note PP and NeuroPhilosophy's reservations in expecting clinical applications to humans and complex motor tasks; NP's discussion of electrode position (and pics)

Tags: neuro, brain, plasticity, research, prosthetic, science_is_a_method on 2008-10-21 -All Annotations (1) -About

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Neurotopia (version 2.0) : Exercise: Feeling the burn is good for your brain

note writing style

Tags: exercise, brain, neuro, neurogenesis, learning, memory, cancer, research on 2008-10-21 -All Annotations (2) -About

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Mind Hacks: Ladies and gentlemen we're floating in space

Tags: brain, neuro, photo on 2008-10-09 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (1) -About

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Neurophilosophy : New memories require new brain cells

This study shows that inhibiting neurogenesis has strikingly different consequences in two distinct regions of the brain. In the olfactory bulb, it leads to significant shrinkage but apparently does not alter smell-related behaviour. In the hippocampus, the effect on structure is not so marked, but it is clear that newly-generated neurons are necessary for the processes of learning and memory. The role of new cells in memory formation is, however, still unclear.

Tags: brain, neuro, neurogenesis, memory, stem_cell, olfaction, aging, science_is_a_method on 2008-10-09 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (9) -About

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strong evidence that the continuous generation of new neurons is critical for brain function, and that the newly-generated cells perform two distinct roles which are critical for tissue maintenance in the olfactory system and for the formation of two distinct forms of memory.
Newborn neurons generated in the SVZ migrate along a pathway called the rostral migratory stream to populate the olfactory bulb
Cre-mediated recombination, which allowed them to label neural stem cells for long periods of time. It also labelled the neurons generated from them, as they inherit the stem cell during cell division. The method involved engineering mutant mice in which the gene encoding Cre recombinase is under the control of a stretch of regulatory DNA which normally activates a gene called nestin in neural stem cells. These animals were then mated with several other mutant strains, each enginnered to possess a "reporter" gene encoding a fluorescent protein. In this system, the activity of Cre recombinase is induced by a drug called tamixifen. Thus, when the offspring of the mutant mice strains are treated with this compound, Cre causes reshuffling of the genes, so that the reporters are activated only in the neural stem cells.
The researchers then investigated what would happen in the olfactory bulb if they aborted the supply of new neurons from the SVZ. To do so, they used the same genetic approach to eliminate the newborn cells. In this case though, the first strain of mutants was crossed with another whose cells contained the gene encoding diptheria toxin unde the control of regulatory DNA which normally switches on a gene during the early stages of neuronal differentiation. When tamixifen is administered in the offspring produced from this mating, Cre activation in causes the toxin to be synthesized as soon as differentiation begins, and the newborn cells are killed.
because the new method labelled cells for far longer than previous ones, this study provides more details.
while neurogenesis was necessary to maintain the structure of the olfactory bulb, it was not in this case required for olfactory function. This is at odds with earlier findings, and so will need to be confirmed further with more tests of olfactory behaviour.
the number of cells in the dentate remained constant for up to 6 months. (By contrast, the hippocampi of the control animals increased in size.) But it did have dramatic effects on spatial memory and associative learning - the mutant mice were unable to learn their way around a maze, and did not exhibit fear behaviour

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A Conversation With Nancy C. Andreasen

Tags: brain, psychology, drugs, aging, alzheimer's, schizophrenia, complexity, interview, neuro on 2008-10-09 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (3) -About

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Direct Recording Shows Brain Signal Persists Even In Dreamless Sleep

"What we've shown provides a bridge between the fMRI work many scientists are doing now and the earlier work involving electrical recordings from the brain that emphasized slow activity," says He. "Bringing those two fields together may give us some very interesting insights into the brain's organization and function."

Tags: brain, neuro, fmri, research, science_is_a_method on 2008-10-09 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Neurophilosophy : Musical training enhances integration of the senses

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Neurophilosophy : Beauty & the Brain

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Tags: architecture, art, neuro, neuroaesthetics, laboratory, pain, photo, productivity on 2008-09-17 -All Annotations (2) -About

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Controversial Plastics Chemical Causes Problems in Monkey Brains | 80beats | Discover Magazine

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The Reality Club: Responses to WHAT MAKES PEOPLE VOTE REPUBLICAN? By Jonathan Haidt

Tags: psychology, religion, morality, voting, republican, democrat, genome-environment_interaction, computer, model, neuro, serotonin, dopamine, parenting, evolution, science_is_a_method, testing, social_network, jonathan_haidt on 2008-09-11 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (31) -About

in list: religion

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His research, if he is to use lofty adjectives (largely meaningless in my experience) such as 'innate' to describe social structures and desires, must encompass a wider range of societies.
Happiness ratings are highest in the socialist societies, while lowest in right wing authoritarian societies. This list could be extended.

Why, then, do right wing partisans ignore this evidence and continue to support policies that are patently dysfunctional? I believe it is because, having stated a position, based on either their own family values or those dictated by their religion, they are loathe to change their minds and declare that they have been wrong.
Right wing positions are more frequently associated with Protestant evangelicals and with traditional (Reagan) Catholics. Often the leaders of these groups (e.g. television evangelists, sinning priests) epitomize the opposite of the stated values. But both of these groups embrace forgiveness, absolution, being born again. Other groups—atheists, non-fundamentalist Jews and non-fundamentalist Protestants—do not have the option of absolution; they make firmer demands on themselves
Once you set up the adjectives in the form of operationally defined personality traits and cognitive styles, it's easy to collect the data to support them. The flaw is in the characterization process itself.
Only some professional philosophers, jurists, scientists and academics believe that the principal point of political argument (or most any argument) is, or ought to be, truth rather than persuasion, and that an argument's principal appeal should be reason rather than passion.
Like other biological systems, moral intuition consists of an imperfect community of jerry-rigged faculties. Societies further combine these universal ingredients in creatively different ways.
a rational analysis of voting suggests that the core act of modern democratic government makes absolutely no sense. Economists would literally call voting "irrational" because it violates the preferences of the people who engage in it. For some reason, people decide to vote even though they would not buy a lottery ticket with identical odds, cost, and payoff. Economists typically think that people who vote are making a mistake, or there are other benefits to voting that we have not considered. For example, early scholars noted that people might vote in order to fulfill a sense of civic duty or to preserve the right to vote. Later scholars have also pointed out that people might vote because they enjoy expressing themselves in the same way they enjoy expressing themselves when they cheer for their favorite team at a ballgame. But these explanations beg the question, "Why?" It is a tautology to say that people vote because they feel like voting.
the rational analysis of voting overlooks important psychological features of human social networks that we have known about for some time.
the media does not reach the masses directly. Instead, a group of "opinion leaders"—a coinage they may have invented—usually acts as intermediary,
the more polarized we become by befriending only people with similar ideologies, the greater incentive we have to participate in politics.
cascades are primarily local phenomena, occurring in a smaller part of the population closely connected to an individual. As it turns out, this is exactly what we have been finding in our other studies of the spread of obesity, smoking, and happiness. These phenomena can spread to our friends (1 degree of separation), our friends' friends (2 degrees), and our friends' friends' friends (3 degrees), but not much further. This "3 Degree Rule" suggests that the power of one individual to influence many is limited by the effect of competing waves of influence that emanate from everyone else in the network.
In other words, one very important reason why people vote Republican is because their parents did. However, other studies have shown that the decision to affiliate with any political party and the strength of this attachment are significantly influenced by genes.

These initial twin studies suggested political ideas are heritable, but they said little about political behavior. That changed this year when we published a new study in the American Political Science Review that examined the heritability of voter participation.
research to link specific genes to political phenotypes, we established a direct association between voter turnout and monoamine oxidase A (MAOA) and a gene-environment interaction between turnout and the serotonin transporter (5HTT) gene among those who frequently participated in religious activities. In other research we have also found an association between voter turnout and a dopamine receptor (DRD2) gene that is mediated by a significant association between that gene and the tendency to affiliate with a political party. Thus we are beginning to find specific genes that can help us to predict who will vote and who won't.
The philosophical framework of liberalism makes it hard for Democrats to articulate the intuitions that most people share. Caring for a particular, individual baby, even a "special needs" baby, and being part of a particular, individual family, even a complex, messy family, are intrinsic human goods. Politics should help people achieve them successfully.
belief make tacit claims about normativity: claims not merely about how we human beings think and behave, but about how we should think and behave. Factual beliefs like "water is two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen" and ethical beliefs like "cruelty is wrong" are not expressions of mere preference. To really believe a proposition (whether about facts or values) is also to believe that one has accepted it for legitimate reasons.
Despite the remonstrations of people like Jonathan Haidt and Richard Shweder, science has long been in the values business. Scientific validity is not the result of scientists abstaining from making value judgments; it is the result of scientists making their best effort to value principles of reasoning that reliably link their beliefs to reality, through valid chains of evidence and argument.
This reliable failure of human reasoning is just that—a failure of reasoning. It does not suggest that there isn't a single correct answer to the Monty Hall problem. While it might seem the height of arrogance to say it, the people who actually understand the Monty Hall problem really do hold the "logical high ground."
Haidt appears to consider it an intellectual virtue to adopt, uncritically, the moral categories of his subjects. But where is it written that everything that people do or decide in the name of "morality" deserves to be considered part its subject matter?
counties of
the US that produce the wealth and innovation voted overwhelmingly
Democratic and the counties of the US that depend on government
subsidy or that simply underperform economically voted overwhelmingly
Republican.
the Republican success of the last
generation, since Nixon and Reagan cracked the code, has been to
exploit irrelevant (to national policy) anxieties. We are at the
point where the national maneuvering for office has nothing to do with
argument (so much for folks who say that "the economy should be
Obama's best argument") and everything to do with positioning a
message between now and election day so that pulling the lever or
pushing the button or punching the chad for one candidate makes you
feel morally satisfied, which is to say, less anxious and guilty and
ashamed.

the
humanistic culture of the orator from Demosthenes to Martin Luther
King Jr. is decisively gone. We don't fully understand what's
replacing it, but it's happening all around us—you might even call
it a third culture...

It is common to make the assumption that people are thinking when they vote and they are making reasoned choices. I harbor no such illusion. No argument I have ever gotten into with these people, (despite avoiding talking to them, I sometimes can't resist saying something true) has ever convinced anyone of anything. They are not reasoning, nor do they want to try. They simply believe what they believe.
It is all very nice to come up with complex analyses of what is going on. As is often the case, the real answer is quite simple. Most people can't think very well. They were taught not to think by religion and by a school system that teaches that knowledge of state capitals and quadratic equations is what education is all about and that well reasoned argument and original ideas will not help on a multiple choice test.
they are not equipped to think about politics and, in my mind, they are not equipped to vote. The fact that we let them vote while failing to encourage them to think for themselves is a real problem for our society.