Pure Pedantry

The Last Post

Tue, 19 May 2009 10:04:12 -0500

Hi everyone,

I apologize for my long hiatus from blogging. Things have just been crazy at work lately. All the same it has given me some time to think about what I want from blogging, and where I see myself in the next several years.

For those of you who don't know I am an MD-PhD student which means that when I finish my PhD -- hopefully in about a year -- I will return to medical school. Anyone who has written a dissertation or gone through 3rd of medical school will tell you that neither are particularly conducive to large amounts of free time. So looking forward I have to take into account that finding time for blogging will be more challenging in the future.

Likewise, I have been doing this schtick for three years now, and after over a thousand posts one does begin to struggle for story ideas. I have always been of the opinion that if you are posting something it shouldn't feel like a chore, because if it does what you are writing isn't going to be that interesting. Increasingly, I have to push myself to wake up in the morning and write something.

For these reasons, I have decided to close the Pure Pedantry blog. I know (sigh) we had a good run, but good things come to an end. I have deeply enjoyed writing for all of you as a blogger, and I appreciate all of you that have been my regular readers.

However -- for those of you concerned that I will now vanish off the planet -- I will be continuing to blog for ScienceBlogs in a capacity. Evil Monkey and Scicurious over at Neurotopia have very graciously offered me a job as a co-blogger. While my posting there will be much more irregular than it was here, I will still have a chance to interact with you all. I encourage you to go take a look -- if you haven't already -- at the always interesting conversations that go on at their blog.

In keeping with the aesthetic over at their blog -- and frankly because all the cool kids are doing it these days :) -- I will be adopting the pseudonym NotoriousLTP (but you'll all know it is still me [winks]).

Take care, and I hope to see you all over at Neurotopia.

Yours,
Jake Young

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Razib and I on Bloggingheads.tv

Mon, 27 Apr 2009 13:06:21 -0500

Razib and I have a discussion up at Bloggingheads.tv about genetics and behavior as well as a brief discussion of neuroeconomics. Check it out below the fold:

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Intact Visual Navigation in a Blindsighted Patient

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:21:53 -0500

There is a fascinating case study in Current Biology.

de Gelder et al. discuss a patient -- referred to as TN to protect his privacy -- who had two sequential strokes that damaged his brain. The parts of the brain that were damaged included the primary visual cortex in both hemispheres -- rendering the patient blind. However, the patient could still respond to some visual stimuli through a phenomenon called blindsight.

Even more interesting, the patient could still navigate around visual objects, while reporting being unable to see them and having no memory for what they were.

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Neuroscience of Envy and Schadenfreude

Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:00:30 -0500

I don't think I am alone in saying that I often feel a little envy and schadenfreude towards my peers. Science is a particularly competitive business with few remunerative rewards, so a lot of my self-worth is tied to comparisons with my peer's successes and failures. I won't deny being envious when someone gets a Science paper. And while seeing the abject failure of my peers isn't high on my list of priorities, I won't deny the small satisfaction that I get when someone who breezed through their PhD gets taken down a peg.

These aren't happy-joy-joy emotions. They don't make me swell with pride for the future of humanity. They aren't pleasant, but they are nonetheless humane in that -- except for saints -- they are general to the human species.

Takahashi et al. study the neurology of these darker emotions. The authors use fMRI to examine the activation in the human brain that comes when we feel envy and schadenfreude. The authors find that these abstract emotions activate very visceral systems in the brain -- which says interesting things about how the brain is organized.

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Children ruin everything

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:34:38 -0500

A study discussed over at Live Science confirms what I have always suspected:

An eight-year study of 218 couples found 90 percent experienced a decrease in marital satisfaction once the first child was born.
"Couples who do not have children also show diminished marital quality over time," says Scott Stanley, research professor of psychology at University of Denver. "However, having a baby accelerates the deterioration, especially seen during periods of adjustment right after the birth of a child."

An unrelated study in 2006 of 13,000 people found parents are more depressed than non-parents. Scientists speculate that the problem is partly a modern one, because parents don't get as much help at home as they did in previous generations.

So your saying that a screaming thing waking you in the middle of the night demanding attention (and possibly financial support) isn't the recipe for nuptial bliss? I'm shocked to hear it.

Reminds me of another Dylan Moran sketch I like. (I really am a hack. Posting two Dylan Moran sketches in a month. It's sad really...)

(Video below the fold. NSFW.)

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Technically Difficult: fMRIs on the young

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 16:13:43 -0500

The title of this pre-publication paper is, "Evidence on the emergence of the brain's default network from 2-week-old to 2-year-old healthy pediatric subjects." The authors put kids in functional MRIs to measure resting state activity and detect the emergence of the default network.

While I am certain that it is very interesting research, I have a more technical question: minus sedation, how in Heaven's name did they get the kids to sit still long enough to collect the data? An fMRI is hardly a crib decorated with puppies and ducklings. You feel like you are about to be shot out of a torpedo tube, and the whole thing is about as loud as being face first in the speakers at a Kiss concert. How did they get the two years-olds to put up with that?

Ideas?

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Parkinson's patients are bad liars, here may be why

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 17:05:08 -0500

Neurological diseases can be strange in that they often have additional personality effects. If someone gets a cold, they sneeze a bunch but are basically the same person they were before the cold. In contrast, meningitis can include mental status and personality changes in its early stages -- including irritability and sleepiness. When a disease involves the brain, it can change who we are in addition to making us sick.

In this vein, I found this paper in the journal Brain particularly interesting. Abe et al. report that Parkinson's patients tell fewer lies than controls in a task where they were prompted to do so. In addition, the resting metabolic rate in areas of the brain associated with deception in healthy patients is lower in Parkinson's patients.

The authors argue that -- in addition to the movement difficulties associated with the disease -- Parkinson's may erode other parts of the brain resulting in the lying "deficit." (Whether you consider that a deficit or not is a matter of personal preference.)

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The Ethics of Diagnosing a Stranger

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:23:08 -0500

Nature Clinical Practice Neurology has a salient article on ethics and medicine. The article asks the question: is it ethical to confront an individual with whom you do not have an official doctor-patient relationship, if you think they have a medical problem? Should you or should you not tell them if you see a medical problem?

Neurology is unique among the medical specialties in that much of the clinical examination can be appreciated visually and taught by use of video recordings.3, 4 Since 2003, we have conducted a 'neurological localization course', during which participants are taught correct clinical examination techniques with the help of patients.5 Trainees are often impressed by the wealth of clinical information that can be gleaned by observation alone; for example, how the externally rotated, slightly plantar-flexed attitude of the lower limb of a supine patient can hint at the possibility of an underlying footdrop, or how muscle atrophy, diabetic dermopathy and trophic changes can not only provide clues to an underlying peripheral neuropathy, but can even indicate the level of the stocking paresthesia.

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Watch HIV Cell-to-Cell Transfer, Live!

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 21:10:03 -0500

It's amazing what the kids are up to these days.

This one comes live from Mount Sinai (my present educational residence). Hubner et al., publishing in Science, use an infectious, fluorescent strain of HIV to watch the virus move from one cell to another. Their results are fascinating and may help us develop better ways to treat the disease.

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Sex and Attention

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 12:43:59 -0500

What you think about during sex matters.

A guy who doesn't want to, ahem, proceed too quickly will think of baseball or something non-sex related. A girl who wants to proceed more quickly might focus on surrounding milieu of a loving environment. These are stereotypes, I know, but the fact that we have them does confirm that what we think about during sex matters: what we attend to changes the nature of the experience.

In this vein, Mind Hacks links to a great review of the role of attention in sex. Vaughan makes the point that we tend to view sexual dysfunction as a problem of equipment -- hence prescribing Viagra, when a more accurate diagnosis may be a problem of state-of-mind. Definitely read the whole thing.

It reminds me a funny sketch by one of my favorite comics, Dylan Moran (below the fold):

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Does it matter that cortical thickness correlates with intelligence?

Fri, 27 Mar 2009 11:28:56 -0500

Numerous studies have attempted to correlate general intelligence with different anatomical measures. (You might even argue that the phrenologists were working in this vein.) Likewise many studies have attempted to relate intelligence to the function of different brain regions -- using techniques like fMRI or PET scanning. However, relatively few studies have attempted to correlate general intelligence with anatomical features of particular brains regions.

This is important because we know that the brain works not as regions operating in isolation, but as a set of neural systems comprised by many different brain regions each performing relatively simple tasks. In order to answer the question, "how does intelligence work?", we first have to ask the question, "what brain regions comprise the neural system underlying intelligence?"

Adding to this body of work, Karama et al. published a study that looked at a large cohort of children age 6 to 18 over time using MRI measures and psychological batteries. They attempt to correlate the cortical thickness in different brain regions over time with g-factor -- a measure of general intelligence (more on this in a second). The authors identified several brain regions that correlated well with increased in intelligence over time in this cohort.

I want to talk about both the significance of this paper in our understanding of intelligence and why we might be skeptical that this is the whole story.

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Go Blonde with Fungus

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 11:14:14 -0500

Wired Science reports on a way to bleach your hair without all issues of...you know...turning it so stiff and destroyed that it resembles a donkey tail. All you women of the world itching to turn blonde, take note.

The system involves an enzyme from forest fungus. Which is good somehow. Forest fungus on your hair being good apparently involves a meaning for the word "good" that I was not hitherto familiar with.

Not that it matters for me. The ongoing race about whether I will lose my hair entirely or whether it will turn entirely gray is a dead heat with both being the likely outcome.

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Interesting Comparison: Economics and Relativity

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:48:16 -0500

I caught this interesting sentence over at Marginal Revolution:

as consumption approaches satiation, workers reduce their hours of work to prevent themselves from actually reaching satiation. More technically, as workers approach satiation, their labor supply curves start to "bend backwards." The result is that rising labor demand stemming from rising productivity raises wages yet reduces employment.

Reminds me of relativity. Thus, one would assume that satiation, like the speed of light, is a level of consumption that a workers can never reach.

I have no idea whether this comparison is apt. Both the economics and the physics are above my pay-grade. The original sentence stems from a question and answer that Bryan Caplan asked on his micro midterm.

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Update for the more Wonkish Among Us: Hippocampal Anatomy

Wed, 25 Mar 2009 10:32:23 -0500

I know this will be of interesting for about 1 in a hundred of you, but there is a REALLY good review of hippocampal and parahippocampal region connectivity in April's Nature Review Neuroscience. Of special interest, there is an interactive .pdf in the supplementary information where you can identify the connections between one region to every other region. Also, they discuss the functions of the entorhinal cortex and the subiculum from the point of view of update anatomy.

(Unfortunately behind a subscription wall, but I feel confident that anyone who understood a word of what I just said also has subscription access.)

Hat-tip: Faculty of 1000

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More on Richardson and Epidural Hematomas: Who is to blame?

Tue, 24 Mar 2009 13:00:00 -0500

I have been reading more on the Natasha Richardson story overnight, and it appears the story has moved into blame-placing mode. (For the original discussion of the story, read this.)

Possible places to lay the blame (that I have read thus far):