neuroscience
cortex | July 17, 2007This is just sad:
Harrah's New Orleans, the largest casino in the city, is on pace for its best year ever: gambling revenue is up 13.6 percent through the first five months of 2007 compared with the same period in 2005, pre-Katrina.
The casinos in this region are generating more revenue -- from significantly fewer players -- in large part because of the extra money that many area residents have in their pockets and fewer alternatives on where to spend it, casino executives and others in the region say.
I sometimes wonder if, one day, we'll view casinos as we currently view cigarettes: a…
neurophilosophy | July 16, 2007
The French anatomist, anthropologist, and surgeon Pierre Paul Broca (1824-1880) is best remembered for his descriptions of two patients who had lost the ability to speak after sustaining damage to the left frontal lobe of the brain. Broca's observations of these patients, and the conclusions he reached after his post-mortem examinations, would lead to major advances in the understanding of the brain, and laid the foundations for modern neuropsychology.
In 1859, Broca founded the Societe d'Anthropologie de Paris. Two years later, several heated debates had arisen there: one was about the…
j7uy5 | July 16, 2007While
looking for information for my last post, I encountered another
interesting article at PNAS. This one is about a new molecule
that improved survival in mice infected with
href="http://www.aphis.usda.gov/lpa/pubs/fsheet_faq_notice/fs_ahscrapie.html"
rel="tag">scrapie.
Scrapie is one of the
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transmissible_spongiform_encephalopathy">transmissible
spongiform encephalopathies (TSE).
Transmissible, because the infection can be transmitted from
one creature to another; spongiform, because the brain tissue of an
infected animal looks like a…
j7uy5 | July 15, 2007We
already knew that
rel="tag">varenicline
could be used to help people stop smoking. Now there is a
report that it can help reduce alcohol consumption, at least for rats.
This was reported in
title="Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences">PNAS
(Varenicline, an α4β2
nicotinic acetylcholine receptor
partial agonist, selectively decreases ethanol consumption and seeking)on
an open-access basis, and echoed in a report in Scientific
American (
href="http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?articleID=ACE9FF1E-E7F2-99DF-31F26EC00AA05F4A&sc=I100322">Need
a Cigarette and a…
j7uy5 | July 14, 2007A
couple of
href="http://www.merck.com/mmpe/sec16/ch221/ch221g.html"
rel="tag">Parkinson's Disease related items came
across the news wires,
briefly. There are lessons in both of them, but both leave me
with unresolved questions.
The first one I noticed was a report based upon a journal article,
rev="review"
href="http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/69/2/187">Risk
factors for somnolence, edema, and hallucinations in early Parkinson
disease. The second was based on a
different article (in the same journal),
href="http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/01.wnl…
cortex | July 12, 2007David Dobbs has a wonderful article in the most recent Times Magazine on Williams syndrome, a development disorder that results in a bizarre mixture of cognitive strengths and deficits:
Williams syndrome rises from a genetic accident during meiosis, when DNA's double helix is divided into two separate strands, each strand then becoming the genetic material in egg or sperm. Normally the two strands part cleanly, like a zipper's two halves. But in Williams, about 25 teeth in one of the zippers -- 25 genes out of 30,000 in egg or sperm -- are torn loose during this parting. When that strand…
clock | July 11, 2007Our former scibling David Dobbs has posted/published two interesting articles about recent findings in neuroscience and behavior:
The Gregarious Brain in New York Times Magazine, about the Williams Syndrome:
If a person suffers the small genetic accident that creates Williams syndrome, he'll live with not only some fairly conventional cognitive deficits, like trouble with space and numbers, but also a strange set of traits that researchers call the Williams social phenotype or, less formally, the "Williams personality": a love of company and conversation combined, often awkwardly, with a poor…
j7uy5 | July 10, 2007This
is starting to look like a never-ending saga, and I have written
about it extensively before. But this latest update certainly
deserves some attention.
It comes from an article (
href="http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstract/ajp;164/7/1029">Suicide
Attempts Among Patients Starting Depression Treatment With Medications
or Psychotherapy) and an editorial (
rev="review"
href="http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/ajp;164/7/989">Antidepressants
and Suicidal Behavior: Cause or Cure?) in the
latest (July 2007)
issue of the
href="http://ajp.psychiatryonline.…
neurophilosophy | July 9, 2007The higher-order brain functions underlying complex patterns of human behaviour are poorly understood, not least because of the enormous number of neural computations involved. Complex behaviours require the parallel and integrated activity of hundreds (or even thousands) of discrete brain modules, each consisting of thousands of neurons.
For a real understanding of how the brain generates complex behaviours, we need detailed knowledge of the large-scale architecture of the neural networks involved. Visualizing this global architecture is possible with simple organisms. For example, the…
cortex | July 9, 2007Here's your depressing determinist paper for the day:
Is lifetime inequality mainly due to differences across people established early in life or to differences in luck experienced over the working lifetime? We answer this question within a model that features idiosyncratic shocks to human capital, estimated directly from data, as well as heterogeneity in ability to learn, initial human capital, and initial wealth -- features which are chosen to match observed properties of earnings dynamics by cohorts. We find that as of age 20, differences in initial conditions account for more of the…
neurophilosophy | July 4, 2007 Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881) is arguably the greatest novelist of all time. He cast a long shadow over world literature, and subsequently influenced many great writers, from Hermann Hesse, Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka, to Ernest Hemingway, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jack Kerouac.
Dostoyevsky had a profound insight into the human condition. He was much more than a novelist: he was also a psychologist and a philosopher. In his novels, Dostoyevsky explored subjects such as free will, the existence of God, and good and evil. The characters in his novels are most often portrayed as living…
omnibrain | July 4, 2007There is a great article today on Slate about why the pretty ridiculous idea that vaccinations containing trace amounts of mercury cause autism will never go away. Here's the first little part of the article:
At the recent 12-day hearing into theories that vaccines cause autism, the link between the disorder and the measles-mumps-rubella vaccine came across as shaky at best. As for the mercury-containing preservative thimerosal, which was used in other vaccines, witnesses showed that in all known cases of actual mercury poisoning (none of which caused autism), the dose was hundreds or…
j7uy5 | July 3, 2007T
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">his
is another post in a series detailing the selection of antidepressant
medication. Use the "Antidepressants" link in the
"Categories"
part of the sidebar to find the other posts in the series.
In this post, I am sort of assuming that the reader has read the
previous posts, or has an adequate fund of general knowledge on the
subject.
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bupropion" rel="tag">Bupropion
is not a member of a family. Most antidepressants can be
placed
in a family of drugs that share similar properties, but there is no
other drug…
neurophilosophy | July 2, 2007Welcome to the 26th edition of Encephalon, the neuroscience blogging carnival. Encephalon #1 was posted almost exactly a year ago at my WordPress blog, so this edition marks the carnival's first anniversary.
First, let me draw your attention to two new neuroscience blogs. Both authors are researchers who use neuroimaging. Jon Bardin, from the fMRI Laboratory at Columbia University, has a nice post about neuroaesthetics and conceptual art at The Third Culture, and Brad Buchsbaum, of the University of California at Berkeley, has posted parts 1 and 2 of a 4-part series called the four ages…
omnibrain | July 2, 2007There has been a whole lot crap floating around the press in the last couple weeks since the trial started that is seeking to link vaccination with higher incidence of autism. Now a survey funded by one of these anti-vaccination groups is correlating, through a random telephone survey, more mental health issues like ADHD with vaccination. So why do you think this correlation exists? Is there a simple way of simply explaining away this correlation (think less pirates = more global warming).
Here's some of the info from medical news today:
The survey, commissioned by Generation Rescue,…
omnibrain | July 2, 2007Have you ever wondered why your left hemisphere is better developed than your right? Are you worried about the negative impacts of hypnotism, crossed eyes and convulsions? The NY Times may have the answer for you!
It's all about how you sleep as a baby and what's in your cradle.
From Nov. 26 1880:
Not only do they provide answers for these questions they express these other very elucidating views on imagery:
See you again next week with a story on the study of Phrenology in Dogs from the Chicago Tribune on October 20th 1895!
omnibrain | July 1, 2007I always loved these homunculi drawings in intro psych and neuro books. These sculptures from the London Natural History Museum are even better!
click picture for much much larger image.
And finally if you have no idea what the heck is going on here. Wikipedia has a good description of the homunculus.
[edit by Sandra - in keeping with our new R-rating, see the NSFW image of a proposed revision involving the penis. Read more here. Oh, and I find it curious/sexist that I can't find an image representing a female homunculus...]
omnibrain | June 30, 2007Thanks to Vaughan over at Mind Hacks we've discovered that the great movie The Brain That Wouldn't Die is now in the public domain :) You can watch it below the fold or even download it in full right here or here. This movie is a wonderful, wonderful movie! ... ok, really, I've never seen it nor do I think I'll take the time to watch it unless I'm really bored. But you should! Let us know how it is. It is after all about brains!
Here's the plot summary from imdb:
After a car crash, a man keeps his wife's head alive in his laboratory. As if this weren't enough, an evil beast pounds and…
clock | June 29, 2007Modern Brains Have An Ancient Core:
Hormones control growth, metabolism, reproduction and many other important biological processes. In humans, and all other vertebrates, the chemical signals are produced by specialised brain centres such as the hypothalamus and secreted into the blood stream that distributes them around the body.
Researchers from the European Molecular Biology Laboratory [EMBL] now reveal that the hypothalamus and its hormones are not purely vertebrate inventions, but have their evolutionary roots in marine, worm-like ancestors. In this week's issue of the journal Cell they…
cortex | June 27, 2007Yesterday, Chris had an interesting post describing an experimental situation in which selective brain damage leads to improved performance. It's an cool paradigm, since it helps to illuminate the innate constraints of the (intact) brain.
Look, for example, at this experiment, led by Baba Shiv, Antonio Damasio and George Loewenstein. The scientists invented a simple investing game. In each round, experimental subjects had to decide between two options: invest $1 or invest nothing. If the participant decided not to invest, he or she would keep the dollar, and the task would advance to the…