Brains and minds
Gleanings from empathetic ravens, lying brains, dying converence, fading vocabularies, and new books
ddobbs | May 18, 2010
Ravens via PDPhoto
Ravens show that consoling one another is also for the birds, Yet another finding that other species have qualities previously thought uniquely human. Our greatest distinction is that we're highly social. Yet in that we've got a lot of company.  
Human brains excel at detecting cheaters. FMRI's, not so much, says Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks-- though in yet another court case, the fMRI lie detection industry pushes another story.
Bell also has a nice write-up of of scintillating RadioLab program on how early dementia shows up in use of language. A stellar program,…
ddobbs | May 12, 2010Traveling. But here's what I'm reading during train, plane, and bus rides -- and over meals:
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Gravity-defying ramps take illusion prize. This contest always produces fascinating stuff. This time, the ball rolls up. Video here.

Vaughan Bell ponders cortisol, dopamine, neuroplasticity, and other things that set off his bullshit detector. Riff launched from a post from Neuroskeptic on cortisol and childcare scare stories, equally read-worthy.
Dan Vorhaus does a wonderful round-up of reactions and implications stemming from the news that genetic testing is coming to Walgreens. Best blog-…
ddobbs | May 5, 2010
Would you believe this brain?
Every few months, sometimes more often, someone tries to ramrod fMRI lie detection into the courtrooms. Each time, it gets a little closer. Wired Science carries the latest alarming story:
A Brooklyn attorney hopes to break new ground this week when he offers a brain scan as evidence that a key witness in a civil trial is telling the truth, Wired.com has learned.
If the fMRI scan is admitted, it would be a legal first in the United States and could have major consequences for the future of neuroscience in court.
The lawyer, David Levin, wants to use that…
ddobbs | May 3, 2010
Newscom/Zuma, via TPM
Brains, genes, and taxes won the month.
How does Williams syndrome prevent racism? It's subtle
Ed Yong, Mo Costandi, Scientific American, and others have covered nicely a new paper finding that people with WIlliams syndrome (a condition I've been interested in since writing a long feature about it for the Times Magazine a few years back) show little or no racial bias. But I wanted to add one thought about the finding.
Most of the write-ups have emphasized, rightly, that people with Williams tend to show little or no social fear -- a lack that could explain a lack of…
ddobbs | April 30, 2010
from The Everett Collection, via Vanity Fair
Notables I didn't get to. Blog posts, MSM stories, and tweets living together.
Fron the genomics front
NOVA | Ghost in Your Genes | PBS streams some of the Skip Gates program I mentioned in my post last week on the Genomes, Environments, and Traits conference.
What can you learn from a whole genome sequence? : Genetic Future ponders just the Lancet/Quake genome
Heritable, yes, which gene...another issue Razib drills down. He argues elsewhere that The origins of morality do not matter |
AP IMPACT: Testing curbs some genetic diseases -…
ddobbs | April 13, 2010Ed Yong, Mo Costandi, Scientific American, and others have covered nicely a new paper finding that people with WIlliams syndrome (a condition I've been interested in since writing a long feature about it for the Times Magazine a few years back) show little or no racial bias. But I wanted to add one thought about the finding.
Most of the write-ups have emphasized, rightly, that people with Williams tend to show little or no social fear -- a lack that could explain a lack of racial bias. If you don't fear people, you don't feel out-groups. Yet as I noted in my article, people with Williams…
ddobbs | April 1, 2010
After I wrote in my Atlantic article about getting my serotonin transporter gene assayed (which revealed that I carry that gene's apparently more plastic short-short form), I started getting a lot of email â several a week â from readers asking how to have their SERT gene tested. This led to an interesting hunt.
It was a hard question to answer. I couldn't just tell people to do what I did, for a psychiatric researcher/MD I'd known for years, who specializes in depression and serotonin, had done mine as a sort of favor to science and journalism. That researcher also stood by, had I needed…
ddobbs | March 29, 2010
Early homind skulls, from A Kansan's Guide to Science (seriously)
A couple weeks ago, the Guardian ran an article in which Oxford neurobiologist Colin Blakemore described "how the human got bigger by accident and not through evolution." Though I didn't get to it at the time, I thought that an odd headline, since evolution actually occurs when genetic accidents -- those mutation things -- grant an advantage. Now John Hawks has written a post addressing what he says is a pretty big muckup by Blakemore:
Thanks to Jerry Coyne, I encountered an interview in the Guardian with Colin Blakemore…
ddobbs | March 26, 2010
from a different Daily Dish -- 365 petri dishes, by Klari Reis
House of Wisdom, the splendid new blog on Arabic science from Mohammed Yahia, editor of Nature Middle East describes an effort to map the Red Sea's coral reefs with satellite, aerial, adn ship-based technologies. Nice project and a promising new blog.
Brain and Mind
Ritalin works by boosting dopamine levels, says a story in Technology Review, reporting on a paper in Nature Neuroscience. The effect is to enhance not just attention but the speed of learning.
As several tweeters and bloggers have noted, H-Madness is a new group blog…
ddobbs | March 19, 2010
Cordyceps in glass, by glass artist Wesley Fleming -- a strange depiction of a rather horrid business. For more, do go to the source, the lovely Myrmecos Blog, which is all about bugs.
Now, the best of the week's gleanings. I'm going to categorize them from here out, and at least try to keep them from being from completely all over everywhere about everything.
Mind, brain, and body (including those gene things)
While reading Wolpert's review of Greenberg's book about depression (he didn't much like it), I found that the Guardian has a particularly rich trove of writings and resources on…
ddobbs | March 17, 2010Jerry Coyne relates that Birds are getting smaller.
Most students use Wikipedia, avoid telling profs about it When I talk to writing classes, someone will usually ask if I use Wikipedia. I tell them, "It's often my first stop -- never my last."
Carl Zimmer has mashed up the data from his clever online survey and brings to us The Science Reader: A Crowd-Sourced Profile. He found that readers are going digital, but not to ebooks, possibly because they still love paper books, and some other good stuff. While Carl's Mac was crunching the data, he peeked Through the Sexual Looking Glass.
A new…
ddobbs | March 17, 2010I'll try doing this now and then, maybe regularly, to gather the more notable tweets I get in my twitter feed.
Darwin2009: Population-level traits that affect, and do not affect, invasion success http://ow.ly/1mMUp
jayrosen_nyu: "The New York Times is now as much a technology company as a journalism company." <--- Bill Keller http://jr.ly/2pfz
dhayton: âH-Madnessâ is a new blog on the history of psychiatry, madness, etc. For and by scholars: http://historypsychiatry.wordpress.com/
stevesilberman: The brains of psychopaths may be hypersensitive to dopamine rewards - http://bit.ly/daP9Go…
ddobbs | March 16, 2010
The Science of Reading is the Harvard library's nice new site about reading. Lots of great old texts and some history of reading science.
BBC News - Man assaulted female police officer with penis. The court heard he had been drinking heavily and could not remember committing the offence at his home in Aberdeen
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Indiana Jones & the Ants - The New York Review of Books
In her review of Harvard entomologist E.O. Wilson's first novel, Anthill, in the April 8 issue of The New York Review, Margaret Atwood encourages anyone interested in ants to "take a look at the daring eco-…
ddobbs | March 15, 2010
We'll start with the science, cruise through J school, and end with healthcare reform or bust.
Genetic material
Willful ignorance is not an effective argument against personal genomics : Genetic Future Mr. McDonald spanks the frightened.
The American Scientist, meanwhile, takes a shot at Putting Genes in Perspective
Culture and the human genome From the excellent A Replicated Typo. (That's gene humor, is 'replicated typo.')
Going to J School
State of the Media, By the Numbers : CJR A review of a review: Columbia Journalism reviews Pew's "State of the Media" report. Eye-popping numbers and…
ddobbs | February 14, 2010
I profiled neuroscientist Eric Kandel for Scientific American Mind a while back; a huge pleasure. Two things stand out.
First, Kandel's work makes a wonderful foundation for an understanding of neuroscience, as his mid-20th-century insights into the dynamics of memory underlie much of the discipline.
Second, Kandel is a gas -- gracious, funny, and stunningly brilliant. When I interviewed him for about 90 minutes in his office at Columbia, he was 73. As he described to me the history of his work, and of modern neuroscience, he seemed to have complete and effortless recall about…
ddobbs | February 1, 2010PTSD, pharma, adjuvants, bad movies -- these are a few of my favorite things, and readers' too.
What's Neil doing here? He wasn't on Neuron Culture; I posted his clip on my catch-all, David Dobbs's Somatic Marker, because I love him. So he comes first. From 1986. Looks as if he's having a particularly good time here.
Neuron Culture's Top Five from Jan 2010
NEJM study finds post-event morphine cuts combat PTSD rates in half
"This is a pretty big deal if it holds up in future trials. One caveat I've not had time to check out is whether the morphine was often applied as part of an more…
ddobbs | January 26, 2010
Above: Kasparov after his first meeting with Deep Blue, in 1997, when he crushed DP. Later it wouldn't go so well.
In a splendid article in the NY Review of books, former world chess champion Gary Kasparov ponders the limitations of technology as a means of playing chess truly well. When I hit this paragraph late in the article, it struck me that you could write much the same thing about pharma. From The Chess Master and the Computer - The New York Review of Books:
Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism…
ddobbs | January 5, 2010'Twas the month of orchidness. I had a spotty month posting in December, as book bidness and then the holidays massacred blog production, but got some good traffic despite. The leaders:
1. Are "orchid kids" the same as "gifted children"? was my blog reaction to Lisa Belkin's' blog reaction at the Times to my Atlantic piece, "The Orchid Children." The short answer to the question was No. See the post for why that doesn't quite cover it.
2. Coming sort of soon to a bookstore near you: "The Orchid and the Dandelion" announced my deal to do a book on the orchid or 'sensitivity' hypothesis. But…
ddobbs | January 5, 2010I rarely take direct exception to anything my friend Jonah Lehrer writes, and I fully recognize he's just quick-riffing on a Hollywood movie. But if I understand his Avatar post correctly, my good man Jonah is arguing, at least in a minddump-at-the-bar sort of way, that James Cameron's latest movie is a pretty full neuro-aesthetico-art-critico realization of film's medium. His is a fun post, and worthwhile just to see Cameron crammed onto the same page, with appropriate apologies, with Clement Greenburg, Clint Eastwood, and Jorge Luis Borges. But I must differ. In Avatar, which I saw last…
ddobbs | December 21, 2009
Note: The version below is altered from the original, which was near-gibberish in a few spots. Why? Because I mistakenly posted a pre-edit version that contained the raw 'transcription' from voice-recognition software I've been trying out. (I suppose it could have been a lot worse.)
Here, more or less as I meant it to appear:
Kevin Dunbar is a researcher who studies how scientists study things -- how they fail and succeed. In the early 1990s, he began an unprecedented research project: observing four biochemistry labs at Stanford University. Philosophers have long theorized about how…