Brain and Behavior
j7uy5 | June 11, 2006UCSF has issued a
href="http://pub.ucsf.edu/newsservices/releases/200606091/">press
release describing their trial of a vaccine,
href="http://www.nabi.com/pipeline/pipeline.php?id=3" rel="tag">NicVAX®
(Nicotine Conjugate Vaccine) , for treatment of nicotine addiction.
The product is made by attaching a nicotine derivative to a
carrier protein. This is necessary because nicotine itself is
too small to elicit an immune response.
When injected, the vaccine causes the immune system to produce
antibodies that bind to nicotine. Once bound, the nicotine is
unable to cross the
href="…
clock | June 11, 2006The Synapse is a new neuroscience carnival. The first edition will appear on Pure Pedantry on June 25th, and the second two weeks later here on A Blog Around The Clock.
Anything involving the brain, nervous system, behavior and cognition is fair game for this carnival, from brand new research to historical studies, from pure basic science to applications in medicine or robotics. Please send the links for the first edition, including your name, your blog's name and a short blurb about the post, to Jake at: jamesjyoung AT gmail DOT com.
Then, once your post appears in an edition of the…
mixingmemory | June 11, 2006As you all know, I love visual illusions, and this may be one of my favorites. This picture is pretty small (go here for a bigger version), but you should be able to figure out what's going on by watching it for a moment. Notice that as the face flips over, you briefly see the concave surface of the back or inside of the mask, but it quickly switches back to a convex, upside-down mask. That's not because the image changes, though. Instead, your brain decides that faces can't be hollow, so it changes it for you. This is called depth inversion, or the "hollow face illusion." Interestingly,…
j7uy5 | June 10, 2006No, it's not a new concept car from Detroit. It is a website
that is designed to collect suggestions for the next edition of the
Diagnostical and Statistical Manual (DSM-V). It occurred to me to mention it
here, after reading a recent article in Seed
magazine.
href="http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/06/serenity_now.php">Serenity
Now!, written by
href="http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/author-stu-hutson/">Stu
Hutson, posted on
href="http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2006/06/">June 8,
2006 12:14 AM, is in the category
href="http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/brain-behavior/"…
dmunger | June 9, 2006If you haven't had a chance to visit the new ScienceBlogs home page, go now. It's got a slew of brand-new features, and we've more than doubled the number of bloggers. What's more, there are now several blogs that are in fields closely related to Cognitive Daily, which have conveniently been grouped together under the Brain and Behavior channel.
Actually, the channels are a bit more sophisticated than that. Every blogger can categorize every post into a channel. So if, for example, I write something about, say, academic publishing, I can specify that it's placed into the "academia" channel,…
retrospectacle | June 9, 2006Cocaine abuse is a major public health issue, with estimations of as high as 1% of the US population over 12 as abusers. Addiction to cocaine, and most substances for that matter, results in physical modifications in your brain which are persistant, and detrimental to many mental fuctions like learning. During and following cocaine addiction, changes occur in a brain region called the nucleus accumbens (NAc), which is important in natural reward pathways. It is a key player in the reinforcement of drug-taking.
A recent brief communication in Nature Neuroscience (Martin et al. 2006) describes…
clock | June 9, 2006The Big Blogging Gurus suggest that one should often link back to old posts. I do that, actually, quite often, but now that I have moved my blog here, all the old posts are elsewhere. Over the next few months I will re-publish some of my best posts here so they get archived on this blog. In the meantime it is nice to have the permalinks of the best (and most likely to be linked) posts, or at least most interesting posts all in one place.
I noticed that, when they moved to their new digs at SEED, several science bloggers posted their lists of "best of" posts. I found those lists very…
pharyngula | May 30, 2006I've received a personal email from Rabbi Avi Shafran—the fellow whose graceless and ignorant opinion piece I criticized a while back. It's a peculiar thing: he wrote a public editorial, I criticized it publicly, and now he asks that we have a private discussion on the matter. I won't post his whole email, but I will put up the main point, what he plainly says is the main point and a restatement of the thesis of his original editorial, and address that here.
If Rabbi Avi Shafran wants to continue the discussion, he should do it publicly. I'm not going to convert him, and he's not going to…
dmunger | May 26, 2006Take a look at the following movie. Your job is to identify which ball appeared to make the noise in the final frame. (click to play):
If this seems confusing now, it should be cleared up by the end of this post. You can register your result in this poll:
Synesthesia, as we've discussed before, is a rare condition. Synesthetes are people who perceive stimuli presented in one mode (often corresponding to one of the five senses) with a different mode. It's a remarkable ability, manifesting itself in a variety of different ways -- seeing "auras" around friends, or associating a sound or even…
jstemwedel | May 23, 2006It's time for anothe installment of "Ask a ScienceBlogger". This week's question:
If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be?
Here, because others have already snagged my standard answer to this question, and because I've already embraced unrealistically high expectations in the last 24 hours, I'm going to opt for something a little more challenging.
I want the public to understand something about how science uses models.
When scientists are trying to understand systems and phenomena, they turn to models. A model is a simplified version of…
grrlscientist | May 22, 2006Bob Levy, whose book, Club George, I recently reviewed here, very kindly agreed to participate in an email interview with me that I could publish here. It took me a little while to follow up on it, but thanks to the magic of email, and to Bob's quick response, the interview is below, for you to enjoy. It also includes some cool new news that no one (to the best of my knowledge) has revealed before!
[Note: minor editorial changes were made in square brackets to improve clarity]
Do you consider yourself to be a bird watcher or do you instead think of yourself as someone who enjoys the company…
dmunger | April 20, 2006If you're older than about 20, you'll probably recognize the image to the left from an anti-drug campaign from the 1980s. The image was supposed to represent the effects of drugs on the human brain. While the effectiveness of the campaign is debatable, the fact that it now seems a quaint relic of a bygone era begs the question: are we repeating the same mistakes in the war on violent video games?
While there are many correlational studies and even some experiments showing the relationship between playing violent video games and aggressive behavior, there have been comparatively few…
melinda wenner | April 20, 2006
What would you do if someone told you it was possible to get merrily drunk with none of the unsavory consequences? No hangovers, no unidentifiable party injuries, no "where-did-this-tattoo-come-from" screams the following morning? What if you also heard that there was a pill you could pop to sober you up quickly, giving you the option to drive home after a night at the bar, or at the very least, not pass out on the subway and end up in a place you can't even pronounce?
Personally, my first reaction would be to drop my half-drunk beer, hug everyone within a half-mile radius while singing the…
pharyngula | April 17, 2006By way of Over My Med Body, I found this article that finds new virtues for seafood: it reduces anti-social behavior. This is great news! I plan to announce when I'm feeling cranky here at the Myers household, which will prompt an immediate serving of tasty salmon. I'm going to be eating fish every day!
Well, maybe not…I'm really not that cranky. But it is yet another piece touting the virtues of polyunsaturated fatty acids, especially the essential ω-3 fatty acids in which sea food is rich, so it reinforces my preferences, anyway.
Dietary polyunsaturated fatty acids do have a record of…
tsmith | April 12, 2006 A new study in the journal Pediatrics suggests this common procedure may improve the condition of kids diagnosed with attention defecit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). I think it's an excellent case of some true "alternative explanations" for the data.
Creationists often try to validate their position by saying that both they and mainstream scientists start from the same data, but that creationists use their "Bible glasses" to interpret it, while scientists view it through their "evolution glasses." In other words, they're not wrong--it's just a different interpretation of the same data,…
neurontic | April 6, 2006Most people don't know that Sigmund Freud was a frustrated neurologist. Before he abandoned himself to abstraction, the father of psychoanalysis was a practicing physician, intent on developing "a neural model of behavior." (Kandel Interview) But Freud found neuroscience too blunt a tool, in the early twentieth century, to serve his purposes.
If brain science had been further along at the turn of the century, we might have been spared the Oedipus Complex and the concept of penis envy. But we may also have missed out on his theory that dreams are a form of wish fulfillment--a hypothesis that…
stcynic | March 29, 2006I saw this article, titled Satanic Art in Catholic Church Exposed, a few days ago at the Worldnutdaily and made a note to write about it. The article details a new documentary called Rape of the Soul that claims that throughout the history of the Church, artists have been subliminally encoding "satanic and occultic imagery" in their paintings. The WND article begins with their standard breathlessness:
Could the Roman Catholic Church's sex abuse crisis be tied to embedded Satanic and occultic imagery in its artwork - some of it hundreds of years old?
The film, which is being released by Silver…
razib | March 18, 2006I often read the weblog Sepia Mutiny, and today there was a post about a pair of men flying while brown. They were pulled off the plane and their bags were sent ahead. It was a big foul up. Now, here is the kicker: the men were wearing "traditional" South Asian clothes and skull caps and one of them was reading the Koran. This scared the crap out of a flight attendent. Now, I pointed out that dressing likes this was likely to scare the crap out of people on a plane, so it is a really idiotic modus operandi for a terrorist, so the response was probably irrational. Frankly, the people…
pharyngula | March 16, 2006Nah, I thought this has got to be a joke:
The Pentagon's defence scientists want to create an army of cyber-insects that can be remotely controlled to check out explosives and send transmissions.
But no…there is actually a DARPA call for proposals.
DARPA seeks innovative proposals to develop technology to create insect-cyborgs, possibly enabled by intimately integrating microsystems within insects, during their early stages of metamorphoses. The healing processes from one metamorphic stage to the next stage are expected to yield more reliable bio-electromechanical interface to insects, as…
razib | March 7, 2006Nick Wade in The New York Times has a piece out titled Still Evolving, Human Genes Tell New Story, based on a paper published today in PLOS, A Map of Recent Positive Selection in the Human Genome. This paper is an extension of the research project that emerges out of the International HapMap Project. In short the HapMap is an assay of ~300 individuals from 3 populations, European Americans from Utah, ethnic Yorubas from Nigeria, and a collection of Japanese and Chinese. What can a few hundred individuals tell you? A lot.
Wade's piece is a soft landing survey of the major points. His…