Brain and Behavior
jrice | January 22, 2008As always, take a gander at 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 jurvetson
Physical Science. From Flickr, by Tetine
Environment. From OAR/ERL/National Severe Storms Laboratory, via pingnews.com
Humanities & Social Science.…
purepedantry | January 22, 2008A lot of people on ScienceBlogs are talking about this paper, Hockings et al., which shows that male chimps will trade food for sex. The food in this case is papayas stolen from nearby farms; foraged food is apparently not traded in particularly large amounts. The chimps will also give papayas to other males as a means of advertising their prowess and reproductive fitness or possibly as a means of reinforcing social bonds in the raiding party.
Now Greg Laden and Afarensis analyze the anthropological aspects of this paper, and they have much more articulate things to say on that subject.…
cortex | January 22, 2008Interesting stuff:
The research team led by Tania Singer, at UCL, asked volunteers to play a game with employees of the lab, secretly instructing the employees to play either fairly or unfairly. Afterward, the scientists measured brain activity in the same volunteers under quite different circumstances: looking on as their former game opponents were subjected to various degrees of pain. In both male and female volunteers, the brain areas that signal pain became active, giving neural evidence of their empathy with the others' pain. Strikingly, however, that empathy did not appear to extend to…
omnibrain | January 18, 2008According to Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago:
"Biological reproduction is not a very efficient way to alleviate one's loneliness, but you can make up people when you're motivated to do so," said Nicholas Epley, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. "When people lack a sense of connection with other people, they are more likely to see their pets, gadgets or gods as human-like."
In his experiments he showed that the lonelier a person was the more likely they were to believe in supernatural entities such as God, angels…
cortex | January 18, 2008That, at least, is the consensus of a new paper in Neuropharmacology:
There is a general consensus that the effects of cannabinoid agonists on anxiety seem to be biphasic, with low doses being anxiolytic and high doses ineffective or possibly anxiogenic. Besides the behavioural effects of cannabinoids on anxiety, very few papers have dealt with the neuroanatomical sites of these effects. We investigated the effect on rat anxiety behavior of local administration of THC in the prefrontal cortex, basolateral amygdala and ventral hippocampus, brain regions belonging to the emotional circuit and…
oracknows | January 17, 2008Things are crazy now for me, both at home and at work. I mean really, really crazy. So crazy that even I, one of the most verbose bloggers out there, am forced to take two or three days off from my little addiction--I mean habit. Consequently, having foreseen that this time would come around these dates, I, Orac, your benevolent (and, above all verbose) blogger have thought of you, my readers. I realize the cries and lamentations that the lack of fresh material inevitably causes. That, I cannot completely obviate. However, I can ease the pain somewhat, and I can do this by continuing my…
revere | January 17, 2008When we complained the other day about World Organization for Animal Health (OIE) Director General Bernard Vallat's ill-considered remarks about how stable H5N1 was and that earlier fears were "overblown" we were not alone. Mike Osterholm at CIDRAP issued a similar remonstrance and the latter was publicized by the folks at Avian Flu Trackers on a press release that was picked up by a number of papers. Now DG Vallat is busy trying to extricate his foot from his mouth (or wherever he lodged it):
At an informal meeting with the press on 10/1/08 , the Director General of the OIE, Dr Bernard…
gregladen | January 16, 2008People from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks, MIT researchers and colleagues report in the first brain imaging study of its kind.
This is not that surprising, but it is very interesting research. We already knew, for instance, that people who read and write different "kinds" of languages ... pictographic vs. non-pictographic ... use different regions of their brain for this function, and thus are differentially affected by strokes or other damage.
This news comes to us from an MIT press release...
Psychological research has…
cortex | January 15, 2008I've written about our wine biases before, but now we have anatomical evidence of why, exactly, expensive wine seems to taste better.
The experiment, led by researchers at Cal-Tech and Stanford, was simple. [A free version of the study is here.] Twenty subjects tasted five wine samples which were distinguished solely by their retail price, with bottles ranging from $5 to $90. Although the subjects were told that all five wines were different, the scientists had actually only given them three different wines. This meant that the first two wines were used twice, but given two different price…
jrice | January 14, 2008Here they are! As always, 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 ellhoisa
Physical Science: "Burning Mountain" in Namib desert. From NASA, via pingnews.com
Environment. From Flickr, by Felix Francis
Humanities & Social Science.…
clock | January 13, 2008Culture Influences Brain Function, Study Shows:
People from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks, MIT researchers and colleagues report in the first brain imaging study of its kind.
Aroma Of Chocolate Chip Cookies Prompts Splurging On Expensive Sweaters:
Exposure to something that whets the appetite, such as a picture of a mouthwatering dessert, can make a person more impulsive with unrelated purchases, finds a study from the February 2008 issue of the Journal of Consumer Research. For example, the researchers reveal in one experiment that…
developingintelligence | January 11, 2008One of the bottlenecks in human memory capacity is its "filtering efficiency" - irrelevant information in memory only detracts from an already-constrained memory span. New work by McNab & Klingberg images the neural structure directly responsible for such filtering, and shows it can predict behavioral measures of memory span. Impressively, the location of this "memory filter" is the globus pallidus, as predicted by a computational network model of cortex, but in contrast to that model, it shows functional correlations with parietal in addition to frontal areas. This work has immediate…
developingintelligence | January 10, 2008A new educational system called "Tools of the Mind" teaches not facts and figures, but rather focuses on cognitive skills in structured play. In the largest and most compelling study yet, exposure to this curriculum in the classroom drastically improves performance on a variety of psychometric and neuropsychological tests.
Vygotskian theory posits that children need to "learn to learn" - by mastering a set of mental tools which bootstrap their mental abilities, the same way that physical tools can extend physical abilities. The consequent "mental exercise" may strengthen the mind just like…
jrice | January 10, 2008Feast your eyes upon 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: Snake skin. From Flickr, by Tambako the Jaguar
Physical Science. From Flickr, by Tambako the Jaguar
Environment. From Flickr, by Tambako the Jaguar
Humanities & Social Science. From…
clock | January 7, 2008
I had no time to read this in detail and write a really decent overview here, perhaps I will do it later, but for now, here are the links and key excerpts from a pair of exciting new papers in PLoS Biology and PLoS ONE, which describe the patterns of expression of a second type of cryptochrome gene in Monarch butterflies.
This cryptochrome (Cry) is more similar to the vertebrate Cry than the insect Cry, also present in this butterfly. The temporal and spatial patterns of expression of the two types of Cry suggest that they may be involved in the transfer of time-information from the…
developingintelligence | January 7, 2008A continuing challenge in cognitive neuroscience is determining which neural structures are actually responsible for certain thoughts and behaviors. For example, fMRI and other neuroimaging techniques cannot tell us if a certain region of visual cortex is necessary for perceiving motion, or if it is merely coactivated whenever motion is perceived. Such distinctions are both particularly important and particularly difficult to achieve in domains thought to be uniquely human: we cannot simply lesion human brains and observe the consequences as we can with animals trained to perform lower-…
terrasig | January 6, 2008The first 2008 issue of New England Journal of Medicine came yesterday in the snailmail box and I read the following story with such great interest that I nearly walked into a tree. Bear with me but the news lately has taken me on a neuroscience streak without my having specific professional expertise in the area.
The famed Johns Hopkins neuroscientist, Solomon H. Snyder, MD, DSc, has a commentary entitled, "Seeking God in the Brain - Efforts to Localize Higher Brain Function" (currently available as free full text). The commentary was very loosely directed at a study elsewhere in the issue…
omnibrain | January 4, 2008The mind is a complicated and a still very much unknown entity. The earliest conceptions of the mind didn't even have it placed in the brain, instead it was very much separate from the body. This is of course all very silly, the only possibility is that the mind wholly and completely resides in the neural system and that system is responsible for every aspect of the mind, from perception, to language, and even for experiencing the presence of a higher power.
With all of these misperceptions of the mind it isn't surprising that people could think that this soul of ours could interact with…
gregladen | January 3, 2008Daily alcohol use by males has been shown to increase sexual arousal and decrease sexual inhibition.
In Fruit Flies.
The current (Jan 2) issue of PLoS ONE includes a paper by Lee et al exploring thye physiological side of changes in sexual behavior under the influence of alcohol, with an eye towards understanding this process in humans, using an animal model.
Alcohol has a strong causal relationship with sexual arousal and disinhibited sexual behavior in humans; however, the physiological support for this notion is largely lacking and thus a suitable animal model to address this issue is…
oracknows | January 3, 2008The other day, I happened across an Op-Ed article in the New York Times that left me scratching my head at the seeming insanity of the incident it described. The article, written by Dr. Atul Gawande, author of Complications: A Surgeon's Notes on an Imperfect Science and Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance, described what seemed on the surface to be an unbelievable travesty:
In Bethesda, MD, in a squat building off a suburban parkway, sits a small federal agency called the Office for Human Research Protections. Its aim is to protect people. But lately you have to wonder. Consider this…