Brain and Behavior
clock | March 26, 2007Salamanders Suffer Delayed Effects Of Common Herbicide:
Pollution from a common herbicide might be causing die-offs in stream salamanders, according to biologists who say findings from their long-term study raise concerns over the role of atrazine in global amphibian declines.
Experience Affects New Neuron Survival In Adult Brain; Study Sheds Light On Learning, Memory:
Experience in the early development of new neurons in specific brain regions affects their survival and activity in the adult brain, new research shows. How these new neurons store information about these experiences may…
pharyngula | March 25, 2007That Allen MacNeill fella is crazy brave — after trying to approach Intelligent Design seriously as a course subject, now he's going to teach another controversial summer seminar on whether religion is adaptive. I think where the previous course ran off the rails was in the too-respectful attempt to encourage the participation of the Cornell IDEA club — he basically ended up aiding and abetting a gang of ignorant ideologues, and that's also the way it got spun in the media, to the creationists' advantage. I agree that it's a good idea to engage the counter-culture warriors who are pushing the…
omnibrain | March 23, 2007I found this entertaining snipit on some random website. I never realized that Tony Robbins (whose whole sctick revolves around firewalking) was such a fraud. It seems that you can delete a single memory (this time without that crazy drug) by visualizing it, making it black and white and then 'sending' it away from you.
Here check it out:
With this exercise you can actually 'delete' anything at all. I learned this memory-delete exercise from Tony Robbins, and it's based on the mental visualization principles from Neuro Linguistic Programming. Here's what you do.
1. Make a picture in your…
terrasig | March 22, 2007It's been just over a month since we last discussed cases of misfilled internet prescriptions and misbehavior by a US drug wholesaling firm. Yesterday, Sandra Kiume at OmniBrain told us about the death of a woman in British Columbia from what sounds like another case of terribly misrepresented drugs purchased over the internet (a second story is here). As Sandra noted,
A "strong sleeping pill and sedative" which "has been linked to overdose deaths in other countries and is not legally available in Canada" [nobody says which one!] along with an "anti-anxiety" medication and acetaminophen…
clock | March 21, 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…
jrosenhouse | March 20, 2007I only have time for quick blogging today, so why not have a look at this article from The New York Times? It discusses the evolutionary origins of morality. Here's the opening:
Some animals are surprisingly sensitive to the plight of others. Chimpanzees, who cannot swim, have drowned in zoo moats trying to save others. Given the chance to get food by pulling a chain that would also deliver an electric shock to a companion, rhesus monkeys will starve themselves for several days.
Biologists argue that these and other social behaviors are the precursors of human morality. They further…
jrosenhouse | March 19, 2007So far I haven't been participating in the anti-Egnor festivities. For those who don't know, Michael Egnor is a medical doctor who lately has become the flavor of the month over at the Discovery Institute's Blog. They get very excited, you see, when someone with actual credentials can be found to parrot their talking points. In Egnor's case he's harping the meme that doctors don't need to know anything about evolution.
Since I know next to nothing about medical practice I've been content to allow bloggers more qualified than I explain the numerous ways in which Egnor is confused. For a…
pharyngula | March 19, 2007What are we going to do with Michael Egnor? He seems to be coming up with a new bit of foolishness every day, and babbling on and on. Should we ignore him (there really isn't any substance there), or should we criticize him every time (although he's probably capable of generating idiocy at a phenomenal rate—he's got a real talent for it)?
I'm not going to link to the awful "Evolution News & Views" site, and I'll make this brief. His latest gripe is with the recent Newsweek cover story (that I had some problems with, too), but his argument is silly.
This is your assignment. You are to read…
tfk | March 19, 2007Michael Egnor is confused.
No, wait, that's like saying that the Titanic is made of metal. Let's try again.
Michael Egnor's confusion is drowning him in his own turgid prose:
I can't tell what live people (or live rats) are thinking by looking at their brains, and I can't even tell using two-photon confocal microscopy (the latest in capillary imaging). Of course, I can't tell what dead people used to think by studying their brains, and I certainly can't tell what dead people used to think if I don't have a speck of tissue from their brains. And I certainly can't tell what 3.2 million year…
cortex | March 19, 2007It's hard to believe it's been four years since the war began. If you missed Bob Woodruff's important documentary on the epidemic of brain injuries caused by war, I highly suggest watching it. According to Woodruff, up to 10 percent of all veterans suffer some sort of brain injury - often caused by explosive shock waves - while in Iraq. Most of these injuries will go untreated.
And then there's the psychological toll. Numerous reports indicate that the army still doesn't get PTSD, and isn't providing our veterans with a suitable level of care. It seems that, because mental illness is…
cortex | March 15, 2007In response to a recent post on spindle cells in which I referred to that neuronal cell type as a transmitter of social emotions, I received a very astute comment:
This doesn't as a statement make any sense "their antenna-like cell body is able to convey our social emotions across the entire brain". Neurons fire action potentials and the best they can conduct is patterns of firing or epsps/ipsps. They can't convey something as complex as 'social emotions'! That sounds like very sloppy thinking, even if they conduct something, some pattern, some information, to other brain regions its not '…
pharyngula | March 13, 2007At last, it's time for Encephalon, the carnival of neuroscience. There were a lot of submissions, and I've tried to organize them into four categories: basic and cognitive neuroscience addresses the problem of understanding brains, more medically and psychiatrically inclined work tries to fix brains, a few crazy dreamers think about technological ways to improve brains, and some rare individuals wonder about how brains evolved. I should mention that brains are incredibly complex and all of these efforts are struggling against the immensity of the problems…but it's fun to try and to watch, and…
retrospectacle | March 13, 2007 Neuroscience has a long and sordid history with anesthetic chemicals. Take curare (d-Tubocurarine) for example. Better known as a South American "dart poison," curare causes paralysis but not loss of consciousness. However, this chemical was used during the early 1900s as a surgical anesthetic for women and children until the 1940s when it was recognized as merely a paralytic. Its quite chilling to think of the numerous surgeries which were performed on completely conscious individuals who were paralyzed but unanestisized. Later procedures mixed muscle relaxants with an anesthetic, and…
purepedantry | March 12, 2007Jeffrey Rosen has an excellent piece in the NYTimes magazine about the increasing use of neurological arguments in the courts:
One important question raised by the Roper case was the question of where to draw the line in considering neuroscience evidence as a legal mitigation or excuse. Should courts be in the business of deciding when to mitigate someone's criminal responsibility because his brain functions improperly, whether because of age, in-born defects or trauma? As we learn more about criminals' brains, will we have to redefine our most basic ideas of justice?
Two of the most ardent…
omnibrain | March 11, 2007There is a great article today in the NYT about the impact neuroscience is having on the field of law. Here's a little snippit:
Carter Snead, a law professor at Notre Dame, drafted a staff working paper on the impact of neuroscientific evidence in criminal law for President Bush's Council on Bioethics. The report concludes that neuroimaging evidence is of mixed reliability but "the large number of cases in which such evidence is presented is striking." That number will no doubt increase substantially. Proponents of neurolaw say that neuroscientific evidence will have a large impact not only…
developingintelligence | March 10, 2007Recent highlights from the best in brain blogging:
Online experiments at the Harvard Visual Cognition Lab!
Less invasive brain-computer interfacing, for video games.
Brain-computer interface implants: videos.
A new weapon in the Israeli arsenal: the VIPER robot.
The current state of the art in robotics, as reviewed by Cognitive Daily.
Guiding pigeons with remote controls.
Hunting by single-cell organisms: the slime mold.
Relatively complex reasoning revealed in rats (improved! now links to the correct page).
Mental representations in non-human animals: signs of animal intelligence?
Evolving…
clock | March 10, 2007Social Tolerance Allows Bonobos To Outperform Chimpanzees On A Cooperative Task:
In experiments designed to deepen our understanding of how cooperative behavior evolves, researchers have found that bonobos, a particularly sociable relative of the chimpanzee, are more successful than chimpanzees at cooperating to retrieve food, even though chimpanzees exhibit strong cooperative hunting behavior in the wild.
Researchers Discover Breakthrough In Malaria Treatment:
An article published in 'The Lancet' by researchers from the Menzies School of Health Research (MSHR) in Darwin has revealed a…
developingintelligence | March 9, 2007"Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication." - Leonardo Da Vinci
"The aim of science is to seek the simplest explanation of complex facts. We are apt to fall into the error of thinking that the facts are simple because simplicity is the goal of our quest. The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be ``Seek simplicity and distrust it.'' - Alfred North Whitehead
No one ever said the brain was going to be simple - and this is precisely why there is a need to use simple tasks in cognitive neuroscience; even the "simplest" tasks may be subserved by bewildering complex…
pharyngula | March 8, 2007I know I'm late getting to this article on "Darwin's God" that was published last weekend…but I've been busy, OK? And to be honest, when I took a look at at, the first couple of paragraphs turned me off. These are silly rationalizations for god-belief.
Call it God; call it superstition; call it, as Atran does, Âbelief in hope beyond reason  whatever you call it, there seems an inherent human drive to believe in something transcendent, unfathomable and otherworldly, something beyond the reach or understanding of science. ÂWhy do we cross our fingers during turbulence, even the most…
sciencetolife | March 8, 2007
I was recently invited to the screening of a new HBO documentary series called "Addiction". I had the pleasure of meeting the filmmakers as well as some of the medical experts, like Nora D. Volkow M.D. and Mark Willenbring M.D., who helped shed light on this phenomenon. I was quite amazed at what I learned about the science of addiction, its new perception as a 'chronic but treatable brain disease' and the many misconceptions surrounding it.
If addiction is a brain disease, I wondered: how does one 'get' the disease and why are some people more prone to 'get' it than others?
According to…