Neurobiology
gregladen | January 27, 2017Asking for a friend...
But seriously, this is a real question. For example, several years ago, Herbert Weinstein tossed his wife out the window of their Manhattan apartment, after killing her, following an argument. He was well known to be a non violent person, and there was really no good reason for him to murder his wife this way. But, it turns out, his prefrontal cortical region was compromised by a very large cyst. Weinstein was one of the first in recent decades to use an insanity style defense connected to neuro-imaging or other neurobiology showing a demonstrable, physical, brain…
gregladen | January 19, 2017I've got this press release that will be of interest to many:
An international team including researchers at the university of Edinburgh and Antoine Wystrach of the Research Centre on Animal Cognition (CNRS/Université Toulouse III—Paul Sabatier) has shown that ants can get their bearings whatever the orientation of their body. Their brains may be smaller than the head of a pin, but ants are excellent navigators that use celestial and terrestrial cues to memorize their paths. To do so, they use several regions of the brain simultaneously, proving once again that the brain of insects is more…
gregladen | July 14, 2014Over 600 (as of this writing) neuroscientists from around the world, but with a very large proportion representing Europe, have written an open letter expressing concern with the Human Brain Project (HBP) and its cousin the U.S. BRAIN Initiative. It appears that the neuroscience community regards these projects as of relatively low value, while at the same time, these projects are sucking up a very large proportion of the funding for neuroscience. From the letter.
... Many laboratories refused to join the project when it was first submitted because of its focus on an overly narrow approach…
gregladen | December 5, 2012A large scale model of a human brain has been created by a team of scientists at the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience, University of Waterloo, Ontario. This is a virtual model, inside a computer, that involves 2,5 million virtual neurons structures in a pattern resembling the overall human brain’s anatomy, including cortical regions, motor control regions, etc. There are two components of the model: Visual processing including input and visual memory, and motor control sufficient to make a relatively simple, but 3D, arm move so it can draw things. The brain is called Semantic Pointer…
gregladen | May 26, 2012Elizabeth Norton has an interesting write-up in Science Now. Some years ago, after a long period of suspicion, it was seemingly demonstrated that neurogenesis (the formation of new neurons) happened in the human nose. This research was based on the identification of proteins that would be associated with the early formation of baby neurons. Therefore, it was not possible to prove that full grown and functioning neurons were being grown in the nose, but it was assumed to be a reasonable possibly.
However, it really isn't a reasonable possibility. If there was an Intelligent Designer, then…
gregladen | January 26, 2011There are human universals. There, I said it. Now give me about a half hour to explain why this is both correct and a Falsehood. But first, some background and definition.
Most simply defined, a human universal is a trait, behavior or cultural feature that we find in all human societies. Men are always on average larger than women. All humans see the same exact range of colors because our eyes are the same. The range of emotions experienced by people is the same, and appears in facial expressions and other outward affect, in the same way across all humans.
The term "Human Universal"…
gregladen | July 10, 2010One of those really cool and useful "evolution stories" gets verified and illuminated by actual research. And blogging!
An oystercatcher is a wading bird of the family Haematopodidae, distributed in one genus, Haematopus. As is the case with many coast loving birds, there has been confusion about the limits of the 11 or so species known to exist worldwide. That itself is an interesting story (Hocke 1996), but one we will not go into now.
Adult coastal oystercatchers (some species are not coastal) eat all sorts of animals found in the intertidal zone, including shellfish of all sorts,…
gregladen | October 15, 2009Constructivism. Determinism. It is all a bunch of hooey.
A recent paper published by PLoS (Culture Shapes How We Look at Faces) throws a sopping wet blanket on widely held deterministic models of human behavior. In addition, the work underscores the sometimes spooky cultural differences that can emerge in how people see things, even how people think.
A Repost
The following is from a PLoS press release:
Because face recognition is effortlessly achieved by people from all different cultures it was considered to be a basic mechanism universal among humans. However, by using analyses…
gregladen | September 23, 2009Sometimes people walk around with only half a brain, or a large portion of their brain disconnected, or simply having never developed, or an extra large brain, and we usually take little notice. But when there is a five or ten or twenty percent difference between two groups of people we are quickly willing to use that to decide (as in the Bell Curve) that those people with the (on average) smaller brain are inferior. The fact that all the well known studies comparing groups of living people that show such differences have been shown to be bogus (i.e. made up or doctored data) is often…
gregladen | July 8, 2009Ion channels, chica.
Hat Tip: Virginia Hughes. Who also has something interesting on Coffee.
gregladen | November 29, 2008The raw material for Miriam Sach's solo contemporary dance was her 2004 Ph.D. thesis at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany, titled "Cerebral activation patterns induced by inflection of regular and irregular verbs with positron emission tomography: A comparison between single subject and group analysis." The question behind her research was whether different types of verbs are processed by different regions of the brain. Sach, now a neuroscientist at the University of California, Davis, embodied this difference by dancing in the various styles of processing: awkward and hunched for the…
gregladen | September 5, 2008Read the following text. As you read it, try to empty your mind. When you encounter grammatical errors or jargon that is impossible to understand, do not try to translate what you are reading. Rather, become one with the obscurity. Read slowly, thoughtlessly, with emptiness of purpose, as though the words were entering your eyes, traveling through your head, and leaving through your ears. The ultimate understanding will be achieved when you reach the end of the abstract and have understood nothing:
Recent neuroimaging studies have identified a set of brain regions that are metabolically…
gregladen | June 2, 2008Look at the following image.
Look in particular at squares A and B. A appears to be dark grey, B appears to be white or whitish. But in fact, they are the same exact color.
Don' t believe it? Me neither! Or at least, I didn't until I went ahead and deleted most everything that is not A or B from this picture. When you do that, you get this:
Remarkable!
This is from the Scientific American web site, where there are a number of illusions in a new piece on the subject of Neuroscience of Illusion. Here.
gregladen | May 7, 2008 Your brain ... to explore the nature of the conscious mind.
You are the teacher, and you've got a classroom full of reasonably well behaved students.
Tell them: "I want you to close your eyes, and I'm going to ask you a question. ...
Quietly work out the answer to the question and keep your eyes closed until I tell you to open them.... Do not say the answer to your question out loud ... and keep your eyes closed."
When they have their eyes closed, say: "in your apartment or home .... where you live ... how many windows are there? Keep your eyes closed."
Now, watch them as they work…
gregladen | April 10, 2008Neuroscientist and inventor Christopher deCharms demos an amazing new way to use fMRI to show brain activity while it is happening -- emotion, body movement, pain. (In other words, you can literally see how you feel.) The applications for real-time fMRIs start with chronic pain control and range into the realm of science fiction, but this technology is very real.
gregladen | April 8, 2008Developmental dyslexia is a disorder affecting as many as 17% of school children. This neurological disorder involves an impairment in reading skills, and has been found to be "associated with weak reading-related activity in left temporoparietal and occipitotemporal regions" in English speakers. However, different abnormalities in the brain are associated with dyslexic readers in the non-alphabetic Chinese language, according to research just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
This is not terribly surprising. Earlier research had shown that individuals…
gregladen | January 3, 2008Daily alcohol use by males has been shown to increase sexual arousal and decrease sexual inhibition.
In Fruit Flies.
The current (Jan 2) issue of PLoS ONE includes a paper by Lee et al exploring thye physiological side of changes in sexual behavior under the influence of alcohol, with an eye towards understanding this process in humans, using an animal model.
Alcohol has a strong causal relationship with sexual arousal and disinhibited sexual behavior in humans; however, the physiological support for this notion is largely lacking and thus a suitable animal model to address this issue is…
gregladen | December 11, 2007This is a good one for your 8th grade biology class...
... or maybe not...
gregladen | November 19, 2007The "statins" make up a class of cholesterol lowering drugs. Fish oil (oil derived from fish) is rich in certain fatty acids.
Both types of compounds can have powerful positive and protective effects in the brain.
A study just now coming out (to be published in Brain Research Reviews) looks at the biochemical effects of statins and fish oil in the brain in detail. The study makes specific recommendations for further research, and concludes with a proposal that the way we classify certain neural pathologies be reconsidered to take into account the complex biochemical pathways that produce…