Brains and minds
ddobbs | January 24, 2007
Place fields tied to a single grid cell in a rat's entorhinal cortex.
From Hafting, Fyhn, Molden, Moser, and Moser, "Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex," Nature, 11 August 2005. By permission of the authors.
I wanted to give a heads-up and a link to a set of blog posts on spatial cognition that ScienceBlog readers might find of interest. These posts compose the first installment in Mind Matters, a new, researcher-authored "seminar blog" that (full disclosure dept:) I conceived, and yesterday launched, at sciam.com, the Scientific American website.
In their posts,…
ddobbs | December 21, 2006
from Furious Seasons
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In my preceding post, about Eli Lilly pressing primary-care physicans to prescribe the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa for elderly dementia, I meant (but forgot) to mention a blog that is following the much wider Zyprexa saga of which this "Dementia is the message" scandal is only a small part. The eminently readable Furious Seasons, written by a reporter who like tens of millions of Americans is, as the author puts it, "a long-time psych patient," follows psych and psych-med issues with great energy and insight; its Zyprexa Chronicles are…
ddobbs | November 29, 2006
That's my head, scanned by Joy Hirsch and Steven Thomas at Columbia University's and then digitized, burned onto a CD and mailed to me. I mashed it through the lovely, open-source Mac program Osirix, which allows me to imagize my brain, which I'm finding much different than imagining it, though the former does call the latter into play. Makes your head spin.
This is just the outside of my head, of course, with only a bottom-up peek inside through an opening created when the MRI machine chopped and dropped my non-brain-containing parts. I'll move inside in future posts as I…
ddobbs | October 24, 2006
Stroke damage in a human brain
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Horrors: I've forgotten to post several articles I wrote about findings presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference last week. I'll work my way backwards, I suppose, so here's the latest, about a University of Milan discovery that blocking a certain cell-wall gate in the hour after stroke (in a lab rat) could prevent almost all damage.
Check it out at Scientific American.
ddobbs | September 15, 2006
W.A. Mozart -- just another hard-working genius
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A few hours ago I received this email:
your article in "new scientist" sept 16-22 06
is pure B S . you should dedicate it to the
extreme liberal intelligensia.
The writer, one Kenneth Rubin (nice meeting you, Mr. Rubin) refers to a New Scientist feature I wrote about genius, talent, and expertise (subscription required -- though you can get a 4-week one for $4.95), which was just published today. Mr. Rubin didn't elaborate, so I can't say what his particular complaint is. (As a critique, Mr. Rubin…
ddobbs | September 11, 2006I opened my feature on mirror neurons for Scientific American Mind by telling how my son Nicholas imitated me sticking out my tongue in his first hour. I regret I can offer you no film of that.
Thanks to PLOS Biology, however, I can now offer you videos of a baby macaque monkey essentially doing the same -- that is, imitating lip-smacking and sticking-out-of-the-tongue -- in these video clips from "Neonatal Imitation in Rhesus Macaques" in PLOS Biology.
Monkey see, monkey do.
On the left, imitation of mouth-opening; on the right, of "tongue protrusion"…
ddobbs | August 26, 2006
"Errant Behaviors," a video and sound installation by Shawn Decker and Anne Wilson.
In response to my post on "Music, Mood, and Genius (not) -- or RockNRoll meets neuroscience," one Shawn Decker, a music professor and composer at the Chicago Art Institute (and a former classmate and ultimate-frisbee teammate of mine from college), wrote asking whether I knew of any studies testing the notion -- popular among the Chicago electronic music crowd, says Decker -- that similar talents or brain areas may underlie both musical composition and computer programming. Writes he,
[I]n many labs doing…
ddobbs | August 23, 2006I've been interested in music and science since taking a physics of music class back in college (20 years later, amazingly, I discovered my violin teacher of 2000, Kevin Bushee, was married to the daughter of the professor who taught that class), so I was intrigued to find this Wired piece in which neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, formerly a rock producer, talks about the neuroscience of music.
Brain excited by music. Image by Daniel Levitin, from Wired story on his work.
As it happens, the piece carries a bonus for anyone following the debate over whether talent or genius is innate — an…
ddobbs | August 15, 2006Among 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. This is why I find so fascinating the work of those who proposed and discovered the mechanisms underlying this plasticity, such as Ramon y Cajal, Donald Hebb, and Eric Kandel. These and other researchers showed the fundamentals of how changing synapses allow our brains to learn new lessons and…
ddobbs | August 6, 2006My 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).
Mayberg made headlines last year when she, psychiatrist Sidney Kennedy, and neurosurgeon Andres Lozano, as the story put it,
cured eight of 12 spectacularly depressed individuals ... by inserting pacemaker-like electrodes into a spot deep in the cortext known as Area 25.
I previously wrote about…
ddobbs | August 3, 2006No 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 babies cope better with stress in later life than bottle fed babies, suggests research published ahead of print in the Archives of Disease in Childhood
The findings are based on almost 9000 children, who were part of the 1970 British Cohort Study, which regularly monitors a sample of the British…
ddobbs | May 25, 2006My 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 -- or even, as it turns out, when we read, think, or hear about someone performing that action. This mechanism, discovered about a decade ago, seems to underlie much motor, social, and even cultural learning.
You can read the story here or buy the digital version online via Scientific American Mind.