neuroscience
scientificactivist | June 19, 2007For this round of Ask a ScienceBlogger, the question is "Is sunshine good for you?"
It's a beautiful sunny day outside. And, of course, you're stuck in the lab (or the office, classroom, or daily holding tank of your choice). Although you may thumb your nose at those who seem to have nothing better to do than have fun in the sun, don't be so quick to judge. In fact, your lack of sun exposure might be partially to blame for that not-so-sunny disposition of yours. Or worse.
Your body operates on a 24-hour circadian rhythm, and regular daily exposure to sunlight keeps it running smoothly. So,…
cortex | June 15, 2007Given recent inane comments about the immateriality of altruism by a certain neurosurgeon, I thought this recent article on the neural underpinnings of "pure altruism" might be of interest:
You don't need to donate to charity to feel all warm inside. Researchers have found that even when money is taken from some people involuntarily, they feel good about the transaction, as long as the funds go to a good cause. The findings may force economists to rethink just what guides our response to taxes and other financial decisions.
The behavior under the microscope is altruism, which refers to…
j7uy5 | June 14, 2007This
is kind of a rambling rehash of an old
href="http://corpus-callosum.blogspot.com/2004/03/multidrug-resistant-tb-lessons-about.html">post.
But it turns out to be topical now. What is more it
illustrates some interesting points about evolution: some obvious,
others subtle. One thing is shows very nicely is that once
nature solves a problem, the same solution keeps cropping up in other
places.
On March 16, 2004, the World Health Organization released a report on
multidrug-resistant tuberculosis. This is a serious problem,
especially in the former Soviet states of eastern Europe…
omnibrain | June 13, 2007"Pavlov's Cockroach: Classical Conditioning of Salivation in an Insect," sounds like a great paper and seriously...salivation in the cockroach! that's great stuff ;)
But this is certainly not the first time classical conditioning has been demonstrated in other animals. Heck, Eric Kandel (among others) won the Nobel prize for his work on classical conditioning and learning in Aplysia (sea slugs). If you're really excited about the salivation component of Classical Conditioning here's a little summary from Medical News Today :)
A new study, led by Makoto Mizunami and colleagues at Tohoku…
clock | June 12, 2007The history of trepanation. An utterly amazing post!
And, Bioephemera posted an appropriate illustration to go with it....
j7uy5 | June 9, 2007Why
is it that recovering persons with alcoholism should not drink
near-beer (beer with little or no alcohol)?
...Hank
had been dry for several weeks thanks to a radical withdrawal program,
but a simple walk past Pete's Tavern on any given night almost erased
his will to abstain. During the daytime he did not feel a craving for
alcohol, but when he passed the bar in the evening--when he saw the
warm light through the windows and heard the glasses clinking--he would
be sorely tempted to run inside for a beer. Addiction researchers call
this phenomenon "conditioned desire." If a person had…
cortex | June 7, 2007The headline says it all: "Forgetting May Be Part of the Process of Remembering":
The more efficiently that study participants were tuning out irrelevant words during a word-memorization test, the sharper the drop in activity in areas of their brains involved in recollection. Accurate remembering became easier, in terms of the energy required.
This is an idea that Jorge Luis Borges would have understood. In his classic short story, Funes the Memorious, Borges invented a character (Ireneo Funes) whose "perception and memory are infallible...the present to him was almost intolerable in its…
clock | June 7, 2007Bjoern Brembs is attending and liveblogging from the Gastropod Neuroscience meeting at Friday Harbor Laboratories and has posted about several talks already and will likely post more over the next couple of days.
Something struck me in his coverage of Dennis Willows' talk about magnetoreception in Tritonia:
However, in 20 years of research, the researchers haven't found the cells which sense the magnetic field and transmit the information to the neurons in the brain.
Well, Ken Lohmann, barely a mile or so from me, has already published several papers on Tritonia neurons sensitive to changes…
purepedantry | June 5, 2007How the brain codes numbers is a challenging problem. We know that certain parts of the brain must code numbers because they are involved in numerical calculation. Some of them -- such as the prefrontal cortex (PFC) -- are also involved in the calculation of reward, so it would be good if we knew how numerical rewards were encoded.
Neider and Merten address this issue of neural encoding of numbers in a recent paper in the Journal of Neuorscience.
In the paper, they trained monkeys to respond to different numbers of cues in a delayed response task while they were recording from their…
cortex | June 4, 2007Matt Yglesias makes an important psychological point about political debates:
My read of what I see in these debates is so heavily colored by ex ante beliefs and information that it's hard for the debate to change anything. During the first 100 days question, for example, John Edwards gave his spiel about "restoring American leadership" which Hillary Clinton followed up by straightforwardly saying that bringing the troops home from Iraq would be Priority Number 1 in a Clinton administration. In a vacuum, that from Clinton would have impressed me a great deal. But in the real world it didn't…
j7uy5 | June 3, 2007
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">This is
an interesting drug. Rarely prescribed, but interesting.
It is older than what we typically give today. It
is an antidepressant with a twist.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">In
order to understand why it is interesting, you need to know a little
bit about the pharmacology of the drug.
rel="tag" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amoxapine">Amoxapine
is a tricyclic antidepressant, in my book, or at least in my
head; but I have seen it referred to as a tetracyclic. It
depends on whether you think all the rings have to have…
j7uy5 | May 30, 2007
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Amitriptyline-2D-skeletal.png">
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">This post is
about amitriptyline, one of the oldest
antidepressants on the market in the USA. It also used to be
the
most widely-prescribed antidepressant.
I've decided to not attempt an encyclopedic style of description of the
pharmacological action of the individual antidepressants.
That is
readily available already at Wikipedia, among others. But in
order to fully understand the topic, those who are not familiar with
the pharmacology should probably go to the general…
purepedantry | May 30, 2007Memory for computers is getting pretty large, but it is still based on basically the same system that it was several years ago. They have just gotten better a fabricating them.
It is an interesting question to ask whether we could store memories in alternative substrates such as biological ones. The idea is an intriguing one, particularly when we are talking about neurons, because while the capacity of biological networks isn't infinite, it is pretty damn large. Just think of the system for long-term memories in your brain. The fact that you can remember your first grade teachers name…
omnibrain | May 29, 2007Growing up I used to read Omni magazine and would always see all sorts of devices that supposedly could induce lucid dreams or tapes that had subliminal messages recorded along with Bach to create special brain states where you'd be particularly receptive to messages like - "you will be psychic... you can lift objects with your mind...you will be rich and successful... you will quit smoking crack...etc etc etc" Let me tell you - I'm not psychic or rich! Although...I never did take up smoking crack so maybe the tapes did work! I eventually forgot about these tapes and devices for many years…
cortex | May 29, 2007David Brooks uses neuroscience to criticize Al Gore's latest book:
[Gore's argument] grows out of a bizarre view of human nature. Gore seems to have come up with a theory that the upper, logical mind sits on top of, and should master, the primitive and more emotional mind below. He thinks this can be done through a technical process that minimizes information flow to the lower brain and maximizes information flow to the higher brain.
The reality, of course, is that there is no neat distinction between the "higher" and "lower" parts of the brain. There are no neat distinctions between the "…
j7uy5 | May 28, 2007
Fast
Company
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif"> has an
amusing and interesting
href="http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss.html">article
on
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy">pychopathy.
Being a business-oriented magazine, they ask "Is your boss a
psychopath?" But one could just as easily apply the same
principles to other important people in your life, such as politicians.
They even have a quiz useful for making armchair diagnoses.
href="http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/96/open_boss-quiz.html">Quiz:
Is Your Boss a Psychopath?
[1] Is he…
cortex | May 27, 2007It works. Dick Cheney shows how to do it:
These are events [9/11] we can never forget. And they are scenes the enemy would like to see played out in this country over and over again, on a larger and larger scale. Al Qaeda's leadership has said they have the right to "kill four million Americans, two million of them children, and to exile twice as many and to wound and cripple thousands." We know they are looking for ways of doing just that -- by plotting in secret, by slipping into the country, and exploiting any vulnerability they can find.
Al Gore, in The Assault on Reason, explains the…
omnibrain | May 26, 2007Here's what PsyBlog has to say about Omni Brain:
Best humorous (but still scientific) psychology blog
The danger with mixing science and humour is slipping into the 'geek trap' where clever people try to be too clever. Omni Brain easily avoids this. Funky finger pictures on this post about sexual orientation and finger length.
Just to let you guys know... the only way we avoid being too clever is by not actually being very clever ;) haha...
Thanks for the props!
Check out the rest of their psychology blog reviews (which are great!) here.
Oh, and the beanie baby Freud doesn't have anything…
cortex | May 25, 2007A new study by economists James Heckman and Dimitriy Masterov argues that investing in the education of young children (pre-K) provides the greatest return on investment. In contrast, trying to educate the brains of adolescents, the economists say, is largely a waste of resources. Here's Joel Waldfogel:
The early investment [in education] is needed, the authors argue, to supplement the role of the family. Recent developments in neuroscience have shown that the early years are vital to cognitive development, which in turn is important to subsequent success and productivity in school, life, and…