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Tag Archives: Brain and Behavior
How Processing Neural Data Works: A Blowfly Perspective
Blowflies. They are nearly impossible to swat dead, because they are so good at getting out of the way, and they are very very fast. For this reason, the blowfly, while an annoying creature, is an excelent model for research into rapid sensory information processing.
A team of scientists from Indiana University, Princeton University and the Los Alamos National Laboratory recently gained new insight into how blowflies process visual information. The findings, published in an article in the Public Library of Science Journals, show that the precise, sub-millisecond timing of “spikes” from visual motion-sensitive nerve cells encodes complex, detailed information of what the fly is seeing.”There’s a long-standing debate over whether precise, millisecond-scale timing is important to encode information in the nervous system,” said Robert de Ruyter van Steveninck, a biophysics professor at IU who conducted many of the experiments. “Depending on the nature of the information, in some cases it might not be. But for motion sensitive neurons in the blowfly visual system, we show that timing is obviously important, especially in the context of natural visual stimulation.” [press release]
Continue reading How Processing Neural Data Works: A Blowfly Perspective
Jill Bolte Taylor: My stroke of insight
Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened — as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding — she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.
Why the Hobbits of Flores Were Probably Not Broken People
There is a new paper out suggesting that the Flores hominids, known as Hobbits, were “human endemic cretins.”From the abstract of this paper:
… We hypothesize that these individuals are myxoedematous endemic (ME) cretins, part of an inland population of (mostly unaffected) Homo sapiens. ME cretins are born without a functioning thyroid; their congenital hypothyroidism leads to severe dwarfism and reduced brain size, but less severe mental retardation and motor disability than neurological endemic cretins. We show that the fossils display many signs of congenital hypothyroidism, including enlarged pituitary fossa, and that distinctive primitive features of LB1 such as the double rooted lower premolar and the primitive wrist morphology are consistent with the hypothesis. We find that the null hypothesis (that LB1 is not a cretin) is rejected by the pituitary fossa size of LB1, and by multivariate analyses of cranial measures. We show that critical environmental factors were potentially present on Flores, how remains of cretins but not of unaffected individuals could be preserved in caves, and that extant oral traditions may provide a record of cretinism.
Continue reading Why the Hobbits of Flores Were Probably Not Broken People
New-generation antidepressants do not produce clinically significant improvements in depression
In this open access publication in PLoS it is
…suggest that, compared with placebo, the new-generation antidepressants do not produce clinically significant improvements in depression in patients who initially have moderate or even very severe depression, but show significant effects only in the most severely depressed patients. The findings also show that the effect for these patients seems to be due to decreased responsiveness to placebo, rather than increased responsiveness to medication. Given these results, the researchers conclude that there is little reason to prescribe new-generation antidepressant medications to any but the most severely depressed patients unless alternative treatments have been ineffective. In addition, the finding that extremely depressed patients are less responsive to placebo than less severely depressed patients but have similar responses to antidepressants is a potentially important insight into how patients with depression respond to antidepressants and placebos that should be investigated further.
Here is the original article. You don’t need to be special to read it, since it is published in an Open Access journal.
Jason McElwain, Autistic Basketball Hero
[Hat Tip: Dan H.]
Michael Pollan: The omnivore’s next dilemma
What if human consciousness isn’t the end-all and be-all of Darwinism? What if we are all just pawns in corn’s clever strategy game, the ultimate prize of which is world domination? Author Michael Pollan asks us to see things from a plant’s-eye view — to consider the possibility that nature isn’t opposed to culture, that biochemistry rivals intellect as a survival tool. By merely shifting our perspective, he argues, we can heal the Earth. Who’s the more sophisticated species now? Continue reading Michael Pollan: The omnivore’s next dilemma
Brilliant chimp
OK, here’s a quiz for you. You have a tube that is fixed in space. You cannot move it. It is too small for you to get your hands into it, and there is a peanut in the bottom. You want the peanut. How do you extract the peanut?Have a look at how this chimp did it: Continue reading Brilliant chimp
Culture influences brain function
People from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks, MIT researchers and colleagues report in the first brain imaging study of its kind.
This is not that surprising, but it is very interesting research. We already knew, for instance, that people who read and write different “kinds” of languages … pictographic vs. non-pictographic … use different regions of their brain for this function, and thus are differentially affected by strokes or other damage. Continue reading Culture influences brain function