neuroscience
omnibrain | March 7, 2007
This guys brain is sorta having an out of body experience...
In any case, The March 6 issue of the journal Neurology has an article in it entitled, Out-of-body experience and arousal. where they found
that some people's brains already may be predisposed to these sorts of experiences. They found that an out-of-body experience is statistically as likely to occur during a near death experience as it is to occur during the transition between wakefulness and sleep. Nelson suggests that phenomena in the brain's arousal system, which regulates different states of consciousness including REM sleep…
purepedantry | March 6, 2007I posted a couple months ago about neuron to glia (in this case oligodendrocyte) synapses in the hippocampus, and how researchers had shown that these synapses were capable of LTP. This was an example of two themes 1) the brain is a tricky business -- particularly with respect to information processing and 2) glia are much more important than we thought they would be.
Here is another set of articles in that vein. Publishing independently in Nature Neuroscience, Kukley et al. and Ziskin et al. has shown that there are neuron to glia synapses in the corpus callosum AND that these synapses…
j7uy5 | March 2, 2007If you have ever been curious to know what the corpus callosum looks
like in vivo, you can see it in this Google video:
href="http://video.google.com/url?docid=2970913114974330555&esrc=srst10&ev=v&q=%22corpus+callosum%22&vidurl=http://video.google.com/videoplay%3Fdocid%3D2970913114974330555%26q%3D%2522corpus%2Bcallosum%2522%26it%3D2911&usg=AL29H22q93tPE6Lk8OUnjP7u5OUGGOqJlg">Pediatric
Hemispherectomy Surgical Treatment For Epilepsy.
The link starts the video at the point where they show the
corpus callosum after it has been severed, surgically. It is
not for the…
cortex | March 2, 2007If you like spicy food - and I love spicy food - then you'll find this report from Harold McGee's blog rather interesting. It concerns the evolution of capsaicin, the pungent chemical that makes chilis so spicy:
Levey, Tewksbury and colleagues tested the theory that capsaicin selectively repels rodents and other grain-eating mammals, which would chew up the chilli's seeds along with the surrounding fruit, while having no deterrent effect on birds, which have no teeth, swallow the fruits whole and defecate the seeds intact. They monitored wild chilli plants in Bolivia and in Arizona with video…
cortex | March 1, 2007Some people are really, really rich:
Take Oracle's founder, Lawrence J. Ellison. Mr. Ellison's net worth last year was around $16 billion. And it will probably be much bigger when the list comes out in a few weeks. With $16 billion and a 10 percent rate of return, Mr. Ellison would need to spend more than $30 million a week simply to keep from accumulating more money than he already has, to say nothing of trying to spend down the $16 billion itself.
He spent something like $100 million on his Japanese-style mansion in Woodside, Calif., making it among the more expensive private residences…
cortex | March 1, 2007Last week, I criticized David Brooks for his conservative interpretations of modern neuroscience. This week, I'm happy to report that Brooks' policy recommendations are much more interesting (and scientifically accurate, at least in my opinion):
If we want to have successful human capital policies, we have to get over the definition of education as something that takes place in schools between the hours of 8 and 3, between the months of September and June, and between the ages of 5 and 18.
As Bob Marvin of the University of Virginia points out, there is a mountain of evidence demonstrating…
j7uy5 | February 28, 2007Note: this post involves a very small amount of self-disclosure.
That is a bit unusual.
My father is also a psychiatrist. He told me once about his
education in psychopharmacology. A guy got up to lecture,
identified himself as the "drug doctor," and gave a lecture on
psychopharmacology. In fact, he gave a series
of
lectures...about five, total.
That was in the early to mid 1950's. What did we have back
then? Basically two things: uppers and downers.
By the mid 1980's things had changed. We knew about
neurotransmitters and receptors. I distinctly recall a
lecture
in which the…
j7uy5 | February 28, 2007Scientific American makes note of a new finding regarding multiple
sclerosis, first reported in The Journal of Neuroscience.
One of the big shifts in our understanding of brain structure and
function, over the past decade or so, has been our improved
understanding of the process of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neurogenesis">neurogenesis
in adults. It is more more common than had been assumed
previously. It turns out that neurons are not the only brain
cells that change in such dynamic ways. New
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroglia">neuroglia
can be generated as…
cortex | February 23, 2007My last post on David Brooks, conservatism and neuroscience inspired a spirited debate. I argued that the discoveries of modern neuroscience seem to support liberal public policies focused on reducing levels of inequality:
While conservatives tend to regard poverty as primarily a cultural issue, solvable by increasing marriage rates and transitioning people to minimum wage jobs, this research suggests that the symptoms of poverty are not simply states of mind; they actually warp the mind. The truth of the matter is that our neurons are designed to reflect their circumstances, not to rise…
cortex | February 22, 2007Jane Galt mocks liberal interpretations of behavioral economics:
[This] also applies to behavioural economics, which the left seems to believe is a magical proof of the benevolence of government intervention, because after all, people are stupid, so they need the government to protect them from themselves. My take is a little subtler than that:
1) People are often stupid
2) Bureaucrats are the same stupid people, with bad incentives.
Pithy, yes. Accurate, not so much. Behavioral economists and neuroeconomists haven't discovered that people are "stupid." Instead, they've discovered that the…
omnibrain | February 21, 2007The role of glial cells - or cells that "glue" the neurons together - has traditionally been that of a house keeper, cooking up and serving food, cleaning up waste products, and holding everything in place. In recent years the role of glial cells has been expanded somewhat, which leads us to Einstein's brain:
In 1985 scientists at the University of California in Berkeley published anatomical studies of slivers of Einstein's brain after counting the different cells in the organ. They found the only difference between his brain and those of dead doctors was a greater ratio of glial cells to…
omnibrain | February 21, 2007An interesting youtube video from the Discovery Channel featuring the research of Chance Spalding. The video features a monkey who can control a robotic arm with the implanted electrodes in its brain.
via boingboing
cortex | February 20, 2007Over at the academic blog Overcoming Bias, Arnold Kling makes a good point:
Before the Iraq invasion, President Bush did not say, "I think that there is a 60 percent chance that Saddam has an active WMD program."
Al Gore does not say, "I think there is a 2 percent chance that if we do nothing there will be an environmental catastrophe that will end life as we know it."
Instead, they speak in the language of certainty. I assume that as political leaders they know a lot better than I do how to speak to the general population. So I infer that, relative to me, the public has a bias toward…
cortex | February 19, 2007In his most recent column, David Brooks argues that the new discoveries of neuroscience and biology have confirmed the conservative view of human nature.
Sometimes a big idea fades so imperceptibly from public consciousness you don't even notice until it has almost disappeared. Such is the fate of the belief in natural human goodness.
This belief, most often associated with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, begins with the notion that "everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man." Human beings are virtuous and free in their natural state…
cortex | February 16, 2007According to some recently published research by Carol Dweck, knowing about brain plasticity makes kids smarter:
100 seventh graders, all doing poorly in math, were randomly assigned to workshops on good study skills. One workshop gave lessons on how to study well. The other taught about the expanding nature of intelligence and the brain.
The students in the latter group "learned that the brain actually forms new connections every time you learn something new, and that over time, this makes you smarter."
Basically, the students were given a mini-neuroscience course on how the brain works. By…
cortex | February 16, 2007It's been one of the enduring mysteries of neurogenesis: where do all our new cells go? Do they plug themselves into the cortical network? Do they travel to the olfactory cortex? Or do they wither away and die, a vestigal legacy of a more primitive brain?
Now a big part of the puzzle has been solved, in a groundbreaking paper in the new Science by researchers in New Zealand and Sweden. They located the superhighway that conducts newly born cells across the brain:
The rostral migratory stream (RMS) is the main pathway by which newly born subventricular zone (SVZ) cells reach the olfactory…
omnibrain | February 15, 2007So cheezy....
Now for a classic....
And finally here's an entire site of children's songs rewritten to be about the brain.
And finally...a robot playing John Coltraine.
cortex | February 15, 2007I have trouble remembering my own telephone number, so feats like this are totally incomprehensible:
When he [Daniel Tammet] gets nervous, he said, he sometimes reverts to a coping strategy he employed as a child: he multiplies two over and over again, each result emitting in his head bright silvery sparks until he is enveloped by fireworks of them. He demonstrated, reciting the numbers to himself, and in a moment had reached 1,048,576 -- 2 to the 20th power. He speaks 10 languages, including Lithuanian, Icelandic and Esperanto, and has invented his own language, Mantï. In 2004, he raised…
omnibrain | February 13, 2007Here's one for Valentine's Day.
BUFFALO, N.Y. -- The Beatles' George Harrison wondered in his famous love song about the "something" that "attracts me like no other lover." A University at Buffalo expert explains that that "something" is actually several physical elements that -- if they occur in a certain order, at the right time and in the right place -- can result in true love.
"There are several types of chemistry required in romantic relationships," according to Mark Kristal, professor of psychology at UB. "It seems like a variety of different neurochemical processes and external…
omnibrain | February 13, 2007
A couple months ago we posted a number of very disturbing cigarette warning labels from around the world and wondered whether perhaps a picture of a rotting, stinking, bleeding tumor on a guys throat would perhaps help lower the incidence of smoking. In the March issue of the American Journal of Preventative Medicine researchers have taken a step toward showing big obnoxious warnings are the best.
The abstract does a good job describing the study so I'll let them do it:
Text and Graphic Warnings on Cigarette Packages: Findings from the International Tobacco Control Four Country Study…