Brain and Behavior
neurophilosophy | June 2, 2008
This email from the owner of the website explains:
Gliocast is a set of software tools for visualizing fiber tracts. The emphasis is on the 3D display technologies. Gliocast includes a rudimentary model for tumor growth, but more physically realistic models can be substituted for it.
Fiber tract imagery provided by the Banks Laboratory at the University of Tennessee.
Brain dataset courtesy of Gordon Kindlmann at the Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute, University of Utah, and Andrew Alexander, W. M. Keck Laboratory for Functional Brain Imaging and Behavior, University of…
sb admin | June 1, 2008I was glancing at the Huffington Post today when I ran into yet another piece of what I wish was absurdist health reporting. Unfortunately, it's meant to be taken seriously.
What's even worse is that there is a real problem hidden in the hyperbole, but the author's over-the-top rant does more to obscure than expose the issue.
In this country, we've never known how to deal with psychiatric disease. From the mass institutionalization present for much of our history, to the massive de-institutionalization of the mid-1960's, from forced lobotomies and sterilizations, to the development of…
ejohnson | May 30, 2008The large versions of this week's channel photos are bigger and better than ever.
(Have a photo you'd like to send in? Email it to photos@scienceblogs.com, or assign the tag "sbhomepage" to one of your photos on Flickr. Note: be sure to assign your photo an "attribution only" or "share and share alike" Creative Commons license so that we can use it.)
First photo here, the rest below the fold.
Life Science. A male Mandarin duck enjoys a swim. From Flickr, by law_keven
Physical Science. The polished surface of Brazilian eudialyte. From Flickr, by kevinzim
Environment. From Flickr, by…
tetrapodzoology | May 26, 2008
It goes without saying that most predatory animals need to open their mouths when they want to stab or bite potential prey items. But, get this, there's a group of snakes that can erect their teeth and stab prey with a closed mouth. And that's not all that's interesting about these snakes. Yes, time for more weird snakes. There are lots and lots and lots of weird snakes, and one of my favourite groups of weird snakes are the atractaspidids (or atractaspids), and in particular the atractaspidid genus Atractaspis. If you haven't heard of these snakes before it might give you some idea of what…
developingintelligence | May 23, 2008The organization of the human prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a lasting mystery in cognitive neuroscience, but not for lack of answers - the issue is deciding among them, since all seem to characterize prefrontal function in very different but apparently equally-valid ways. If this mystery were resolved, it could revolutionize cognitive neuroscience and neuropsychology as well as education and artificial intelligence - prefrontal cortex is crucial for the most high-level cognitive abilities we know of, including the executive functions, but no existing theory of intelligence specifies the exact…
ejohnson | May 23, 2008The large versions of this week's channel photos are bigger and better than ever.
(Have a photo you'd like to send in? Email it to photos@scienceblogs.com, or assign the tag "sbhomepage" to one of your photos on Flickr. Note: be sure to assign your photo an "attribution only" or "share and share alike" Creative Commons license so that we can use it.)
First photo here, the rest below the fold.
Life Science. From Flickr, by frozenchipmunk
Physical Science. From Flickr, by tanakawho
Environment. From Flickr, by rappensuncle
Humanities & Social Science. From Flickr, by Ctd 2005…
neurophilosophy | May 22, 2008
Via Street Anatomy comes this recent case report from Acta Neurochirurgica, of a man who had a paintbrush stuck into his brain - bristly end first - during a fight, but didn't realize until 6 hours later, when he went to hospital complaining of a headache! Even more remarkably, any brain damage that may have occurred was apparently insufficient to cause any behavioural or cognitive deficits.
Mandat, T. S., et al. (2005). Artistic assault: an unusual penetrating head injury reported as a trivial facial trauma. Acta Neurochir. 147: 331-333. [Summary]
The authors report a case of…
clock | May 21, 2008 (First posted on February 5, 2007) Last week I asked if you would be interested in my take on this paper, since it is in Serbian (and one commenter said Yes, so here it is - I am easy to persuade):
Stankovic Miodrag, Zdravkovic Jezdimir A., and Trajanovic Ljiljana,
Comparative analysis of sexual dreams of male and female students (PDF). Psihijatrija danas 2000, Vol. 32, No. 4, pp. 227-242
Here is the English-language Abstract:
The subject of research is analysis of connection between sexuality as instinctive function and dreams with sexual content as cognitive function. The sample consisted…
developingintelligence | May 21, 2008New research from Wharton and the Carlson School shows that a methodologically-appealing measure of impulsivity - hyperbolic discounting rate - may actually reflect a systematic "skew" in the way people perceive time.
Previous work has shown that people tend to decreasingly discount the usefulness or appeal of a reward with increasing delays; that is, a reward provided now is more appealing than a reward provided 1 week or 1 month from now, but that change in appeal is nonlinear (hyperbolic) across time. In other words, people prefer to behave impatiently now, but prefer to act more and…
clock | May 21, 2008There are 61 articles published in PLoS ONE this week. Here are some of the highlights, look around for more and please comment, rate, and send trackbacks:
Adaptive Evolution and Functional Redesign of Core Metabolic Proteins in Snakes:
Adaptive evolutionary episodes in core metabolic proteins are uncommon, and are even more rarely linked to major macroevolutionary shifts. We conducted extensive molecular evolutionary analyses on snake mitochondrial proteins and discovered multiple lines of evidence suggesting that the proteins at the core of aerobic metabolism in snakes have undergone…
clock | May 21, 2008I got several e-mails yesterday about a new study about the molecular mechanism underlying circadian rhythms in mammals ("You gotta blog about this!"), so, thanks to Abel, I got the paper (PDF), printed it out, and, after coming back from the pool, sat down on the porch to read it.
After reading the press releases, I was in a mind-frame of a movie reviewer, looking for holes and weaknesses so I could pounce on it and write a highly critical post, but, even after a whole hour of careful reading of seven pages, I did not find anything deeply disturbing about the paper. Actually, more I read…
omnibrain | May 20, 2008 Actually, I'll let you read the press release first and then we'll decide if 'religious leaders' and the damn hippies know something we don't ;)
Religious leaders have contended for millennia that burning incense is good for the soul. Now, biologists have learned that it is good for our brains too. In a new study appearing online in The FASEB Journal (http://www.fasebj.org), an international team of scientists, including researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, describe how burning frankincense (resin from the Boswellia plant) activates poorly…
mixingmemory | May 19, 2008Got your attention, right? That's the title of a paper by Penn, Holyoak, and Povinelli in April's Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Well, the full title is "Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds." Here's the abstract:
Over the last quarter century, the dominant tendency in comparative cognitive psychology has been to emphasize the similarities between human and nonhuman minds and to downplay the differences as "one of degree and not of kind" (Darwin 1871). In the present target article, we argue that Darwin was mistaken: the profound biological…
sb admin | May 18, 2008I love Saturday mornings. I usually get up early, make coffee, hang out with my daughter. Before my daughter wakes up and makes me change the channel, I usually catch a few minutes of CNN, which, at that time of day, features fellow Michigander Dr. Sanjay Gupta. Today, he started out talking about women and heart disease, an important topic. Then he moved on to a discussion with Dr. Bernadine Healy about vaccines. This is where it got ugly. In fact, I was emailing Orac about an unrelated matter, and I began to rant incoherently. Orac reeled me back in, and was kind enough to send me a…
oracknows | May 17, 2008Believe it or not, even I, Orac, sometimes get tired of blogging about antivaccination idiocy. Indeed, this week was just such a time. I hope you can't blame me. After all, the last few months have been so chock-full of some of the most bizarre and annoying antics of antivaccinationists at such a frequent clip that there was just no way I could even keep up with it, and trying was starting to burn me out. (I guess there's only so much that the stupid can burn before even Orac's nearly indestructible clear plastic case can handle before he needs a break.) Truth be told, not wanting Respectful…
ejohnson | May 16, 2008Because we know you've been waiting for them, here are the large versions of this week's channel photos.
(Have a photo you'd like to send in? Email it to photos@scienceblogs.com, or assign the tag "sbhomepage" to one of your photos on Flickr. Note: be sure to assign your photo an "attribution only" or "share and share alike" Creative Commons license so that we can use it.)
First photo here, the rest below the fold.
Life Science. From Flickr, by badjonni
Physical Science. Quartz crystals trapped in a glittering geode. From Flickr, by seeks2dream
Environment. From Flickr, by Claudia…
grrlscientist | May 14, 2008tags: parrot, amazon parrot, behavior, mimicking behavior, streaming video
This streaming video shows a talented amazon parrot that appeared recently on Animal Planet. [3:19].
jrosenhouse | May 13, 2008David Brooks has a fairly goofy column in today's New York Times. Apparently “hard-core materialism” is on its way out:
Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold machine. It does not operate like a computer. Instead, meaning, belief and consciousness seem to emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of neural firings.
The idea that meaning, belief and consciousness emerge mysteriously from idiosyncratic networks of nerual firings is not an alternative to materialism, it is a consequence of it. The…
hrynyshyn | May 13, 2008There are basically two kinds of news consumers. Those who will find David Brooks' latest creation from his corner of the New York Times stable of columnists absolutely irresistible and those who will cross the street to Fox News before reading anything with a headline like "The Neural Buddhists."
This David Brooks fellow is a funny sort. Conservative, but not as conservative as some. Respectful of science and reason, but not as respectful as some. Today, perhaps bereft of anything else to say about the candidate who wouldn't die, he decided to wade into the atheism debate. The Neural…
denialism | May 12, 2008So on the blog birthday we asked our dear readers what they've learned over the last year, and as a test we gave them this crank who attacks the bisphosphonate anti-osteoporosis drugs in his article "the delusion of bone drugs".
I think the reader with the best grade is LanceR or Martin, but SurgPA would have done better if he had shown his work.
But let's talk about some signs that something you're reading is unscientific crankery. In this case, we don't have a particularly sophisticated crank, and he let's the cat out of the bag in his very profile:
Because of Bill's increasing concerns…