Brain and Behavior
jstemwedel | July 14, 2008Randy Olson's newest film, Sizzle, bears the subtitle, "a global warming comedy". To my mind, it delivered neither the laughs nor the engagement with the issue of global warming that it promised. Maybe this is just a sign that I fall outside the bounds of Olson's intended audience, but perhaps the biggest question this movie left me with was who precisely Olson is trying to reach with Sizzle.
The film starts out presenting itself almost as Olson's own follow-up to An Inconvenient Truth; Olson notes that he liked Al Gore's movie a lot but wondered where all the scientists were. He…
goodmath | July 14, 2008 So my fellow SBer PZ is in all sorts of hot water with Catholics over a blog post. I didn't really want to poke my nose into this, but there's been so much noise about it, that it's really unavoidable. But I think I've got a rather different opinion on this than most bloggers I've seen so far. And I'm pretty sure that I'm not going to be making any friends by posting this. But people keep asking, so I'm going to open my big mouth, and tell you what I think.
You see, I think that both sides are assholes. Obviously, the people making threats take the prize as the biggest assholes, but a…
developingintelligence | July 14, 2008Most readers of this blog are probably familiar with "unilateral neglect," one of several behavioral manifestations of brain damage to the parietal lobe. Perhaps fewer readers are aware of other findings from unilateral neglect patients which are often omitted from classic descriptions of this syndrome.
First, the obligatory illustration of unilateral neglect; here's what happens when you ask a patient with right parietal lobe damage to copy a simple drawing of a clock and a flower:
Patients with this "unilateral" or "hemispatial" neglect are able to describe only those parts of a mental…
oracknows | July 14, 2008Prelude: Sunday, June 22, 2008
Only three weeks ago. All seems well.
Prelude II: Thursday, July 3, 2008
We learn that all is not well.
Saturday, July 12, 2008, 6:30 AM
He spoke through tears of 15 years how his dog and him
traveled about
The dog up and died, he up and died
And after 20 years he still grieves.
(From Mr. Bojangles by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, 1970)
It is early Saturday morning, and I can no longer sleep. Preternaturally quiet, a shroud of silence blankets the house, oppressive, dark, and hateful. There aren't even any birds chirping, and puzzlingly I have yet to hear the…
ejohnson | July 11, 2008In this post: the large version of the Brain & Behavior and Technology channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week.
Brain & Behavior. From Flickr, by zorilla
Technology. The workings of a Victorian machine shop. From Flickr, by Elsie esq.
Reader comments of the week:
In Kids and Happiness, Jonah Lehrer of the Frontal Cortex reports on new evidence which contradicts a widely held notion- that adults with children are happier than those without. A handful of studies have shown that being a parent may actually lead to a greater risk of depression, and that…
jstemwedel | July 10, 2008
Ronald A. Howard and Clinton D. Korver (with Bill Birchard), Ethics for the Real World: Creating a Personal Code to Guide Decisions in Work and Life. Harvard Business Press, 2008.
I fully embrace the idea that ethics should not just be a subject of esoteric inquiry in philosophy departments but rather a central feature of our lives as we live them.
Yet how exactly that's supposed to happen in a world where lots of people have been able to avoid ethics classes altogether presents a bit of a puzzle. Sure, we are presented with lessons about ethics outside the classroom, by family, friends…
oracknows | July 10, 2008What is it with the local news media in my hometown?
You might (or might not) remember when I noted back in February that there was one Detroit station that did an unbelievably, hilariously dumb and credulous story about "orbs" in photos and whether they are ghosts or spirits manifesting themselves to their friends and family. That story came courtesy of "reporter" Ama Daetz of the local NBC affiliate WDIV-TV (and I do use the term "reporter" loosely). It was so over-the-top, credulously stupid, so hard to distinguish from an Onion parody, that I even "honored" it with a spot on Your Friday…
jstemwedel | July 9, 2008Finally, here is the long awaited fourth part in my three part series examining the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology Ethics Education Committee response to the allegations of scientific misconduct against Spencer Lucas and co-workers. Part 3 was a detailed examination of the "best practices" document (PDF) issued by this committee. In this post, I make a brief foray into the conversations paleontologists have been having online about their understanding of the accepted practices in their field.
As these conversations are ongoing (and some of them are happening on listservs to which I do…
cortex | July 9, 2008One of the biggest misconceptions of natural selection is that it mandates nastiness, that the pressure to survive and multiply requires a ruthless sort of amorality. In other words, we are all Hobbesian brutes, driven to survive by selfish genes.
Fortunately, our psychological reality is much less bleak. We aren't fallen angels, but we also aren't depraved hominids. In fact, it's now becoming clear that evolution lavished lots of attention on what might be called the moral brain, which is really a series of neural circuits enabling social interaction. The end result is that we…
developingintelligence | July 8, 2008How would an ideal behavioral method for cognitive enhancement actually affect the brain? Perhaps cognitive enhancement would be accompanied by more activity in the prefrontal cortex, indicating more successful engagement of control - or perhaps by less, indicating more efficient processing? Perhaps it would be accompanied by a transition from prefrontal activation to parietal activation, suggesting more automatic processing of task information. Perhaps it would make representations in prefrontal cortex more abstract and generalizable, or perhaps it would cause representations there to…
clock | July 6, 2008Circadian Phase Resetting via Single and Multiple Control Targets:
The robust timing, or phase, of the circadian clock is critical in directing and synchronizing molecular, cellular, and organismal behaviors. The clock's failure to maintain precision and adaption is associated with sleeping disorders, depression, and cancer. To better study and control the timing of circadian rhythms, we make use of systems theoretic tools such as sensitivity analysis and model predictive control (MPC). Sensitivity analysis is used to identify key driving mechanisms without having to fully understand or…
gregladen | July 4, 2008 (... makes me laugh .. )
The previous Four Stone Hearth Anthropology Blog Carnival was Four Stone Hearth Number 43, here, at Swedish Extravagaza. It was the Lard Edition. Go check it out. The home page for Four Stone Hearth is here. The next edition, due on or about July 16th, will be at YOUR blog if you want it to be (the position is still open). Just let Martin Know at the 4SH home page.
BIOLOGICAL AND EVOLUTIONARY ANTHROPOLOGY
Neuroanthropology
Chicks dig jerks?: Evolutionary psych on sex #1
In our continuing exploration of facile examples of 'evolutionary' explanations for…
clock | July 3, 2008Secret Of The Sweet-Sounding Stradivarius: Wood Density Explains Sound Quality Of Great Master Violins:
The advantage of using medical equipment to study classical musical instruments has been proven by a Dutch researcher from the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). In collaboration with a renowned luthier, Dr. Berend Stoel put classical violins, including several made by Stradivarius, in a CT scanner. The homogeneity in the densities of the wood from which the classical violins are made, in marked contrast to the modern violins studied, may very well explain their superior sound…
clock | June 30, 2008As always on Monday night, there are new articles published in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine. Here are some of the highlights:
Shedding Light on Animal Cryptochromes:
Anyone who's neglected a houseplant for any length of time knows that plants can't survive without light. But it's more complicated than that; in addition to serving as an energy source, light is used by plants as a signal to sense and respond to the environment. For example, both red and blue light send the signal for maturation and flower and seed development. Depriving a plant of such light signals disrupts a variety of…
ejohnson | June 26, 2008In this post: the large version of the Medicine & Health, Brain & Behavior and Technology channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week.
Medicine & Health. From Flickr, by Vox Efx
Brain & Behavior. Neurons in the brain. By Benedict Campbell at Wellcome Images, via LoreleiRanvig on Flickr
Technology. From Flickr, by jurvetson
Reader comments of the week:
In Energy Equivalence, Jim of Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge does the math to show that Americans have at least 3.713 kjoules of energy stored as excess fat. He also calculates the kjoules…
developingintelligence | June 25, 2008In a fascinating review of the cognitive neuroscience of attention, authors Raz and Buhle note that most research on attention focuses on defining situations in which it is no longer required to perform a task - in other words, the automatization of thought and behavior. Yet relatively few studies focus on whether thought and behavior can be de-automatized - or, as I might call it if I were asking for trouble, deprogrammed.
What would count as deprogramming? For example, consider the Stroop task, where subjects must name the ink color of each word in a list of color words (e.g., "red" might…
clock | June 24, 2008There are 54 new articlespublished in PLoS ONE today. Here are my picks:
Climate Extremes Promote Fatal Co-Infections during Canine Distemper Epidemics in African Lions:
Extreme climatic conditions may alter historic host-pathogen relationships and synchronize the temporal and spatial convergence of multiple infectious agents, triggering epidemics with far greater mortality than those due to single pathogens. Here we present the first data to clearly illustrate how climate extremes can promote a complex interplay between epidemic and endemic pathogens that are normally tolerated in isolation…
cortex | June 24, 2008I was on the Takeaway last week talking about this study:
We examined the role of serotonin transporter (5-HTT) and oxytocin receptor (OXTR) genes in explaining differences in sensitive parenting in a community sample of 159 Caucasian, middle-class mothers with their 2-year-old toddlers at risk for externalizing behavior problems, taking into account maternal educational level, maternal depression and the quality of the marital relationship. Independent genetic effects of 5-HTTLPR SCL6A4 and OXTR rs53576 on observed maternal sensitivity were found. Controlling for differences in maternal…
j7uy5 | June 23, 2008Sometimes I see news about upcoming drugs, and hope that it
works out. Sometimes, I don't see the point.
Rarely, I actively hope that it does not
work out.
Staccato® alprazolam is one that I hope does not work out.
It's a form of
href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/medmaster/a684001.html">alprazolam
(Xanax®)
that goes in an inhaler. It is heated by a little electrical
circuit, vaporized, then inhaled. The idea it to give it a
faster onset of action.
Why?
First, a little background. Alprazolam is a member of the
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…
clock | June 19, 2008It's Friday - and time for new articles in PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS Genetics:
An Evolutionarily Conserved Sexual Signature in the Primate Brain:
The contribution of genetics versus environment to behavioral differences between the sexes is a fundamental question in neuroscience. We hypothesized that some differences between the sexes might be partially explained by sexually dependent gene expression differences in the brain. We further speculated that if differences in gene expression between males and females are functionally important, they may be conserved in the…