Brain and Behavior
cogdaily | June 14, 2007"What was your 6th birthday party like?
"If you successfully retrieved that memory, you may now be ever so slightly less able to remember your other childhood birthdays. A variety of behavioral evidence has shown that such "retrieval induced forgetting" of strongly competing memories is fundamental to memory retrieval."
A fascinating article was posted over at the Developing Intelligence ScienceBlog discussing how retrieving an old memory can compete with the ability to later recall similar memories. This competition is said to assist in selective memory retrieval, and reduce metabolically…
clock | June 13, 2007More stuff from SLEEP 2007, the 21st Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies:
Sleep Deprivation Affects Eye-steering Coordination When Driving:
Driving a vehicle requires coordination of horizontal eye movements and steering. Recent research finds that even a single night of sleep deprivation can impact a person's ability to coordinate eye movements with steering.
Extra Sleep Improves Athletes' Performance:
Athletes who get an extra amount of sleep are more likely to improve their performance in a game, according to recent research.
Going To Bed Late May Affect The…
grrlscientist | June 13, 2007tags: behavior, evolution, humans, mate choice
A recent study has found a strong correlation between a woman's choice of a partner and her relationship with her father. Basically, the better she was treated by her father when she was a child, the more closely that her partner's face resembled her dad's.
The team's leader, Lynda Boothroyd from Durham University in the UK, said that her findings add to our understanding of how we become attracted to certain types of people. Such knowledge could have important implications for fields such as relationship counselling, she added.
In this study,…
developingintelligence | June 13, 2007What was your 6th birthday party like?
If you successfully retrieved that memory, you may now be ever so slightly less able to remember your other childhood birthdays. A variety of behavioral evidence has shown that such "retrieval induced forgetting" of strongly competing memories is fundamental to memory retrieval. In a new article in Nature Neuroscience, Kuhl et al. provide neuroimaging evidence which ties retrieval-induced forgetting to activity in prefrontal cortex.
In the study, subjects studied a series of 240 word pairs, for example ATTIC-DUST, ATTIC-JUNK, or MOVIE-REEL. During…
bushwells | June 13, 2007
Today, the FDA's Endocrinologic and Metabologic Advisory Committee reviews rimonabant, the cannabinoid receptor antagonist developed by Sanofi-Aventis, for recommendations, or lack thereof, as an anti-obesity medication. Rimonabant was approved in Europe for limited cohorts of obese patients, but rejected as an anti-smoking medication. Approval for marketing rimonabant in the US is pending next month, and the advisory committee's assessment will weigh heavily on this decision.
There are other 'bants in the pharma pipeline so it should be interesting to see how today's decision plays out…
clock | June 13, 2007There are a lot of people blogging about their kids. But when Kate writes about parenting issues, it is pure science. After attending a meeting on parental behavior, she's been churning out post after post on this fascinating topic:
Cheetah Infidelity and the Bruce Effect
Bird brains and sex reversal
Thanks, Dad - the paternal brain and his selfish genes
Thanks, Dad - footage of a paternal eagle
Perhaps there will be more over the next few days, so stay tuned...
developingintelligence | June 7, 2007The neural processing of color, shape, and location appears to be widely separated in the brain, and yet our subjective experience of the world is highly coherent: we perceive colored shapes in particular locations. How do these distributed representation about visual features get brought or "bound" together to form an integrated percept?
Charles Gray suggests that there are actually many such binding problems - not only between visual features, but between other sensory modaliities as well as between perception and action. The brain may have evolved redundant mechanisms for solving this…
cortex | June 6, 2007I've always been embarrassed by my relentless fidgeting. I play with my beer bottlecaps at bars and endlessly twirl the remote while watching television (this drives my girlfriend crazy). I tap my leg at the dinner table and rap my fingers all day long on my desk. I fold napkins, twirl forks and play with my buttons. It turns out, though, that my behavior has a genetic basis. It also keeps me slender:
Are you the type of person who is constantly fidgeting? If you are there is a chance fidgeting may be in your genes - and the good news is that you are less likely to be fat, according to the…
omnibrain | June 4, 2007Can dogs perform deduction? Evidently so...
The provocative new experiment indicated that dogs can do something that previously only humans, including infants, have been shown capable of doing: decide how to imitate a behavior based on the specific circumstances in which the action takes place.
Original Story
neurontic | June 2, 2007Charlie Rose recently ran a show billed as "A discussion about the legacy of Sigmund Freud." I'd urge anyone interested in the impact of neuroscience on psychotherapeutic practice to take the time to watch it.
The title is a bit misleading. It's less a discussion of Freud's contributions than it is a free wheeling conversation about how the fields of neuroscience and psychotherapy are beginning to overlap--and, perhaps more importantly, how understanding the biology of the brain promises to revolutionize the practice of psychotherapy.
The participants are seriously heavy hitters: There's…
oracknows | May 31, 2007Via Ed Brayton, I've learned of an interesting commentary by Sasha Abramsky on a topic that's near and dear to my heart. Well, its' more like a major pet peeve, one that irritates me so much that two years ago I even created a character who's made regular, albeit increasingly infrequent, appearances on this blog. I'm talking, of course, about the Hitler Zombie, everybody's favorite undead Führer whose chomp on a pundit's brain results in stupid and ridiculously overblown Nazi analogies. Indeed, such analogies irritate me sufficiently that at times my attacks on them have been described by…
developingintelligence | May 30, 2007While the "modal model of memory" is still widely taught and accepted as a general theory, an enormous amount of recent research has focused on how short-term memory enables higher cognitive processes like those involved in planning, goals, and executive functions. Yet this research has revealed surprisingly intricate links between short- and long-term memory. Increasingly, it appears that interactions among prefrontal areas (traditionally thought to be important for short-term memory) and medial temporal lobe areas (traditionally thought to be important for long-term memory) are important…
retrospectacle | May 30, 2007[I'm starting a new series here at Retrospectacle, called 'Science Vault,' of which this post is the first. Pretty much I'm just going to dig back into the forgotten and moldering annuls of scientific publications to find weird and interesting papers that very likely would never be published today (and perhaps never should have.) I'll probably try to do it once a week (and if you have suggestions, please do email me with them.)]
Most of you read the title and thought I was kidding, right? I mean, who in their right mind would give a huge dose of a psychotropic substance to an elephant, just…
j7uy5 | May 28, 2007
Fast
Company
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> has an
amusing and interesting
href="http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss.html">article
on
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy">pychopathy.
Being a business-oriented magazine, they ask "Is your boss a
psychopath?" But one could just as easily apply the same
principles to other important people in your life, such as politicians.
They even have a quiz useful for making armchair diagnoses.
href="http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss-quiz.html">Quiz:
Is Your Boss a Psychopath?
[1] Is he…
denialism | May 28, 2007Corpus Callosum points us to a review in science entitled Childhood Origins of Adult Resistance to Science (Chris at mixing memory also has coverage of the article). This is a perfect study to emphasize a critical aspect of denialism and crankery, that is, the central role the overvalued idea plays in the evolution of a crank.
Denialism, in a nutshell, is the rhetorical strategy used to protect an overvalued idea from things like facts and data. The denialist or crank is trying desperately to hold on to a concept that is important to their self-identity or ego, and is in conflict with…
clock | May 25, 2007Definitive Evidence Found Of A Swimming Dinosaur:
An extraordinary underwater trackway with 12 consecutive prints provides the most compelling evidence to-date that some dinosaurs were swimmers. The 15-meter-long trackway, located in La Virgen del Campo track site in Spain's Cameros Basin, contains the first long and continuous record of swimming by a non-avian therapod dinosaur.
Teen Sex And Depression Study Finds Most Teens' Mental Health Unaffected By Nonmarital Sex:
For a decade, the legislative push for "abstinence only" sex education has suggested that nonmarital sex negatively affects…
developingintelligence | May 24, 2007Many will agree that algebra is difficult to learn - it involves planning, problem-solving, the manipulation of symbols, and the application of abstract rules. Although it's tempting to imagine a specialized region of the brain for each of these processes, they may actually recruit roughly the same widely-distributed and general-purpose "task network" of brain regions. The individual contribution of each region has been, and continues to be, a matter of much debate.
However, the functional specialization of each brain region may be best understood as fulfilling a particular balance between…
j7uy5 | May 23, 2007This
is in response to a
href="http://scienceblogs.com/corpuscallosum/2007/05/childhood_ptsd.php#comment-439606">comment
from a prior post. There are a few related questions here.
Can preemies develop PTSD, can
they be labeled with PTSD, if they can get PTSD is it fundamentally the
same as it is in adults, and if it is different, should we call it
something else????
The comment was left by Stacy, the author of a blog,
href="http://thepreemieexperiment.blogspot.com/">The Preemie
Experiment. I spent a bit of time on
href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi">Medline…
neurontic | May 19, 2007I'm told I went out last night and that many beers were consumed, but I have no memory of the event. Why does too much hooch make us forget? And does the fact that I "blacked out" mean I should reserve a place in rehab?
Sincerely,
Chastened Boozehound
Dear Boozehound,
You probably never thought you'd have anything in common with the main character from Memento, but, guess what? Now you do. See, Leonard was suffering from a condition known as anterograde amnesia brought on by severe head trauma, which kept him from transferring new experiences into long-term memories. His memories of…
denialism | May 18, 2007As I sit here, trying to write a paper, I found this article entitled "How to write consistently boring scientific literature" very interesting. (via The Annals of Improbably Research"
I'm afraid it's behind a paywall, so I'll summarize their findings.
Here's their table that summarizes their findings in bullet-points.
Avoid Focus
This is my favorite one:
If an author really wants to make sure that the reader looses interest, I recommend that he/she does not introduce the ideas and main findings straightaway, but instead hide them at the end of a lengthy narrative. The technique can be…