neuroscience
scientificactivist | July 14, 2006Although a given scientific paper probably has at least something fairly interesting or unique about it, most people aren't going to be too interested in reading about, for example, the structural details of the protein-protein interactions between cytoplasmic integrin tails and focal adhesion-associated proteins (my work).
But this paper... man, this is completely different. Not only could I not wait to read it, hell, I wished I was there when the experiments were taking place!
On July 7th, researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine published a paper in Psychopharmacology…
purepedantry | July 12, 2006The most recent issue of Nature has a paper by the Donoghue lab at Brown about their project implanting an ensemble of electrodes into the motor cortex of a paraplegic. Signals from the electrodes were decoded and used to run a computer program so the patient can literally move the cursor with their mind. This is really incredible stuff. The day is rapidly approaching when we can really help these people.
You can read the article, but the most interesting part is the videos available (without a subscription) here. My favorite is a game of Pong.
Hat-tip: Mind Hacks (by one of the authors…
purepedantry | July 12, 2006What is the deal with the stories showing brain lesions that end addiction? First, there was this one. Then, today in Nature there was another one:
Strokes often change a person's character, depending on where the damage hits. Some may become more impulsive, others depressed. Now researchers have shown that damage to a small but very specific brain area can wipe out an addiction to smoking.
Antoine Bechera, of the University of Iowa in Iowa City, has identified 14 patients who all stopped smoking immediately after having a stroke that damaged their insular cortex. This seems to be not…
neurotopia | July 12, 2006We seem to have a plethora of posts pertaining to Pure Pedantry's penchant for peroratory punditry. I found a recent press release that I fear will only encourage him.
Using magnetoenephalography, this group tracked how the brains of newborns, 6 month olds, and one year olds work when speaking. They specifically looked at cross-talk between Broca's Area, which is responsible for comprehending speech, areas responsible for audition in general, and other areas responsible for generating it.
The babies were exposed to three kinds of sounds through earphones -- pure tones that do not resemble…
purepedantry | July 12, 2006Parents can rest easy. If your child is a late-talker, it is because your kid is a late-talker, not because you didn't show them enough baby Einstein videos:
New research findings from the world's largest study predicting children's late language emergence has revealed that parents are not to blame for late talking toddlers.
The LOOKING at Language project has analysed the speech development of 1766 children in Western Australia from infancy to seven years of age, with particular focus on environmental, neuro-developmental and genetic risk factors. It is the first study to look at predictors…
clock | July 12, 2006
This post was a response to a decent (though not too exciting) study and the horrible media reporting on it. As the blogosphere focused on the press releases, I decided to look at the paper itself and see what it really says. It was first posted on August 09, 2005. Under the fold...
I saw this on Pandagon first - a response to an article on NeuroImage about gender-specific voice recognition. Actually, it was not a response to the article itself (behind the subscription wall), but to the MSM reporting about the article. Soon, other bloggers chimed in, notably Feministing, Blondesense,…
cortex | July 12, 2006Jake over at Pure Pedantry links to a recently published article which shows that the adult neocortex has roughly the same number of neurons (but more glial cells) than the neocortex of a newborn. This is an interesting study and deserves a brief comment. As I wrote in Seed earlier this year, neurogenesis - the idea that neurons in our brain are constantly dividing - is no longer controversial. Thanks to the persistence of Elizabeth Gould, Fernando Nottebohm and others, the paradigm has finally shifted.
But the details of neurogenesis remain hotly debated, especially when it comes to the…
cortex | July 11, 2006Sometimes science experiments smack of the obvious. When researchers at Johns Hopkins gave 36 people with deep religious convictions hallucingenic mushrooms (active ingredient psilocybin) they experienced a deep, and lingering, sense of spirituality.Furthermore, as every day tripper knows, about a third of users were pummelled by feelings of fear and anxiety. Apparently, transcendence and nervousness are separated by a very thin line.
Despite the dangers, researchers concluded that psilocybin, the compound in the mushrooms, might have therapeutic value in improving the outlook of addicts and…
purepedantry | July 10, 2006There has been a big debate over the last couple years about whether the adult human brain is capable of generating new neurons.
A new study in Neuroscience by Larsen et al. provides some relevant new evidence to that debate. It used rigorous stereological measurement -- a technique called the optical fractionator -- to show that in newborn humans there are the same number of neurons as in the adult brain. This result would lend credibility to the notion that large numbers of new neurons are not being produced in the postnatal human brain.
This is the first time the total number of…
purepedantry | July 10, 2006Misha at Mind Hacks has a great update on brain-computer interface advances.
purepedantry | July 10, 2006I haven't had time to read it all yet (it is sort of long and technical), but a new model by Grossberg and Seidman purports to explain how normal cognitive processes go wrong in autism -- a pretty tall order but it looks like they deliver. Here is a description from the press release:
A new model of the brain developed by Dr. Stephen Grossberg, professor and chairman of the Department of Cognitive and Neural Systems at Boston University, and Dr. Don Seidman, a pediatrician with the DuPage Medical Group in Elmhurst, IL, sheds light on the triggers of behaviors commonly associated with autism…
neurotopia | July 10, 2006I know Tara is going to kick me for this post, because as one of the resident D.I.N.K.s here at ScienceBlogs my parenting advice doesn't extend into the realm of "ethical" so much as "practical". Specifically, I've advised her on numerous occasions to just give the toddlers a "pharmacological sleep aid" of sorts. Ok, ok, so my suggested "sleep aid" usually takes the form of whiskey or Nyquil, but I'm not adverse to Benadryl either. After all, diphenhydramine is actually recommended by pediatricians to help kids sleep. Surely it is just as efficacious as my other suggestions, if a little…
purepedantry | July 9, 2006Jonah at The Frontal Cortex posted a great article exposing the limits of genetic determinism. Sometimes a genetic explanation seems so obvious, but further study shows that environment also plays a prominent role. Definitely read the whole thing.
purepedantry | July 9, 2006The American Journal of Psychiatry has this very interesting case, but first you should know some background. There is a pathway in the brain that is commonly referred to as the reward pathway. It is referred to as the reward pathway because if I were to -- for instance -- implant an electrode into parts of it and train a rat to press a lever to zap himself there, he would do so more or less in perpetuity. This ability to very rapidly train self-stimulatory behavior (keep your mind out of the gutter) suggests that these areas of the brain are involved in learning reward.
Here is a diagram…
neurotopia | July 8, 2006A highly conserved set of genes known as the sirtuin family are known to be activated by caloric restriction (CR) and extend the lifespan of a number of species. CR may also reduce the risk of Alzheimer's Disease, and can prevent the formation of amyloid plaques in transgenic mouse models of AD. The question, then, is whether sirtuin gene activation is a mechanism through which CR can prevent AD pathology, and what genes/compounds are involved in this particular biochemical cascade. Since I'm writing this post, you can probably guess that I've found an article that addresses this very…
purepedantry | July 8, 2006The Synapse #2 is up at A Blog Around the Clock.
The next Synapse is to be hosted by The Neurophilosopher's Blog on July 23rd. Submission guidelines are here.
clock | July 8, 2006Welcome to the second edition of The Synapse, the new neuroscience carnival.
This time, you have a puzzle to solve. Next to each entry, there is an image depicting the structural formula of a neurotransmitter, neurohormone or neuromodulator. Your job is to figure out what they are and leave the answers in the comments (or in your own posts that link to this edition). If I have managed to figure out MovableType by now, you should be able to click on images to enlarge.
Watch out - not everything is mammalian, or even vertebrate neurochemistry! The winner - whoever is the first to…
cortex | July 8, 2006These bonobos can even invent metaphors...The secret, at least according to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, head scientist at the Great Ape Trust near Des Moines, is to expose primates to language when they are still infants. Of course, this isn't the first time talking chimps have threatened to dethrown Chomsky and his Innate Grammar Machine, but these poetic bonobos are pretty persuasive.
purepedantry | July 7, 2006Prosopagnosia is a rare disorder that can result from strokes where the individual is unable to recognize faces but maintains the ability to recognize other non-face objects. Disorders like prosopagnosia suggest to neuroscientists that the machinery for processing faces in the brain is in part special and segregated from the machinery for processing other objects.
It turns out that there is also a wildly underreported and surprisingly prevalent form of hereditary prosopagnosia (HPA), as shown in a new paper in American Journal of Medical Genetics. HPA has a prevalence of almost 2.5% and…
scientificactivist | July 7, 2006Since all of my Fantastical Fridays posts so far have been about chemistry or physics, I think it's time for a change of pace. Here's a post I wrote a couple of months ago about some more "political" science that had been in the news.
(24 January 2006) Now I have an excuse for my behavior the next time I get into a bitter political debate: I can't help being defensive--it's hardwired into me!Those are the findings, at least, of a recent study led by psychologist Drew Westen, as reported by The New York Times today.
Using M.R.I. scanners, neuroscientists have now tracked what happens in the…