find beliefs that simply will not yield to science or reason. Whether it be creationism, quackery such as homeopathy,…
clock | August 31, 2009Monday - and new articles in PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and PLoS ONE. 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:
Skeeter Buster: A Stochastic, Spatially Explicit Modeling Tool for Studying Aedes aegypti Population Replacement and Population Suppression…
clock | August 26, 2009There are 22 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:
Playing Charades in the fMRI: Are Mirror and/or Mentalizing Areas Involved in Gestural Communication?:
Communication is an important aspect of human life, allowing us to powerfully coordinate our behaviour…
tqa | August 26, 2009
PZ called my attention to the fact that former US Army 2nd Lieutenant William Calley has, for the first time, publicly apologized for his conduct at My Lai. Something that Paul wrote got me thinking, particularly while I was running some errands on base this morning:
There is no doubt that Calley was a bad man and a weak man -- he was the lieutenant who led the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians in 1968 -- but at the same time, he was one of the pawns in a game dictated at the highest levels of American policy.
I'm absolutely certain that PZ is at least half right - at a time and in…
cortex | August 24, 2009In the LA Times, Megan Daum has an interesting reflection on the late comedy director John Hughes, and his eccentric cinematic representations of adolescence:
If the brooding, solitary Andie played by Ringwald in "Pretty in Pink" were in high school in 2009, it's hard to imagine she wouldn't be a candidate for anti-depression therapy. Likewise, if "The Breakfast Club," which is about five teens serving time in Saturday detention, took place in a post-Prozac, post-Columbine America, Ally Sheedy's mostly mute, kleptomaniac misfit would have undoubtedly been medicated, and Anthony Michael Hall's…
cortex | August 24, 2009Mirror neurons are a classic illustration of a scientific idea that's so elegant and intriguing our theories get ahead of the facts. They're an anatomical quirk rumored to solve so many different cognitive problems that one almost has to be suspicious: how can the same relatively minor network of motor neurons be responsible for tool use, empathy, language and be a core feature of autism?
I'm not saying that mirror neurons don't have the potential to be an astonishingly cool cortical feature, especially when it comes to the intuitive understanding of physical actions. But I have yet to be…
clock | August 19, 2009There are 15 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:
Hippocampal Sharp Wave/Ripples during Sleep for Consolidation of Associative Memory:
The beneficial effect of sleep on memory has been well-established by extensive research on humans, but the…
cortex | August 18, 2009Natalie Angier has an excellent column on the self-defeating feedback loop triggered by chronic stress. According to a new paper, when mice are chronically stressed, they end up reverting to habit and routine, even though these same habits are what led to the chronic stress in the first place:
Reporting earlier this summer in the journal Science, Nuno Sousa of the Life and Health Sciences Research Institute at the University of Minho in Portugal and his colleagues described experiments in which chronically stressed rats lost their elastic rat cunning and instead fell back on familiar routines…
gregladen | August 18, 2009A falsehood is an incorrect or muddled belief widely enough held to be notable, and possibly dangerous. A falsehood is also a potentially powerful teaching tool. Evolution generally, and human evolution in particular, is loaded with them.
[Previous post: "The Falsehoods"]
"False Pearls before Real Swine" ... I won't tell you who said that, but when he did say it it was in front of a classroom of several hundred Harvard freshmen, and he was referring to the idea of telling little white lies to the unwashed masses in order to achieve the dissemination of greater truth. No one in the room…
clock | August 17, 2009The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January.
Today, I asked Bjoern Brembs to answer a few questions.
Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you?What is your (scientific) background?
As a boy, I was always out and about chasing and catching animals. I've been fascinated by watching animals behave and at the time…
bioephemera | August 16, 2009I read Scibling Jonah Lehrer's How We Decide some time ago, but Moveable Type ate my half-finished review, and it's taken me until now to get back to it. You may have seen quite a few reviews elsewhere by now - Adam Kepecs reviewed it for Nature back in April, and to make a long story short, I largely agree with him: Lehrer is a very good writer, but this is not a great book.
Lehrer starts his book with an airplane anecdote, so I'll do the same - although his opening anecdote is about crashing a plane (albeit a simulated plane), so I'm not sure I'd recommend the book for nervous flyers.…