Brain and Behavior
jrosenhouse | March 8, 2007With all the fuss lately about the atheistic books of Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, it is easy to overlook another glut of books that tend to threaten religion. I am referring to the series of books intending to provide a scientific basis for the prevalence of religious belief.
Examples of the genre include Daniel Dennett's Breaking the Spell, Pascal Boyer's Religion Explained and Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust. In each case the idea is to show that a propensity for religious belief is the result of evolution by natural selection.
This week's New York Times Magazine featured this cover…
pharyngula | March 8, 2007Newsweek has a story about the capture of the colossal squid, and it sounds like a) there will be video footage released next month, and b) the boat captain made a good bit of money off of it.
Dolan, the Ministry of Fisheries observer, remembers being surprised at how docile and sluggish the squid was. "It really didn't put up much of a fight," he says. "Its tentacles were moving back and forth, but that's about it. It certainly wasn't grabbing crew members and pulling them back into the sea."
As it happens, Bennett had brought along a video camera in order to film a small documentary about…
clock | March 8, 2007
Despite Their Heft, Many Dinosaurs Had Surprisingly Tiny Genomes:
They might be giants, but many dinosaurs apparently had genomes no larger than that of a modern hummingbird. So say scientists who've linked bone cell and genome size among living species and then used that new understanding to gauge the genome sizes of 31 species of extinct dinosaurs and birds, whose bone cells can be measured from the fossil record.
Human Pubic Lice Acquired From Gorillas Gives Evolutionary Clues:
Humans acquired pubic lice from gorillas several million years ago, but this seemingly seedy connection does not…
dmunger | March 8, 2007There's been a lot of news about robots lately, so I thought I'd take the opportunity to synthesize what's going on in this field and offer a bit of speculation about where robotics is headed.
First: From Neurodudes comes news of an artificial robotic limb that not only responds to nerve impulses but also has the potential to give feedback to its human host -- as if she was sensing her environment with her own hands. Is this the first cyborg? What's next -- direct mind control of machines?
Actually, a company is working on just such an interface -- a video game controller that works by…
cortex | March 5, 2007First of all, I apologize for the most grandiose blog title of all time. I was going to add Love and War to the title too, but I ran out of space.
My subject is yesterday's Times Magazine synopsis of the current scientific explanations for the universal human craving for some sort of God. The article neatly (perhaps too neatly) divides the scientists into dueling camps: the adaptionists and the non-adaptionists (spandrelists?).
The non-adaptationists hold that religious belief is a side-effect of our cortical evolution. God emerges naturally from the constellation of tricks and tools that…
omnibrain | March 2, 2007We all know that the full moon turns you into a werewolf or just plain stark raving mad. Well at least according to this website:
The full moon is credited for a lycanthropic man's moonlight metamorphosis into a dangerous howling beast - the werewolf (in North American cultures, or a horse or goat in Brazil, or a tiger in India, and so on). In a less Anthropomorphic vain, many believe that the full moon is responsible for an increase in abnormal psychological behaviors such as suicides and violent crimes. As I shared the introduction of this article to this point with the nurse at my…
purepedantry | March 2, 2007I don't know if you have ever seen this show on Animal Planet -- Meerkat Manor. It is disgustingly cute. It is about a family of meerkats that were followed over several years.
Anyway, I love that show, so lately I have had meerkats on the brain.
Some other researchers are also apparently interested in meerkats. Publishing in the journal Science, they have recently shown that meerkats teach their young how to hunt.
Thorton and McAuliffe examined hunting in meerkats. Meerkats eat basically anything they are bigger than -- as you will note if you watch the show above. This would…
jrosenhouse | March 1, 2007Christianity Today has published this lengthy review of The God Delusion. The review's author is Alvin Plantinga, who is often described as America's foremost philosopher of religion.
As regular readers of this blog are aware, I find the central truth claims of Christianity to be rather implausible, to put it kindly. I am also aware, however, that rather a lot of people feel differently. I have no trouble with the idea that all of those people are mistaken, but I do find it difficult to dismiss them all as fools. So I keep reading religious literature, in the increasingly vain hope that I…
pharyngula | March 1, 2007Robert M. Sapolsky is one of my favorite science writers — if you haven't read Why Zebras Don't Get Ulcers(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), The Trouble With Testosterone: And Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), A Primate's Memoir(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), or Monkeyluv: And Other Essays on Our Lives as Animals (amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), I suggest you get off your butt right now and visit your library or bookstore. He's a primatologist who studies the endocrinology and behavior of baboons, but he always presents his work in terms of the human condition. We aren't so…
thusspakezuska | February 26, 2007So, you've probably heard about this by now: the sorority at DePauw University where 23 members were asked to vacate the house because they weren't "sufficiently dedicated to recruitment". It just so happens that the cadre of insufficiently dedicated members included all the sorority's black, Korean, and Vietnamese members. It included all the members who were overweight, we are told. Seemingly, it also included a large number of women who were math and science majors as well.
...the chapter appears to have been home to a diverse community over the years, partly because it has attracted…
developingintelligence | February 24, 2007The story of a patient who awoke after a 20-year coma, induced by traumatic brain injury.
Epidemic proportions of TBI in soldiers returning from Iraq: a new problem.
Second chance to live: a new blog written by a TBI survivor.
It is becoming clear that we have little idea of how the sleep medication Ambien (zolpidem) actually works. A few months ago it was shown to awaken some people from "persistent" vegetative states, but now is being implicated in bizarre behavior.
Douglas Hofstadter has a new book on consciousness. So does Gerald Edelman, also on consciousness.
Computers can now play…
pharyngula | February 23, 2007Sometimes it's the little things that are the most revealing, that expose the bankruptcy of an idea. For instance, this story from a Florida school where the principal and teachers cast a magic spell.
It had been a hard Friday at Brooksville Elementary School, with lots of misbehavior that didn't bode well for the start of state testing the following week.
So the principal and a few staff members appealed to a higher power.
They prayed and blessed their students' desks with prayer oil.
While the Christian prayers and anointing took place after school hours on Friday, Feb. 2, the oil was…
retrospectacle | February 22, 2007Fetal alcohol syndrome---where the developing fetus is exposed to high levels of ethanol in the womb---has far-reaching negative effects on neural development. Now environmental and biological factors of parental alcohol abuse might also retard brain growth, according to a new study published in Biological Psychiatry.
Many studies have shown that alcohol-dependent men and women have smaller brain volumes than non-alcohol-dependent individuals. It is widely believed that this is due to the toxic effects of ethanol, which causes the alcoholic's brain to shrink with aging to a greater extent…
cortex | February 22, 2007Jane Galt mocks liberal interpretations of behavioral economics:
[This] also applies to behavioural economics, which the left seems to believe is a magical proof of the benevolence of government intervention, because after all, people are stupid, so they need the government to protect them from themselves. My take is a little subtler than that:
1) People are often stupid
2) Bureaucrats are the same stupid people, with bad incentives.
Pithy, yes. Accurate, not so much. Behavioral economists and neuroeconomists haven't discovered that people are "stupid." Instead, they've discovered that the…
cortex | February 22, 2007It's a gripping video, a youtube window into the autistic mind:
And now Dr. Sanjay Gupta, the telegenic brain surgeon on CNN, has spent time with Amanda, the "low-functioning" autistic woman produced and starred in the video:
She taught me a lot over the day that I spent with her. She told me that looking into someone's eyes felt threatening, which is why she looked at me through the corner of her eye. Amanda also told me that, like many people with autism, she wanted to interact with the entire world around her. While she could read Homer, she also wanted to rub the papers across her face…
grrlscientist | February 21, 2007Can one be religious while simultaneously claiming to be an ardent atheist? This is what Sam Harris manages to accomplish in his rant, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris (New York: WW Norton & Co., 2004, 2005).
Throughout much of this simplistic argument, Harris uses blunt, hard-hitting prose to make his case for why abrahamic religions, particularly Islam, are the most dangerous element of modern life. According to the author, religious faith is flawed because it requires its adherents to cling irrationally to mythic stories of heaven and hell. He…
clock | February 21, 2007New Research Finds People And Pigeons See Eye To Eye:
Pigeons and humans use similar visual cues to identify objects, a finding that could have promising implications in the development of novel technologies, according to new research conducted by a University of New Hampshire professor. Brett Gibson, an assistant professor of psychology who studies animal behavior, details his latest research in the journal article, "Non-accidental properties underlie shape recognition in mammalian and non-mammalian vision," published in Current Biology. Gibson and his colleagues found that humans and…
mementomori | February 20, 2007Message to all those who are thinking of smoking their first cigarette today:
Message to all those who know someone who has recently taking up cigarette smoking:
Message to all those who have quit smoking but are having difficulty fighting the craving for nicotine:
People who smoke cigarettes for a long period of time permanently alter their brain cells in such a way that mimics the damage done from other addictive drugs such as cocaine and heroin.
Researchers from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) examined eight samples of human brain tissue from each of three groups: long-term…
clock | February 19, 2007This was a meme I posted back on my birthday last year (May 11, 2006) - it's a shame not to move it to the new archives here....
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Carel Brest van Kempen tagged me with the 10 bird meme. A DC Birding Blog started the meme and is collecting the responses (over 50 so far) here.
As you can see, those are all birders and birdwatchers, real pros. They really know their birds. They picked their choices by beauty and grace, or by special meaning in their lives, or by excitement of having seen them.
But I am, unfortunately, not a birdwatcher. I always…
retrospectacle | February 19, 2007I love video games. Hell, I was raised by Mario, Luigi, Sonic, and Yoshi and eagerly anticipated every new upgrade of the Nintendo console. My parents understood, they were of the Atari generation and saw video games as harmless fun on a rainy Florida afternoon, and perhaps even "good" for improving hand-eye coordination. I played outside like any normal kid, had friends, did schoolwork, grew up, and went to college. However, video games followed me through all of it. And while I don't play much anymore, a new Final Fantasy game or a Wii demo at Best Buy is still capable of raising my blood…