Discover Mind & Brain

Neurons transplanted into mouse spines reverse chronic pain | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Thu, 24 May 2012 15:10:35 +0000

Several neural diseases, including chronic pain and epilepsy, involve a lack of restraint. That is, damage to nerves in the spine reduces the levels of a signalling chemical called GABA, which silences excitable neurons. The result: too much neural activity.

There are drugs that can restore GABA, but they don’t always work, they are only temporary and they have unwanted side effects like sedation. There is another option: transplant GABA-producing neurons directly into the spine. Scientists have now done this in mice, with successful results.

I covered the story for The Scientist. Check it out.

Photo by Nanny Snowflake

My new story on psychology’s problem with replications | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Wed, 16 May 2012 16:23:33 +0000

I have a new feature out in Nature looking at two big problems within the field of psychology. First, the field is almost entirely dominated by positive results, while negative ones languish unpublished in personal file drawers. Second, there are few incentives to replicate old results and negative replication attempts face a lengthy gauntlet of obstacles. In the story, I look at why these problems exist and why some psychologists are starting to take them very seriously.

The piece has its origins in an incident that regular readers will already know. In January, Stephane Doyen and colleagues had unsuccessfully tried to repeat a classic experiment where people walk more slowly down a corridor after being unconsciously primed with age-related words. I wrote about their research. Two months later, the man behind the original study – John Bargh of Yale University – wrote a scathing attack on Doyen’s team, me, and the journal that published the study. I responded.

The ensuing discussion opened my eyes to an undercurrent of unrest. Many psychologists came out of the woodwork to mention experiments that were hard to replicate, common practices that they ...

Tapeworms in the brain: Fearfully common | The Loom

Tue, 15 May 2012 21:29:03 +0000

We’ve all heard about tapeworms getting into the intestines. That’s bad enough. But sometimes they can also end up in the brain. In my column in the latest issue of Discover, I write about neurocysticercosis, which is shockingly common in some parts of the world, causing an estimated five million cases of epilepsy. Yet neurocysticercosis experts consider the disease as a fairly easy one to wipe out. We have the tools to do it, but not the will. Check it out.

Dogs Catch Yawns From Their Owners. Does That Mean They Empathize with Us? | 80beats

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:45:45 +0000

One sleepy person can start a bout of contagious yawning that quickly spreads through a room. But a new study suggests the effect may not be limited to the room’s human inhabitants: Dogs can “catch” yawns from people, the study found—especially their owners, hinting that pooches may empathize with familiar people.

When listening to recordings of people yawning, 12 of the 29 dogs in the study yawned themselves. It made a big difference, however, whom they heard: The dogs yawned more than four times as much when they heard their owner yawn as when they heard as a stranger.

Earlier work has suggested a link between contagious yawning and empathy. Humans and chimps both yawn more when friends and acquaintances yawn than when strangers yawn, and people who don’t have much insight into what others are feeling—such as very young children and people with autism—don’t seem to catch contagious yawns. This is some of the strongest evident yet that dogs—humans’ constant companions for 15,000 years—may be able to empathize with us. But a yawn alone can’t tell us what’s going on in a dog’s brain, or its heart of hearts. A similar ...

The Brain: Hidden Epidemic:  Tapeworms Living Inside People's Brains | DISCOVER

Tue, 15 May 2012 15:00:00 +0000

Theodore Nash sees only a few dozen patients a year in his clinic at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. That’s pretty small as medical practices go, but what his patients lack in number they make up for in the intensity of their symptoms. Some fall into comas. Some are paralyzed down one side of their body. Others can’t walk a straight line. Still others come to Nash partially blind, or with so much fluid in their brain that they need shunts implanted to relieve the pressure. Some lose the ability to speak; many fall into violent seizures.

Underneath this panoply of symptoms is the same cause, captured in the MRI scans that Nash takes of his patients’ brains. Each brain contains one or more whitish blobs. You might guess that these are tumors. But Nash knows the blobs are not made of the patient’s own cells. They are tapeworms. Aliens.

A blob in the brain is not the image most people have when someone mentions tapeworms. These parasitic worms are best known in their adult stage, when they live in people’s intestines and their ribbon-shaped bodies can grow as long as 21 feet. But that’s just one stage in the animal’s life cycle. Before they become adults, tapeworms spend time as larvae in large cysts. And those cysts can end up in people’s brains, causing a disease known as neurocysticercosis.

“Nobody knows exactly how many people there are with it in the United States,” says Nash, who is the chief of the Gastrointestinal Parasites Section at NIH...

Image: A human brain overrun with cysts from Taenia solium, a tapeworm that normally inhabits the muscles of pigs. Courtesy of Theodore E. Nash , M.D.

Paranormal Circumstances: One Influential Scientist's Quixotic Mission to Prove ESP Exists | DISCOVER

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:40:00 +0000

On a winter afternoon last March, Daryl Bem stepped out of the psychology department building at Cornell University, dressed in a red parka and a woolen hat to fend off the icy wind. As he walked along the pavement, navigating mounds of snow and taking care not to step onto the slushy street, the well-bundled social psychologist looked like a man who might prefer staying safe within the boundaries, a man who might shun risk—proving once again the danger of mistaking surface for substance. The 73-year-old Bem has defied the norm throughout his intellectual life, burning every dogma he’s encountered in the pyre of his logic. Now, in the twilight of his career, he has committed what may be his most daring act of sacrilege: claiming the existence of precognition, the ability to sense future events. Maybe this time, his colleagues say, Daryl Bem has gone too far.

Bem made his mark as a psychologist four decades ago by proposing the then radical idea that people adjust their emotions after observing their own behavior–that we sometimes develop our attitudes about our actions only after the fact. The proposition challenged the prevailing wisdom of the 1960s that things worked the other way around, that attitude was the engine from which behavior emerged. Though counterintuitive, Bem’s theory has held up to scientific scrutiny in dozens of studies and is now enshrined in psychology textbooks.

Over the years, Bem cemented his reputation as a rebel by floating other controversial theories on topics such as personality and sexual orientation. His own personal life was also decidedly unconventional. Despite being married to a woman, Bem never hid from his family the fact that he is gay. A few years ago, he explained this conjugal conundrum in an Internet posting distinguishing between romantic love and sexual attraction, arguing that many individuals—like himself—fall in love with a person of the “wrong” gender.

Even in the context of a career of irreverence, there was little to suggest that Bem would end up defending the possibility of extrasensory perception, or ESP, which most mainstream scientists consider unworthy of serious inquiry. Through most of his career, he was as dubious about telepathy (mind reading) or precognition (seeing the future) as any of his colleagues...

Photograph: Shannon Taggart

Scanning man’s best friend | The Loom

Fri, 11 May 2012 22:26:26 +0000

We’ve learned a lot about how the brain works from functional magnetic resonance images. I should clarify: we’ve learned a lot about the human brain. Thousands of people have volunteered to lie down inside fMRI scanners and have the activity in their brains monitored as they perform different kinds of mental tasks, or even just do nothing at all. We must resist the temptation to look at the pretty fMRI images and think they’re just photographs of the mind. They’re actually more like very complex, statistically worked-over graphs. But even with those caveats, there’s a lot to learn from them. But fMRI only works if you hold very, very still. Having been scanned myself for a story a few years back, I can vouch that this experience takes a lot of patience, and a high tolerance for loud buzzing noises and for narrow, confined spaces. Scientists have managed to take fMRI scans of monkeys and rats, but they’ve either been knocked out cold, or restrained so the images of their brains don’t blur. If you can persuade a gorilla to lie peacefully in the bore of a scanner for half ...

Discover Interview: The World's Most Celebrated Virus Hunter: Ian Lipkin | DISCOVER

Fri, 11 May 2012 16:05:00 +0000

When Ian Lipkin chose a career in infectious diseases, he envisioned hunting for pathogens in daring treks around the world. Though disappointed to learn that modern-day virus hunters work largely from the lab, he still wound up a pioneer. At the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, then at the University of California, Irvine, and since 2001 as director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, Lipkin has developed groundbreaking techniques that have helped a new generation of disease detectives sleuth out the infectious roots of mystery ills, chronic disease, and neuropsychiatric disorders like autism and OCD. Lipkin’s signature invention is a technology called Mass Tag PCR, which searches through large numbers of known viral and bacterial genomes to identify a culprit in a few hours. He often complements this test with others, including microbial detection microchips (GreeneChips) and gene sequencers that can complete an exhaustive search for known and unknown pathogens within a tissue sample in less than a day.

When DISCOVER features editor Pamela Weintraub interviewed Lipkin last year, he had to cut his workday short because his dog, Koprowski—a gift from Polish virologist Hilary Koprowski—was desperately sick. Lipkin had a treatment plan: not an antiviral drug or chemotherapy, but red meat. “It has antibiotics, it has growth hormone, it has everything. Koprowski’s my best friend in the world,” he explained before descending into the subway and heading home.

You were in the first class of men at Sarah Lawrence, where you studied anthropology, even shamanism. Yet you are known for hunting pathogens. How did that come about?
 I felt that if I went straight into cultural anthropology after college I’d be a parasite. I’d go someplace, take information about myths and ritual, and have nothing to offer. So I decided to become a medical anthropologist and try to bring back traditional medicines. Suddenly I found myself in medical school.

 But you didn’t become a medical anthropologist. Instead you studied neurological disease and infection. Why?
 By 1977 I had gotten a fellowship at the Institute for Neurology in London, where a professor named John Newsom-Davis was working on myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disorder characterized by weakness often so profound that people lose their ability to breathe. Back then, nobody really understood what the disorder was. John was trying something new, treating it with plasmapheresis...

Meat-eating plant digests insects using ants | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Wed, 09 May 2012 21:00:20 +0000

Many insects eat plants, but some plants can turn the tables on their would-be diners. The pitcher plants are among several groups that can capture insects and digest their flesh. And one species – the fanged pitcher plant – goes even further. It digests insects with insects.

There are around 120 species of pitcher plants and all of them have large leaves that fold to produce fluid-filled traps. The rims of the pitchers are usually extremely slippery, and insects that wander by lose their foothold and fall into the pool of fluid within. There, they drown and are digested by the plant.

The fanged pitcher is unusual. Its rim lacks the usual waxy layer and is less slippery than those of its cousins. And it’s the only species that recruits ants. The base of each pitcher contains a swollen tendril that houses ants of the species Camponotus shcmitzi. These insects are permanent residents; they’ve never been seen in any other plant.

People have assumed that this is yet another case of a plant-ant alliance. Aside from accommodation, the ants also get food from the nectar that exudes ...

Do Unhatched Chicks Sleep and Wake In Their Eggs? | 80beats

Tue, 08 May 2012 14:07:24 +0000

You go to sleep at night, you wake up in the morning—the definition of sleep doesn’t seem so complicated. But start asking questions and things start getting thorny: Are dolphins that never stop swimming sleeping? Are migrating birds that “shut down” half their brains sleeping? Is someone under general anesthesia sleeping? And what about babies in the womb?

Unborn human babies in the womb are pretty difficult to monitor 24/7, so the researchers interested in that last question got ahold of unhatched chicken eggs. In a new Current Biology paper, they report that chicks show higher-brain activity patterns similar to sleep, and the cries of a hen could “wake up” the chick even when other loud but not chicken-salient sounds could not. These higher-brain activity patterns only appear in the last stage of incubation, presumably after their brains become well developed.

To monitor brain activity in the chicks, the scientists carefully made a small hole in the top of the egg and injected radioactive sugars onto the egg’s inner membrane. The developing embryo absorbed these sugars, which the team could then track with a PET scan. Active neurons need energy, which they get from sugar, so ...

Dolphins that help humans to catch fish form tighter social networks | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Tue, 01 May 2012 23:00:30 +0000

In the coastal waters of Laguna, Brazil, a shoal of mullet is in serious trouble. Two of the most intelligent species on the planet – humans and bottlenose dolphins – are conspiring to kill them. The dolphins drive the mullet towards the fishermen, who stand waist-deep in water holding nets. The humans cannot see the fish through the turbid water. They must wait for their accomplices.

As the fish approach, the dolphins signal to the humans by rolling at the surface, or slapping the water with their heads or tails. The nets are cast, and the mullet are snared. Some manage to escape, but in breaking formation, they are easy prey for the dolphins.

http://youtu.be/sVinWYmu5lQ

According to town records, this alliance began in 1847, and involves at least three generations of both humans and dolphins. Today, there are around 55 dolphins in the neighbourhood, and around 45 per cent of them interact with the fishermen.

Now, Fabio Daura-Jorge from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil studied Laguna’s dolphins to learn how their unusual collaboration has shaped their social networks. He spent two years taking photographs of the local dolphins, and ...

Gallery | Ink Wants to Form Neurons, and an Artful Scientist Obliges | DISCOVER

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:50:00 +0000

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Neurons in a pigeon’s brain respond to magnetic fields | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 18:00:47 +0000

In retrospect, the helmet should have been a clue…

Of all the super-senses that animals possess, the ability to sense the Earth’s magnetic field must be the most puzzling. We’ve known that birds can do it since the 1960s, but every new attempt to understand this ability – known as magnetoreception – just seems to complicate matters even further.

Take the latest discovery. Le-Qing Wu and David Dickman from the Baylor College of Medicine have found neurons in a pigeon’s brain that encode the properties of a magnetic field. They buzz in different ways depending on how strong the field is, and which direction it’s pointing in.

This is a big step. Scientists have identified parts of the brain that are important for magnetoreception, but no one has managed to nail down the actual neurons responsible for the sense. Miriam Liedvogel, who studies magnetic senses, calls it “a milestone in the field”. It’s a key puzzle piece that has been unavailable for a very long time.

But Wu and Dickman’s discovery doesn’t solve the magnetoreception puzzle. If anything, it makes it more complex. Until recently, scientists thought that ...

Want to Make Rational Decisions? Think About Them In a Foreign Language. | 80beats

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 16:48:46 +0000

Behavioral economists have documented the all too many ways that humans are predictably irrational. Emotions and biases often just get the better of us. In a new study in Psychological Science, however, psychologists found that people forced to think in a foreign language made more rational decisions. C’est vrai!

Psychologists took classic scenarios from behavioral economics and posed them to students in their native and foreign languages. Here’s an example of one:

There’s a disease epidemic sweeping through the country, and without medicine, 600,000 people will die. You have to choose one of two medicines to make:

If you choose medicine A, 200,000 people will be saved. If you choose medicine B, there is a 1/3 chance of saving 600,000 people and a 2/3 of saving no one. Which medicine do you choose?

Most people would go with A, the less risky bet, because we’re risk-averse when the choice is framed as a gain—as in “saving people.” But what if we framed the question a little differently in this second scenario?

If you choose medicine A, 400,000 people will die. If you choose medicine B, there is a 1/3 chance of saving 600,000 people and a 2/3 of saving no ...

Found: The Cause of Brain Freeze and Ice Cream Headaches | Discoblog

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 14:52:17 +0000

Ow, my anterior cerebral artery!

Next time a bite of ice cream is ruined by brain freeze, you’ll know what to blame. New research suggests that changes in blood flow in the brain—and through the anterior cerebral artery in particular—are correlated with that flash of pain while eating cold food.

In a study presented at the Experimental Biology conference this week in San Diego, researchers got 13 participants to sip ice water through a straw pressed right against the roof of their mouths—prime conditions for brain freeze. Blood flow in their brain was measured using transcranial Doppler as they sipped. At the moment the ice water sippers got brain freeze, the anterior cerebral artery dilated to let blood rush through the brain. When the artery constricted again, the pain also subsided.

Jorge Serrador, who carried out the research, speculates that brain freeze is a self-defense mechanism for the brain. A rush of warm blood keeps the vital organ from getting cold. (On the other hand if the brain gets too hot, yawning may be one way of cooling it down.) The downside of that hot blood rush is that forcing more blood in the skull is ...

How Our Brains Set the World Spinning | The Loom

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 21:00:10 +0000

If there’s ever excuse to publish an optical illusion as cool as the “Rotating Snakes,” I’ll take it. This illusion was invented in 2003 by Akiyoshi Kitaoka of Ritsumeikan University in Japan, and ever since, Kitaoka and other scientists have been trying to figure out why it works. A new paper by Stephen Macknik at the Barrow Neurological Institute in Phoenix may have the answer.

As you’ll notice, the circles seem to rotate in response to where you look at the illusion. So Macknik and his colleagues tracked the movement of people’s eyes as they gazed at two of these wheels on a computer screen. Their subjects kept a finger pressed on a button, lifting it whenever they seemed to see the wheels move.

Macnick and his colleagues found a tight correlation between the onset of the illusion and a kind of involuntary movement our eyes make, known as microsaccades. Even when we’re staring at a still object, our eyes keep darting around. These movements, called microsaccades, help us compensate for a peculiar property of the eye: if we stare at an object for too long, the signals each photoreceptor sends ...

Brain decoder allows monkeys to control paralysed muscles | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 10:40:07 +0000

Spinal injuries often leave people with paralysed limbs, as commands from their brains can no longer reach the muscles in their arms. So why not bypass the spine entirely? A team from Northwestern University has used a brain decoder to give monkeys control over their temporarily anaesthetised arms. The decoder deciphers the activity in the monkey’s motor cortex (the part of the brain that controls movements), and electrodes in the monkey’s arm stimulate its muscles in the right way. Even though it can’t feel its arm, it can grab a ball using this electronic middle-man.

I covered this research in more detail at The Scientist, including some comments from a few skeptical scientists, who are concerned about the technique’s limitations.

Brains, Genes, and You: My Discover column on the Duke Neurogenetics Study | The Loom

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:49:38 +0000

I’ve got a new column in Discover on a scientist tracing the links from our genes to our personality. Here’s how it starts:

Ahmad Hariri stands in a dim room at the Duke University Medical Center, watching his experiment unfold. There are five computer monitors spread out before him. On one screen, a giant eye jerks its gaze from one corner to another. On a second, three female faces project terror, only to vanish as three more female faces, this time devoid of emotion, pop up instead. A giant window above the monitors looks into a darkened room illuminated only by the curve of light from the interior of a powerful functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. A Duke undergraduate—we’ll call him Ross—is lying in the tube of the scanner. He’s looking into his own monitor, where he can observe pictures as the apparatus tracks his eye movements and the blood oxygen levels in his brain.

Ross has just come to the end of an hour-long brain scanning session. One of Hariri’s graduate students, Yuliya Nikolova, speaks into a microphone. “Okay, we’re done,” she says. Ross emerges from the machine, pulls his sweater over his head, and signs ...

The Brain: Can a Brain Scan Tell You What Drugs to Take and Choices to Make? | DISCOVER

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:50:00 +0000

As he’s about to leave, he notices the image on the far-left computer screen: It looks like someone has sliced his head open and imprinted a grid of green lines on his brain. The researchers will follow those lines to figure out which parts of Ross’s brain became most active as he looked at the intense pictures of the women. He looks at the brain image, then looks at Hariri with a smile. “So, am I sane?”

Hariri laughs noncommitally. “Well, that I can’t tell you.”

True enough: On its own, Ross’s brain can’t tell Hariri much. But a thousand brains? That’s another matter...

Numbers: The Majority of Minors Have Faced Mental Illness | DISCOVER

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 19:35:00 +0000

82.5: The percentage of children and young adults who exhibit significant symptoms of mental illness at some point between the ages of 9 and 21. The startling statistic comes from a collaborative study conducted by Duke University and the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services, which surveyed 1,420 children over 12 years beginning in 1993. Investigators checked in up to nine times to test for anxiety, depression, addiction, obsessive-compulsive  disorder, and more. The results...

Juicers, Trippers, and Crocodiles: The Dangerous World of Underground Chemistry | DISCOVER

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 16:45:00 +0000

Nobody dreams of growing up and landing a low-paying job in New Jersey making chemicals used in shampoos and hair gels. And on those long, tedious days back in 1991 when a 24-year-old lab technician named Patrick Arnold stood alone in a room stirring thickening agents into smelly vats of goo, there was plenty of time to reflect on the twists of fate that had condemned him to work in a place where “nothing interesting ever happened,” in a job that was “just going nowhere.”

It took months to find the way out, but the path was there in front of him all along. Arnold was an avid weight lifter, cursed with an average build that had long ago stopped cooperating with his efforts to get bigger. Even so, every night after work he would head to one of several gyms where he pumped iron and talked shop with other muscleheads. The conversation would often turn to anabolic steroids. Arnold had majored in chemistry at the University of New Haven, and those weight-room discussions got him thinking.

One afternoon after starting the day’s reactions at work, Arnold marched down the hall to the chemistry library on his floor and looked up the molecular structures of the steroids mentioned in his muscle magazines. Anabolic steroids, which are essentially synthetic testosterone, had only just been declared controlled substances, so there was still an awful lot of information available about them.

It wasn’t long before it hit him: “I hate my job, I’m sitting here, I’ve got a lab—I can try making some of these things myself. No one will even know what the hell I’m doing.” Arnold added the steroid precursors he would need to the regular list of laboratory chemicals he ordered through the company, and nobody was the wiser...

How to Treat Drug Addiction With Videos of Drug Use | 80beats

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 15:39:36 +0000

What’s the News: Retrieving a memory in your brain is a bit like taking an old keepsake off the shelf. If you get startled while holding grandma’s old vase in your hands, you could drop and break it. Memory retrieval is just as vulnerable to disruption, and scientists have tried to exploit this fact to erase PTSD-associated memories with drugs.

A new study in Science tries a different tack, using a behavioral approach to rid people of addictions to drugs. Addiction is sometimes treated with “extinction,” which means showing patients drug-related images while they’re off drugs, so that, for example, they stop associating needles with a high. The researchers found that retrieving drug memories right before an extinction session—basically, giving them a short exposure to drug-related stimulus, followed by a similar but longer exposure session—made the treatment more effective in both rats and humans.

How the Heck:

The researchers got rats addicted to either cocaine or morphine and gave them a short memory-retrieval session 10 minutes, one hour, or six hours before the longer extinction session. Memory retrieval was done by giving the rats a light and sound cue they had previously learned to associate with getting high. ...

Science's Long—and Successful—Search for Where Memory Lives | DISCOVER

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 15:35:00 +0000

Marilyn  Monroe and Jane Russell appeared  outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre  to write their names and leave imprints  of their hands and high heels in the  wet concrete. Down on their knees,  supported by a velvet-covered pillow for their elbows, they wrote “Gentlemen  Prefer Blondes” in looping script, followed by their signatures and the date, 6-26-53. But how did those watching the  events of that day manage to imprint a memory trace of it, etching the details with neurons and synapses in the soft cement of the brain? Where and how are those memories written, and what is the molecular alphabet that spells out the  rich recollections of color, smell, and sound?

After more than a century of searching, an answer was recently found, strangely enough, just eight miles from Grauman’s. Although not located on any tourist map, the scene of the discovery can be reached easily from Hollywood Boulevard by heading west on Sunset to the campus of UCLA. There, amid one of the densest clusters of neuroscience research facilities in the world, stands the Gonda (Goldschmied) Neuroscience and Genetics Research Center. And sitting at a table in the building’s first-floor restaurant, the Café Synapse, is the neuroscientist who has come closer than anyone ever thought possible to finding the place where memories are written in the brain.

That spot, the physical substrate of a particular memory, has long been known in brain research as an engram. Decades of scientific dogma asserted that engrams exist only in vast webs of connections, not in a particular place but in distributed neural networks running widely through the brain. Yet a series of pioneering studies have demonstrated that it is possible to lure specific memories into particular neurons, at least in mice. If those neurons are killed or temporarily inactivated, the memories vanish. If the neurons are reactivated, the memories return. These same studies have also begun to explain how and why the brain allocates each memory to a particular group of cells and how it links them together and organizes them—the physical means by which the scent of a madeleine, the legendary confection that sparked Marcel Proust’s memory stream, leads to remembrance of things past.

“It’s amazing,” says neurobiologist Alcino Silva...

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Gallery | Beauty & Brains: The Best of the Art of Neuroscience | DISCOVER

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 16:30:00 +0000

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Democrats & Republicans Don’t Care Much About Each Other’s Physical Distress | 80beats

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 15:39:55 +0000

As we descend into another election year, it would be nice if we could remember that people across the political divide are, er, people too. Unfortunately, that’s harder than it sounds, according to a new study in Psychological Science. Democrats and Republicans both are less likely to empathize with people from the opposite end of the political spectrum.

Psychologists know that empathy is often dependent on similarity. It’s easier, for example, to empathize with Jack London’s characters when you’re reading about Yukon explorers at a snowy bus stop than on the beach in Cancun. The researchers devised a clever experiment where students at a Michigan bus stop in January were asked to do a “reading comprehension” test. The short story they read, about a hiker who gets lost without clothes, food, or water, also inserted some clues to the hiker’s political affiliations.

In the follow-up test, questions about story details were mixed in with questions probing how the reader reacted to the hiker being cold. Students with political views similar to the hiker’s rated the character as feeling colder than students with opposite political views (7.8 versus 5.5 out of 10). When participant and hiker shared ...

Surprise! Fruit Fly Circadian Rhythms Are Different in Nature Than in the Lab | 80beats

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 18:39:40 +0000

A fruit fly in its natural habitat

In circadian rhythm research, the single best-studied organism is probably the fruit fly. It was through grinding up the heads of countless flies that scientists discovered molecular clock genes, which were then found to play similar roles in humans. But when it come to how actual fly behavior changes in a 24-hour period, a recent study questions whether conventional lab wisdom is wrong. A new paper in Nature put those same lab-bred fruit flies in a natural habitat and observed bursts of activity at unexpected times.

Two set of experiments, one in Italy and another right in the backyard of the lead researcher in England, found that flies are diurnal. That means they’re most active during the day, specifically the afternoon with small upticks in activity during dawn and dusk. While this may not sound exciting by itself, it upends decades of lab research that said fruit flies take a “siesta” during the day and have dramatic bursts of morning and evening activity. This behavior is so well-accepted that there are neuron clusters of the fly brain called morning and evening oscillators whose activity corresponds to the ...

Will we ever have a fool-proof lie detector? | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 12:57:30 +0000

Here’s the fourth piece from my new BBC column

In The Truth Machine, a science-fiction novel published in 1996, scientists invent a device that can detect lies with perfect accuracy. It abolishes crime, changes the world, and generally saves humanity from self-destruction. Which is nice.

Could such a machine ever be a reality? Not if our current technology is anything to go by. The polygraph has been around for almost a century, with wired-up offenders and twitching needles becoming a staple of criminal investigations. But there is no solid evidence that the signs it looks for – faster heart rates, shallower breaths and moist skin – can accurately indicate whether someone is telling a lie. Underpinned by fluffy theory and backed by a weak and stagnant evidence base, this lie-detection device is unlikely to get any better.

Inside the brain

Abandoning the polygraph, some scientists have turned to brain scanners. Two technologies have dominated the field. The first uses electronic sensors on a person’s scalp to measure an electrical signal, or “brainwave”, called the P300, which appears when we recognise something. By looking for this signal, you ...

Vital Signs: Boys and Brains and Genes | DISCOVER

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 16:00:00 +0000

The five-year-old ran into my exam room with his mother trailing behind. He wore a Transformers T-shirt and jeans that each bore signs of a recent encounter with a chocolate bar. Immediately he took a toy train apart and scattered the pieces all over the floor. “The kindergarten teacher said she doesn’t think Jason belongs in the class,” the mother said to me. “But we’re not sure.” Jason’s pediatrician had referred him to me because of his hyperactive behavior. “New patient to me,” her note said. “No old records available. Very hyperactive, difficult to examine, possible  developmental delay: refer to developmental pediatrician.”

Having been a general pediatrician for many years before specializing in developmental pediatrics, I sympathized with her. The 20 minutes allotted for a standard exam wasn’t nearly enough to try to figure out what was going on with this child.

Jason was now busy with a ball, but then quickly moved to a book and began turning the pages and pointing to every picture, labeling each one: “House! Duck! Train!” Then he was off to crash two trucks together.

His mother looked at him uncomfortably, clearly unsure whether she should try to guide him or let him alone. “It’s ok, nothing here is breakable,” I reassured her. “Tell me what he’s like at home.”

“He’s into everything, just like he is here,” she said. “He can’t sit still for a minute. That’s probably why the kindergarten teacher doesn’t think he belongs there. But...” She paused, as if trying to decide whether or not to say something...

Image: Shutterstock

Tomorrow’s brain debate: simulcast and livestream update #brainbrawl | The Loom

Sun, 01 Apr 2012 19:12:20 +0000

Tomorrow (April 2) Robert Krulwich of Radiolab and I will be at Columbia University to moderate a debate about the future of neuroscience. Entitled, “Does the brain’s wiring make us who we are?” it will bring together Sebastian Seung of MIT and Anthony Movshon of NYU.

The auditorium filled up less than two hours after the tickets were made available online a few weeks ago, and a hefty waiting list quickly took shape. Fortunately, the organizers have made it possible for more people to watch the neurological fireworks. If you’d like to see a live simulcast, you can sign up for a free seat in nearby Pupin Hall 301. Here’s the Eventbrite page where you can grab yours.

If you can’t make it there in person, you can join us in cyberspace by catching the livestream on the Radiolab web site.

And if you want to tweet the debate or follow it on Twitter, please use the hashtag #brainbrawl (I decided #igotyourconnectomerighthere would take up too much space…)

If you’d like get ready for the debate by reading about its origins, here are some places to start:

*My latest Discover brain column is about Seung’s ...

The brain is full of Manhattan-like grids | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 18:00:03 +0000

London’s streets are a mess. Roads bend sharply, end abruptly, and meet each other at unlikely angles. Intuitively, you might think that the cells of our brain are arranged in a similarly haphazard pattern, forming connections in random places and angles. But a new study suggests that our mental circuitry is more like Manhattan’s organised grid than London’s chaotic tangle. It consists of sheets of fibres that intersect at right angles, with no diagonals anywhere to be seen.

Van Wedeen from Massachusetts General Hospital, who led the study, says that his results came as a complete shock. “I was expecting it to be a pure mess,” he says. Instead, he found a regular criss-cross pattern like the interlocking fibres of a piece of cloth.

For years, scientists have been able to trace the outlines of individual neurons by injecting them with telltale chemicals that migrate along their lengths. But this technique can only be used in dead brains, and it’s small in scale. To get the big picture, Wedeen turned to diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a technique that uses magnetic fields to detect the water flowing along our neurons. ...

The Bionic Limb Revolution? Not So Fast | 80beats

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 13:52:35 +0000

A monkey controls his robotic arm with a brain-machine interface.

If this monkey can eat marshmallows with his robotic arm, mind-controlled prosthetics for humans can’t be far off, right? Well, that’s true if all you ever wanted to do with your prosthetic was sit strapped in a chair reaching for marshmallows. But as Michael Chorost explains in a recent feature for Wired, challenges abound when building an arm that works in everyday life.

Over the course of a day, you might use your arm to pick up a chair, unzip your jacket, or scratch your neck—each one of these actions are unique. But statistical algorithms used now can translate the firing of neurons into only a few stereotyped motions. And it’s not just about writing better algorithms; it’s an input problem too. Getting electrodes to pick up signals from the same neurons over time is a continuous battle against the body’s natural defenses:

Electrodes are made of metal. The body is loaded with water, salt, and a dizzying array of other chemicals. Putting them together is like trying to bond a fork and a steak. And the steak fights back by trying to dissolve the fork.

The steak treats the fork as ...

Scientists create mice that automatically label new memories for easy reactivation | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 16:30:09 +0000

Finding a specific memory in your brain is not easy. Is it held within a particular group of neurons? If so, which ones? Are they clustered together, or spread throughout the brain? In science-fiction, a goofy helmet and a fancy operating system is all it takes. In real life, we need a subtler and cleverer technique.

Two independent groups of scientists have devised just such a method, and used it to awaken specific memories in mice. One group even planted a slightly artificial memory. These techniques have great promise. They will allow us to study how memories are formed, how our existing memories affect the creation of new ones, and what happens during the simple act of remembering.

Scientists have long been able to reactivate old memories, but only in a crude and undirected way. Back in the 1940s, brain surgeon Wilder Penfield found that when he electrified the brains of some epileptic patients, they recalled vivid random memories. The results were scattershot, and expectedly so. Even the tiniest of electrodes will shock thousands of neurons. There’s no way of directing the electricity to the specific neurons involved in any particular ...

Google Books Helps Reveal How Words Come and Go | 80beats

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 16:05:30 +0000

Who thought a paper on the history of words could have so many graphs? Enter “culturomics,” an emerging field that drops data-crunching into the laps of humanities professors. Armed with the scanned corpus of Google books, researchers published in 2011 the first culturomics paper, which examined the changing popularity of words over time. The paper hinted at all sorts of possibilites: tracking the evolution of irregular verbs, mapping a politician’s rise to fame, identifying censorship when a name suddenly drops in popularity, etc.

A group of physicists have taken up culturomics with a new study that models the birth and death of words in three languages: Spanish, Hebrew, and English. At the same time they’re crunching serious math, they also have an eye on history. Here are a few of their in findings:

Them’s Fighting Words

War has a dramatic effect on the birth and death of words. The figure above depicts variability in how fast words change in popularity: a high variability over a short period of time is likely due to an influx of new words. Comparing the English and Spanish language corpuses during WWII, the researchers found English shakes up while Spanish remains relatively stable. The pattern reflects the ...

Mapping 100 Trillion Connections: My new brain column for Discover | The Loom

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 14:52:03 +0000

Our 80 billion neurons form an estimated 100 trillion connections. Through those links surge the signals that make thought possible. Sebastian Seung of MIT has been calling for a full-blown atlas of those connections, because he believes it will help us understand how the brain works and how the brain makes us who we are. In the April issue of Discover, I pay a visit to Seung’s lab to see what he’s up to, and what he hopes for the future. Check it out.

I couldn’t be happier that this column is available a couple weeks before Seung will participate in a public debate about the connectome on April 2, hosted by myself and Robert Krulwich of Radiolab. The tickets were all snapped up about an hour and a half after becoming available online, but I will certainly report back afterwards about how it went.

The Brain: The Connections May Be the Key | DISCOVER

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 17:00:00 +0000

If I didn’t know Sebastian Seung was a neuroscientist, I would have pegged him as a computer game designer. His onyx-black hair seems frozen in a windstorm. He wears black sneakers, jeans, and a frayed bomber jacket over an untucked shirt covered in fluorescent blobs. If someone had blindfolded me on Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, led me into Building 46 on the campus of MIT, past the sign that says Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, taken me up in the elevator to the fifth floor and whisked off the blindfold in Seung’s lab, I still wouldn’t have guessed he had anything to do with brains. There are no specimens floating in jars on the shelves. There are no electrodes plugged into the heads of sea slugs. Instead, I see a dozen young men gazing at monitors, some pushing their computer mice, others drawing tethered pens across digital tablets to manipulate 3-D images, each packed with more megabytes than a feature film on a Blu-ray Disc.

And there is Seung himself, gazing over the shoulder of postdoc Daniel Berger, whose monitor looks like a science fiction forest, with branches and trunks colored turquoise and cherry, floating unrooted in space. I almost find myself wondering when Seung’s next game will hit the stores.

But appearances to the contrary, Seung is an expert on the web of neurons that make up the brain. And the images he’s creating are part of an ambitious attempt to understand how the connections between those brain cells give rise to the mind. “How do you put together dumb cells and get something smart?” he asks.

Neuroscientists know that the brain contains some 100 billion neurons and that the neurons are joined together via an estimated quadrillion connections. It’s through those links that the brain does the remarkable work of learning and storing memory. Yet scientists have never mapped that whole web of neural contact, known as the connectome. It would be as if doctors knew about each of our bones in isolation but had never seen an entire skeleton. The sheer complexity of the connectome has put such a map out of reach until now...

Image: Each branch of each neuron is studded with hundreds of little spines. R. Schalek, B. Kasthuri, K. Hayworth, J. Tapia, J. Lichtman/Harvard and D. Berger, S. Seung/MIT

The Last of the Split-Brain Patients | 80beats

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 14:22:52 +0000

A split-brain patient is unable to say what he sees with his nonverbal right brain, but he can draw it.

Half a century ago, patients with intractable epilepsy were presented with a radical surgery: severe the corpus callosum. Cutting this bundle of fibers that allows the left and right brain hemispheres to communicate created split-brain patients. Their epilepsy got better, but a whole host of other strange things happened, such as left and right hands that would fight over what to get at the supermarket.

Nowadays, these patients have access to better drugs and less invasive surgeries, and severing the corpus callosum is no longer done. A dozen or so of these patients have been the subject of countless scientific studies, but they’re all getting older. A recent Nature News feature talks about just how invaluable these patients have been to neuroscience.

Split-brain patients allow neuroscientists to probe the separate workings of the verbal left brain and nonverbal right brain as well as how they would work together. Michael Gazzaniga, who has been working with split-brain patients for decades, came up with the interpreter theory to explain why patients tend to have a unified sense of self despite having “two brains.” The left hemisphere is ...

Facing sexual rejection, male flies turn to booze | Not Exactly Rocket Science

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 13:00:15 +0000

“A male fruitfly will try to court a female by nuzzling her genitals, tapping her abdomen and singing with his wings. If all that fails, he drowns his sorrows in booze.”

That’s how my latest piece for Nature News starts. It’s obviously a cute result, but there’s some serious and intriguing science underlying it. These twin rewarding activities – sex and drinking – are linked by a chemical called neuropeptide F (NPF), which acts as a sort of currency of reward in the brain.

The study suggests that NPF is part of a system that acts like a ‘reward-thermostat’. If flies aren’t getting rewarding feelings from sex, their levels of NPF fall, and this compels them to get their kicks elsewhere, such as in a boozy meal.

Mammals also have a counterpart of NPF, known as NPY, which may play a similar role. It’s depleted in the brains of people who attempt suicide or suffer from PTSD, and some clinical trials are testing it as a way of dealing with addictions or mood disorders.

Go read the Nature News piece for more.

Would People Rather Smack a Baby or Watch a Baby Get Smacked? (With Pictures!) | Discoblog

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 19:50:20 +0000

Truly one of the strangest figures we’ve ever seen in a paper.

Good news, kids: turns out we humans feel pretty awful about harming other people. That much you’d expect. But there’s a question about exactly what this feeling is: is it more that we feel the victim’s pain, or that we feel especially bad for causing the pain?

Psychologists put this question to the test in a paper called “Simulating murder,” which does, among other things, exactly what the title suggests. They made participants perform a slew of fake violent acts, such as pointing gun at someone’s face or smacking a baby against a desk, and asked partipants to either perform them or watch them being performed. If the victim’s pain was what matters, participants would presumably react the same in both situations.

Instead, participants had higher blood pressure and more constricted blood vessels—indicators of higher stress–when they were the guilty party. The subjects also performed similar but not objectionable physical tasks, like smacking a broom instead of a baby, to make sure simple physical exertion didn’t account for the difference.

Don’t worry, no babies were harmed in this study, though some baby dolls were. From ...

Can a Limb That Never Existed Become a Phantom Limb? | Discoblog

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 18:59:25 +0000

Our brains sometimes just refuse to believe the truth. No, we’re talking not deniers or conspiracy theorists today—just phantom limbs.

If you ask RN, a 57-year-old woman, she would agree that she does not have a right hand: it was amputated after a bad car crash when she was 18. She would also tell you that she has never had a right index finger: she was born with a congenital deformity that gave her only the rudiment of a thumb, immobile ring and middle fingers, and no index finger at at all. More than 35 years after the amputation, she feels pain in a phantom right hand, which has five—not four—fully mobile fingers.

This latest case study recently published by Paul McGeoch and V.S. Ramachandran, leading brain scientists who study phantom limb syndrome, suggests the brain have an innate, hard-wired template for body image that is independent of what we see and feel. The authors say that most people born with congenitally missing limbs do not experience phantom ones, but a small subset do. Why that’s so is unclear, as is the origin of phantom limbs in general.

RN’s phantom phantom finger is similar to the supernumerary phantom ...

The Great Brain Debate: New York, April 2 | The Loom

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 23:20:42 +0000

If you’re in New York please consider joining me and Robert Krulwich of Radiolab on April 2 for a fascinating debate about the future of neuroscience. Tickets are free, but limited, so grab them when they become available on noon, 3/12.

Here are the details from the event page:

Does the brain’s wiring make us who we are?

Two leading neuroscientists debate maps, minds and the future of their field.

Sebastian Seung (MIT) vs. Anthony Movshon (NYU)

Professor of Computational Neuroscience, MIT
Author of Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring
Makes Us Who We Are

Professor and Director,
Center for Neural Science, NYU

Moderators: Robert Krulwich of NPR’s Radiolab and

Carl Zimmer, science journalist (NYTimes, Discover, NPR)

FREE AND OPEN TO THE GENERAL PUBLIC

What will be the next big breakthrough in neuroscience? What will finally explain how brains work, how they fail in disease, and what makes us each unique? Some neuroscientists believe that research would be radically accelerated by finding and deciphering “connectomes,” maps of connections between neurons. Funding agencies are wagering millions of dollars on the idea that connectomics will be as fundamental to neuroscience as genomics is to molecular ...

Autism and the blooming brain: My new column in Discover | The Loom

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 19:59:21 +0000

In my new column for Discover, I write about Eric Courchesne, a neuroscientist at the University of California at San Diego. Courchesne survived childhood polio, went on to become a champion gymnast, and then turned his attention to another nervous system disorder: autism. Courchesne is one of the first researchers to find anatomical differences in the brains of people with and without autism. He believes his findings point to autism’s beginnings before birth, and perhaps even to new ways to treat it. Check it out.

[Image: SFARI]

What’s That in Your Pocket? Is That a Speeeeeech……Jammmm….. | Discoblog

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 17:06:35 +0000

Who hasn’t suffered a fool who won’t shut up? Suffer no more—Japanese scientists have invented a portable SpeechJammer that they say can get someone to stop talking mid-sentence.

The device described in a paper on arXiv is nothin’ fancy. It’s basically a speaker and a mic that work together to exploit a neat psychological trick: if your speech is played back with a slight delay, it becomes really hard to keep talking. The SpeechJammer works with a delay of 0.2 seconds but anything up to 1.4 seconds (pdf) also works. Because your brain relies on auditory feedback when you speak, the slight, very unnatural delayed feedback screws with the cognitive process.

According to the authors, this technique also has the advantages of only affecting the speaker and afflicting no physical damage. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work on non-word sounds, like yelling or humming. Sorry to get your hopes up, parents of screaming toddlers.

If you haven’t got a SpeechJammer handy, here’s a neat way to test this trick yourself:

Go to Gchat. Start a chat with this bot: echo@bot.talk.google.com. Try talking to yourself.

Ahh weird! The echo bot—designed to test audio and visual quality for videochatting—does exactly what its name suggests it does. ...

No Surprise: Pot Messes With Memory. Surprise: It’s Not by Affecting Neurons. | 80beats

Tue, 06 Mar 2012 16:33:44 +0000

Human astrocyte. The vivid color is from GFP, not drugs.

What’s the News: “Marijuana makes you forgetful,” say most headlines about this paper, but let’s face it, that’s not news. That’s the premise of every stoner comedy ever made.

The real news is the importance of a type of brain cells called astroglia, which have long been ignored while researchers focus on neurons. THC, the psychoactive chemical in marijuana, impairs working memory by connecting to astroglia, according to a new paper published in Cell. So the star-shaped astroglia turn out to be the real star of this study.

How the Heck:

Researchers injected synthetic THC into the hippocampuses of rats and recorded their brain activity, finding that THC weakened connections between specific neurons. Then they took three types of mutant mice: two without THC receptors in their neurons and another without THC receptors in their astroglia. When they again injected THC, it had the same, original effect on the first two mutants and no effect on rats with astroglia that had no THC receptors. That suggests the THC acts directly on astroglia rather than neurons. The team then showed that the signaling molecule ...

The Brain: The Troublesome Bloom of Autism | DISCOVER

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:20:00 +0000

Eric Courchesne managed to find a positive thing about getting polio: It gave him a clear idea of what he would do when he grew up. Courchesne was stricken in 1953, when he was 4. The infection left his legs so wasted that he couldn’t stand or walk. “My mother had to carry me everywhere,” he says. His parents helped him learn how to move his toes again. They took him to a pool to learn to swim. When he was 6, they took him to a doctor who gave him metal braces, and then they helped him learn to hobble around on them. Doctors performed half a dozen surgeries on his legs, grafting muscles to give him more strength.

Courchesne was 11 when the braces finally came off, and his parents patiently helped him practice walking on his own. “Through their encouragement, I went on to have dreams beyond what you’d expect,” he says. He went to college at the University of California, Berkeley. One day he stopped to watch the gymnastics team practicing, and the coach asked him to try out. Before long Courchesne was on the team, where he won the western U.S. championship in still rings.

When Courchesne wasn’t competing at gymnastics, he was studying neuroscience. “I understood a neurological disorder firsthand, and I wanted to help other children,” he says. Fortunately, the polio outbreak that snared him in 1953 was the last major one in the United States; a vaccine largely eliminated the disease in this country. But in the mid-1980s, as a newly minted assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, Courchesne encountered a 15-year-old with another kind of devastating neurological disorder: autism...

Scientists Watch Cars at an Intersection, Make Grand Claims About Greed | Discoblog

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 15:54:31 +0000

The intersection in question.

For two Fridays in June 2011, from 3 to 6 pm, two experimenters sat near an intersection in San Francisco and watched the cars. They arranged themselves so that drivers couldn’t see them, and every now and then, they recorded the make and physical appearance of a car and tried to guess the gender and age of the driver. As their chosen cars pulled up to the intersection, they kept track of which ones cut off others. Later, in another study, they positioned an experimenter at a crosswalk. They took note of which cars neglected to stop for the pedestrian.

No, this is not performance art—it’s science!

These studies, and five others that had people variously taking candy from children and pretending to be unscrupulous bosses, were recently published as a paper, in which the researchers claim they collectively show a connection between higher socio-economic class and greed.

The cars perceived as high-status turned out to have been the most frequent cutter-offers. The “upper-class” subjects reported that they took more candy. The subjects with higher socioeconomic class more frequently chose not to tell a job candidate that the job would soon be eliminated and ...

Impatient Futurist: Good News, Spock—We're Getting Closer to a Universal Translator | DISCOVER

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 18:45:00 +0000

Those of us for whom Star Trek serves as a benchmark for technological progress can only bemoan the fact that hopes for faster-than-light travel to other galaxies seem to be receding at warp speed, given that we no longer even have faster-than-sound travel to France. But I would prefer to focus on the bright side: We’re rapidly closing in on the Universal Translator, which means that when I do finally arrive in France, I’ll be able to communicate as easily as if I were on Earth.

The Universal Translator, of course, was a handheld device that  instantly converted Captain Kirk’s futuristically clipped English into the language of whichever vaguely humanoid alien was offering to buy him a blue drink. It is impossible to overemphasize the potential usefulness of such a device on a visit to France, whose vaguely humanoid populace turns Klingon when confronted by a nonspeaker of their primitive but pretty language. Imagine the delight of the garçon when I mumble into my translator, “Can you bring me a good California chardonnay to drown the stench of this cheese?” and out comes flawless French. And back from the device will come a translation of the waiter’s enthusiastic response.

In fact, I already have something surprisingly close to a Universal Translator in my pocket, courtesy of a growing number of automated spoken-language-translating services that run on smartphones. I’m not counting on getting my favorite blue drink in any bar in the world just yet: “These systems still make mistakes that a 4-year-old wouldn’t make,” says Ashish Venugopal, a researcher at Google who works on the company’s Google Translate service. But unlike most 4-year-olds, Google has about a googol million dollars to throw at the problem, and more computing power, too.

Some of that power is spent prowling the web 24/7 to find examples of text—on websites, in email, or anywhere else—that can be paired with translations of that text into another language. The pairs of documents are digested by Google’s computers in chunks of three or so words, with each chunk analyzed and matched to its best translation. Having built in this way a constantly growing database of millions of translation chunks, Google Translate is armed to take on any sentence, find the set of phrases that most closely matches it, and spit back the translation into any of 64 languages. You can go to www.translate.google.com to try the results. Go ahead, do it now. I’ll wait right here...

Emotions and Survival Circuits | The Loom

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:26:28 +0000

Joseph LeDoux of New York University has built his career on studying emotions, especially fear. But now he’s arguing that scientists don’t really have a good definition of emotions. In fact, he is issuing a call to avoid using the e-word at all costs. At Txchnologist, I reflect on how we can understand emotions without the emotions. Check it out.

Of Mice and Men and Medicines | DISCOVER

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 14:55:00 +0000

You won’t find more mentally ill mice per square mile anywhere than in Bar Harbor, Maine. Mice who seem anxious or depressed, autistic or schizophrenic—they congregate here. Mice who model learning disabilities or anorexia; mice who hop around as though your hyperactive nephew had contracted into a tiny fur ball; they are here too. Name an affliction of the human mind, and you can probably find its avatar on this sprucy, secluded island.

The imbalanced mice are kept under the strictest security, in locked wards at the Jackson Laboratory, a nonprofit biomedical facility internationally renowned for its specially bred deranged rodents. Every day trucks carry away boxes and boxes of them for distribution to psychiatric researchers across the nation.

There are no visiting hours, because strangers fluster the mice and might carry in contagious diseases. The animals are attended only by highly qualified caregivers, people like neuroscientist Elissa Chesler. Sitting in her airy Jackson Lab office, accessible to germy and perturbing strangers, Chesler clicks open a series of photographs from a type of mouse personality test on her computer screen. The first picture shows a mouse sleeping on a nestlet, a stiff, square bed of compressed cotton. Mice typically gnaw vigorously at the cotton, shredding it to make soft igloos for sleeping and staying warm. The second image shows a mouse that has propped his nestlet against a wall, forming a makeshift lean-to. “When I see this guy, I’m thinking anxiety,” says Chesler, whose research delves into the genetics of stress. “This design isn’t trapping a lot of heat, but he’s secure under there.”

She smiles as she clicks open the last photo. “And here we have the ‘I can’t deal with it’ mouse,” she says. The image shows a mouse asleep, with his rigid nestlet balanced on his back. Personality, Chesler maintains, can be read from these nestlet styles more clearly than from a test of forced swimming or bar pressing...

The Hive Mind Reader: My Smithsonian profile of Thomas Seeley | The Loom

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 19:52:10 +0000

In the March issue of Smithsonian, I profile Thomas Seeley, a Cornell scientist who has spent forty years pondering how honeybees make up their collective minds. His discoveries reveal some striking parallels between honeybee swarms and our own brains. There are even some lessons we can learn from bees about how to run a democracy.

Reporting this story involved some of the weirdest experiences I’ve ever had, as the introduction to my piece illustrates:

On the front porch of an old Coast Guard station on Appledore Island, seven miles off the southern coast of Maine, Thomas Seeley and I sat next to 6,000 quietly buzzing bees. Seeley wore a giant pair of silver headphones over a beige baseball cap, a wild fringe of hair blowing out the back; next to him was a video camera mounted on a tripod. In his right hand, Seeley held a branch with a lapel microphone taped to the end. He was recording the honeybee swarm huddling inches away on a board nailed to the top of a post.

Seeley, a biologist from Cornell University, had cut a notch out of the center of ...

Brain Cuttings Meets the Woes of the Ebook Business | The Loom

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 13:00:07 +0000

By weird coincidence, on the same day I announce the launch of an ebook review, I get to enjoy some of the harsh realities of the ebook business. Over the past year I’ve published two collections of my pieces about the brain, Brain Cuttings and More Brain Cuttings. I just found out that Amazon has decided, for now, not to sell them. (Here’s some background.)

You still have lots of options for getting your hands on these ebooks.

Scott & Nix, the publisher, offers both titles in pdf and epub formats. (Brain Cuttings, More Brain Cuttings)

Barnes & Noble sells then for the Nook. (Brain Cuttings, More Brain Cuttings)

Apple sells it in them iBookstore. (Brain Cuttings, More Brain Cuttings)

Update: Publisher’s Lunch has the details of the showdown between Amazon and Independent Publishers Group over Kindle titles.