neurobiology
katie glasrud | November 1, 2007Tomorrow is the big day. Much to my liver's dismay, I'm turning 21, so I thought it would be appropriate to discuss the effects on alcohol on the brain in this post.
I searched through article databases reading abstracts about how alcohol shrinks the brain, depletes white mater, inhibits growth of and destroys neurons etc..., until I stumbled on a study that examined acutely intoxicated rat brains. Over hour intervals after alcohol exposure, researchers were able to document neuroplastic changes involving tyrosine hydroxylase, proenkephalin and cannabinoid CB(1) receptor gene expressions.…
mark_antimony | October 26, 2007Hi guys and gals, it's been awhile since my last entry. Last week kept me very busy. In the midst of my late nights typing, I learned some fun things about chloride channels (for one of PZ's exams.) I learned about their job of regulating cell volume and an appropriate cell-membrane charge.
One thing piqued my curiosity. The cell exterior has roughly 5 milliMolar [chloride - ], while the interior has 125 Molar [chloride - ]. The interior also has a negative charge. Despite all of those factors, the articles I read seemed to say that chloride would diffuse inward if the channels were to…
pharyngula | October 20, 2007My next lecture in my neurobiology course is going to be about metabotropic receptors and how modulating internal cGMP levels is one way neuronal activity can be affected. I was planning to use the eye as an example of this process — but now Revere has inspired me to add a bit about the penis and viagra to the lecture. Here at UMM, we're all about giving students information they can use.
katie glasrud | October 13, 2007I read an interesting article in the New Yorker the other day. It followed the research of neuroscientist Adrian Owen and his work on patients in vegetative states. In some patients, when he gave the verbal command to "imagine you are playing tennis," their brain regions lit up on an fMRI indistinguishably from your average walking, talking, and recognizably conscious human being asked to perform the same task. Moreover, the patients were able to sustain this activity (so presumably the tennis imagination) for over thirty seconds suggesting some degree of focus.
The article goes on to…
harderkid13 | October 10, 2007In biochemistry this past week we have been learning about the immune system. This lead me to do a google scholar search on neurobiological diseases. This search turned up a large number of articles on Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's, and Huntington's disease, which casused me to form the hypothesis that neurological disorders onset are typically later in life (post 40's). Is my hypothesis way of mark or is there some truth to it?
katie glasrud | October 4, 2007As I pondered what to post about on Pharyngula this week my thoughts immediately turned to football *wink* ...which got me thinking spinal cord injuries (and no... not in the context of malice toward Drew Brees), which got me thinking of last year's Distinguished Alumni speaker, physiatrist (and poet!) Jon Mukland '80.
Dr. Mukland presented his research on the development of the BrainGate Neural Interface System-- a program designed to interface victims of spinal cord injury with a computer. A silicon chip implanted in the motor cortex uses feedback from hundreds of probes to map electrical…
harderkid13 | October 3, 2007While I am a college student and enjoy the occasional alcoholic beverage, I have never tried to get any other species drunk. Until now. As some of my classmates may have previously stated, we have to design and implement some sort of neurobiological experiment. I will be testing the alcohol tollerace of zebra fish, testing reactions and behaviors after cronic exposure to various concentrations of alcohol. Perhaps after this experiment I will test my own reactions and behaviors after being constantly smashed for two weeks.
harderkid13 | October 3, 2007Today in Neurobiology the topic of migraines and headaches was brought up. There was a question raised that wasn't able to be answered adequately, and that question was, "Why do we experience the sensation of pain inside our skulls during a headache despite the fact that there are no nerves there?" Is there any primary research on this subject?
pharyngula | October 2, 2007I tried. I really, honestly, sincerely tried. I've been struggling with this book, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, for the past week and a half, and I've finally decided it's not worth the effort. It's just about completely unreadable.
The writing is aggravating. It is constantly broken up with strings of quotes — 3, 4, 5, or 6 at a time — that are just plopped out there to speak for themselves, and often the authors don't even bother to address the points brought up in the quotes. It's…
grrlscientist | September 27, 2007tags: book review, neuroscience, neurobiology, body maps, Sandra Blakeslee, Matthew Blakeslee
As a biologist who reads both widely and deeply about a number of scientific topics, it is very rare when I read a popular book that adds depth and nuance to my understanding of a biological phenomenon, but The Body Has a Mind of Its Own By Sandra Blakeslee and Matthew Blakeslee (NYC: Random House; 2007) is that book. This quiet but well-written book explores the interconnection between the environment, the body and the brain; discusses that the body is more just than a container for the brain and a…
katie glasrud | September 25, 2007Dear Drew Brees,
As your fantasy football owner and a concerned fan, I respectfully request that you stop sucking. Your very manhood may depend on it. According to evolutionary psychologist David M, Buss, it is a well-documented phenomenon that testosterone levels in males fluctuate with the outcome of sporting events. Winners experience a boost of testosterone and mood while losers of athletic competition experience a decrease of testosterone. No wonder you feel like this:
So you're now 0-3, you threw about four too many interceptions Monday night, and let's be honest. That fumble in…
bright_lights | September 24, 2007Hello again! It's amazing the things that are going on right under our noses (undergraduate noses that is). I was wondering why we can continue to form so many memories in a life time with no new cell growth after a specific age. If every memory is a new reconstruction of interacting neurons firing off with each other, wouldn't we need new cells eventually so that the others can maintain function? I suppose this isn't too unrealistic with billions of neurons and trillions of connections, but the idea of neurogenesis sure explains a lot.
According to a recent article from BioED,…
grrlscientist | September 24, 2007tags: encephalon, brain, behavior, cognition, neurobiology, blog carnival
The last frontier: The brain.
Orphaned Image. Contact me so I can provide credit and linkage.
Several months ago, I was invited to host Encephalon, probably because I send so many submissions to this blog carnival and possibly also because I am fairly good at sending traffic to the contributors of those blog carnivals that I host. Unfortunately, I have not had wifi for the past two days, so I hope that you appreciate my modest efforts on behalf of this blog carnival. So, without further ado, I present to you the 32nd…
mark_antimony | September 22, 2007Since I'll be using PZMyer's lab, I'll have access to plenty of zebra fish. As per being in his Neurobiology course, I get to design my own experiment.
Zebra fish are schooling fish. If they are isolated, I wonder if finding another fish would be their top priority. Would it be high enough that they would navigate a few turns to find? Would it be higher priority than food? It looks like I may be testing the power of a social reward.
Some other random thoughts:
In class, we bounced the idea that deer are the perfect example of depression and suicidal tendencies in the wild. Who else…
blue_expo | September 21, 2007In PZ's class we're reading and discussing Soul Made Flesh by Carl Zimmer. This non-fiction book follows the journey that neurobiology has made throughout its history. The details of this history that most prominently catch my attention are the logic, methods, and observations upon which early discoveries were built.
Plato got the ball rolling with his theory that the body consists of three souls. The human soul resides in the head where it can sense surroundings and and divinely reason about their meaning. The vegetative soul resides in the abdomen where it initiates growth, lustful…
lua yar | September 20, 2007Researchers at MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory may have found the key to controlling how the brain is wired while studying the bursts of activity that occur after communication between neurons.
First, I will give an overview of neural communication. Neural cells communicate with each other at a synapse, which is the point of contact between the cells at which signals are transmitted. The action potential stimulates the input cell (presynaptic) to release neurotransmitters. These neurotransmitters travel across the synaptic cleft and bind to neurotransmitter receptors on the…
katie glasrud | September 14, 2007... like a lamb to the slaughter.
I guess I'm one of the last of PZ's sacrificial students. As you may have gathered from my clever alias my name is Katie and I'm a senior biology major. I've actually known PZ for a number of years--I'm a Morris native and went to high school with his son, Connlann. When I was thirteen I met Connlann in an upper level math class (something esoteric called "algebra") and learned that Connlann's dad was a biologist (cool!) and an atheist (he puts people to sleep before surgery??) I soon adopted him as my personal biological encyclopedia and would pester PZ with…
pharyngula | September 12, 2007A football player, Kevin Everett, suffered serious spinal cord trauma in a game the other day. That's tragic, but the impressive part of the story is that he may recover to some degree thanks to advances in treatment, and most surprising, this comment from a consulting neurosurgeon:
"I don't know if I would call it a miracle. I would call it a spectacular example of what people can do," Green said. "To me, it's like putting the first man on the moon or splitting the atom. We've shown that if the right treatment is given to people who have a catastrophic injury that they could walk away from…
pharyngula | September 11, 2007There's an obvious design fla* in this experiment reported in the LA Times. The researchers ran a simple experiment *here the subjects *ere sho*n a series of letters, and they *ere supposed to tap a key *hen they sa* one, but not the another. The subjects *ere classified by their political vie*s, from left-*ing to right-*ing, and a correlation *as discovered: students *ith liberal vie*s had more brain activity and made fe*er mistakes than conservatives. This fits *ell *ith my biases, but I *ouldn't *ant to s*ear to the trust*orthiness of the *ork. There *as a very poor choice in the design.…
pharyngula | September 4, 2007Dr. Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary have come out with a new book, The Spiritual Brain, that Ms O'Leary has announced on her blog. I asked if she'd send me a review copy, and oh, boy, she's going to. This could be interesting.
It's received accolades from such stellar reviewers as Andrew Newberg, Michael Egnor, Michael Behe, and Jeffrey Schwartz, and it apparently concludes that "spiritual experiences are not a figment of the mind or a delusion produced by a dysfunctional brain". See? It's getting fun already.
Even better, I'm currently re-reading Soul Made Flesh: The Discovery of the…