Brain and Behavior
gregladen | October 4, 2008Constructivism. 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.
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 inspired by…
clock | October 3, 2008There are 12 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. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Importance of Achromatic Contrast in Short-Range Fruit Foraging of Primates:
Trichromatic primates have a 'red-green' chromatic channel in addition to luminance and 'blue-yellow' channels. It has been argued that the red-green channel evolved in primates as an adaptation for detecting reddish or yellowish objects, such as ripe fruits, against a background…
cwilcox | October 2, 2008Of all the materials that were discovered in the past 100 years or so, none have become so widespread as plastic. Plastic is used for just about everything. From soda-pop to sterile saline in hospitals, flooring to teflon pans, plastics have become universal in every home and business in America and around the world. Unfortunately.
The great thing about plastics is their almost unlimited usefulness. The finished product can be shaped in almost any way imaginable, vary in hardness, and is relatively chemically inert, all for a nice, low price. Unfortunately, these properties also make it one…
oracknows | October 1, 2008Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste...
Well, not really. I might have one of the two. Or not.
Be that as it may, I'm Orac, and I blog regularly at Respectful Insolence. In the more than two and a half years I've been with ScienceBlogs (not to mention the more than a year before that on my own), I've become known as its resident "vaccine blogger." True, others around here sometimes do posts about vaccines, antivaccine lunacy, and the discredited idea that vaccines somehow cause autism, but with nowhere near the frequency and intensity that I do. Without a doubt,…
gregladen | October 1, 2008Welcome to the Third Edition of the Carnival of Evolution. The previous edition of this web log 'carnival of the vanities' was at Jason Rosenhouse's Evolution Blog. The next edition will be written by Mike (TUIBG) and hosted here, at Clashing Cultures.
Please submit your web posts on Evolution for the next carnival, which is slated for Mid October! Use this handy dandy submission form. And now, on with the show:
Newly reconstructed Neanderthal female. (View larger image) A Very Remote Period Indeed presents Fear and Loathing in the Pleistocene.
"... [the] narrator announces "Today,…
clock | September 30, 2008There are 13 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. Here are my own picks for the week - you go and look for your own favourites:
Geographic and Genetic Population Differentiation of the Amazonian Chocolate Tree (Theobroma cacao L):
Numerous collecting expeditions of Theobroma cacao L. germplasm have been undertaken in Latin-America. However, most of this germplasm has not contributed to cacao improvement because its relationship to cultivated selections was poorly understood.…
clock | September 29, 2008
Getting Lost: A Newly Discovered Developmental Brain Disorder:
Feeling lost every time you leave your home? You may not be as alone as you think. Researchers at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver Coastal Health Research Institute recently documented the first case of a patient who, without apparent brain damage or cognitive impairment, is unable to orient within any environment. Researchers also believe that there are many others in the general population who may be affected by this developmental topographical disorder.
Out Of Iraq Emerges Hope For Those With Severest Of Head…
neurophilosophy | September 29, 2008Learning to play a musical instrument is known to involve both structural and functional changes in the brain. Studies published in recent years have established, for example, that professional keyboard players have increased gray matter volume in motor, auditory and visual parts of the brain, and that violinists have a larger somatosensory cortical representation of the left hand than do non-musicians.
Musical training is a complex process involving simultaneously perceiving the inputs from the senses of hearing, sight and touch, as well as co-ordinating these with the outputs of the motor…
neurophilosophy | September 26, 2008Around 15 years ago, researchers discovered that the adult rodent brain contains discrete populations of stem cells which continue to divide and produce new neurons throughout life. This discovery was an important one, as it overturned a persistent dogma in neuroscience which held that the adult mammalian brain cannot regenerate.
Since then, neural stem cells have been the subject of intensive investigation, in large part because of their potential uses in treating neurological conditions such as Parkinson's Disease, stroke and epilepsy. Even so, the function of newly-generated neurons has…
sb admin | September 26, 2008In this post: the large versions of the Medicine and Health, Brain and Behavior and Technology channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week.
Medicine and Health. From Flickr, by sevenbirches
Brain and Behavior. From Flickr, by Mandroid
Technology. Control electronics for the sidereal tracker stepper motor. From Flickr, by PhliarShamim
Reader comments of the week:
Things got a little sexy at Scienceblogs over the last few weeks with both the Brain and Behavior and the Medicine and Health channels looking at a subject Scienceblog readers are all too…
jstemwedel | September 26, 2008We continue discussions with the elder Free-Ride offspring about potential projects for the spring science fair.
Elder offspring: Maybe I could do an experiment with Mentos and soda.
Dr. Free-Ride: You mean that one where you use Mentos to create a fountain of soda?
Dr. Free-Ride's better half: That's not an experiment. It's a cliché.
Dr. Free-Ride: Like sticking battery-leads into a dill pickle.
Dr. Free-Ride's better half: But less illuminating.
Elder offspring: Well, I've never put Mentos in soda.
Dr. Free-Ride: But from what you've read, you have a pretty good idea what's going to…
oracknows | September 26, 2008It figures.
I know, I like to start posts with "it figures," and maybe I do it too often, but this time it really fits. For a moment I thought I was going to have a lot of egg on my face over this, but just for a moment. Yesterday, I wrote a rather extensive post about how some left wing bloggers are going into fits of paranoid conspiracy-mongering frenzy, claiming that John McCain's melanoma was more extensive than advertised and that he is supposedly dying of recurrent melanoma and hiding it from everyone. I spent a lot of effort, not to mention verbiage, explaining why that scenario is…
neurotopia | September 25, 2008Some people have been noticing erratic behavior from republican nominee John McCain lately. His most recent seems to be slight, but rather odd. Specifically, he appears to have developed ptosis--- a drooping eyelid--- which could of course be related to any number of causes, from an autoimmune attack on cholinergic receptors such as that seen in myasthenia gravis, to diabetes.
Ptosis can also be the result of a brain tumor that affects the oculomotor nerve (cranial nerve III). Sudden development of the condition at old age following multiple bouts of melanoma (which has a penchant for…
neurophilosophy | September 25, 2008Radiation therapy is a common treatment for adults and children who present with tumours in or close to the brain. In the last 20 years, advances in radiotherapy have significantly improved the prognosis for brain cancer patients. However, the resulting longer survival rates reveal that the therapy has deleterious effects on brain health - even at low doses, radiation leads to cognitive impairments in later life.
These impairments, which include attention deficits and learning disabilities, occur as a result of the effects of radiation on the hippocampus. This structure is known to be…
clock | September 18, 2008Now that PLoS ONE is publishing daily (OK, not really, only on work-days, i.e., 5 times a week), I have been pointing to my picks every day. Let's look at what has been published there last night and tonight as well as what's new in other PLoS journals. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers.
Courtship Initiation Is Stimulated by Acoustic Signals in Drosophila melanogaster:
Finding a mating partner is a critical task for many organisms. It is in the interest of males to employ multiple sensory modalities to search…
cortex | September 18, 2008In the new Atlantic, Ross Douthat argues that porn is a moral slippery slope, and is part of the adultery continuum:
Yes, adultery is inevitable, but it's never been universal in the way that pornography has the potential to become--at least if we approach the use of hard-core porn as a normal outlet from the rigors of monogamy, and invest ourselves in a cultural paradigm that understands this as something all men do and all women need to live with. In the name of providing a low-risk alternative for males who would otherwise be tempted by "real" prostitutes and "real" affairs, we're…
cortex | September 17, 2008In response to my post yesterday which argued that Democrats and Republicans are both vulnerable to what's politely referred to as "motivated reasoning" - in other words, we're all partisan hacks - some commenters objected. They pointed out that the actual study I was discussing found that conservatives, perhaps due to their rigid beliefs, were especially vulnerable to such cognitive flaws. Here's a sample:
Imagine any other post like this generically. "A new study found something that supports my worldview! Haha. Except part of the conclusions undermine my worldview, so anecdotally I…
clock | September 16, 2008Arctic Sea Ice At Lowest Recorded Level Ever:
Arctic sea ice may well have reached its lowest volumes ever, as summer ice coverage of the Arctic Sea looks set to be close to last year's record lows, with thinner ice overall.
How Memories Are Made, And Recalled:
What makes a memory? Single cells in the brain, for one thing. For the first time, scientists at UCLA and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel have recorded individual brain cells in the act of calling up a memory, thus revealing where in the brain a specific memory is stored and how the brain is able to recreate it.
Don't Throw…
cortex | September 16, 2008How much can we learn about disease from studying genetics? A few months ago, Nature published an interesting article on the possible impossibility of ever finding the faulty genes behind many mental illnesses. Today, Nicholas Wade in the Times had an interesting article on the skeptical geneticist David Goldstein:
Goldstein says the effort to nail down the genetics of most common diseases is not working. "There is absolutely no question," he said, "that for the whole hope of personalized medicine, the news has been just about as bleak as it could be."
Of the HapMap and other techniques…
clock | September 14, 2008
This is one a couple of posts about Creationism, written originally on May 1st, 2005.
Creationism Is Just One Symptom Of Conservative Pathology
I am not an "evolutionist". I am not a "Darwinist". I am a biologist. Thus, by definition, I am an evolutionary biologist. Although my research is in physiology and behavior, I would never be able to make any sense of my data (or even know what questions to ask in the first place) without evolutionary thinking.
As I am also interested in history and philosophy of biology, I consider myself a Darwinian. But not a "Darwinist" or "evolutionist" - those…