Brain and Behavior
neurotopia | May 1, 2007Lots of talk today about the joys of undergraduate research sparked by a recent study (the results of which can be found here). Chad has a post or two that I like on the matter. I thought I would throw my personal two cents in the ring as well, since undergraduate research has factored heavily into my career choices.
When I got to college at a small liberal arts school in Illinois, I was unsure what career plans were. I had some vague interest in being a lawyer or potentially some sort of psychologist, but nothing tickled my fancy. My thoughts turned to science in my first year, and I went…
bushwells | May 1, 2007When I encounter horrific articles like Hope for sex-boosting slimming pill , I would just as soon take a pencil and shove it in my ear because that would be more gratifying than giving such journalistic shattery any kind of serious consideration. But what the hey, this is the Chimp Refuge, where we toss scat with giddy abandon, so I'll hold off on the pencil in ear and substitute a cathartic round of fisking.
At first glance, I thought I should be pissed off at the misogynistic overtones in this article. I mean, look at the byline:
Scientists are developing a pill which could boost women…
purepedantry | May 1, 2007Earlier this week in the post Neurological "Personhood," I made a comment about individuals with autism. My comment was as follows:
1) Some individuals do not show normal development in the system of identifying personhood described. For example, individuals with autism sometimes show deficits in this area. What does the fact that this system is not universal say about ethical behavior? Clearly, many autistic people are still getting there, but they must be getting to ethical behavior by some other route.
I realized later on that I was not being particularly clear about where I was going…
purepedantry | April 27, 2007Ronald Bailey at Reason reviews an interesting article in the American Journal of Bioethics by Martha Farah and Andrea Heberlein and the responses to it. Farah and Heberlein argue that while an innate system for the detection of personhood exists in the human brain, it is so prone to being fooled by clearly non-person objects that it suggests that no reasonable standard for personhood can exist. Many commenters took issue with that argument.
Money quote:
Farah and Heberlein contend that the personhood brain network evolved because as an intensely social species, our ancestors' survival was…
revere | April 24, 2007Excitement, then irritation. That was my reaction to a news article in Nature about a technique using a protein to switch off nerve firing when activated by light:
There were audible gasps and spontaneous applause at a neuroscience meeting in Salt Lake City, Utah, in February, when Ed Boyden described a protein that switches off nerve firing when activated by light. And when Karl Deisseroth told the fuller story of the protein, called NpHR and published in this week's Nature, at Cold Spring Harbor in New York late last month, there was talk of a revolution in neuroscience. It is perhaps no…
grrlscientist | April 24, 2007tags: congressional timetable, troops, Iraq war, politics
Bush has no empathy or consideration for anyone, which means that the troops, the gallant men and women of this nation's military, are stuck in a losing war with no end in sight. This is shameful. The fact that Bush can change this situation, but won't, demonstrates his shocking arrogance and stupidity and disregard for the lives of mainstream Americans.
Bush is steadfastly resisting Congress's timetable for a withdrawal of our troops from Iraq.
"I'm disappointed that the Democratic leadership has chosen this course," Bush complained…
hrynyshyn | April 24, 2007Time was when any mention of members of the order Hymenoptera referred to the prospect of killer bees stinging their way up through America. Not anymore. Today it's the other way around. Bee hives are collapsing left, right and center, and not just this side of the Atlantic. And no one is quite sure why. Among the strangest hypotheses is one that blames cell phone radiation, believe it or not. See here, and here for discussion elsewhere on ScienceBlogs in response to a story across the pond in the Independent. I just want to point out the curious fact that...
today's Science Times section…
cortex | April 24, 2007Not all wags mean the same thing. Careful analysis reveals an emotional difference between wags to the right and wags to the left. This asymmetry reflects an underlying asymmetry built into the mammalian brain:
When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.
A study describing the phenomenon, "Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli," appeared in the March 20 issue of Current Biology. The authors are Giorgio…
clock | April 23, 2007Similar Brain Chemicals Influence Aggression In Fruit Flies And Humans:
Serotonin is a major signaling chemical in the brain, and it has long been thought to be involved in aggressive behavior in a wide variety of animals as well as in humans. Another brain chemical signal, neuropeptide Y (known as neuropeptide F in invertebrates), is also known to affect an array of behaviors in many species, including territoriality in mice. A new study by Drs. Herman Dierick and Ralph Greenspan of The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego shows that these two chemicals also regulate aggression in the fruit…
neurontic | April 18, 2007For those of us with even a passing knowledge of psychology, Virginia Shooter Seung Cho's plays read like a fictionalized retelling of DSM IV, the bible of psychiatric disorders. The characters exhibit signs of everything from paranoia, to pedophilia, to anti-social personality disorder, and psychopathy.
Lucinda Roy, one of Cho's English professors was so alarmed by his writings that she referred him to counseling. Cho declined to go. Ms. Roy then contacted campus police. They did nothing. Distressed, Ms. Roy contacted university officials, who gave her two options: She could drop Cho from…
dmunger | April 18, 2007Madam Fathom has an excellent discussion of nicotine's effect on the brain and cognitive function. First off, I've rarely seen a clearer explanation of how neurons actually work:
Neurons are functionally integrated in expansive neural networks, with each neuron receiving up to thousands of inputs from other neurons. However, the neurons are not actually physically connected to one another; there is a tiny gap that separates neurons, called a synapse.
When a neuron is activated, an electrical pulse (an action potential) travels down its membrane; the neuron is said to "fire" an action…
developingintelligence | April 17, 2007Your body's bilateral symmetry statistically predicts your health, probability of schizotypy and depression, number of sexual partners, and resting metabolic rate (particularly if you are male). Bodily symmetry may reflect "developmental stability" - i.e., influences like disease, mutation and stress may cause a developmental divergence from DNA's symmetric blueprint. Not only do individuals differ in their environmental exposure to these things, but also in their sensitivity to them: a recent Intelligence article claims that "some individuals grow adaptive phenotypes under almost any…
clock | April 15, 2007Sex And Prenatal Hormone Exposure Affect Cognitive Performance:
Yerkes researchers are using their findings to better understand sex differences in cognitive performance, which may lead to increased understanding of the difference in neuropsychological disorders men and women experience.
In one of the first research studies to assess sex differences in cognitive performance in nonhuman primates, researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center have found the tendency to use landmarks for navigation is typical only of females.
This finding, which corroborates findings in rodents and…
zooillogix | April 12, 2007The parasite Toxoplasma gondii is common in rats, but can only sexually reproduce inside the belly of a feline. The solution? Brainwash the rats into craving the scent of cat urine. Once infected by Toxoplasma gondii, rats who would normally have a phobia of cat urine actually seek it out, increasing their chances of getting eaten and transmitting the parasite into a feline gut.
"There are a million examples of parasites manipulating host behavior," said Robert Sapolsky, a Stanford University neuroscientist. Just see the related article "Suicide Grasshoppers Brainwashed by Parasite Worms".…
omnibrain | April 12, 2007
Researchers in at the University of New Hampshire discovered something very important recently. The show COPS is actually useful for something besides freaking out stoned kids who accidentally flip to FOX when it's on. By watching many many many episodes of COPS Mardi Kidwell, assistant professor of communication, learned that making eye contact with a panicked person is a very important way of controlling their behavior. She describes her findings in a paper entitled, "'Calm Down!': the role of gaze in the interactional management of hysteria by the police," which was recently published…
omnibrain | April 12, 2007This story is almost useless without video - which Is why I'm posting it. Can anyone get a video of an Orangutan playing a video game? In any case... Here's the basic story:
In one game, orangutans choose identical photographs or match orangutan sounds with photos of the animals -- correct answers are rewarded with food pellets. Another game lets them draw pictures by moving their hands and other body parts around the screen. Printouts of their masterpieces are on display in the zoo.
The computer games, which volunteers from IBM spent nearly 500 hours developing, test the animals' memory,…
cortex | April 12, 2007So I'm sitting in the movie theater the other day (I went to see The Lives of Others - go see it), and as soon as the first scene begins, the elderly lady sitting next to me says to herself: "Gosh darnit! I've already seen this movie! But it sounded so different when I read about it!"
When the movie was over, I struck up a conversation with the woman. It turns out that she read the description of the movie in the lobby and didn't recognize any of the plot elements. However, as soon as she saw the face of the main character she instantly remembered having seen the movie a few weeks before. At…
clock | April 12, 2007I made only a brief mention of the study when the press release first came out, but the actual paper (which is excellent) is out now. It is on PLoS so it is free for all to see: Mania-like behavior induced by disruption of CLOCK:
Circadian rhythms and the genes that make up the molecular clock have long been implicated in bipolar disorder. Genetic evidence in bipolar patients suggests that the central transcriptional activator of molecular rhythms, CLOCK, may be particularly important. However, the exact role of this gene in the development of this disorder remains unclear. Here we show that…
razib | April 11, 2007I don't normally blog about stuff like this, but I've decided to link to this story about an assault on a Sikh American veteran by a police officer. Here's the original story posted by the Sikh American Legal Defense and Education Fund. If this sort of stuff concerns you I encourage you to link as well, with a high enough pagerank some public pressure might ensue. Here's the relevant bit:
Mr. Nag then came outside to answer the officer's questions regarding the van. The Joliet police officer then demanded that Mr. Nag park the van inside his garage and not on the driveway, to which Mr. Nag…
grrlscientist | April 11, 2007tags: bipolar disorder, mania, manic mouse, psychiatric research
Some of you, like me, suffer from bipolar disorder or might know someone who does, so I thought I'd take this opportunity to write a little about the creation of a mouse model to study the genetics that are thought to underlie the manic phase of bipolar disorder -- a phase that has not been well understood so far.
Bipolar disorder, or manic-depressive illness, is a psychiatric condition that affects a person's moods. Typically, a person who suffers from a classical bipolar disorder (Also known as bipolar affective disorder,…