neuroscience
omnibrain | May 23, 2007
Sometimes headlines really rub me the wrong way. This happens to be a consistent topic that always bugs me - finger length. It's interesting in that finger length is correlated with testosterone levels and that affects all sorts of cognitive abilities - but come on! Really?! Shouldn't they be spending their time trying to figure out how to ungay these people? (That was sarcastic by the way!)
Here's the first story from EurekAlert:
Researchers at the University of Warwick have found that sexual orientation has a real effect on how we perform mental tasks such as navigating with a map in a…
omnibrain | May 23, 2007Ok... not really at home (Are they really suggesting in the picture that you can do it yourself?). There are now some relatively simple consumer devices on the market that will let your Psychiatrist wave his magic wand over your head, helping to alleviate your depressive symptoms in his office without checking you into a hospital and knocking you out. I'm curious whether they need an MRI before doing this procedure? It doesn't look like it's too precise. In any case... here's the device:
And a description from Engadget:
The devices employ a technique known as transcranial magnetic…
cortex | May 22, 2007From the March 31 issue of The Lancet:
The ease of getting to sleep and staying asleep depends not only on previous wake time, but also on associations with the circadian rhythm of core temperature. Sleep is easiest to initiate when core temperature is falling rapidly or is at its lowest, and most difficult when body temperature is rising rapidly or is high. Waking is the opposite of sleep initiation, because it happens when core temperature is rising or is high.
Normally, our body is at its coolest in the wee hours of morning, just before 5 a.m. Our body temperature peaks around noon, when…
j7uy5 | May 21, 2007
One of the things that most consistently surprised me, when I was doing
the consultation-liaison rotation in residency, was how common delirium
was, and how frequently it was missed by the medical team.
Even since then, it has evolved into a pet peeve of mine. The
brain is a rather important organ, and when it shows acute signs of
dysfunction, you'd think doctors would notice and pay attention.
All too often, they do not.
Why is this so important?
A recent paper in the BMJ indicates:
Delayed
or missed diagnosis is an important issue — non-detection of
delirium in emergency…
clock | May 18, 2007
As we mentioned just the other day, studying animal behavior is tough as "animals do whatever they darned please". Thus, making sure that everything is controlled for in an experimental setup is of paramount importance. Furthermore, for the studies to be replicable in other labs, it is always a good idea for experimental setups to be standardized. Even that is often not enough. I do not have access to Science but you may all recall a paper from several years ago in which two labs tried to simultaneously perform exactly the same experiment in mice, using all the standard equipment,…
omnibrain | May 17, 2007Here is an updated reposting (originally published on 04-26) with further information at the bottom of the post. Enjoy!
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I really like soda, especially the kinds with lots of caffeine and sugar. However, I have minor panic attacks whenever I drink them and think about all the corn syrup and other scary junk that goes into the soda flowing through my body. On the other hand I can't stand diet sodas - whose chemicals won't make me fat and diabetic (and probably take a lot longer to insidiously wreck the body) but taste…
cortex | May 16, 2007David Leonhardt has an interesting column on the importance of using subtle environmental cues - Leonhardt calls them "nudges" - to encourage good decision-making. He begins with a fascinating anecdote about patients in hospital beds:
For more than a decade, it turns out, medical researchers have known that people on ventilators should generally have their heads elevated. When the patients are lying down, bacteria can easily travel from the stomach, up to the mouth and breathing tube, and ultimately into the lungs, causing pneumonia. When people are propped up, gravity becomes their ally.…
clock | May 15, 2007Google was really no help in finding the exact quote, but everyone in the animal behavior field has heard some version of the Harvard Rule of Animal Behaviour:
"You can have the most beautifully designed experiment with the most carefully controlled variables, and the animal will do what it damn well pleases."
Anyone here knows who actually said that and what were the exact words?
Anyway, one way to re-word the "whatever they damned please" is to call it "free will". Björn Brembs says so but apparently not everyone agrees. The discussion in the media and on blogs is just about to start…
j7uy5 | May 14, 2007
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">Domestic violence and
other forms of childhood trauma are all too common. The
effects of trauma on children have been studied in a variety of ways,
but much of this research has not employed strict diagnostic criteria.
Now, the Archives of General Psychiatry
has published an article that addresses this. It is
subscription-only, but there is a
href="http://www.medpagetoday.com/Psychiatry/Depression/tb/5602">good
summary of it on MedPage Today,
so nonspecialists don't really need access to the full article.
face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif…
clock | May 9, 2007Lots of interesting Neuro/Behavioral stuff came out lately, some really cool, some questionable...so you let me know what you think:
Brain's White Matter: More 'Talkative' Than Once Thought:
Johns Hopkins scientists have discovered to their surprise that nerves in the mammalian brain's white matter do more than just ferry information between different brain regions, but in fact process information the way gray matter cells do. The discovery in mouse cells, outlined in the March issue of Nature Neuroscience, shows that brain cells "talk" with each other in more ways than previously thought. "…
clock | May 8, 2007It could be the seasonal use of pesticides, as this study suggests, or it could be seasonality in nutrition of mothers and infants, or seasonality of environmental stressors, or seasonality of mothers' hormone profiles. Most likely all or most of these and other factors play a role, and the relative importance of the factors differs between geographic regions, between socioeconomic strata, and between times in history.
But there is one factor that has been repeatedly demonstrated to play no role at all: the position of planets, moons and stars, as seen from Earth, at the moment of birth of…
j7uy5 | May 4, 2007The
work of Li-Huei
Tsai on the partial restoration of memory was in the news a
few days ago. Although the experiments were done on mice, it
was hoped that the results could indicate a reason to hope that humans
with dementia could be helped.
The study showed that an environment enriched with varied stimuli could
help organisms regain long-term memories.
This
recovery of long-term memory was really the most
remarkable finding. It suggests that memories are not really erased in
such disorders as Alzheimer’s, but that they are rendered
inaccessible and can be recovered...
...The…
cortex | May 1, 2007Score another one for unconscious processing, which is especially prevalent during sleep. A new study in PNAS suggests that, as people sleep, their brains are forming relational memories, which require "the flexible ability to generalize across existing stores of information".
Earlier studies found that people appear better able to remember things they have just learned if they are able to sleep soon after. In effect, they found, the brain appears to use sleep time to consolidate memories.
This study suggests that the process is still more complex, and that sleep helps people make inferences…
omnibrain | April 30, 2007Clearly, washing your hair isn't going to have any effect since I highly doubt that your Head and Shoulders is going to sink through your scalp, through bone, through your meninges and then go straight to the source of your seizures. But hey! If you can get your local neurosurgeon to open up your scalp, do some intracranial recordings to find the source of your seizures and then massage the shampoo onto your neurons you might have some luck. Don't forget to wash, rinse and repeat!
You should probably condition those newly cleaned cells while you're in there as well.
Here's the details:…
cortex | April 29, 2007I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section today on the cognitive revolution, and recent research demonstrating the relationship between cognition and emotion.
Ever since Plato, scholars have drawn a clear distinction between thinking and feeling. Cognitive psychology tended to reinforce this divide: emotions were seen as interfering with cognition; they were the antagonists of reason. Now, building on more than a decade of mounting work, researchers have discovered that it is impossible to understand how we think without understanding how we feel.
"Because we subscribed to this…
purepedantry | April 27, 2007Ronald Bailey at Reason reviews an interesting article in the American Journal of Bioethics by Martha Farah and Andrea Heberlein and the responses to it. Farah and Heberlein argue that while an innate system for the detection of personhood exists in the human brain, it is so prone to being fooled by clearly non-person objects that it suggests that no reasonable standard for personhood can exist. Many commenters took issue with that argument.
Money quote:
Farah and Heberlein contend that the personhood brain network evolved because as an intensely social species, our ancestors' survival was…
cortex | April 26, 2007Mike Penner, a sports writer for the LA Times, has decided to become a woman. He will return to the paper as Christine Daniels. He wrote a gripping personal reflection for the paper explaining his decision:
Transsexualism is a complicated and widely misunderstood medical condition. It is a natural occurrence -- unusual, no question, but natural.
Recent studies have shown that such physiological factors as genetics and hormonal fluctuations during pregnancy can significantly affect how our brains are "wired" at birth.
As extensive therapy and testing have confirmed, my brain was wired female.…
omnibrain | April 26, 2007It looks like Slate, over the next few days, is going to have a series of articles on some yummy looking neuroscience!
Here's a few details:
Welcome to "Brains!", Slate's special issue on mind science and the state of neuro-culture. Over the next few days, we'll present a series of articles about how laboratory research on the brain makes its way into our daily lives.
Wednesday, William Saletan revisits the most compelling brain-related stories of the year, from mind-reading fMRI scans to the effects of brain damage on morality. Max Linsky heads to the local brain gym for a neurobic work out…
cortex | April 25, 2007Does football cause brain damage? The evidence remains sketchy and completely inconclusive, but is nevertheless suggestive:
Bennet Omalu, a man who knew nothing about football and was a soccer goalie in his homeland, believes he has proven that repeated concussions in football lead to early-onset dementia, very similar to the boxing ailment known as "punch-drunk syndrome," possibly leading to dementia and depression.
Omalu has been able to examine four brains -- those of former Philadelphia Eagles defensive back Andre Waters, former Pittsburgh Steelers offensive linemen Mike Webster and Terry…
j7uy5 | April 17, 2007Nightmares
are a terrible problem for many persons with posttraumatic stress
disorder. Not only that, but they can be difficult to treat.
Lately, the LA Times has taken to emailing me a summary of some of
their Science & Medicine headlines. I'm not sure why;
maybe the LA Times thinks the mighty prowess of ScienceBlogs will save
them from a corporate takeover somehow.
Anyway, they did report one thing that I noticed and want to pass along:
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-ptsd14apr14,1,2738769.story?coll=la-news-science">
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/…