Brain and Behavior
ksharpe | January 26, 2009Review by David Dobbs, from Neuron Culture
Originally posted on: January 25, 2009 10:45 PM
The book opens so thrillingly -- a plane crash, a last-second Super Bowl victory, and a first chapter that comfortably reconciles Plato and Ovid with Tom Brady and John Madden -- that it spawns a worry: Can the book possibly sustain this pace?
"How We Decide" delivers. Jonah Lehrer, -- author of "Proust Was a Neuroscientist," blogger at Frontal Cortex, and (full disclosure) an online acquaintance and sometime colleague of mine for a couple years now (I asked him to take over editorship of Scientific…
gregladen | January 26, 2009I thought we already knew this, but here goes:
Schizophrenia may blur the boundary between internal and external realities by over-activating a brain system that is involved in self-reflection, and thus causing an exaggerated focus on self, a new MIT and Harvard brain imaging study has found.
The traditional view of schizophrenia is that the disturbed thoughts, perceptions and emotions that characterize the disease are caused by disconnections among the brain regions that control these different functions.
But this study, appearing Jan. 19 in the advance online issue of the Proceedings of the…
cwilcox | January 25, 2009Ok, the consistent reader of this blog can't help but notice that I am a sucker when it comes to unique studies about human relationships and the trappings that go with them. The biological basis and interaction with behavior is simply fascinating to me. This is why I had to report on a study that showed even without knowing it, women's brains picked up on the smell of arousal in men's sweat. And, following that vein, I can't help but write about a new olfactory study, which found that a woman's passion for her man affects her ability to identify the smell of other men in her life.…
ddobbs | January 25, 2009
The book opens so thrillingly -- a plane crash, a last-second Super Bowl victory, and a first chapter that comfortably reconciles Plato and Ovid with Tom Brady and John Madden -- that it spawns a worry: Can the book possibly sustain this pace?
"How We Decide" delivers. Jonah Lehrer, -- author of "Proust Was a Neuroscientist," blogger at Frontal Cortex, and (full disclosure) an online acquaintance and sometime colleague of mine for a couple years now (I asked him to take over editorship of Scientific American's Mind Matters last year, and we share blogging duties at VeryShortList:Science)…
palmd | January 24, 2009...or so goes the refrain of the addict. I was going to put up a more substantive, well-researched post, but I wanted to give you a few weekend thoughts to chew on.
I deal with addictions a lot, but the most common and deadly one is tobacco. Tobacco is responsible for millions of serious illness and deaths every year in the U.S., all of which are preventable. But, like other substance use disorders, we don't really know how to talk about tobacco addiction (which is more properly "nicotine addiction"). There is no doubt that nicotine is powerfully addictive, and the health and social…
cortex | January 24, 2009I've got a short column in the Wall Street Journal today where I recommend five books on human irrationality. I wanted to work in a novel too, but I soon realized that every novel is about irrational people.
1. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds
By Charles Mackay
1841
There is nothing modern about financial bubbles. In this classic work, Charles Mackay compiled an exhaustive list of the "schemes, projects and phantasies" that are a recurring theme of economic history. From the tulip mania of 17th-century Holland, in which 12 acres of valuable land were offered for a…
clock | January 24, 2009Scientists Unlock Possible Aging Secret In Genetically Altered Fruit Fly:
Brown University researchers have identified a cellular mechanism that could someday help fight the aging process. The finding by Stephen Helfand and Nicola Neretti and others adds another piece to the puzzle that Helfand, a professor of biology, molecular biology, cell biology and biochemistry, first discovered in 2000. Back then, he identified a mutation in the Indy ("I'm Not Dead Yet") gene that can extend the life span of fruit flies.
'Warrior Gene' Predicts Aggressive Behavior After Provocation:
Individuals with…
developingintelligence | January 23, 2009Refining the Turing Test: If it looks like a human, plays like a human, fights like a human, it's probably a ....
Using your own child in developmental research: An ethical issue?
Mice, math and drugs: On science without understanding. How much will new data mining techniques subvert the scientific method?
Distortions in Introspection: Do our intuitive assessments of our own abilities actually only reflect our mood?
Clandestine Manufacture of MDMA (see comments section). The take-home for me: detached analysis of MDMA's therapeutic potential is complicated by the schism between the overly-…
ksharpe | January 22, 2009Review by Scicurious, from Neurotopia
Originally posted on: January 19, 2009 1:27 AM
It is rare that a non-fiction book, let alone a non-fiction book about science, makes me laugh so hard I have to put the book down until I can get off the floor. In fact, I would say it's only happened once. That once was during this last week, when I finally got to read "Bonk: the Curious Coupling of Science and Sex" by Mary Roach.
I don't know why I never read the book before. You'd think as the lover of all things Weird Science, Sci would be all over this thing. Me, I blame grad student poverty.
So…
cortex | January 22, 2009So the book is now shipping from Amazon, B&N, Powells, Borders, independent booksellers, etc. I thought I'd post an interview I conducted with myself a few months ago. (Once upon a time, I read these author Q&A's that are used for publicity purposes and thought that someone else was asking the questions. Now I know better. But feel free to put your harder questions in the comments.)
Q: Why did you want to write a book about decision-making?
A: It all began with Cheerios. I'm an incredibly indecisive person. There I was, aimlessly wandering the cereal aisle of the supermarket, trying…
oracknows | January 22, 2009Being involved in clinical research makes me aware of the ethical quandaries that can arise. Fortunately for me, for the most part my studies are straightforward and don't provoke much in the way of angst over whether what I am doing is ethical or whether I'm approaching a line I shouldn't approach or crossing a line I shouldn't cross. However, there's lots of research that flirts with the unethical and sometimes even crosses the line. Institutional review boards are there to oversee the ethics of clinical trials and protect the human subjects who participate in them, but they don't always…
cwilcox | January 21, 2009Everyone knows that dieting and losing weight is hard, especially for women. It's like our bodies are hard-wired to fail - and, perhaps they are. At least that is one interpretation of a new study coming out of the Brookhaven National Laboratory this week, set to be published in PNAS shortly.
The researchers looked at the PET scans of men and women after 20 hours of fasting at rest, when looking, smelling, and drooling over their favorite food, and when that food is presented to them but they are told not to think about it. All of the subjects reported feeling less hungry for the food when…
palmd | January 21, 2009Jake over at Pure Pedantry has a post up about eCards used to warn of sexually transmitted infections (STIs), and while the idea is certainly humorous, it's probably a really good idea. The story has popped up a few times in the last several months, most recently in the New York Times. The basic idea is this: you hook up with someone, find out you have and STI, and then email them anonymously through a third party service to let them know they've been exposed and need to get checked out. These third party services usually provide health care links as well.
Anonymous internet hook-ups…
purepedantry | January 21, 2009This post over at Neuroskeptic reignites a debate -- if it ever really stopped -- as to the role of impaired adult neurogenesis in causing depression and the function of anti-depressants in stimulating neurogenesis to treat the disease.
This is one of those hot topics in neuroscience. If you look away for just a second the entire field changes, so I thought I would do a little update on where the field stands.
Short summary: Whether neurogenesis is at fault in the etiology of depression is still a very controversial idea among neuroscientists with mixed evidence. Many anti-depressants…
laelaps | January 20, 2009A little more than halfway through the horror novel The Relic, a blood-spattered tale of a monster lurking in the bowels of the American Museum of Natural History, the scientist Greg Kawakita shows off his evolutionary extrapolation program to his colleague, Margo. It is a complex analysis system designed to take two DNA samples and spit out a hypothetical intermediate creature, essentially extrapolating what their common ancestor must have been like. In a test run, Greg has the computer scrutinize the DNA of a chimpanzee and a human;
Intermediate form morphological characteristics:
Gracile…
clock | January 19, 2009Humans Are Reason For Why Domestic Animals Have Such Strange And Varied Coat Colors:
You notice it in your everyday life, the bewildering diversity in coat colour among our pigs, dogs and other domestic animals. This stark contrasts with the uniformity of colour within wild animals. A new study on pigs reveals that the prime explanation for this phenomenon is that humans have actively changed the coat colour of domestic animals by cherry-picking and actively selecting for rare mutations and that this process that has been going on for thousands of years.
Game Theory Explains Why You Can't…
cwilcox | January 15, 2009Most parasites are really, really small. Especially the ones that mess with brains - they tend to be able to fit in them. But not all parasites that can do some fun jedi mind tricks are so itsy-bitsy. Take, for example, the Rhizocephalans - the parasitic barnacles.
Yes, I did just say parasitic barnacle. Although you probably wouldn't recognize it as a barnacle when it's an adult. The adult parasites look like a sac where a female crab would have eggs. It's classified as a barnacle, however, due to its larval forms, specifically the cypris larvae (left), which neatly place it in the class…
awild | January 15, 2009This weekend, Arizona State University is hosting a slate of myrmecologists to brainstorm on ant genomes. I'd link to the meeting information, but apparently the gathering is so informal that they've not given the event a web page. In any case, the topic is this: in the age of (relatively) cheap genomes, which ants should we sequence? And, what should we do with the assembled data?
I originally planned to attend, but life intervenes and I'm frozen to the tundra of central Illinois. Instead, I will register here a few suggestions about which species should considered, in addition to…
clock | January 15, 2009
High-tech Imaging Of Inner Ear Sheds Light On Hearing, Behavior Of Oldest Fossil Bird:
The earliest known bird, the magpie-sized Archaeopteryx, had a similar hearing range to the modern emu, which suggests that the 145 million-year-old creature -- despite its reptilian teeth and long tail -- was more birdlike than reptilian, according to new research.
High Caffeine Intake Linked To Hallucination Proneness:
High caffeine consumption could be linked to a greater tendency to hallucinate, a new research study suggests. People with a higher caffeine intake, from sources such as coffee, tea and…
cwilcox | January 14, 2009Every kid blames their parents for all their bad habits. Parents are supposed to be your role models, your guides. So who doesn't try and get away with a "mom's X behavior when I was a kid made me like this" every once in awhile? Well, it turns out you might get to pile one more on poor mom's shoulders. Drink a little too much, a little too often? Find yourself naked in unfamiliar places with no idea how you got there? Think that beer is a "soft drink" because it's less than 20% alcohol by volume? Well, it's possible your boozing behavior is your mother's fault. That's because a new study out…