Brain and Behavior
chaoticutopia | July 26, 2006I've been saving these for a rainy day--a game or other timesinking tidbit for each ScienceBlogs category. I originally was going to wait until a rainy weekend, but the climate hasn't favored that idea. As it is,I'm behind on other projects, so today works. Besides--it is pouring outside, leaving me in dire need of something to chase the rainy blues away. Rather than making ten separate posts, I've crammed the distractions all into one list, counting down to my favorite. I'll admit, some of the categorizations are a stretch (you try coming up with something about politics that is a fun…
cortex | July 26, 2006Small Gray Matters has an insightful post on the recent mirror neuron debate here at Scienceblogs. While I think a dose of skepticism is always helpful (especially when big mysteries like "empathy" and "theory of mind" are being tossed around), Small Gray Matters offers a persuasive defense of this circuit in the motor cortex:
Mirror neurons offer what is clearly the most plausible current model of imitative behavior, which isn't a trivial matter, since imitation turns out to be pretty rare in the animal kingdom. For another, it wasn't all that long ago that people were pretty skeptical about…
clock | July 26, 2006Since my move here to SEED scienceblogs, I made a mistake of assuming, quite wrongly, that most of my visitors are aslo science bloggers (or people interested in science) who, almost by definition, regularly read all of the other SEED sciencebloggers as well.
I forgot that some of the readers are not new readers, but people who came over here with me, people who have read one of my three old blogs for a long time before my move.
They may be liberal/progressive bloggers, or fans of John Edwards, or North Carolina bloggers, or Balkans bloggers, or edubloggers or academic bloggers. Not to…
neurotopia | July 25, 2006Mixing Memory brings up some excellent points regarding mirror neurons in primates, and Frontal Cortex follows up with his thoughts. To both of them I say "bravo, but your skepticism probably doesn't go far enough".
We give Rizzolatti et al too much credit with their conclusions. After all, they've only demonstrated the existence of mirror neurons in monkeys. Due to the obvious inherent difficulties associated with recording from human neurons in vivo, no one has yet (to my knowledge) published anything that demonstrates the existence of mirror neurons in people. Instead, we stick…
clock | July 25, 2006
You and I, as well as all of our mammalian brethren, have just a few photopigments, i.e., colored molecules that change shape when exposed to light and subsequently trigger cascades of biochemical reactions leading to changes in electrical properties of sensory neurons, which lead to modulation of neurotransmitter release, which propagates the information from one neuron to the next until it is integrated and interpreted somewhere in the brain - we see the light!
More under the fold....
Mammals have rhodopsin (in rod-shaped photoreceptor cells in the retina of the eye), three or four color-…
stcynic | July 25, 2006It always amuses me just how powerful the anti-gay loonies think homosexuality is. It's so powerful that it causes the very tectonic plates to crash together, causing earthquakes in San Francisco. It causes the weather patterns to change, causing hurricanes in Florida and New Orleans. And all of this, of course, accompanied by lots and lots of death and suffering for innocent (i.e. straight) people. One half expects to see a gay superhero who takes his heroic form by yelling "By the power of Garland!" at the top of his lungs.
Bartholomew, as usual, is on top of the latest developments in the…
purepedantry | July 24, 2006The Economist has an article about an economist using evolutionary ideas. To wit:
...Eric Beinhocker, of the McKinsey Global Institute, has undertaken his own 500-page haj, entitled "The Origin of Wealth: Evolution, Complexity, and the Radical Remaking of Economics". In places (such as its headline call for a "paradigm shift" in economics) the book may irk Mr Krugman and other gatekeepers of the profession. But it is good enough, and scholarly enough, to warrant their attention rather than their scorn.
Indeed, Mr Beinhocker is himself critical of "loose analogising" between biology and…
mixingmemory | July 23, 2006There are a few topics in cognitive science that are like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. I find the very mention of them irritating, and the irritation can stick in my craw for days. At or near the top of that list are mirror neurons. These little cells have been made so sexy, either by their sheer coolness or massive, overblown publicity (it's hard to tell which), that they seem to have become the solution to virtually every problem in the study of cognition and behavior in the minds of some researchers. Of course, the blogosphere has also jumped on the mirror neuron boat (I was…
cortex | July 19, 2006In response to my blog yesterday about America's continued love affair with horsepower and V8 engines, I recieved an excellent comment. It's worth a read:
If you ask people why they drive 4WD SUVs you get a number of answers, usually associated with safety, or power and control. While many early SUV models were available in 2WD versions, people overwhelmingly prefered 4WD. Yet repeated usage surveys in the 90s showed only about 10% of SUV drivers ever used 4WD. What gives? Why are people buying the extra design, precision engineering, and transmission weight and buying the extra gas to haul…
retrospectacle | July 19, 2006Recently the topic of Parkinson's has come up both here (in regards to more young people getting the disease) and at Neurotopia (who gave a great summary of a paper which suggested that chemicals in pesticides can contribute to Parkinson's symptoms). I want to keep the ball rolling on the topic by offering a silver lining: a promising new therapy for Parkinson's via neurogenesis (replacing or regenerating lost neurons). This post (beginning below the fold) was written by an expert on the dopaminergic system and a fellow Neuroscience PhD student here at the University of Michigan. We'll call…
neurontic | July 17, 2006I've been meaning to read Temple Grandin ever sense reading about her in Oliver Sacks' 1995 book, An Anthropologist on Mars. But for some reason, her books continually ended up on the bottom of the pile on my nightstand. What a shame. Having just finished Grandin's Animals in Translation, I regret dragging my feet for so long. Her life story is like catnip for the psychologically curious.
Arguably America's foremost animal behavioralist, Grandin has spent her 32-year career working to ensure that the animals that end up in slices on our dining room tables are treated with care and compassion…
mixingmemory | July 17, 2006[First published on 1/22/05 at the old blog.]
Recall V.S. Ramachandran's 10 principles of art.
Peak shift
Perceptual Grouping and Binding
Contrast
Isolation
Perceptual problem solving
Symmetry
Abhorrence of coincidence/generic viewpoint
Repetition, rhythm and orderliness
Balance
Metaphor
In the last post, I talked about the first three. In this post, I'll discuss 4, 5, 6, 7, and 10.
Isolation
Ramachandran's first three principles, peak shift, grouping, and contrast, may, after a little thought, seem fairly obvious. Art is generally not meant to be strictly representational, but instead to…
neurotopia | July 16, 2006Unfortunately I'm stuck with the press release on this one, my government-access VPN doesn't seem good enough to get me this article at home. Face blindness, or prosopagnosia, is a condition where a person is unable to recognize another person by their face and must rely on other features, such as gait, hair, voice, or other features.
Recognition of faces can be disrupted by damage to the fusiform gyrus of the temporal lobe. Here, it seems the researchers have found a heritable genetic defect that leads to face blindness.
The 14 participants reported that they experienced uncertainty in…
neurotopia | July 16, 2006Shelley mentioned a study last week that suggested more and more young people are getting Parkinson's Disease, and she wondered whether there was any utility in blaming our industrialized society based on the fact that certain compounds we produce can induce Parkinsonian symptoms. Let's start by giving a brief overview of the systems involved before we attempt to answer that question.
The substantia nigra contains a collection of dopaminergic neurons that project to the striatum. Integrity of this pathway is essential for normal motor function, although this nigrostriatal system is capable…
jstemwedel | July 15, 2006After my post yesterday suggesting that women scientists may still have a harder time being accepted in academic research settings than their male counterparts, Greensmile brought my attention to a story in today's Boston Globe. It seems that almost a dozen professors at MIT believe they lost a prospective hire due to intimidation of the job candidate by another professor who happens also to be a Nobel laureate. Possibly it matters that the professor alleged to have intimidated the job candidate is male, and that the job candidate and the 11 professors who have written the letter of…
scientificactivist | July 14, 2006Although a given scientific paper probably has at least something fairly interesting or unique about it, most people aren't going to be too interested in reading about, for example, the structural details of the protein-protein interactions between cytoplasmic integrin tails and focal adhesion-associated proteins (my work).
But this paper... man, this is completely different. Not only could I not wait to read it, hell, I wished I was there when the experiments were taking place!
On July 7th, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine published a paper in Psychopharmacology…
purepedantry | July 12, 2006What is the deal with the stories showing brain lesions that end addiction? First, there was this one. Then, today in Nature there was another one:
Strokes often change a person's character, depending on where the damage hits. Some may become more impulsive, others depressed. Now researchers have shown that damage to a small but very specific brain area can wipe out an addiction to smoking.
Antoine Bechera, of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, has identified 14 patients who all stopped smoking immediately after having a stroke that damaged their insular cortex. This seems to be not…
clock | July 11, 2006Last Carnival of Education (teaching, educational policy) was on NYC Educator and the next one is tomorrow on School Me.
Last Animalcules (microorganisms) was on Aetiology and the next will be on July 13th, 2006 on Science Matters.
Last Change Of Shift (nursing) was on Emergiblog and the next one will be on July 13th, also pm Emergiblog.
Last Friday Ark (animals) was on The Modulator and the next one will be on July 14th, also, as always, on The Modulator.
Last History Carnival (history) was on Chapati Mystery and the next one will be on July 15th on Air Pollution.
Last Tar Heel Tavern (…
mixingmemory | July 11, 2006Theory of mind, or how we think about what's going on in other people's heads, continues to be one of the hottest topics in cognitive science today. A debate continues to rage over whether we reason about other people's thoughts by means of theory-like propositional knowledge, or through simulation (i.e., putting yourself in their shoes... in your head). Since psychologists are unlikely to solve this debate by themselves, they've called in the artillery - cognitive neuroscientists. And those buggers have come up with some interesting ways to figure out where mentalizing (another name for…
purepedantry | July 10, 2006I haven't had time to read it all yet (it is sort of long and technical), but a new model by Grossberg and Seidman purports to explain how normal cognitive processes go wrong in autism -- a pretty tall order but it looks like they deliver. Here is a description from the press release:
A new model of the brain developed by Dr. Stephen Grossberg, professor and chairman of the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University, and Dr. Don Seidman, a pediatrician with the DuPage Medical Group in Elmhurst, IL, sheds light on the triggers of behaviors commonly associated with autism…