Brain and Behavior
purepedantry | July 9, 2006The American Journal of Psychiatry has this very interesting case, but first you should know some background. There is a pathway in the brain that is commonly referred to as the reward pathway. It is referred to as the reward pathway because if I were to -- for instance -- implant an electrode into parts of it and train a rat to press a lever to zap himself there, he would do so more or less in perpetuity. This ability to very rapidly train self-stimulatory behavior (keep your mind out of the gutter) suggests that these areas of the brain are involved in learning reward.
Here is a diagram…
razib | July 7, 2006Prosopagnosia is "An inability or difficulty in recognizing familiar faces; it may be congenital or result from injury or disease of the brain." I've talked about this before. Well, Jake "The Superficial" Young now has a follow up post on the paper which elicited my initial skepticism. Since you can read the abstract, here is the conclusion:
Congenital PA is the only known monogenic dysfunction of a higher cognitive visual skill. Among more than 90 different cognitive functions (e.g., musical mind, absolute pitch) and dysfunctions (e.g., agraphia, dyscalculia, dyslexia) related to…
purepedantry | July 7, 2006Prosopagnosia is a rare disorder that can result from strokes where the individual is unable to recognize faces but maintains the ability to recognize other non-face objects. Disorders like prosopagnosia suggest to neuroscientists that the machinery for processing faces in the brain is in part special and segregated from the machinery for processing other objects.
It turns out that there is also a wildly underreported and surprisingly prevalent form of hereditary prosopagnosia (HPA), as shown in a new paper in American Journal of Medical Genetics. HPA has a prevalence of almost 2.5% and…
j7uy5 | July 6, 2006There has been some blogosphere and mediasphere activity regarding the
following article (
href="http://archpedi.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/160/7/739">Age
at Drinking Onset and Alcohol Dependence) in Archives of
Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine. The New York
Times picked it up (
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/health/04teen.html?ex=1309665600&en=64fcb20497217e6c&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">permalink),
and Jake
href="http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2006/07/on_the_merits_of_postponing_yo.php#more">posted
about it at Pure Pedantry.
There'…
razib | July 6, 2006This entry is somewhat unconvential, but I will place in the "brain & behavior" category because I want comments on my own feelings & attitudes from those who know some psychology. I am an individual with opinions about the world. I suppose you could say that I'm your typical individual with a scientific & operationally materialistic worldview. I'm also mildly right-of-center, and tend to have as many issues with Post Modern "progressives" thought as I do with Religious Right reactionaries. Like the Religious Right I do believe there are truths in this world which are sacred…
purepedantry | July 6, 2006The New York Times has a interesting article about the long term consequences to adolescent brains of early drinking. To whit:
In experiments conducted by the Duke team, the reformed rat drinkers learned mazes normally when they were sober. But after the equivalent of only a couple of drinks, their performance declined significantly more than did that of rats that had never tippled before they became adults. The study was published in 2000 in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. Other research has found that while drunken adolescent rats become more sensitive to memory…
stcynic | July 6, 2006Michael Shermer writes of a fascinating experiment on how the brain processes statements and claims about which one has a powerful attachment to the truth being a certain way. It may well illuminate the sort of irrational thinking driven by political partisanship. I'll post his description of the experiment below the fold:
This surety is called the confirmation bias, whereby we seek and find confirmatory evidence in support of already existing beliefs and ignore or reinterpret disconfirmatory evidence. Now a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study shows where in the brain the…
mixingmemory | July 5, 2006Throughout the brief history of cognitive science, debates over the nature of knowledge representation have raged. In the 1970s, the debate was between those who thought that knowledge was represented as images -- modal, or sensory representations -- and those who thought that knowledge was represented propositionally. That particular debate ended in a stalemate, upon the realization that you could account for pretty much any data set from either perspective. If you can't distinguish between perspectives, you can't really debate them. Despite the stalemate, most cognitive scientists who've…
clock | July 4, 2006
I got several e-mails yesterday about a new study about the molecular mechanism underlying circadian rhythms in mammals ("You gotta blog about this!"), so, thanks to Abel, I got the paper (PDF), printed it out, and, after coming back from the pool, sat down on the porch to read it.
After reading the press releases, I was in a mind-frame of a movie reviewer, looking for holes and weaknesses so I could pounce on it and write a highly critical post, but, even after a whole hour of careful reading of seven pages, I did not find anything deeply disturbing about the paper. Actually, more I read…
purepedantry | July 4, 2006When a man wakes up after a 20 year coma, you know that people are going to pay attention. Particularly after the Terry Schiavo business, I think it is important to add some facts to this debate as early as possible before it gets completely out of control.
So let's talk about this guy. In 1984, Terry Wallis has a car accident where he was thrown from his pickup. He goes into a coma. Despite his family's objections, it would appear he was misdiagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state rather than a minimally conscious state:
But improvements in the care of patients could be made…
ddobbs | July 4, 2006Several bloggers have commented on Paul Bloom's Seed plaint about brain imaging studies receiving too much attention and a certain false credibility. (See the posts at Cognitive Daily , Mixing Memory and — in refutation — Small Gray Matters, as well as other citing blogs via Technorati or BlogPulse.) Bloom has a point: Both popular and science media show an outsized fondness for brain imaging studies, inspiring much work more diverting than informative. The most overhyped of these studies and stories suggest that in some busy brain area lies the locus of love, the center of empathy, or the…
clock | July 3, 2006Believe me, I love the word "circadian". It is a really cool word, invented by Franz Halberg in the late 1950s, out of 'circa' (Latin - "about") and diem ("a day"), to denote daily rhythms in biochemistry, physiology and behavior generated by the internal, endogenous biological clocks within living organisms.
It's been a while since the last time I found someone mistaking the word for 'cicada' which is a really cool insect. 'Circadian' has become quite common term in the media and, these days increasingly, in popular culture. Names of some bands contain the word. A few blogs' names…
pharyngula | June 30, 2006Once upon a time, as a young undergraduate, I took a course in neurobiology (which turned out to be rather influential in my life, but that's another story). The professor, Johnny Palka, took pains at the beginning to explain to his class full of pre-meds and other such riff-raff that the course was going to study how the brain works, and that we were going to be looking at invertebrates almost exclusively—and he had to carefully reassure them that flies and squid actually did have brains, very good brains, and that he almost took it as a personal offense when his students implied that they…
retrospectacle | June 30, 2006RNAi, or RNA interference, is a rapidly developing and powerful tool to achieve gene silencing (turning a gene "off"). Gene silencing shows what happened in a system or organism when that gene is no longer functional. In a recent study, described in a story in Technology Review, female mice lose all interest in sex when a specific gene in the brain is silenced.
(More, including a video of the un-horny mice, below the fold!)
The mating behavior of female mice is heavily influenced by the hormone estrogen--up-regulation of estrogen provokes "lordosis," where the females arch their spines in…
mixingmemory | June 30, 2006 I'm going to play biologist for a moment, and talk about a species other than humans or nonhuman primates. First, imagine that you're about 10 mm long, a couple mm high, and you're stuck in the middle of the Sahara desert. Eventually you've got to find food, so you leave the comfort of your burrow to forage for food that could be many meters away. When you find food, you then have to find your way back home. And all you have to do this is a brain that weighs 0.1 mg (see the image below). If you're a member of the genus Cataglyphis, you do this on a daily basis, and you do it so well that you…
purepedantry | June 28, 2006Are there neurobiological correlates of economic behavior such as utility seeking? The answer is yes, as demonstrated by some very elegant work by Berns et al in Science.
Bern et al. wanted to establish what areas activate during the feeling of dread. Dread is defined as the feeling during the wait for a bad outcome that one knows is going to be inevitable. Why would we have dread? What is the purpose of dread? Well, the decision about whether to delay a bad outcome or get it over with quick is determine, in their view, by a comparison of the utility of the time during the delay to the…
clock | June 28, 2006
This is one a couple of posts about Creationism, written originally on May 1st, 2005.
Creationism Is Just One Symptom Of Conservative Pathology
I am not an "evolutionist". I am not a "Darwinist". I am a biologist. Thus, by definition, I am an evolutionary biologist. Although my research is in physiology and behavior, I would never be able to make any sense of my data (or even know what questions to ask in the first place) without evolutionary thinking.
As I am also interested in history and philosophy of biology, I consider myself a Darwinian. But not a "Darwinist" or "evolutionist" - those…
neurotopia | June 27, 2006Mrs. Evil Monkey and I went to visit Fallingwater for our 8th anniversary, and got some interesting surprises along the way. Lots of photos involved.
First off, we got this really swanky hotel called Log Cabin Motel. The accommodations were clean and the staff was friendly, and we got a room with a jacuzzi tub. The decor, on the other hand, was rather hilarious.
Surprisingly, there was a walk-through outdoor animal park adjacent to the hotel. Even more amazing, it was relatively clean and the animals seemed to be in good health. And they had a rather interesting assortment of animals!…
clock | June 27, 2006A bunch of updates are in store. First the DonorsChoose update. Let's look at the whole SEED scienceblogs action first (thanks Janet for all the information):
Total raised so far: 13,535.14Total donors so far: 170
Excluding Pharyngula (because Pharyngula is done), the top 5 in terms of ...
Amt/donor:
Stranger Fruit ($132.64)
A Blog Around the Clock ($116.50)
Good Math, Bad Math ($110.34)
Terra Sigillata ($86.35)
The Scientific Activist ($86.25)
Donors per 1000 hits:
Terra Sigillata (4.96)
Evolgen (2.35)
Stranger Fruit (2.02)
Afarensis (1.89)
The Questionable Authority (1.74)
$ raised per…
mixingmemory | June 27, 2006In a response to my defense of Freud, Jonah Lehrer states that, with Harold Bloom (ewww!), he sees Freud as "one of the great artists of the 20th century." In my view, how we read Freud today -- as literature, philosophy, or science -- is largely a matter of choice, as is the case for most early psychologists. We don't even need to pick just one. I myself tend to see his work as both philosophy and science, though not as literature. In this post, I'm going to briefly make the case for my own perception of him, as a way of extending my defense of his work as relevant to psychology today.
Two…