The latest Encephalon is up over at Brain In A Vat. This issue includes herpes related Alzheimer’s, brain structure of ADHD patients, language in infants and debunking of pseudoscience. Great issue, chock full of interesting articles. Go check it out.

Neuroscience and human behavior still remain mainly a mystery. Because of that, they have accrued an unusually high number of theories. Take any intro to psychology class to see the diversity and breadth of theories that supposedly explain human behavior. So hey, why not add one more?

Two Carnegie Mellon scientists have come up with a new theory, this one based off a computational slant. I haven’t read their paper yet (saving that for my 5 hour layover in Detroit later this week) but the press release makes me dubious. Their theory involves regions of the brain “volunteering” themselves for tasks. When a primary region is damaged, lesser apt regions volunteer to take the load and restore partial function. This mimics how the brain recovers from damage by switching brain activity to a undamaged region.

I’ll withhold criticism until I read the paper, but it sounds far too simplistic. I highly doubt the regions in our brain are volunteering on a moment-to-moment basis over who can perform which task. Plus, I doubt their model incorporates regions growing or expanding, rather than just being damaged or not. And I doubt it includes the capability to incorporate new regions.

Carnegie Mellon University neuroscientist Marcel Just and Stanford postdoctoral fellow Sashank Varma have put forward a new computational theory of brain function that provides answers to one of the central questions of modern science: How does the human brain organize itself to give rise to complex cognitive tasks such as reading, problem solving and spatial reasoning? Just and Varma’s theory, called 4CAPS, is described in the fall issue of the journal Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience.

[...]

Just and Varma, however, propose that the evidence reveals a more complex picture in which thinking is a network function — a collaboration of several brain areas that is constantly adapting itself, based on the task at hand and the brain’s own resources and biological limitations. The collaborating parts of the brain, according to Just, are like members of a sports team whose players substitute in and out of the action. 4CAPS (an acronym for Capacity Constrained Concurrent Cortical Activation-based Production System), proposes a decentralized process by which members of the cortical team volunteer themselves when their strengths are called for, but also permits less efficient but capable members to step forward when the primary player is injured or disabled, as might occur as a result of a stroke. Just and Varma have constructed a number of computational models to demonstrate this process, such as a model that understands English sentences.

Everyone knows there are magnetic fields all over the earth. It is how your compass works. For the first time a map Earth’s entire magnetic field has been made.

The first global map of magnetic peculiarities - or anomalies - on Earth has been assembled by an international team of researchers.

Magnetic anomalies are caused by differences in the magnetisation of the rocks in the Earth’s crust.

The magnetic signature of the Earth’s crust has been measured for many decades by a multitude of groups; but now, for the first time, the data has been combined to give a truly worldwide view of the phenomenon.

It would be interesting if some enterprising avian researcher would combine this magnetic information with migration charts of migratory birds. Birds are well known for their magnetoreception, it would be interesting to see if there is a correlation to magnetic “landmarks” and migratory paths.

More information on the project can be seen at the project home - World Digital Magnetic Anomaly Map

Arizona State University is making some great advances in the field of nanotechnology electronic storage. Their new technique is called programmable metallization cell (PMC). It is apparently one tenth cheaper than equivalently sized flash drives and a whopping 10,000 times more energy efficient. Put together, this means you can have tremendously small storage capacities in tiny packages which use equally tiny amounts of energy.

PMC memory stores information in a fundamentally different way from flash. Instead of storing bits as an electronic charge, the technology creates nanowires from copper atoms the size of a virus to record binary ones and zeros.

In research published in October’s IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, Kozicki and his collaborators from the Jülich Research Center in Germany describe how the PMC builds an on-demand copper bridge between two electrodes. When the technology writes a binary 1, it creates a nanowire bridge between two electrodes. When no wire is present, that state is stored as a 0.

The first thing that came to my mind while reading this was potential neural applications. Imagine taking this tiny storage unit and coupling it with a paper thin battery. Throw in a “Utah” electrode arrays and you have a portable brain imaging implant that can hold hours, days, weeks worth of information. This could be excellent for research in a number of areas, from behavior studies to epilepsy treatment.

The article describes how a terrabyte of information could be stored on a thumbdrive. Imagine how much could be stored on the size of a pin, or a sliver of paper. More than enough for an implant. A mouse could receive one of these paper thin implants and perform some behavioral test (such as running a maze).

Researchers would have an exact readout of the brain areas selected coresponding to time. Include a transmitter in the implant to get data back off the device and you have a mouse that can perform any number of tests and provide excellent data without the need for bulky or interfering equipment.

Hat tip Foresight Nanotech Instititute.

It seems like I’ve got an artistic theme going, so this news article fits in nicely. A study published in Neuropsychologia shows that creative thinkers actually have altered brain activity when compared to others. This occurs both during normal, resting state and while solving problems.

One difference was that the creative solvers exhibited greater activity in several regions of the right hemisphere. Previous research has suggested that the right hemisphere of the brain plays a special role in solving problems with creative insight, likely due to right-hemisphere involvement in the processing of loose or “remote” associations between the elements of a problem, which is understood to be an important component of creative thought. The current study shows that greater right-hemisphere activity occurs even during a “resting” state in those with a tendency to solve problems by creative insight. This finding suggests that even the spontaneous thought of creative individuals, such as in their daydreams, contains more remote associations.

Second, creative and methodical solvers exhibited different activity in areas of the brain that process visual information. The pattern of “alpha” and “beta” brainwaves in creative solvers was consistent with diffuse rather than focused visual attention. This may allow creative individuals to broadly sample the environment for experiences that can trigger remote associations to produce an Aha! Moment.

BPR3 has published the official icons. If you are a blogger, these allow you to identify which of your posts are about peer-reviewed articles. If you are a reader, these let you know that the blogger has read the original publication and isn’t just spewing pre-processed information from the mainstream media.

For more information, check out the announcement.

Currently, the only aggregation of these posts are by hand or using a crude Technorati search. Fret not though, we are rolling out the aggregation soon! As soon as I can finish it, that is. I’ve been making good progress and have a rough working prototype finished. Once we polish off a few more features we plan to roll it out to some beta-testers, then distribute for mass consumption.

Keep an eye out here or at BPR3 for more details as they come.

I like art. I almost went to an art school to become an artist instead of an engineering school. I was at first intrigued by what my school was doing, a “BioArt” exhibit. Sounds interesting, doesn’t it?

From Lab Work to Artwork: New Initiative Melds Biotechnology, Electronic Art
“Through ongoing art and research exhibitions open to the public, the BioArt program at Rensselaer will bridge the arts and sciences in a very real, very tangible way,” said Kathy High, head of the Arts Department and one of three faculty members leading the initiative. “I see the discipline as a way to allow all people to feel involved and participate in the advances made in biotechnology.”

I was walking through the Biotech building on my way to lab when a large poster caught my eye (it was new). Stopping to take a look, I saw a poster of artist Caitlin Berrigan inserting a butterfly needle into a vein in her arm. Another section of the poster showed her dripping the freshly removed blood over a terrarium of dandelions. The caption detailed how she ate dandelion root as a medicine for Hepatitis C, so she was “giving back” to the dandelions by giving them some of her own blood.

That’s something that makes you stop and go “hmm”. Not a good “this is enlightening me”-hmm. More like a “how did they convince the administration this was a good idea”-hmm.

More details after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry

Deep brain stimulation has been all the rage lately, but not all is not well in Candy Land.

For those who suffer with the debilitating symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, Deep Brain Stimulation offers relief from the tremors and rigidity that can’t be controlled by medicine. A particularly troublesome downside, though, is that these patients often exhibit compulsive behaviors that healthy people, and even those taking medication for Parkinson’s, can easily manage.

DBS implants affect the region of the brain called the subthalamic nucleus (STN), which also modulates decision-making.

“This particular area of the brain is needed for what’s called a ‘hold-your-horses’ signal,” Frank said. “When you’re making a difficult choice, with a conflict between two or more options, an adaptive response for your system to do is to say ‘Hold on for a second. I need to take a little more time to figure out which is the best option.’”

Straight from the “That’s pretty cool” department, scientists in England are growing neurons from fat cells.

The Manchester technique uses stem cells - immature cells which the body naturally uses to create different tissue types. So far, the team has extracted stem cells from fat tissue taken from rats, and managed to coax the cells into becoming neurons - nerve cells - in the laboratory.

Their next step is to repeat this in stem cells from human fat, and then create a full replacement nerve, using a biodegradable “sheath” to surround it. This nerve-filled tube could then be implanted to re-join the ends of a severed nerve virtually anywhere in the body, they claim.

Watson has done it again. Yep, the “Watson and Crick” Watson. He is again insinuating that those of African descent are less intelligent than Westerners, due to genetics. Bolding is mine.

James Watson [...] drew widespread condemnation for comments he made ahead of his arrival in Britain today for a speaking tour at venues including the Science Museum in London.

The 79-year-old geneticist reopened the explosive debate about race and science in a newspaper interview in which he said Western policies towards African countries were wrongly based on an assumption that black people were as clever as their white counterparts when “testing” suggested the contrary. He claimed genes responsible for creating differences in human intelligence could be found within a decade.

The newly formed Equality and Human Rights Commission, successor to the Commission for Racial Equality, saidit was studying Dr Watson’s remarks “in full”. Dr Watson told The Sunday Times that he was “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours – whereas all the testing says not really”. He said there was a natural desire that all human beings should be equal but “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

I don’t care what Watson has done to advance science, he is an opportunist, chauvinistic prick. Or he is a drama whore looking for attention. Considering he has written another book, soon to be published, I would say this publicity prank fits both profiles. Fitting to his elitist attitude, the title of the new book is “Avoid Boring People: Lessons Learned from a Scientific Life”.

Others are already slamming Watson’s opinion and I’m sure more will follow soon. I expect the blogosphere to light up over this one.

“These comments serve as a reminder of the attitudes which can still exists at the highest professional levels.”