Brain and Behavior
razib | July 18, 2007Go Ahead, Everyone Talk at Once:
People who can't follow a movie when someone else is talking can blame their genes. The ability--or inability--to listen to more than one thing at once is largely inherited, according to a study of twins. The finding could help scientists better understand disorders that involve problems in auditory processing.
...
"This is the first study to show that [normal] people vary widely in their ability to process what they hear, and these differences are due largely to heredity," NIDCD director James Battey said in a statement. That's important, says Deborah…
clock | July 18, 2007The third post in the series on entrainment, first written on April 10, 2005, starts slowly to get into the meat of things...As always, clicking on the spider-clock icon will take you to the site of the original post.
In the previous post, I introduced the concept of entrainment of circadian rhythms to environmental cycles. As I stated there, I will focus on non-parametric effects of light (i.e., the timing of onsets and offsets of light) on the phase and period of the clock.
Entrainment is a mechanism that forces the internal period (&tau - tau) of the biological clock to assume the…
cortex | July 17, 2007This is just sad:
Harrah's New Orleans, the largest casino in the city, is on pace for its best year ever: gambling revenue is up 13.6 percent through the first five months of 2007 compared with the same period in 2005, pre-Katrina.
The casinos in this region are generating more revenue -- from significantly fewer players -- in large part because of the extra money that many area residents have in their pockets and fewer alternatives on where to spend it, casino executives and others in the region say.
I sometimes wonder if, one day, we'll view casinos as we currently view cigarettes: a…
revere | July 17, 2007In the world of opera a diva is a prima donna, often problematic in behavior, but in the world of bird flu, DIVA stands for differentiating infected from vaccinated animals (DIVA). The bird flu DIVA relates to a problematic behavior of vaccinating poultry: after you've artificially induced them to produce antibodies against bird flu, you are faced with the trying to tell if a bird with antibodies against bird flu got it artificially or naturally. Since antibody detection is the main screening method for poultry infection with avian influenza virus most countries won't accept imports of…
drorzel | July 16, 2007This is the final Best Novel Hugo nominee of this year's field, and given James Nicoll's immortal description of Watts's writing ("When I feel my will to live getting too strong, I pick up a Peter Watts book" or words to that effect), I wasn't terribly enthusiastic about picking up Blindsight. I was on something of a roll, though, and took it along to read on the plane to our Internet-less vacation weekend in Michigan. In the end, I think my reaction to the book was colored by James's comment, but it wasn't as bad as it might've appeared.
Blindsight is narrated by Siri Keeton, who had a…
j7uy5 | July 15, 2007We
already knew that
rel="tag">varenicline
could be used to help people stop smoking. Now there is a
report that it can help reduce alcohol consumption, at least for rats.
This was reported in
title="Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences">PNAS
(Varenicline, an α4β2
nicotinic acetylcholine receptor
partial agonist, selectively decreases ethanol consumption and seeking)on
an open-access basis, and echoed in a report in Scientific
American (
href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=ACE9FF1E-E7F2-99DF-31F26EC00AA05F4A&sc=I100322">Need
a Cigarette and a…
clock | July 13, 2007A short post from April 17, 2005 that is a good starting reference for more detailed posts covering recent research in clock genetics (click on spider-clock icon to see the original).
As I have mentioned before, there was quite an angst in the field of chronobiology around 1960s about the lack of undestanding of circadian and other rhythms at cellular and subcellular levels. Experiment involved manipulation of the environment (e.g,. light cycles) and observing outputs (e.g., wheel-running rhythms), while treating the clock, even if its anatomical location was known, as a "black box".…
clock | July 12, 2007A new paper just came out today on PLoS-Biology: Glucocorticoids Play a Key Role in Circadian Cell Cycle Rhythms. The paper is long and complicated, with many control experiments, etc, so I will just give you a very brief summary of the main finding.
One of the three major hypotheses for the origin of circadian clocks is the need to shield sensitive cellular processes - including cell division - from the effects of UV radiation by the sun, thus relegating it to night-time only:
The cyclic nature of energetic availability and cycles of potentially degrading effects of the sun's ultraviolet…
cortex | July 12, 2007David Dobbs has a wonderful article in the most recent Times Magazine on Williams syndrome, a development disorder that results in a bizarre mixture of cognitive strengths and deficits:
Williams syndrome rises from a genetic accident during meiosis, when DNA's double helix is divided into two separate strands, each strand then becoming the genetic material in egg or sperm. Normally the two strands part cleanly, like a zipper's two halves. But in Williams, about 25 teeth in one of the zippers -- 25 genes out of 30,000 in egg or sperm -- are torn loose during this parting. When that strand…
clock | July 12, 2007 I wrote this post back on January 23, 2005. It explains how clock biologists think and how they design their experiments:
So, are you ready to do chronobiological research? If so, here are some of the tips - the thought process that goes into starting one's research in chronobiology.
First, you need to pick a question. Are you interested in doing science out of sheer curiosity to discover stuff that nobody knew before (a very noble, but hard-to-fund pursuit)? Or would you prefer your work to be applicable to human medicine or health policy, veterinary medicine, conservation biology, or…
clock | July 11, 2007Our former scibling David Dobbs has posted/published two interesting articles about recent findings in neuroscience and behavior:
The Gregarious Brain in New York Times Magazine, about the Williams Syndrome:
If a person suffers the small genetic accident that creates Williams syndrome, he'll live with not only some fairly conventional cognitive deficits, like trouble with space and numbers, but also a strange set of traits that researchers call the Williams social phenotype or, less formally, the "Williams personality": a love of company and conversation combined, often awkwardly, with a poor…
purepedantry | July 11, 2007One of the ways that scientists study human decision making is through the study of behavior in simple games -- loosely lumped into a field called game theory.
Some of the most interesting and revealing findings involving such games is that human beings are not "strictly rational." Before everyone jumps all over me, let me define that statement. Strictly rational in this sense means that the behavior of human beings during these games does not always maximize expected value of the numerical (usually monetary) reward over the long-term. In laymans terms, if you offer someone $5 with no…
sheril | July 11, 2007As a child of the 80's growing up in the US of A, I was raised under the 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle' mantra. The phrase was as familiar as Stop, Drop, and Roll or This is your Brain on Drugs. To improperly dispose of a plastic bottle was an act of sacrilege in a world of neatly labeled disposal bins. Television even suggested we could recycle our way to a healthy planet where the animals sang songs and we were Free to Be You and Me. Or something like that. It was as if abiding by the three R's would bring utopia.
Even though this notion no longer holds water in my pragmatic adulthood, I…
jjacquet | July 10, 2007The New York Times, ever one to embrace diversity, can run a flag-waving article about the plight of bluefin tuna and the future for sushi (deer meat) and then turn around, as it did today, to publish a glowing review of sushi restaurant on New York's 15th Street. The review's clever title Does the Squid Get a Mani-Pedi? was a reference to the laborious massaging of the octopus (PZ's dream job) before its big brain was slow-cooked.
But the reviewer's behavior was even odder than the chef's. He orders essentially everything under the sea, including bluefin tuna, without so much a word on the…
oracknows | July 10, 2007I'm devastated.
Truly and totally devastated emotionally and intellectually. Indeed, I don't know how I'll ever be able to recover, how I'll ever be able to live down the shame and go on with my career.
What could bring me to this point, you ask? I'll tell you. Everybody's favorite creationist neurosurgeon and dualist Dr.Michael Egnor thinks I'm "unprofessional."
Worse, he does it while agreeing with Pat Sullivan's article in which Pat asserts that "Darwinism" has what he calls a "marketing problem," in essence seemingly saying that, because he can't understand "Darwinism" but can understand…
clock | July 10, 2007
This is the second in the series of posts designed to provide the basics of the field of Chronobiology. See the first part: ClockTutorial #1 - What Is Chronobiology and check out the rest of them here - they will all, over time, get moved to this blog.
Here is a brief overview of the concepts and terms used in the field of chronobiology. I will write much more detailed accounts of various aspects of it in the future.
Seasons of the year, phases of the moon, high and low tides, and alternation between night and day are examples of cyclic changes in the environment. Each presents a different…
clock | July 9, 2007Considering I've been writing textbook-like tutorials on chronobiology for quite a while now, trying always to write as simply and clearly as possible, and even wrote a Basic Concepts And Terms post, I am surprised that I never actually defined the term "biological clock" itself before, despite using it all the time.
Since the science bloggers started writing the 'basic concepts and terms' posts recently, I've been thinking about the best way to define 'biological clock' and it is not easy! Let me try, under the fold:
A biological clock is a structure that times regular re-occurence of…
clock | July 8, 2007What?....
There is a slang phrase in Serbo-Croatian that means "doing nothing; being idle; wasting time", and it is "hladiti jaja", which means "cooling (one's) balls". So, if you see a guy just sitting there, clutching a beer bottle and gazing into the distance, you may ask him "Hey, man, whatcha doin'?" and he may reply " 'ladim jaja", i.e., "I'm coolin' me balls".
Well, this slang phrase, indicating a thermoregulatory behavior, has its origin in the real theromoregulatory physiology. Yes, mammals have to cool their balls. That is why mammalian testes are located outside the body inside…
ddobbs | July 7, 2007
My article on Williams syndrome and human sociability is now on the New York Times Magazine web site, at
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/magazine/08sociability-t.html
This was one of the more enthrallling stories I've worked on. Williams syndrome rises from a genetic deletion of about 20-25 of our 30,000 genes, and those who have it can be pretty much counted on to be quite gregarious and social. How can a deletion amplify a trait? Is their sociability actually increased, or simply left less fettered?
As the story relates, research into Williams has addressed these questions, throwing…
neurotopia | July 5, 2007This is the third part in an overview of menopause and hormone therapy. Parts one and two are here and here. This time around I describe changes in cognitive and behavioral profiles for women and animal models of menopause. I may decide to expand on a handful of studies at a later date, but for now I wanted to provide a very brief overview of human studies, problems inherent to human studies, and animal studies. I think the next part of this series will focus on the quality of our animal models and what they have to tell us. But for now, anyone who is interested in these issues knows where…