Brain and Behavior
sporte | June 19, 2008Right or wrong, the word "dopamine" always conjures up images in my head of rats pushing levers over and over again, working desperately hard to send shots of dopamine into their tiny little rodent brains.
Dopamine, like many other neurotransmitters (chemicals that send signals in the brain), works by binding to proteins on the surface of brain cells and sending a signal to the cell. There are five different subtypes of receptors for dopamine (D1-D5) with somewhat different activities (1) and drugs that bind to these receptors are known to have potent effects on brain activity and behavior (…
mixingmemory | June 19, 2008We already know that mirror neurons are responsible for social interaction (except when they're not), meaning, art, religion, sports, dinosaurs, sun spots, Marxism, post-it notes, freeze-dried fruit, Harleys, and and Firefox 3.0, so it's not at all surprising that we're now learning that they're responsible for sex as well. Oh, I know, I know, we'd already learned that mirror neurons were responsible for sexual orientation, as I mentioned like two years ago, but we're just now learning that they're responsible for all sex. But we should have known already, right?
Let's start with the sexual…
ejohnson | June 19, 2008In this post: the large versions of the Medicine & Health and Brain & Behavior channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week!
This week's Medicine & Health photo was kindly submitted by one of our own bloggers, the Neurophilospher.
Medicine & Health. Surgical saws at the Wellcome Trust's Medicine Man Exhibit. From Flickr, by mcost
Brain & Behavior. From Flickr, by DerrickT
Reader comments of the week:
On the Medicine & Health channel, revere takes on Big Pharma in Drug giant GlaxoSmithKline to its scientists: fuck off. The pharamaceutical…
oracknows | June 19, 2008I just shook my head as I perused this item on Pharyngula earlier this morning. What else can you do? The irrationality and lunacy is beyond belief as I read a story about a mother named Colleen Leduc called into school because a report of sexual abuse was made about her autistic daughter Victoria:
The frightened mother rushed back to the campus and was stunned by what she heard - the principal, vice-principal and her daughter's teacher were all waiting for her in the office, telling her they'd received allegations that Victoria had been the victim of sexual abuse - and that the CAS had been…
razib | June 16, 2008Genetic and Environmental Effects on Same-sex Sexual Behavior: A Population Study of Twins in Sweden:
There is still uncertainty about the relative importance of genes and environments on human sexual orientation. One reason is that previous studies employed self-selected, opportunistic, or small population-based samples. We used data from a truly population-based 2005-2006 survey of all adult twins (20-47 years) in Sweden to conduct the largest twin study of same-sex sexual behavior attempted so far. We performed biometric modeling with data on any and total number of lifetime same-sex…
purepedantry | June 16, 2008One of the most interesting aspects of human behavior is our nearly infinite capacity to arrange and coordinate symbols. Think of the symbols that permeate our existence. Paper money has no value in and of itself. A wedding ring is just a band of metal. The progress of the science might even be seen as the creation of an incredibly elaborate super-abstraction from which we can derive novel and testable predictions. Humans beings, in short, are into symbols.
We know, however, that we are not the only animals capable of symbolic thinking. For example, I could argue that whenever I teach a…
developingintelligence | June 16, 2008In a recent issue of Science, Dahlin et al report the results of an executive function training paradigm focused on the process of mental updating. "Updating" is thought to be one of the core executive functions (as determined through confirmatory factor analysis), is thought to rely on the striatum (as determined through computational neural network modeling), and provides the dynamic gating capacity to working memory which may allow for "perceptual filtering" in which some items are attended and others ignored (as confirmed with neuroimaging).
24 subjects matched for age, education,…
gregladen | June 13, 2008 Clipped from CultureCat Bacterial Communication Pathways; Super Computer to Mimic Brain Language Area; CDC: Breastfeeding Gap in US. Hospitals; Online Checklist of Bee Species; Bird Flu Strains that have Acquired Nasty Properties
MIT researchers unravel bacteria communication pathways
MIT researchers have figured out how bacteria ensure that they respond correctly to hundreds of incoming signals from their environment.
The researchers also successfully rewired the cellular communications pathways that control those responses, raising the possibility of engineering bacteria that can…
ejohnson | June 13, 2008Each week we post a new picture and a choice comment from each of our nine channels here at ScienceBlogs on our channel homepages. Now, we're bringing you the best of the week in daily postings that will highlight individual channels. We've already seen Life Science, Physical Science, Environment, Humanities, Education and Politics and Medicine & Health; below, please find our selections from the Brain & Behavior and Technology channels:
From Flickr, by ul_Marga
From Flickr, by chaosinjune
Reader comments of the week:
On Office noise: Are your homicidal thoughts about your…
purepedantry | June 12, 2008Here is an interesting article showing the cross-over between neuropharmacology and decision making. Crockett et al. show that if you use acute tryptophan depletion to lower the levels of serotonin in subjects, they are more likely to reject unfair offers in the ultimatum game.
Background
The ultimatum game is an experimental economics paradigm. It works something like this. The proposer in the game gets to divide a certain pre-specified quantity of money between themselves and another player. The other player sees that division, and then gets to decide whether to accept it or reject it…
j7uy5 | June 12, 2008A study published in
title="Journal of the American Medical Association">JAMA
indicates that treatment with bright light alone (1,000
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lux">lux), or
bright light combined with
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Melatonin">melatonin,
can improve symptoms in patients with dementia. Melatonin
alone appeared to have a slight adverse effect.
This already has been reported by
href="http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1813396,00.html">Time,
the BBC,
href="http://www.modernmedicine.com/modernmedicine/Neurology/Bright-Light-Can-Help-…
clock | June 10, 2008If you are an astute watcher of the PLoS ONE homepage (or the PLoS Blog, or my blog for that matter), you may have noticed that PLoS ONE now has something like a 'theme of the month', i.e., a single, broad topic that we highlight in several different ways on the homepage, blog, in e-mails, etc. We check out the most viewed and downloaded papers on the topic and interview the authors and Academic Editors of those papers, etc. Last month, in May, the theme was Cell Signaling. This month, June '08, the overarching theme is The Birds!
If you search PLoS ONE for bird + avian (keep clicking '…
clock | June 9, 2008A Roadmap for Migrating Neurons:
Politicians, pundits, and even your best friends occasionally do things that make you wonder how their brains are wired. The next time you have that thought, consider consulting a developmental neuroscientist: they work every day to understand the processes that wire up everyone'sbrains. It's a mind-boggling job, because as an embryo develops, the connections within its brain ramify, becoming ever more complex. For example, consider the neural connections in the mammalian cerebellum. This distinctive structure is responsible for coordinating sensory and motor…
oracknows | June 9, 2008After having subjected my readers to all those posts about the antivaccination lunacy that was on display in Washington, D.C. last week, I think it's time for a break from this topic, at least for a while if not longer. In the run-up to the "Green Our Vaccines" rally events on the antivaccinationism front were coming fast and furious, and I felt it was my duty to comment on them. Now, with great relief I can say that the rally is over. How many people actually attended the rally is uncertain. The organizers themselves claim that 8,500 people attended, while more objective estimates from…
developingintelligence | June 6, 2008A variety of new cognitive neuroscience shows how our ability to ignore distractions - to "perceptually filter", in a sense - is based on a ventral attentional network, is related to working memory, and may be involved in putative inhibitory tasks.
First, a little background. In 2004, Vogel & Machizawa showed that some people may appear to have a lower working memory capacity merely because they are unable to filter distractions from their environment. The authors found a particular wave of electrical activity on the scalp - over the parietal cortex - which corresponded to subjects'…
oracknows | June 6, 2008I'm tired.
I apologize in advance if I'm not as--shall we say?--energetic as usual this week. I'm sure you'll understand. After all, I just spent the last three days subjecting myself to the most toxic and concentrated woo known to humankind. If you're a regular reader here, you clearly know what I'm talking about, namely Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey's "Green Our Vaccines" rally on Wednesday in Washington, D.C. Fortunately, it wasn't as large as attended. Although its organizers claim that 8,000 showed up, more realistic estimates were maybe around 1,000. Maybe. Even better, the media hardly…
cortex | June 5, 2008It's been recognized for a few years that drinking diet sodas can actually cause weight gain, since the phony sweetness of artificial sweeteners disrupts the "predictive relationship" between a sweet taste and caloric satisfaction. In other words, people drink a diet Coke when they are craving a sweet pick-me-up. However, because the soda doesn't actually contain any calories, the craving remains unsatisfied. The end result is that rodents (and people) end up consuming more calories later on. The craving returns with a vengeance. Here, for instance, is the abstract for a recent paper in…
dmunger | June 4, 2008Not long ago we discussed work led by Deena Skolnick Weisberg showing that most people are more impressed by neuroscience explanations of psychological phenomena than plain-old psychology explanations. Talking about brains, it seems, is more convincing than simply talking about behavior, even when the neuroscience explanation doesn't actually add any substantive details.
Now David McCabe and Alan Castel have taken this work on the acceptance of neuroscience to a new level: now they've got pictures! They asked 156 students at Colorado State University to read three different newspaper articles…
cortex | June 4, 2008Over at Neurophilosophy, Mo has an excellent summary of a drug in Phase II clinical trials that tries to treat depression by up-regulating neurogenesis. In other words, it wants to ease your sadness by giving you more new brain cells. What these new brain cells do, exactly, remains a mystery, but numerous studies have found a connection between reduced neurogenesis and rodent models of depression. This research strongly suggests that the most effective treatments for severe depression (Prozac and ECT) work by increasing the rate of neurogenesis in the hippocampus. For instance, if you…
pharyngula | June 2, 2008
We're all familiar with Pavlov's conditioning experiments with dogs. Dogs were treated to an unconditioned stimulus — something to which they would normally respond with a specific behavior, in this case, meat juice which would cause them to drool. Then they were simultaneously exposed to the unconditioned stimulus and a new stimulus, the conditioned stimulus, that they would learn to associate with the tasty, drool-worthy stimulus — a bell. Afterwards, ringing a bell alone would cause the dogs to make the drooling response. The ability to make such an association is a measure of the…