Brain and Behavior
purepedantry | March 7, 2008Unbelievable.
Unbelievable is simply the only word that can describe this article in the Lancet. Citing problems with retention of doctors in under-treated populations in Africa, Mills et al. argue that direct recruitment of doctors by groups in the West should be criminalized and the individuals perpetrating it prosecuted in the International Criminal Court.
The authors present clear and compelling data to support the assertion that there is a brain drain of health care workers from Africa. Further, they show that this brain drain is exacerbating an already severe doctor shortage in…
ejohnson | March 7, 2008For your weekly viewing pleasure, here are the larger versions of this week's channel photos. Because size does matter.
(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. Wings of a Morpho butterfly. From Felice Frankel and George M. Whitesides' "On The Surface Of Things"
Physical Science. Prismatic soap bubble.…
cortex | March 7, 2008It's a new pilot program in a few dozen New York City schools: students are given cash rewards in exchange for higher test scores. Jennifer Medina reports:
The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a few minutes, they would learn how much money they had earned for their scores on recent reading and math exams. Some would receive nearly $50 for acing the standardized tests, a small fortune for many at this school, P.S. 188 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan.
When the rewards were handed out, Jazmin Roman was eager to celebrate her $39.72. She whispered to her…
gregladen | March 6, 2008A team of scientists including Linda B. Buck, who shared the 2004 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, has retracted a scientific paper after the scientists could not reproduce their original findings.
...
In the paper, the researchers described how they produced genetically engineered mice that produced a plant protein in certain smell-related neurons. The researchers had claimed that as the plant protein traveled between neurons, they could map out which neurons in the cortex of the brain received information from which smell receptors in the nose.
In the retraction, published by Nature…
pharyngula | March 6, 2008Somewhere south of San Francisco, there is a billboard that declares that there is physical proof of the existence of a god, and which suggests that you read their website. A reader sent it to me, and being the sort of open minded fellow who doesn't believe in any gods but is happy to look at any evidence someone might find, I looked.
I'm still an atheist. You can stop here if you want.
This thing is one big tease. It starts with a splash screen:
THE TIME HAS COME FOR YOU TO
WITNESS A MIRACLE
ARE YOU READY?
Sure, I'm ready. Although, really, this is the web, that nest of lies, so it's…
cortex | March 6, 2008Radio Lab delves into the mystery:
Yang and her colleagues put all 49 people, both the liars and the non-liars, into a magnetic resonant imaging scanner and took pictures of their prefrontal cortex. They chose to focus on this area of the brain because previous studies had shown that the prefrontal cortex plays a role in both lying and in antisocial behaviors.
If you could look into this part of the brain, which sits right behind your forehead, you would see two kinds of matter: gray and white. Gray matter is the groups of brain cells that process information. Most neuroscience studies focus…
apalazzo | March 4, 2008So in previous posts I've written:
How to think about biology, Life is full of machines and Life and information. I guess I'm on some philosophy of Biological study kick.
Now I'll put the pieces of the puzzle and talk about what those proteins encode in the typical mammalian organism. This will go a long way to explaining how these machines promote what has been called evolvability. But what is evolvability? Here I am using the term as the ease of which a system can evolve phenotypically in response to natural selection. Going back to my first essay, I had emphasized the idea that the…
terrasig | March 1, 2008DrugMonkey just had an interesting post about the potential influence of cocaine use trends following the 1986 death of Maryland college basketball player, Len Bias, just days after his being selected in the NBA draft by the Boston Celtics. DM's post and the ensuing discussion got me thinking tonight about a variety of issues in substance abuse, realistic assessment of risk and, ultimately, parenting.
In the comments, I mentioned that Heath Ledger's recent death might be a trigger for pop culture to pay more attention to the risks of recreational use of prescription and over-the-counter…
cortex | February 28, 2008Noam Scheiber has an article in TNR touting Obama's connections to behavioral economics. The article isn't particularly persuasive, since the only examples Scheiber can muster are Obama's 401(k) savings plan and his embrace of automatic tax returns. Neither plan is unique to Obama, and only the 401 (k) savings plan is really rooted in the findings of behavioral economics.
Nevertheless, it's interesting to see the fruits of psychological science enter the arena of public policy. One of the advantages of interdisciplinary fields like behavioral economics (or neuroeconomics, for that matter)…
purepedantry | February 28, 2008We have all heard about the runner's high, and a great many of us have felt it. When you are running a marathon, about an hour or two in you feel a feeling of euphoria right like you could run forever. Of course you can't, but you don't feel that way. (In my case the runner's high immediately precedes the runner's heart attack.)
It is still not entirely clear what causes the runner's high, but Boecker et al. have taken a big step in explaining it using PET scanning.
The prevailing theory is that the runner's high is caused by endorphins. Endorphins are endogenous opioid…
ddobbs | February 27, 2008
A jazz player's brain: Brain activation while improvising. Blue areas are deactivated comparable to normal, orange and read are ramped up. From PLOS One.
An intriguing finding: While improvising, jazz players seem to turn OFF the part of the brain that (to quote a new study just published in PLOS One) "typically mediate self-monitoring and conscious volitional control of ongoing performance." They're in what athletes call the zone, where they navigate the oncoming musical terrain by a sort of flexible trained instinct, like boulder-hopping downhill: Think about it and you stumble. Lovely…
grrlscientist | February 27, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, endocrine disruptors, environmental pollutants, DDT metabolites, dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, birdsong, physiology, behavior
European Starling, Sturnus vulgaris.
Image: Gerd Rossen [larger view].
An elegant but disturbing paper was just published that documents that biologically relevant concentrations of endocrine disrupting pollutants are affecting the quality and quantity of song produced by male songbirds, which in turn, influences female mate choice. According to the research team, not only do these pollutants influence behavior, but they also affect…
ejohnson | February 27, 2008For your weekly viewing pleasure, here are the larger (more Xtreme!) 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 *clairity*
Physical Science. Newborn stars peek out from beneath their natal blanket of dust in this dynamic image of the Rho Ophiuchi dark…
developingintelligence | February 25, 2008How does the human brain construct intelligent behavior? Computational models have proposed several mechanisms to accomplish this: the most well known is "Hebbian learning," a process mathematically similar to both principal components analysis and Bayesian statistics. But other neural learning algorithms must exist - how else could the brain disentangle mere correlations from true causation?
Temporal precedence helps to some extent - and does seem to play a large role in Hebbian learning (e.g., spike-timing dependent plasticity). But the smell of rain does not actually cause rain -…
ejohnson | February 21, 2008For your weekly viewing pleasure, here are the large-scale 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 clairity
Physical Science. Crystals growing on a cast iron fence. From Flickr, by Unhindered by Talent
Environment. White Desert, Egypt. From Flickr,…
sheril | February 21, 2008If you watch prime time tv, music videos, or walk past a magazine stand, it would appear that the average adolescent male has sex on the brain. I never gave it much thought, although regular readers know by now I'm not particularly comfortable with any kind of generalization. We humans are a diverse bunch. If we're to assume the guys are most motivated in pursuing a relationship because of sex, there sure are plenty of anomalies. And isn't our reality hugely the result of cultural norms? Family experience? Social expectations? So uh, no, I don't quite buy research that attempts to…
apalazzo | February 17, 2008As an outsider, I'm glad to hear all the new developments coming from those who study human behavior. It would seem from my ignorant, non-expert, outside-of-the-field perspective that there is a revolution going on. Many have abandoned the platonic view of thought, the juvenile Freudian view of motivation, and the idyllic view of the blank slate. What has replaced these ideas is the realization that the human brain is a product of evolution - our mental world was molded by our history. It is full of tools or what some refer to as modules - a language module, a moral module, a simulation (…
jstemwedel | February 14, 2008You've probably heard that UCLA scientist Edythe London, whose house was earlier vandalized to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars by animal rights activists, has once again been targeted. This time an incendiary device was left on her front door.
Abel and Mark weighed in on this appalling use of tactics to terrorize a scientist doing work on approved protocols -- protocols that had to meet the stringent standards imposed by federal regulations. But while the NIH and the odd newspaper columnist stands up to make the case for animal use in medical research and against the violent…
cortex | February 12, 2008It's so easy to take our cultural forms for granted. We get so used to their particulars that we forget there is nothing inviolate about them. Movies can have sad endings, classical music can turn atonal and novelists can get self-referential. Such transgressions are the mark of cultural progress. (Or decadence, depending on your aesthetic preferences. Me? I like Jane Austen and Italo Calvino.)
But I've always assumed that there was only one way to write a letter, that the epistle was the sturdiest of cultural forms. But I was wrong. It turns out that, back in the 19th century, people…
purepedantry | February 12, 2008The NYTimes published two articles about abortion in the last couple days. The first was a review by William Saletan of the book Embryo, A Defense of Human Life by Robert P. George and Christopher Tollefsen. The second was an article about the science of trying to detect pain in infants and possibly fetuses as well.
The two juxtaposed reminded me of the tendency of the abortion debate in this country to degenerate into moral absolutes -- and simplistic ones at that. This is the subject of the Saletan article, but I believe it also applies to discussions of fetal pain.
In the Saletan…