Author and journalist David Dobbs writes on science, medicine, nature, education, and culture for the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Scientific American Mind, and other publications. He is also the author of three books (see below), most recently Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral.
Among the many wonders of neuroscience -- and central to the discipline -- is the brain's plasticity, its ability to rework synapses and networks to respond to new challenges and experiences. In this dynamic lies the physical explanation of the fluid nature of experience, thought, and consciousness…
My profile of Emory neurologist Helen Mayberg is out now in Scientific American Mind. You can read either a text-only version at my website, or get the full published version, with photos and such, at the Scientific American Mind site (free to subscribers, $5 for the article for non-subscribers).…
No sooner had I noted that mouse pups seem to handle stress better when near their mothers than I found a study of some 9000 British kids showing that breastfeeding seems to make kids more resilient to stress even well after they've stopped breastfeeding. As the press release puts it,
Breastfed…
One of the pleasures of following science is seeing how researchers use old, simple tools to test new questions. In a nice piece of work published in Nature Neuroscience, University of Oklahoma researchers Stephanie Moriceau and Regina Sullivan used learned-fear association in mice to reveal how…
From the Department of Fairness and Balance:
Marrow stem, by Spike Walker
For an elevatory antidote to the grimness of my previous post (about global warming cracking the Eiger), see the lovely collection of images from the Wellcome Trust's Biomedical Image Awards contest.
As the site puts it…
I enjoy most any mix of science and mountaineering — part of why I so like Mark Bowen's Thin Ice, his book about climatologist Lonnie Thompson's remarkable work documenting global warming in high-altitude glaciers. Scientific work done at rarefied altitudes. How can you not like it?
The North…
You don't see this every day:
Jake at Pure Pedantry draws due attention to an incredible case report in the American Journal of Psychiatry showing that a lesion in a patient's brain cured the patient's drug addiction, apparently by knocking out the reward circuit that made the addiction pleasurable…
My interest in global warming grows apace, both because it stands to impose some very grim effects and because it makes an interesting (if dismaying) study in culture's attitude toward science (see my post on "Climate change as a teset of empiricism and secular democracy") and how vested interests…
Several 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…
Now here's a provoking notion: PTSD in elephants .In an arresting article in Seed, Gay Bradshaw, a professor at Oregon State University, describes the implications of several studies of elephant groups in which wayward youngsters went a-wilding, essentially, murdering rhinos and creating mayhem.…
The Public Library of Science — the wonderful open-access journal — features a fine, thought-provoking piece by staffer Lisa Gross on Scientific Illiteracy and the Partisan Takeover of Biology. Gross takes a sobering look at how the fast pace of today's science and the public's lack of…
In a promising experiment, Nature reports that it is beginning a trial in which it will evaluate submitted papers through two tracks, one using its current, traditional closed peer review system and another using open peer review. As the blog O'Reilly Radar notes, this is a highly encouraging and…
The cover of the May 27 New Scientist bluntly asks, regarding climate change, “What Does It Take?” What will it take, that is, to convince our political leaders to start braking the accelerating runaway train we’ve created in global warming? I won’t review the (overwhelming) evidence here; for that…
from New Scientist, 30 May 2006:
Wild birds have helped transmit the deadly H5N1 bird flu across Eurasia, a meeting of 300 scientists at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) concluded on Wednesday. But killing them to prevent further spread of the disease is not the answer, they warn.
I…
My Scientific American Mind article on mirror neurons is out, and includes some amusing and apt photographs and art. Mirror neurons, as the story explains, are motor neurons that fire not only when we perform an action (like reaching for an apple) but when we see someone else perform an action --…
My Scientific American Mind article on mirror neurons is out, and includes some amusing and apt photographs and art. Mirror neurons, as the story explains, are motor neurons that fire not only when we perform an action (like reaching for an apple) but when we see someone else perform an action --…
'Wow Factor': Humans Perceive More Than They Think They Do:
From the "Interesting If True" Department:
Faces tell the stories in UC Riverside Professor Larry Rosenblum's ecological listening lab, as volunteer test subjects show that they can 'read' unheard speech -- not just from lips, but from…
Before I wrote my Times Magazine story on treating depression with deep-brain stimulation implants, several people (including myself) warned me I'd hear complaints about promoting psychosurgery. Those warnings proved fair, Letters to the Times and myself, as well as blogs, opined that the story…
Even as my
New York Times Magazine article about deep brain stimulation for depression went to press, a new study came out throwing more light on the "network model" of depression discussed in the article.
In the article I wrote about (among other things) how some interesting work by Andreas…
As a story in today’s ScienceNow [subscription required] by the indefatigable Jennifer Couzin details, the last week has brought more “expressions of concern” from leading journals over prominent papers written by leading scientists. The latest concern regards papers in the New England Journal of…
3My piece in yesterday’s New York Times on errors in scientific journals lacked room to consider a key factor generating the sort of fraud that has haunted science lately: The way publishing concentrates and broadcasts not just the sort of error that John Ioannidis writes about, but power and money…
