Medicine and Brain Weekly Channel Highlights

In this post: the large versions of the Medicine & Health and Brain & Behavior channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week.

This week's Medicine & Health photo was kindly submitted by one of our own bloggers, the Neurophilospher.

Brain & Behavior. The blurred colors of plastic Easter eggs. From Flickr, by josef.stuefer

Medicine & Health. From Flickr, by Gaetan Lee

Reader comments of the week:

On the Medicine & Health channel, Orac discusses a contentious issue, sure to become more prominent as more parents buy into anti-vaccinationist claims, in Mixing unvaccinated children with vaccinated children: Whose rights prevail? Because no vaccine is 100% effective, even one unvaccinated child in a group puts the rest at risk. But parents who refuse to vaccinate their children insist that they are being unfairly discriminated against.

Reader i am so wise has little sympathy:

One of the components of freedom is the right to accept the consequences of one's actions. If your idiocy makes your child a potential Typhoid Mary, well expect people to avoid you like the plague.

In Nature, Nurture and Switched Babies, Jonah of The Frontal Cortex relates an interesting case in which two baby girls were swapped in the hospital and given to the wrong families. When they turned into adults, both girls' personalities were remarkably similar to their birth families—not the ones they were raised in. Though Jonah calls the Nature vs. Nurture debate a "false dichotomy," the story does serve as a reminder that genetics play an immeasurable role in shaping who we become.

Reader Rachael found the story inspiring:

Stories like this are humbling for so many reasons. First, "I think I've got problems", ha : ) Second, we know so little. I do not believe in a creator, but I am humbled by the complexity of these processes which we'd like to think we understand. I would be very bored and very sad if the day ever came that interesting occurrences like this were predictable.

Some other Medicine & Health posts we thought were cool this week were:

The real Olympic performers

Now for some real vampires

The luxury of time

The consequences of mumps

The Stone of Madness

And from the Brain & Behavior channel:

1960s Ritalin ad

The smell of fear

Experts' memory: Not as expert as they think

Group behavior in an elevator

Escher-themed nurseries? Even four-month-olds can recognize impossible objects

Look for highlights from other channels coming up!