Brain and Behavior
clock | March 19, 2009So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS ONE this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Robust Food Anticipatory Activity in BMAL1-Deficient Mice:
Food availability is a potent environmental cue that directs circadian locomotor activity in rodents. Even though nocturnal rodents prefer to forage at night, daytime food anticipatory activity (FAA) is observed prior to short meals…
pharyngula | March 18, 2009Well, gang, the voting is closed on our first Survivor event. I would never have expected such a dramatic turn-around. From out of nowhere, John Kwok surged out of fifth place in the field — I had written him off as a bad bet — to rally astonishingly by doing one simple thing: commenting. He clobbered Pete Rooke and Simon, even, just by writing one threat (to sic his facebook friends on me), and doing his usual irritating name-dropping nonsense. He showed real heart in this race, and I'm sure that if he just continues to babble, he will eventually win his place in the fabulous Pharyngula…
clock | March 17, 2009There are 20 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, 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 Spatial and Temporal Construction of Confidence in the Visual Scene:
Human subjects can report many items of a cluttered field a few hundred milliseconds after stimulus presentation. This memory decays rapidly…
palmd | March 16, 2009Over at Neurotopia, Scicurious has been doing some terrific writing about depression. Mental illness is a topic I've written about many times, so I was inspired to look into the vault and see what kind of goodies I had back there. Well, since I truly loathe people who dole out dangerous medical lies, I figured it was time to dust off this little bit on Scientology and mental illness, rework them a bit, and share them with you again.
The problem
Depression, in the medical sense, is not a mood...it is a severe
disorder originating in the brain, and affecting the entire body. Major…
ddobbs | March 16, 2009Below are materials supplementing my story "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap," Scientific American, April 2009. (You can find the story here and my blog post introducing it here.) I'm starting with annotated sources, source materials, and a bit of multimedia. I hope to add a couple sidebars that didn't fit in the main piece -- though those may end up at the main blog, so you may want to keep an eye there or subscribe via RSS or Atom.
Main sources and documents in "The Post-Traumatic Stress Trap."
These are organized by story section, roughly in the order the relevant material appears.…
clock | March 16, 2009Children As Young As Preschoolers Tend To Follow Majority Opinion:
When we are faced with a decision, and we're not sure what to do, usually we'll just go with the majority opinion. When do we begin adopting this strategy of "following the crowd"? In a new report in Psychological Science psychologists Kathleen H. Corriveau, Maria Fusaro, and Paul L. Harris of Harvard University describe experiments suggesting that this tendency starts very early on, around preschool age.
Your Looks, Creditworthiness May Go Hand In Hand, At Least In The Eyes Of Some Lenders:
New research suggests that a person…
oracknows | March 16, 2009The antivaccine counterattack against Brian Deer continues.
As you recall, about a month ago British reporter Brian Deer published an exposé, a tour de force of investigative journalism that led him to discover that Andre Wakefield had not only had incredibly blatant undisclosed conflicts of interest (his having been in the pocket of trial lawyers suing vaccine manufacturers and his forgetting to mention the little fact that he had been developing a competing version of a measles vaccine that he had been hoping to market) when he published his infamous 1998 Lancet paper linking MMR to…
clock | March 13, 2009What I Was Doing Vs. What I Did: How Verb Aspect Influences Memory And Behavior:
If you want to perform at your peak, you should carefully consider how you discuss your past actions. In a new study in Psychological Science, psychologists William Hart of the University of Florida and Dolores AlbarracaÂn from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign reveal that the way a statement is phrased (and specifically, how the verbs are used), affects our memory of an event being described and may also influence our behavior.
American Adults Flunk Basic Science:
Are Americans flunking science? A…
cortex | March 12, 2009A reader asks:
What's the hardest question you've gotten about the new book? Is there one you were totally unprepared to answer?
This is a slightly embarrassing confession, but one of the most difficult questions I've been asked is also one of the most obvious. It goes something like this:
"What practical knowledge have we gained by looking at decision-making in the brain that we didn't already have, either through introspection or behavioral studies?"
When I was first asked this question, I think I muttered something about the virtue of curiosity, breaking open the black box and fulfilling…
laelaps | March 11, 2009It has been a week since ABC's Nightline ran footage obtained by the Humane Society of primates being abused at the New Iberia Research Center in Louisiana. Even though the ethics of animal research has been big news on the blogs in the past week, with a poorly-argued article in last week's Huffington Post (Janet, DrugMonkey, Orac) and the recent attack on a UCLA scientist who uses primates in his studies (Janet, Evil Monkey, Nick), I am puzzled as to why there has been virtually no discussion of the footage taken at the New Iberia labs. For those of who you missed it, here is the Nightline…
purepedantry | March 10, 2009Did you catch this story? A man in Illinois walks into a church and shoots the pastor. After killing the pastor, his gun jams, he grabs a knife and starts stabbing himself. At which point, he is tackled by two guys and remanded into custody.
Now his lawyer is claiming that his mental status was impaired because he had Lyme disease. (And, shocker: this interpretation of the story is being pushed over at Huffington Post.)
Listen, this guy may be crazy. In fact, he undoubtedly has severe emotional and neurological problems. But Lyme disease isn't why.
Lyme disease is caused by a…
neurophilosophy | March 10, 2009One of the central dogmas of neuroscience, which persisted for much of the history of the discipline, was that the adult human brain is immalleable, and could not change itself once fully developed. However, we now know that this is not the case: rather than setting like clay placed into a mould, the brain remains pliable, like a piece of putty, so that each new experience makes a lasting impression upon it.
This phenomenon, referred to as synaptic (or neural) plasticity, involves reorganization of the connections between nerve cells, and is arguably the most important discovery in…
oracknows | March 10, 2009...the reasons are threefold.
Reason #1 is my iPhone. As I mentioned the other day, the microphone mysteriously stopped working while I was in Phoenix. At first I thought it was a network thing, as on less rare than I would like occasions I had had difficulty with AT&T in which I might have trouble making a phone call or people I called couldn't hear me even though I could hear them. But the problem persisted after I got home. (In restrospect, I wonder if the occasional problems I had had when people couldn't hear me after I connected were the canary in the coal mine for this total…
terrasig | March 9, 2009
I'm very proud today to see one of my formative professors, Dr Fulton Crews, quoted extensively in a USAToday article on a new, web-based alcohol awareness initiative, "Rethinking Drinking," from NIH's National Institute for Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) Division of Treatment and Recovery Research.
While many associate heavy drinking with liver problems, it can also increase the risk for heart disease, sleep disorders, depression, stroke and stomach bleeding. Consumed during pregnancy, it can cause fetal brain damage, says Fulton Crews, director of the Bowles Center for Alcohol…
purepedantry | March 9, 2009In the Economist, they have a piece in "honor" of the 100th year anniversary of the first attempts to render drugs illegal. After looking at the evidence, they take a dim view of the drug war's effectiveness:
A HUNDRED years ago a group of foreign diplomats gathered in Shanghai for the first-ever international effort to ban trade in a narcotic drug. On February 26th 1909 they agreed to set up the International Opium Commission--just a few decades after Britain had fought a war with China to assert its right to peddle the stuff. Many other bans of mood-altering drugs have followed. In 1998…
dmunger | March 5, 2009A few years ago we discussed a fascinating study which appeared to show that the main reason we stop eating at the end of a meal isn't because we "feel" full. Instead, we simply see that we've finished eating the food in front of us, so we stop. We don't eat more an hour later because we remember we just ate.
In that study, led by Paul Rozin, experimenters provided two amnesic patients with two meals separated by just 15 minutes. They both did not recall eating the previous meal due to their medical condition, and each of them ate both meals as if they hadn't had anything to eat.
But maybe…
revere | March 5, 2009The Supreme Court ruled yesterday that if the FDA approves a drug, it doesn't mean you don't have to keep the labeling up to date if you should warn people. So that settles one question about FDA approval. The FDA put its stamp of approval on the drug Vioxx, too, but approved or not, Vioxx was not OK. Some unfortunate people traded their arthritis pain for a heart attack. Not a good trade. So the maker of Vioxx got sued. When the regulatory agencies don't do their job, that's about the only remedy left. More important, it is the only way to change the behavior of companies whose negligence…
clock | March 4, 2009First Fossil Brain: Shark Relative That Lived 300 Million Years Ago Yields Very Rare Specimen:
A 300-million-year-old brain of a relative of sharks and ratfish has been revealed by French and American scientists using synchrotron holotomography at the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF). It is the first time that the soft tissue of such an old fossil brain has ever been found.
Evidence Appears To Show How And Where Brain's Frontal Lobe Works:
A Brown University study of stroke victims has produced evidence that the frontal lobe of the human brain controls decision-making along a…
cortex | March 2, 2009In the Times Science section today, Natalie Angier discusses a fascinating-sounding new book, by the primatologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. The book, "Mothers and Others," argues that humans evolved a powerful set of moral instincts - a set of instincts that far exceed those of our primate relatives - because we depend on others to help us rear our helpless infants:
As Dr. Hrdy argues in her latest book, "Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding," which will be published by Harvard University Press in April, human babies are so outrageously dependent on their elders for…
neurophilosophy | March 2, 2009Despite occuring only rarely, amnesia (or memory loss) has featured often in Hollywood films for almost a century. By 1926, at least 10 silent films which used amnesia as a plot device had been made; more recent productions, such as 50 First Dates and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, are therefore part of a well established tradition.
In a review published in the British Medical Journal in 2004, clinical neuropsychologist Sallie Baxendale of the Institute of Neurology in London points out that cinematic depictions of amnesia are consistenly inaccurate, and usually "bear no relation…