Brains and minds
ddobbs | July 1, 2010Â
You just never know what'll catch fire. Then again, maybe I should have figured "Ozzy Osbourne" and "genome" would have. In any case, Ozzy simply buried every other contender this past month, racking up 7 times as many hits as any other entry ever did in one month -- and accounting for two-thirds of June's unique pageviews altogether. The power of Stumbleupon. A fifth of those readers went on to other pages. So maybe something good came of it.
Without further ado, here are Neuron Culture's Top 5 from June.
Ozzy Osbourne. Now genomics is getting somewhere. Geneticists hope to figure out how…
ddobbs | June 29, 2010Reading isn't just a monkish pursuit: Matthew Battles on "The Shallows" » Nieman Journalism Lab More on Carr's ideas from "The Shallows"
BoraZ interviews Eric Roston and gets some good ideas about journalism and reporting, past, present and future.
The Cure for Creative Blocks? Leave Your Desk. Or why my move to London is a good work idea.
Razib says what can't be said too often:Â Your genes are just the odds
Also worth many reminders:Â Healthcare: U.S. spends more, but gets less, from the Well
Not again with the sekrit Renaissance brain anatomy! But yes: again. 
I want to see this…
ddobbs | June 28, 2010Â
A few days ago Jonah Lehrer put up a lovely post about stuttering and Tourette's syndrome. He looks at stuttering, Updike, Kanye  -- and a couple papers suggesting that many people with Tourette's (and by extension, I suppose, perhaps stuttering) develop
a compensatory change ... whereby the chronic suppression of tics results in a generalized suppression of reflexive behavior in favor of increased cognitive control." In other words, the struggle makes us stronger.
Jonah chose his studies well; you should read his (fairly brief) post to see how they that reveal this apparently…
ddobbs | June 28, 2010Research Digest has posted an q&a interview with me as part of their The Bloggers Behind the Blog series. Here are a few key tidbits. Do read the rest there, as well as the other interviews already run and to come.
On why I write about psychology, psychiatry, and other behavioral sciences:
Science constitutes our most serious and rigorous attempt to understand the world -- and psychiatry, psychology, and now neuroscience make great material partly because they so often and starkly show science's power and pitfalls. These disciplines are hard. The people who work in them, whether…
ddobbs | June 25, 2010Â
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Ed Yong offers a particularly nice write-up of some studies about how physical experience shapes emotion, opinion, thinking, and so on. TKTK:
When you pick up an object, you might think that you are manipulating it, but in a sense, it is also manipulating you. Through a series of six psychological experiments, Joshua Ackerman from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has shown that the properties that we feel through touch - texture, hardness, weight - can all influence the way we think.
Weight is linked to importance, so that people carrying heavy objects deem interview…
ddobbs | June 23, 2010I'm 'posed to be writing, really writing (insert argument over what's really writing in comments), but hit so many juicy bits in my morning read today I wanted to share. Here's my eclectic mix for the day:
A great rompy scary post from @susanorlean on how her book bounced around many publishers and editors.
Keith Kloor at Collide-a-scape has a round-up of stories on the "credibility of climate experts" report
"memory performance boosted while walking"  Beautiful. Perhaps why walking oft solves writing probs.  via @mariapage:
"Theory Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning" From @kerin at…
ddobbs | June 22, 2010Research Digest blog, the highly useful and content-rich site that tracks all things psych, just opened its "The Bloggers Behind the Blogs," series, which will run ten interviews with bloggers of mind and brain. It's with a nice interview of Jesse Bering, of Bering in Mind.
It's a dandy line-up (of which I'm happy to be part), and I look forward to reading them as they come out, about one a day, over the next couple weeks. Here's who's coming, in alphabetical order.
Jesse Bering of Bering in Mind -- already posted Anthony Risser of Brain blog. (coming soon) David DiSalvo of Brain spin and…
ddobbs | June 17, 2010
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Fungis Danicis, a lovely collection at the beautiful Bibliodyysey
Mind Hacks offers a reminder (we can't get too many) that expressions of distress vary across culture and history. Separately he considers an interesting study showing that Tylenol reduces the pain of social rejection.
Neurophilosophy has a post listing several fine New Neuroblogs
NeuroDojo ponders the upgrade from helicopter parents:Â Armored car parents
A quite interesting post from BlogHer considers The iPad: a Near-Miracle for My Son With Autism. Among other charms, it lists what sound like some pretty cool apps.…
ddobbs | June 17, 2010
Last week's spat between Nicholas Carr and Steven Pinker generated a lot of attention â and, happily, delivered a couple of the more lucid framings yet of the debate over whether digital culture makes us shallow, as Carr argues in his new book, or simply represents yet another sometimes-distracting element that we can learn to deal with, as Pinker countered in a Times Op-Ed last Thursday.
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I sympathize with both arguments; I see Carr's point but feel he overplays it. I find digital culture immensely distracting. I regularly dive down rabbit holes in my computer, iPhone, and iPad,…
ddobbs | June 11, 2010Â
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Unbelieveble! Department, via SciencePunk: Â Giant mayfly swarm caught on radar
NYRB reviews what sounds like an especially moving memoir from Andre Agassi.
Whatever It Takes Department, via Ed Yong:Â Superstitions can improve performance by boosting confidence.
The climate-change doubt industry and its roots - http://bit.ly/an4cAr, via @stevesilberman
RitaRubin: Study: Have bad habits? U r more likely 2 blame health problms on your genes. 'Cause u can't do anything 2 change them http://bit.ly/ad6iRy. Damned interesting if true.
techreview: Genetic Testing Can Change Behavior http…
ddobbs | June 9, 2010
Andrew Carnie, Magic Forest, 2002, via Neuroculture.org
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Do we live in a neuroculture? Of course we do!
Coming from a blog named Neuron Culture, this is obviously a set-up question â my excuse to call attention to a post by Daniel Buchman that offers a brief review article on the question.
It seems that everywhere I look nowadays, Iâm seeing images of, or reading descriptions of, the brain in some shape or form.
Buchman links (at the post's bottom, as is now the practice at NCore) to several good reads and sites, including Neuroculture.org, which has some lovely stuff, and â curse those…
ddobbs | June 1, 2010
In reverse order:
5. Â David Sloan Wilson, pissing off the angry atheists.
"I piss off atheists more than any other category, and I am an atheist." This sparked some lively action in the comments.
4. Lively or not, Wilson and Dawkins lost fourth place to snail jokes.
A turtle gets mugged by a gang of snails. 
3. A walking tour that lets you See exactly where Phineas Gage lost his mind
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2. "Push" science journalism, or how diversity matters more than size
We're constantly told -- we writers are, anyway -- that people won't read long stories. They're hard to sell to editors,…
ddobbs | May 28, 2010
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A press release about Snails on methamphetamines works for me.  The story is about memory. The jokes are about snails:
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Snail Joke #1
A turtle gets mugged by a gang of snails. Cop is interviewing the turtle afterwards, still at the scene. Turtle still flustered. Cop asks, "Just start at the beginning."
"I don't know," says the turtle. "It all happened so fast."
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Snail Joke #2
Guy opens his front door and grabs the paper off the porch. There's a snail on it. He gives a flick of the wrist, and the snail sails off the porch into the garden.
Three weeks later there's a knock at the…
ddobbs | May 28, 2010Danny Carlat reports a stimulating time at the recent American Psychiatric Association meeting in New Orleans:
She took a look at my name tag, and said, "Oh, I've heard about you."Since her expression was somewhere between stern and outright hostile, I queried, "In a good way or a bad way?""In a bad way, to tell you the truth." And then she was off on a high volume rant that went something (if memory serves) like this:"How DARE you write an article in the New York Times saying that your therapy training at Mass General was terrible, and then later having this GREAT AWAKENING that"--she…
ddobbs | May 28, 2010Here's what I distracted myself with this morning. Don't mix these at home.
Wired Sci examines how Testosterone Makes People Suspicious of One Another. And that's a hell of a photo.
New Flu Vaccines Could Protect Against All Strains If all goes well, of course. Not to count on at this point, but an interesting look at one direction in vaccine development. I covered another approach in an Technology Review article last year, when I also looked at the weird history of adjuvants. (If you want, check out my complete vaccine coverage. You can find also some other good ones at the Technology…
ddobbs | May 27, 2010
At Biophemera, Jessica Palmer takes a look at Mechanical Brides of the Uncanny. Actually a couple look to me a bit like cans. 
Like most junk science that just won't die, the polygraph stays with us. Even Aldrich Ames could see the polygraph was junk. NB, those who don't shy from no-lie fMRI. From the wonderful Letters of Note.
Ben Carey Notes that Enemies Can Be Good for a Childâs Growth. This should not surprise.
And in one of those science stories that's so fun I almost don't care whether it's true, the Times examines A Pattern of Sibling Risk-Taking in the Major Leagues. I should…
ddobbs | May 26, 2010Selling a work fiction is difficult; publishing in Nature is a long-shot; yet somehow writer and genomeboy Misha Angrist managed to publish fiction in Nature.
The only way I was ever going to get a first-author publication in Nature [Angrist explains] was if I just made it all up. So thatâs what I did. Hat tip to David Dobbs for providing the scientific inspiration.
The short story/fantasy Angrist publishes actually pulls little, it seems to me, from my story about the orchid/plasticity/differential susceptibility hypothesis, though it does work ground seeded by both genetics and…
ddobbs | May 26, 2010
David Sloan Wilson, an atheist himself, has a few things to relate to 'angry atheists' like Richard Dawkins.
I piss off atheists more than any other category, and I am an atheist. One of the things that infuriates me about the newest crop of angry atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, is their denial of the beneficial aspects of religion. Their beef is not just that there is no evidence for God. They also insist that religion "poisons everything", as Christopher Hitchens subtitled his book. They are ignoring the scientific theory and evidence for the "secular utility" of religion, as Ãmile…
ddobbs | May 26, 2010
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Two or three years ago, Emory neurologist Helen Mayberg, whose experiments using deep-brain stimulation for depression I check in on now and then, told me that Karl Deisseroth's work using light to fiddle with brain circuits had huge potential both as a replacement for DBS and for much else. As Lizzie Buchen ably reports in Nature, that potential is now being realized.
This is a very slick tool that seems almost too far out to actually work. It lets you use light to turn brain circuits on and off at will, and with great precision. It's not simple to construct. But once constructed, it…
ddobbs | May 20, 2010
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Phineas Gage enjoys an unfortunate fame in neuroscience circles: After a 5-foot iron tamping rod blew through his head one September afternoon in 1848, the once amiable and capable railroad foreman became a uncouth ne-er-do-well â and Exhibit A in how particular brain areas tended to specialize in particular tasks. (In his case, the prefrontal cortical areas that went skyward with the tamping rod proved, in retrospect, to be vital to his powers of foresight and self-control.)
I've always taken an extra level of interest in Gage because his horrific accident happened in my adopted home…