But there's so much more to neurodevelopment!

"Reduced to a one-page cartoon"?

I suspect that Creationist Brain Development could be reduced to a single panel stolen from Garfield Minus Garfield.

I think the bit about cats and stripes shows why the religious need to indoctrinate the young. When you are constantly taught to see "God's hand" in everything, it is hard to stop seeing it when older.

While it may be reductionist, it, as you mentioned, does increase awareness. PhD Comics has done some real good work at raising awareness of what researchers do. All with a good joke. He's a good guy.

This is really quite good for someone with a limited attention span, which these days, includes quite a lot of us.

Hey, don;t knock it. I learned something about cats. So do stripey ginger toms see differently from Persians?

Richarddawkins.net forum has been pulled down.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyLnxu19DM8

tells the story andprovides gathering spaces for refugees.

Quadrillion cells in the human body? Even including bacteria that live in and on us, that's an order of magnitude higher than other estimates I've seen.

But where's the toroid balloon-brain stage?

#6

A bit off topic, and everyone knew it was going to happen. But some people just had to push the envelope, eh?

For those who like text better:
http://forum.richarddawkins.net/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=110313

And now I'm off topic...

Neurons travel by climbing? I think all my neurons fused when I read that.

Once again, something that happens inside the human body reflects the free-swimming ancestry of our cells. The creationists babble about being formed by God, but each human brain grows as an organizing colony of independent cells.

Wait, so what exactly prompted them to close the forum? The new format described in that post sounds like some kind of over-moderated pseudoblog, and I don't see what their motivation is.

WUT? BERGMANN GLIA?

Methinks not! ANY FULE NO that Bergmann Glia are specific for the developing cerebellum. Radial Glia is the term you want (since Radial glia can be used as an umbrella term to include, among others, Bergman glia, but is applicable to the whole brain).

I REJECTS THE ENTIRE PROPOSAL>

#5 No. The effect on the cats is an extreme condition where the kittens effectively have to be raised with their heads in stripey boxes iirc. There's a narrow window (I think it's only about a day long in cats) where the visual cortex is wiring itself together, and even temporarily blinding someone or something during this time can seriously mess up how their vision works. Incidentally, I met the guy who did a big chunk of this work, who spent a good fifteen years being hounded by animal rights protesters.

#7 Yeah, I thought that too, but I didn't have the current esitmates to hand. A rough fermi calculation tells me that's a volume of about 8 square metres, which I think is about the volume of a large wardrobe. Given the errors in my calculaton, it could be right.

@Menyambal

The cells that make your peripheral nervous system, all the para and sympathetic ganglia and the ganglia in your gut are even more mobile. They exit the top of the young neural tube not long after it fuses in the cartoon and migrate outwards into the body settling into ganglia (collections of neuron cell bodies) in the right places and sending out and receiving connections over a greater area than in the brain.

@Peter - yeah, but they do it by the "expected" method of just pushing through their neighbouring cells, rather than shimmying up another cell's process like a lamp-post.

Incidentally, a lot of other cells use this trick too - once the first nerve cells have spent all that time and energy sending out their little growth cone tentacles (third row down), cells can use them as pathways to follow when they're moving around, or even put out their own tentacles (axons) to just follow the one that's there.

In fact, there are a bunch of neurons whose sole function is to do this, and never end up being functional - they just happily commit suicide once all the other nerves have got where they need to go.

Question for someone who is perhaps more well-versed in this than I:

How can there possibly be as many connections between neurons as there are cells in your body? Wouldn't that mean that even if each individual connection was composed of a single cell, your entire body would just be... connections?

There's way more than 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy. But overall I guess it's good.

How can there possibly be as many connections between neurons as there are cells in your body?

Your average neuron (a "brain cell") is connected with many other neurons, often thousands.

That is the point, inter-neural connections have a whole lot to do with the brain and its functions.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p

Oh jeez, more of this parental paranoia about "the brain is still developing until age 25 so nobody have a beer or even leave the house at all!!! Also, molesters!!!"

Meanwhile other studies show age related brain decline beginning around 21. So you can't win I guess.

Meanwhile other studies show our brains continue to make connections throughout out lives, so stop encouraging beer legal consumption on this blog!!!

To add to what Glen has said:

Neurons can only send one signal at a time, although that signal can be sent to thousands of other neurons. However, each neuron can receive many signals at once. There are exceptions, and in reality it is more complicated that this, but this will suffice to understand how there can be more connections than neurons.

@18

there is also the Homer Simpson theory. Beer kills the weakest neurons, so the more you drink, the more "fit" the population becomes...

Ok, so just to clarify. The connection itself is part of a single cell, correct? Each individual connection isn't composed of multiple cells. I'm woefully ignorant when it comes to this sort of stuff.

Ok, so just to clarify. The connection itself is part of a single cell, correct? Each individual connection isn't composed of multiple cells. I'm woefully ignorant when it comes to this sort of stuff.

Correct. Extensions running from a given neuron connect to other neurons. The connections are not themselves cells.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron has a decent schematic diagram in the overview section.

Ok, so just to clarify. The connection itself is part of a single cell, correct? Each individual connection isn't composed of multiple cells. I'm woefully ignorant when it comes to this sort of stuff.

The connection is normally part of two cells.

A neuron receives incoming signals via connections dendrites. Each neuron can have many dendrites, and each dendrite can have many branches.

A neuron sends signals via a connection called an axon. Normally there is only one axon per neuron, although that axon can branch many times.

Normally an axon of one neuron will connect to a dendrite of another. The connection is called a synapse.

Thus a neuron will consist of the input (dendrites coming in from the synapses where they connect with other neurons) and the output,(the axon that branches to connect with many dendrites of other neurons). There is also the cell body, in which the processing of the input, and creation of the output is done.

As I said earlier, this is a simplified explanation and reality is more complicated and messy.

Despite copious quantities of beer, (Canadian & British beer mostly, not that USAnian gnat's piss), whisky, & wine, from my vantage point forty years on from my teens, i would say that my mental faculties have improved since then.

Okay, so maybe i was starting from a low base-level, or i've become forgetful of what i once was, or my judgement's impaired, but i really do think that my mental functioning has gotten better, (or less worse). (And i've not had any alcohol since yesterday. Ahhhh, mebbe that's it!)

Our brain has as many neurons as there are stars in the Milky Way? This is obviously proof of Intelligent Design! If you doubt this is possible, how is it there are PYGMIES + DWARFS??

A few years some research was published showing that scientists became less productive as they got older. Or rather they tended to publish fewer papers.

John Maynard Smith nailed the flaw in the argument put forward by the authors of that research.

First, he said, those still working in science over 40 will tend to have positions within their departments that mean they have considerable responsibilities outside of simply doing research.

Second, those scientists will also have established themselves within their field and further, will have responsibility for supervising and advising other researchers. Most papers do not advance understanding within a field a great deal. They are not unimportant but they would do little to advance the reputation of a scientist well established in the field. However such papers do enhance the reputation of those starting out in their scientific career. Thus Maynard Smith argued older scientists tended to let their junior researchers take credit even if the contribution of the senior scientist might well justify being named as an author.

"The are over one hundred billion neurons in the brain (the same number as there are stars in the milky way galaxy)"

Over one hundred billion isn't a number. I can't see how anyone is okay with that. It's like saying "There are over fifty senators (the same number of representatives of the house)"

It's just an awful comparison and shouldn't be done.

"Quadrillion cells in the human body? Even including bacteria that live in and on us, that's an order of magnitude higher than other estimates I've seen."

Bear in mind that the great majority have no clear understanding of "order of magnitude."

Off topic:

Recommend everyone to read Kitcher & Block's beautiful and serious takedown of Fodor et al.'s recent miss in the Boston review:

http://bostonreview.net/BR35.2/block_kitcher.php

Slightly off topic... Today's Jesus And Mo gives a good analysis of discussing a homeopathy wooster.

@ 29

Thanks for the link. I had not yet had time to read any reviews of Fodor & PP's book, and...*facepalm*

I've long run out of patience for all that hairsplitting, but it looks to me that they are engaging in what Dennett would call a 'bombastic rediscription' of Humean skepticism, foundationalism, and assorted philosophical tropes. *yawn*

It is terribly enjoyable to find yet another validation of my decision to abandon philosophy.

That cartoon was horribly misleading. It didn't even mention Me!

A++ would read again.

Seriously. Guy is good at comicing AND brains.