Missives from the Frontal Lobe

An open letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt

2008-08-08T21:17:00.001-07:00

Secretary Leavitt,

First and foremost, let me state that you are an economist. You have no medical or scientific expertise; in fact, you only have a bachelor's degree in a completely unrelated field. You are unfit to take the helm of a position that requires you have comprehensive knowledge of American health. I am appalled that Bush appointed you, and I am appalled that you accepted his appointment (although the last Democratic appointee, Donna Shalala, a former chancellor of my university, was about as qualified as you were, and I'm not too happy that the last three HHS secretaries were political scientists).

Secondly, the text of the memo clearly states that you will redefine abortion as "Any of the various procedures -- including the prescription and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action -- that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.". That is unequivocally a statement that tries to redefine contraception as abortion. "No comment" is NOT AN ACCEPTABLE ANSWER, MR. SECRETARY. You have a duty to the nation, and you cannot shirk it. You owe us the truth.

Thirdly, you are clearly not listening to your scientific advisors here; you would do well to solicit the opinion of Dr. Elias Zerhouni, the director of the NIH. Pregnancies are not viable until they implant in the uterine wall amid the endometrium. If a fertilized egg is not implanted, it remains a fertilized egg and does not grow. Two medical dictionaries, a Zogby poll, and a bunch of conservatives' religious beliefs do not change scientific fact, besides the fact that the Zogby poll and a bunch of conservatives' religious beliefs are unscientific and probably come from a bunch of people who don't know squat about human reproduction. We who are in the scientific community and who are in the know about human reproduction think, bluntly, that your pandering to unscientific individuals is about the most disingenuous thing you can do in your position. As I said on your blog, by your logic, I have an abortion every month when I menstruate, and by your logic, every man who masturbates has fifteen million abortions every time he has a wank.

Fourth, you would do well to listen to some of the stories of women who have had to deal with birth control, and consider not only the numerous non-contraceptive reasons why people use contraception, but also the contraceptive reasons, and ESPECIALLY listen to women's reasons for having abortions. There are women who are glad they had them; every child should be wanted. Seeing as you are a man, you have never had to be in this position. Listen to those who have had to be in this position.

You are the Secretary of Health and Human Services, Secretary Leavitt, not a Bush toady. Do your job.

Genetic diversity and intelligence

2008-07-31T08:19:00.000-07:00

From a paper in Animal Cognition, we find out that mules are smarter than horses and donkeys.

This raises interesting questions about hybrid vigor and, especially, in humans, if multiracial individuals or people with more diverse genetic ancestry have a higher IQ on average than people from a more uniform ethnic background.

Caffeine (or why Dr. Drew is full of shit)

2008-07-28T08:22:00.000-07:00

LOL at a comment from Dr. Drew:

Is there a culture of restriction at treatment facilities? For example, what is the tolerance for lesser vices like caffeine, or sex?
Sex is a no; relationships are what take people out. Caffeine is not actually a stimulant. It removes a nervous system depressant so the brain can feel stimulated. Addicts will always put things in their mouth. They always try to alter [their perception] automatically — that's their orientation. Of course we want that behavior to stop. However, there's no evidence that caffeine alters their course [of recovery]. We used to say the same thing about nicotine. Now there is evidence that we should be focusing on stopping nicotine early.

Caffeine is a stimulant. You can find a better post explaining why this is so at Chris's website. Refer to this article too.

'Stimulant' by definition means at least removing a nervous system depressant; in addition, the effects of caffeine on the body are well-documented.

PZ finally does what many of us have been dying to do

2008-07-24T11:09:00.001-07:00

Reading this post felt great .

In which I expound on my frustration

2008-07-24T09:02:00.000-07:00

Warning: Rant. If you do not want to read this, page down.

Sometimes I come across things which are supremely stupefying in their simplemindedness and their illogic; the long list of things that are wrong with them is so long and interwoven that I don't even know where to begin describing them. I comprehend the problem, but it is difficult to translate it into words and organize the points sometimes.

Mostly, I am not sure how much to explain some things sometimes. I come from an upper-middle-class family, for example, the progeny of two parents who have masters' degrees, and am planning to get a PhD in neuroscience (as you all know, I am currently in college studying neuroscience), which is actually fairly easy for me, compared with how hard it seems to be, from the reactions I've gotten from many whom I've told about my studies, for many others. Sometimes, when for example I have to communicate with someone who has less than a high school education, I wrack my brain trying to tell them about various intricate concepts in simple terms. Even people in other fields, who may be as educated or more educated than me, make me wrack my brain in telling them things in ways they can understand. I really only have a certain amount of ease communicating with people who study what I study; I don't have to do a whole lot of explaining.

(As an aside, though I have a distaste for Mooney, Nisbet, Olson and their ilk, the sentiment that we could do a little better in communicating science to people is true, though I disagree with them on how.)

As for social criticism, I have some of the same problems - I cannot muster the words, no matter how much grandiloquence I can wedge into my posts, to express how utterly disastrous the world is right now. I make no move to hide my misanthropy. I mean, yes, it is informed, to some extent, by a past that I mostly vigorously shove to the back of my mind where I am seldom reminded of it, though it is also informed by what I read in the news and my understanding from my point of view. Sometimes the explanations I muster are long enough that I do not have the patience to say everything I want to say, that the other person probably doesn't have the time to listen to me, and sometimes they're also filled enough with harsh and well-deserved criticism, which is usually fairly angry even if somewhat eloquent, that emotionally it makes me feel like retreating into a room for a while and either beating the shit out of an inanimate object or crying. Anger is tiring. I make no move to hide the fact that I have much of it, and it tires me daily.

Sometimes my blog posts sound a little clipped; honestly, I don't get enough feedback in my comments to know what the apparent several hundred people who've read this blog think of what I write. Those are usually because sometimes, on some topics, it's hard to know where to start - some are so wonderfully or nastily complex that no one angle seems quite adequate to explore what I'm writing about.

I tried to make this post somewhat organized, and I think I didn't organize it much; I was already reluctant to post this anyway, because of what a reader might think, and because I've been shit on enough for just bringing up some of my own problems - I mean, seriously, there's a shortage of people who seem to really care when their friend has problems instead of pushing them away for temporarily being a sad sack, even though everyone has problems at some point (man, if this loses me any friends at Wisconsin - I know some of you read this blog from time to time - I'm not gonna be happy), but I got tired of being quiet about this.

I'm tired, I'm tired, I'm tired.

2008-07-23T07:03:00.000-07:00

Stupidity from the Department of Health and Human Services .

Rotating objects

2008-07-21T14:23:00.001-07:00

Via Cognitive Daily, older people are worse at some visuospatial tests than younger people.

Mélanie Joanisse, Sylvain Gagnon, Joshua Kreller, Marie-Claude Charbonneau (2008). Age-related differences in viewer-rotation tasks: Is mental manipulation the key factor? Journal of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 63B (3), 193-200

This is very interesting - not only for the whole neuroscientific aspect, but because I have also tested as having much higher visuospatial abilities than other people my age. The study looked at three different methods of presenting an object to a viewer - updating, ignoring, and imagining. See the Cognitive Daily post for the study methods.

What is cool about this is the fact that some aspects of mentally rotating objects decline in older people but not other methods, which makes me wonder whether these aspects are controlled by different areas of the brain - different parts of the visual cortex or the intraparietal cortices? Do older people lose particular synapses? Does this vary by original visuospatial ability?

Put an fMRI in there - I want to see the activity of the parietal lobe in this study.

Exercise slows down Alzheimer's syndrome

2008-07-21T08:52:00.000-07:00

An article in the journal Neurology says that exercise may prevent your brain from shrinking if you have Alzheimer's.

Why?

Well, exercise has some neuroprotective effects. It increases the flow of blood to the brain and promotes growth factors and neurochemical protectivity. It's not going to hurt your brain.

There is no idea what causes this, but there was four times less brain shrinkage in Alzheimer patients with moderate physical activity than in Alzheimer patients with slight physical activity.

Meta stuff .

2008-07-20T12:21:00.000-07:00

It may take a few days for me to put up another post. Things are hard right now.

Emotional support is welcomed.

Congratulations

2008-07-19T06:55:00.000-07:00

Congratulations to Karl and Ariela, who are now no longer Mogel and Haro but Haros von Mogel.

The frustrations of trying to find research - a window into undergraduate life

2008-07-17T04:36:00.000-07:00

Most science blogs out there are from graduate students or faculty members. I'm still in college, and I'm looking pretty feverishly for research.

Part of the problem is personal issues; I've got a few pretty difficult ones to deal with, and I'll hopefully deal with them by the beginning of the semester. I'm not going to tell readers what the issues are, but they suck.

I'll admit my grades are not what they should be, either, because of these personal issues. One of the things that has been helping me keep my head up is Brian Switek's series of posts at Laelaps, telling the reader about his own struggles, which are different than mine, but reading the advice there keeps me from crumbling.

My first attempt at finding research was back in 2007, when I emailed a neurogeneticist at my university who was doing work on Drosophila. There was a lot of back-and-forth with emails until he said 'I can't train you' and I just went batshit until his graduate student said 'Hey, I'm looking for someone to help me' and I volunteered and he said 'I can't train you'.

Fall of 2007 was spent grumbling about the missed research and doing my classes. Spring of 2007 was when I started trying to pick up more research, but after contacting at least six or seven different people, there was nothing to do.

This semester will be spent trying to pick my grades up, and after that I'll probably try a few other places and reapply, since my grades will be higher. My advisor, another professor in my department, and a few others are good sources of information.

But I spend most of my precious little free time on campus reading blogs from fellow science people, reading new information, and sucking up every bit of knowledge I can find. I have a passion for what I study - neuroscience is my life. I've gotten encouragement from my fellow students; one who works at the VA hospital that's near the university hospital has given me some useful advice on trying to find a lab.

I'll get my degrees. I have to.

PZ gets death threats

2008-07-13T14:34:00.001-07:00

Lest you think tolerance of stupidity and fanaticism is a good thing, read this blog post and some of the comments beneath it (luckily most of the comments are sensible).

I mean, srsly, death threats? The fuck?

This is madness

2008-07-12T18:08:00.000-07:00

Via Mike the Mad Biologist, from Driftglass .

If you replay the video, and listen under Stephanopoulos' interruption, this is point Koppel was trying to get across:
"And I think there is just a small but significant fraction of Americans for whom...the truth in this instance is never going to matter."

Which sounds like a small thing, but for me it was almost a cultural event, because it is almost the only time in my memory when a Big Time Newscritter sat in front of a camera and called bullshit on some specific, identifiable group other than "bureaucratsinwashington" or "liberalelites".

Because in Stephanopoulos' world (as in fairy tales of old) knowing and using the True Name of things comes with the possibility of dire fucking consequences, and so one must never, ever, ever, ever, ever call the 27%-ers out by their True Name lest All Conservative Hell break loose.

And so, in Stephanopoulos' world the 27%-ers are people who have merely been somehow bamboozled by the medium through which the message passes.

They are innocent naifs, bedazzled by Teh Sparkly Internets.

The inhabitants of Stephanopoulos' world will never come within a million miles of even forming their mouths to say the words "Jesse Helms was a despicable, racist motherfucker who stayed in power for as long as he did because his supporters and admirers were and are despicable, racist motherfuckers, one and all."

Instead, the inhabitants of Stephanopoulos' world believe that on the occasion of the death of this evil man we should toddle down to the Piggly Wiggly and buy some brand of Kiwi shoe polish powerful enough, to buff this turd of a human being to a shine high enough, so that he can be buried under a gooey, compromise word like "Controversial" or "Provocative".

But Koppel -- admittedly in the weakest, most tepid way possible -- was trying to at least hint at the terrible truth that dare not be spoken, because its implications are so enormous.

The truth that, fundamentally, it's not that our courts that are broken. Not our roads and bridges. Not our schools.

Not something from which science or engineering or manufacturing will rescue us. Not something we can figure out, prototype and then make a fortune selling a million units for a buck apiece.

Because it is we ourselves that are broken.

When I look at Dubya's poll numbers staying absolutely dead-level week after week after week regardless of what he has fucked up this week, or how badly, I learn nothing new about George W. Bush. But A-B-Cs behind just about everything else I need to know about America stand painfully revealed. Those numbers confirm for me for the unmpteenth time that inside the mushy skulls of the 27%-ers there is nothing but a hatbox of junk machine parts, still twitching and clattering mindlessly along on corrupted software that was already obsolete before men walked on the Moon.

The 27%-ers are slugs madly fighting for the right to jump into the salt bucket and drag us all down with them, and any solution to the problems that vex us must begin with their grotesquely mutant versions of patriotism, economics, virtue and civilization being discredited, sequestered and driven into oblivion.

Our first, great, national problem is that our fellow citizens -- in their millions -- are damaged beyond repair.

Support PZ!

2008-07-11T04:41:00.001-07:00

Here.

A short introduction to the neuron

2008-07-09T09:48:00.000-07:00

Doing my part to contribute to basic science blog posts on the Web.

This blog is, as stated, mostly a neuroscience blog. In this post, I'll be teaching those of you who don't know, perhaps, a friggin' thing I'm talking about about the basic component of the nervous system.

The neuron is the basic building block of the nervous system. There are several different shapes of neurons, which I'll describe later, but here's a basic neuron:

(Carlson, Niel. A. (1992). Foundations of Physiological Psychology. Needham Heights, Massachusetts: Simon & Schuster. pp. 36)

There are some parts of the neuron that aren't labeled here, including the nodes of Ranvier, but this is a basic neuron. A basic description of the parts -

Dendrites - These receive synaptic signals and contain receptors on them for neurotransmitters.
Soma - The cell body contains the nucleus and all that other cellular shit.
Axon - The tunnel which electric and chemical signals travel down.
Myelin sheath - The insulating cover for the axon. Gets eaten in people with MS.
Nodes of Ranvier - The axon between the myelin sheaths. Electrical signals travel in saltatory ('jumping') motion between the nodes.
Terminal button - These send synaptic signals.

The most important part of a neuron is its cell membrane. This is what receives electrical and chemical signals. Here is a diagram of a neuron membrane:

(http://www.columbia.edu/cu/psychology/courses/1010/mangels/neuro/neurosignaling/LipidBilayer.gif)

There are ion pumps in the cell walls. There are three ions which are important to the neuron: sodium, potassium, and calcium. These make your electrical impulses work. Gradients of charge across a cell produce potentials, which are differences in the voltage across a cell membrane and which drive electrical charges, known as action potentials, which do the work of your nervous system. Here is an action potential:

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_potential)

Action potentials always begin with a stimulus and depolarization - once the voltage across the membrane approaches a threshold (in this case a small negative voltage), the action potential is triggered. Action potentials are an all-or-nothing action, kind of like an orgasm, where the voltage becomes positive then drops down again and undershoots a tad.

There's an equation which relates the charge in a cell given the concentrations of ions, which is called the Nernst equation (which relates to a lot of other cells, but is used in neurons) and something one of my professors called the Extremely Important Equation.

The Nernst equation:

where E = equilibrium potential, RT/F = 59.1 mV, z = the number of electrons transferred, and the words in brackets should be self-explanatory.

The Extremely Important Equation, which I think is called the Goldman equation:

where Em = equilibrium potential of the membrane, E(ion) = equilibrium potential of an ion, P(ion) = the permeability of the ion in arbitrary units, usually siemens for conductance, and Ptot = the total permeability of all permeant ions.

And here's some basic physics equations:
V=RI
Q=CV

Here's some different types of neurons, categorized by function:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuron#Classes

Outrage

2008-07-09T06:53:00.000-07:00

Ah, fascism.

Mercury militia wackjobs

2008-07-09T06:08:00.001-07:00

Discussion at Respectful Insolence.

Jump in the fray, it's fun to make fun of idiotic parents who don't know the first thing about autism and are likely making their offspring and other people's offspring susceptible to other diseases.

I wonder if they've heard of genetics.

Time for a bit of shaming

2008-07-08T07:43:00.000-07:00

This morning, I stumbled across this heinous post, in which some asshole decided to use my blog's content in an attempt to justify his racism:

This is the content he used from my blog, which comes from this post:

"NOT SO. I can name a couple of genes and not much more that influence intelligence:

COMT
DTNBP1
SNAP-25
CHRM2
Human neuropsin
FADS2
IGF2R
Dysbindin-1
and a small amount of genes on chromosome 4"

And this is what the asshat wrote in the rest of his article:<

"http://theamericanscene.com/2007/11/27/wheres-the-beef

"Some comments on Jim Manzi’s article at above link. This is well written and thought out. However, we can measure IQ racial differences at the top of the column easily. Very few blacks produce great math. One exception is David Blackwell and there are others.

"To tell if two bodies of water are the same height you look at the top. Same with trees, people, etc. You don’t have to know the chemistry of the insides of the lakes, trees, or people to tell that one is higher than the other. Its the same with intelligence. We look at the top of the races and see a huge difference. That is the measurement. We can look at the societies and civilizations and see a large part of the distribution.

"If blacks can’t figure out not to eat lead, that is an indication of intelligence. Whites did figure that one out. Claiming its lead or whatever in the environment doesn’t explain why one group can figure out lead is a problem and avoid it. If lead was the problem, then liberals say its whites fault for not keeping blacks from ingesting lead."

Someone doesn't understand much about intelligence, does he. Nor does he understand shit about logical fallacies.

Let the shaming commence!

It really drives you insa-a-a-a-ane

2008-07-07T08:29:00.000-07:00

Hernandez-Gonzalez M, Guevara MA, Agmo A (2008). Motivational influences on the degree and direction of sexual attraction. Ann. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 1129: 61–87

Motivation can be defined as a class of central nervous processesdetermining the likelihood of display of a behavior and theintensity of the behavior if displayed. All behavior is, accordingto this definition, caused and controlled by motivation. Althoughthe concept of motivation eventually could be replaced by anentirely mechanistic explanation of the causes of behavior,in terms of neural events, such explanations would be overlycomplex for everyday use. This is particularly the case withregard to the momentaneous fluctuations in the intensity ofa behavior, like those occurring during copulation in rats.Thus, the concept of motivation will remain useful even whenmechanistic explanations become available. Even though the propensityto perform sexual responses is determined by sexual motivation,another element is required for the execution of such responses.This other element is an appropriate stimulus, a sexual incentive.For a male rat, an appropriate incentive could be a sexuallyreceptive female. For a human, it could be a mental representationof a sexual partner. The incentive activates approach behaviors,and the intensity of these behaviors will be determined by motivationand by the quality of the incentive stimulus, its attractivity.Much work has been done with the purpose of identifying thenature of the incentive stimulus or stimuli emitted by ratsand other mammals. While visual stimuli seem to be of limitedimportance, auditory and particularly olfactory stimuli havebeen found to have incentive properties. Soluble chemicals maybe important for some aspects of copulation, but copulatorymotor patterns are basically under the control of tactile stimuli.The processing of sexual incentives in the rat brain has beenstudied with electroencephalographic techniques, and data showthat the prefrontal cortex (PFC) participates in the identificationof sexual incentives. Furthermore, there are important differencesbetween the medial and orbital frontal cortices. The medialPFC, as well as the ventral tegmental area, also seem to participatein the generation of pelvic thrusting.

How antidepressants work

2008-07-07T05:36:00.001-07:00

What you thought about depression is about to be up-ended.

Recent studies from Yale and Princeton and a university in Italy suggest that depression is a mild neurodegenerative disease. Instead of simply disturbing your brain's neurochemistry, depression destroys neurons. (This is bad for the 10% of people in the United States who are depressed.)

Antidepressants work depending on each individual's neurochemistry, but they supposedly perform another function: they prevent neurons from dying. My question is - how do the neurons die? What biochemical trigger makes them die? If we dissected the brains of a happy rat and a depressed rat, what would we find? Loss of neurons has been already found in the hippocampus - so maybe SSRIs help protect the hippocampus.

The gamut of drugs for already-identified neurodegenerative diseases is acetylcholinesterase inhibitors, NMDA receptor inhibitors, L-dopa (dopamine), dopa decarboxylase inhibitors, dopamine agonists, MAO-B inhibitors, MAOIs, and other drugs. MAO inhibitors are a class of antidepressant reserved for those cases that cannot be treated with other antidepressants, and antidepressants and antipsychotics are used to decrease symptoms of depression and psychosis in people with neurodegenerative diseases.

Depression is a disorder which contains some wacky brain chemistry, which would no doubt kill a few neurons. The neurotransmitters affected in depression are serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine (the catecholamines), and possibly GABA and glutamate. A lot of brains also secrete excess amounts of MAO-As, where the MAOIs come into play.

As we further understand the processes of neuronal death in depression, treatment will advance. Some treatments for more advanced neurodegenerative disease might, in small doses, cure depression.

Japanese neuroanatomical drawings

2008-07-04T06:56:00.000-07:00

Via Neurophilosophy, the Kaibo Zonshinzu, a set of medical illustrations from the 1800s.

An exposure of the meninges and their vasculature.

The cerebral cortex.

The cortex opened exposing the corpus callosum and the cranium.

The cerebellum opened and the ventral view of the cranium, showing cranial vasculature and how the brain is oriented in the cranium .

The ventral view of the brain, showing the brainstem, olfactory bulbs, pons, pineal gland, and medulla.

Reader censuses

2008-07-03T11:14:00.000-07:00

Comment open season:

I have temporarily enabled anonymous posting so I can get a better idea of who's reading and what posts they've liked and what they haven't liked so far. Please, feel free to include or not include this information in your post:

- A little bit about yourself - where you're from, a broad idea of what you do
- Critique of the blog

Death and the brain

2008-07-03T10:50:00.000-07:00

Today I'm going to post about death.

This post is dedicated to my canine buddy whom I knew for thirteen years, Hot Shot (don't laugh; I got the dog when I was seven, and I called him that for thirteen years - I'm 20, and I got him when he was a mere sixteen weeks old - he died at the ripe old age of thirteen, which, if you use the 7 years to one human year rule, is equivalent to a 91-year-old human. He was an elderly ), who I euthanized two days ago after finding he suffered from a tumor on his enlarged heart, a tumor on his testicles, chronic kidney failure , and a stroke. He was beginning to convulse as I held his furry little body while the veterinarian sedated him, and the only indication that he'd died was his stopped heart, his lack of breathing, and some spasms. He died peacefully, and I'm glad he has no more agony, even if he is no longer alive. I feel like shit, as you can guess, and even though I look mildly stoic on the outside, I am grieving for my old very small friend who is, at least, going to do his part for nature after he has croaked by feeding organisms. Eat up, bacteria.

When the brain dies, all electrical activity ceases. Simple.

The problem is, how do you determine the brain has died? The American Academy of Neurologists has a set of criteria for determining brain death.

Brain death is defined by the American Academy of Neurologists as 'the irreversible loss of function of the brain, including the brainstem'. The brainstem is an important part of the definition because it controls your basic bodily functions - breathing and heartbeat.

The criteria are listed thus:

- Directly quoted from the list of criteria, clinical or neuroimaging evidence of an acute CNS catastrophe (which is our term for a critical occurrence in the brain or spinal cord) that is compatible with the clinical diagnosis of brain death
- Exclusion of complicating medical conditions that may lead to a different assessment - rule out various disturbances in the body's chemical milieu
- No poisoning
- Core temperature higher than 90 degrees F (32 degrees C)
- Three cardinal findings: coma/unresponsiveness, absence of brainstem reflexes, and apnea
- Eyes: Unresponsive to bright light, normal to dilated, no oculocephalic reflex if there is no apparent fracture or instability of the cervical spine, no deviation of the eyes in response to ear irrigation
- Facial sensation and motor responses: No corneal reflex, no jaw reflex, no grimacing in response to pressure on sensitive parts of the body
- Pharyngeal reflexes: no response to stimulation with tongue depressor, no cough response to bronchial suctioning
- PCO2 pressure higher than 60 mm Hg

Visual observations that can still be seen in brain death include spontaneous movements of limbs other than pathologic flexion or extension response, respiratory-like movements, sweating, blushing, tachycardia, normal blood pressure without pharmacologic support or sudden increases in blood pressure, absence of diabetes insipidus, deep tendon reflexes, superficial abdominal reflexes, triple flexion response, and the Babinski reflex (quoted almost directly from the criteria).

Tests that can be performed to diagnose brain death include conventional angiography, EEG, transcranial Doppler ultrasonography (except in ten percent of patients, who may not have temporal insonation windows, which are structures in the temporal bone of the cranium allowing sound waves to provide a picture of your brain), small systolic peaks in early systole without diastolic flow or reverberating flow, technetium-99m hexamethylpropyleneamineoxime brain scan, and somatosensory evoked potentials.

These criteria are vital in determining when a patient has died so the family may take them off life support, harvest their organs for donation, and a physician may declare them legally dead. There have been people declared legally dead who are still alive. There is a bunch of hemming and hawing about when death occurs, mostly split along religious/ideological lines (as an atheist, I think when their brain goes, they're effectively dead). Even among physicians, there are variations. - according to 'Greer et al. (2008) Variability of brain death determination guidelines in leading US neurologic institutions. Neurology; 70: 284-289', there is significant variability in 'requirements for performanceof the evaluation, prerequisites prior to testing, specificsof the brainstem examination and apnea testing, and what typesof ancillary tests could be performed, including what pitfallsor limitations might exist'. Does brain death stop, for that matter, when consciousness stops? Consciousness comes from our frontal lobe; we would have to find a way to judge when those neurons fall silent. (But that gets into a big argument about what consciousness is, and philosophy of mind is, as you know, one of the things I love to hate, as a person in neuroscience who is highly positivist, highly materialist, and absolutely hates dualists. Why the hell are they still debating whether the mind is part of the brain when we've already established it and are doing more research? Let us people in neuroscience do research on the brain; you go sit over there with your Kant, especially you bloody dualist bastards, who can keep your Descartes, the worthless frog)

If the diagnosis of brain death is this shaky, a few limitations might exist in determining it: misinterpretation of tests, unreliable test results, complicating comorbid symptoms, unknown factors in the neurological milieu (likely neurochemical processes), and other bits of human imperception.

I expect, as we grow in our knowledge of the healthy living brain, that we can use it to determine when that brain stops being living.

If this doesn't eradicate creationism at all, the world will probably go to pot

2008-06-30T15:28:00.000-07:00

Via my friend Bill.

Bacteria Make Major Evolutionary Shift in the Lab

A rendition of 'Boom De Yada'

2008-06-27T15:28:00.000-07:00

In honor of the Discovery Channel's awesome new commercial, I bring you my folksy song dedicated to my field. Because we neuroscience people have a sense of humor.

I love my neurons
And all their dend-r-ites
I love my foramen
I love my astrocytes
I love my whole brain
It's such an awesome organ
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada

I love my dopamine
I love adrenaline
I love my GABA
And seroton-in
I love my whole brain
It helps me think and shit
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada

I love my spinal cord
I love my frontal lobe
I love my thalamus
And my temporal lobe
I love the human brain
It is my favorite thing
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom de yada
Boom da yada

Great ape personhood

2008-06-26T12:44:00.000-07:00

www.greatapeproject.org

EW SMOKE BREATH

2008-06-23T11:07:00.000-07:00

Today's post is about nicotine.

Before I launch into a rather calm treatment of the neuropharmacology of this, let me say that smoking is bad and your nervous system is not to be messed with, because it can have irreversible issues.

Nicotine is a stimulant of nicotinic acetylcholine receptors, specifically two kinds of receptor: the ganglion type nicotinic receptor and the CNS type nicotinic receptor. Nicotine interferes with the reception of acetylcholine by nicotinic acetylcholine receptors and can be blocked by curare and hexamethonium. Since it blocks acetylcholine, it produces a high. In the ganglion type nicotinic receptor, it stimulates production of adrenaline, and in the CNS type nicotinic receptor, it stimulates production of dopamine. Therefore, it makes you feel awake and good. This is why people often smoke when stressed - nicotine gives them a jump.

The most little-known side effect of nicotine is the fact that it raises the heart rate (duh - it releases adrenaline into the body) and releases the body's stores of fat into the blood. Nicotine by itself can cause strokes.

Therefore, reducing addiction to nicotine would require simply inhibiting nicotine's ability to attach to the receptors, right? Varenicline (Chantix) is a drug that has been tried, but it causes suicidal thoughts in drug users, probably due to the fact that it prevents acetylcholine from bonding to the receptors. Acetylcholine is important for cognitive function and mood, and inhibiting it would cause symptoms similar to depression. The only way to safely stop nicotine is to quit cigarettes cold turkey.

And nicotine is only one of many drugs that make you feel good when you take them, but do some really stupid shit to your body when you take them - so don't use drugs.

Architeuthis peezeemyers

2008-06-20T13:29:00.000-07:00

...has been discovered lurking somewhere in Lake Superior. It is the first species of squid known to reside in the Midwest.

Catch footage of it here, along with one of its three offspring:

Spore may not be strictly an evolution game, but it features it as a theme. Spore is about the biological pressures on a species. Check out the Creature Creator.

Bullshit from the Associated Press

2008-06-18T05:22:00.001-07:00

From A Blog Around the Clock and BoingBoing, we get a shining example of stupidity from the Associated Press:

The Associated Press wants people to pay how much for QUOTING their articles? As several people have said already, this violates Fair Use. From the U.S. Government copyright website:

The 1961 Report of the Register of Copyrights on the General Revision of the U.S. Copyright Law cites examples of activities that courts have regarded as fair use: “quotation of excerpts in a review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment; quotation of short passages in a scholarly or technical work, for illustration or clarification of the author's observations; use in a parody of some of the content of the work parodied; summary of an address or article, with brief quotations, in a news report; reproduction by a library of a portion of a work to replace part of a damaged copy; reproduction by a teacher or student of a small part of a work to illustrate a lesson; reproduction of a work in legislative or judicial proceedings or reports; incidental and fortuitous reproduction, in a newsreel or broadcast, of a work located in the scene of an event being reported.”

One day, if this crap keeps up, we will no longer be able to criticize anything.

Uppity delicate religious idiots on MY campus?

2008-06-17T12:30:00.000-07:00

Most frightening things I've read all week.

Via The Friendly Atheist and the NYT courtesy of Chris.

Gender differences and sexual orientation in the brain

2008-06-17T06:07:00.000-07:00

From the Beeb and several other sources comes an article about which I already kind of knew the answer:

Homosexual brains are similar to heterosexual brains of the opposite sex.

The survey was different, though, in that it measured hemisphere volume. Lesbians and heterosexual men had asymmetric hemispheres, while gay men and heterosexual women had symmetric hemispheres.

What this says about people who are bisexual or pansexual or who are transgender or who are intersex, I don't know. Nature, however, is not quite as cut-and-dry as to make a clear-cut dichotomy for sexual orientation and sex, even though individuals on neither end of the dichotomy don't appear often, so this study has some flaws, but that's another post.

Most studies I've seen about this have been mostly about hormones, in which lesbian women have elevated levels of testosterone and gay men have elevated levels of estrogen or where lesbian women have more or less activation in a certain area of their brain or where gay men have more or less activation in a certain area of their brain than heterosexual people of their sex. What we do know is that sexual orientation is biological.

There are also differences in symmetry of synaptic junctions in the amygdala.

What I'd like to see is a study on people who fit neither end of one or both of the continua to see how similar a brain in, say, a bisexual or pansexual person is to heterosexual or homosexual people.

On gay marriage

2008-06-15T06:19:00.001-07:00

A comic that briefly summarizes my sentiments about the homophobic troglodytes who want to ban it.

Of birthdays and booze

2008-06-11T09:41:00.000-07:00

I have to keep up with my friends' birthdays a little bit better.

Chris, my friend and proprietor of The Uncredible Hallq, is now 21. Send him alcohol.

A short history of human civilization

2008-06-07T18:15:00.000-07:00

Contains some gore and genitals. May not want to maximize this if at work.

Blogging is one of many steps we need to take to spread atheism

2008-06-07T17:36:00.001-07:00

Two more months and a week or so until I make a 16-hour long drive with my stuff, which my folks are looking after right now while I'm visiting them this summer, back to Madison. I'm visiting my folks right now, and it is nothing short of a pain in the ass (mostly because of where they live).

It occurs to me that much of my sentiments about atheism and about the stupidity of religion have been expressed elsewhere. I am not sure that repeating the same true things - which are true; at the same time, repeating them does not contribute much to the conversation or the movement - will make much of an impact in helping us atheists to at least be recognized as a group which deserves as much equality as anyone else and helping people to realize that religious conservatives are killing the world. In the end, it will be about writing letters to Congressmen, staging protests, educating people, and donating money to those who will help us.

Blogging certainly helps, but we cannot keep saying the same things - we have to keep explaining them further and make sure people are aware of where we have said these things, and we have to show by our actions that we are a group that needs to be listened to.

Ultimately, we will make religion meet its demise if we do it in a way that destroys it by bringing people to atheism. Religion was originally designed as a way to fill gaps in the human knowledge of the day before we figured out the scientific method - and it is important to make the point to people that atheism is a characteristic of we educated and we knowledgeable masses and has been for millennia. We are atheist because we know better. I am an atheist because I see no evidence for any deities; any evidence anyone has posited has incontrovertibly and always eventually been shown to be explained by purely scientific processes. Atheism is logical.

Karl Marx was astute when he said:

Religion is, indeed, the self-consciousness and self-esteem of man who has either not yet won through to himself, or has already lost himself again. But man is no abstract being squatting outside the world. Man is the world of man—state, society. This state and this society produce religion, which is an inverted consciousness of the world, because they are an inverted world. Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification. It is the fantastic realization of the human essence since the human essence has not acquired any true reality. The struggle against religion is, therefore, indirectly the struggle against that world whose spiritual aroma is religion. Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.

Let me explain the quote: Marx makes the inference, quite correctly, that the vast majority of people - the unwashed, idiotic, poor, resourceless, uneducated masses - do not have the ability to understand and/or access the resources we have. What are they to assume, until they learn what a thunderstorm really is, what a thunderstorm is? Do they think it is the physically-manifested anger of, perhaps, an entity swinging a big invisible hammer or an angry sky god, which we know is nonexistent and completely impossible, but which they think is real? The part where he says 'Religion is the general theory of this world, its encyclopedic compendium, its logic in popular form, its spiritual point d'honneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction, its solemn complement, and its universal basis of consolation and justification' is an indication of the times which he lived in, a time where, quite frankly, many people were idiotic and/or uneducated.

Establishing rationality, reason, and ultimately atheism in society may be dependent on establishing an environment where every single person on the earth has access to all information and lives under a government where they are free, justly-protected citizens with all the rights and responsibilities inherent therein and has both an adequate support system to support them when they fall and the discipline to pull themselves up and get to wherever they want to be in society.

My friend Mr. Plush Neuron is happy

2008-06-04T11:01:00.001-07:00

Because Obama has won the primary and he is way more electable than Hillary. He is very pro-science, mostly (except for his apparent non-opposition to the mercury militia).

This bodes well.

(As an aside, if anyone wants to get me a plush neuron from www.giantmicrobes.com, I will be quite happy about your gifting of such plush object)

LOLPLoS

2008-06-02T12:09:00.000-07:00

Via A Blog Around the Clock, the LOLPLoS submissionfest.

Science is awesome. Science humor is nearly as awesome.

Neuroscience and epigenetics

2008-05-22T10:07:00.001-07:00

Chris has a new site up at http://uncrediblehallq.net. If you read his site, redirect your links there.

The quality and frequency of my posting has been rather shitty these days, mostly because I have a lot to deal with.

Anyway, here's a real post.

Epigenetics is the ancillary system of your genes which causes them to be expressed in different locations by different stimuli. For example, it is why you are not a blob of uniform cells, but rather a person made of different types of cells which have the exact same genetic information.

There are a few terms in epigenetics you should be familiar with if you want to know anything about it:

- DNA methylation: DNA methylation is the addition of a methyl group to the carbon-5 position of cytosine residues ('residue', in this context, is a fancy word for an individual nucleic acid) that are followed by a guanine (at least, in 99% of cases of methylation ). A methylated cytosine followed by a guanine is called a CpG dinucleotide. The human genome doesn't have a lot, which is due to the deamination of these methyl-cytosine complexes, which are called 5-methylcytosine. This is important in cancer.

- DNA histone: DNA histone is the stuff that makes DNA curl into chromatin - if you didn't have histones, you would almost certainly not be alive, because without histones, DNA is a 1.8-meter long tangled mess of crap. With histones, DNA condenses into 90-millimeter bits of chromatin that are tightly packed in the nucleus, which is more condensed into 90-micrometer chromosomes during mitosis. Different folding of histones would change the folding of DNA.

- Transcription factors: Transcription factors enable the replication and transcribing of DNA into RNA, which is translated into proteins.

- Prions: Prions are proteins gone nuts. They can infect cells and catalytically convert other native state versions of the same protein to the infectious state.

Why is epigenetics so important in neuroscience? Epigenetic abnormalities cause a number of neurological issues, and has been implicated in a number of seemingly non-developmentally-related conditions such as schizophrenia (which is sort of our favorite illness to speculate about the causes of, as it is very poorly understood and very devastating and very interesting in its symptoms.) It is indeed also a factor in neural stem cell developmental issues, and is also implicated in differences in things such as intelligence.

Much research has been devoted to the role of epigenetics in psychiatric disorders. It's going to become much more important in the next few years; I suspect those of my fellow neuroscience people who investigate the psychiatric will do more gene-based research surrounding these things.

The stupidity of dignity

2008-05-21T08:03:00.000-07:00

Via EvolutionBlog, an article on the stupidity of dignity, which is a much-needed topic to discuss.

Neuroimmunology

2008-05-15T12:00:00.000-07:00

I had been mystified by this subfield until now, and it is profoundly relevant to research of neurological disease, both somatic and psychological:

The brain is extremely immune-protected, since there is a blood-brain barrier made by the glia surrounding our neurons (astrocytes). Very few substances get through the blood-brain barrier, and the molecules that get through produce some interesting effects, but viruses and bacteria which enter the nervous system are acted on by molecules which also affect the nervous system - in a sense, these molecules possess a double duty , particularly cytokines and chemokines.

Psychoneuroimmunology, in particular, is very interesting. It focuses on the 'mind-body connection', which is largely a lot of stuff about placebos and nocebos and how attitude affects your immune system and things of such ilk. What I'd like to see psychoneuroimmunologists address is microbes and mental illness.

As stated before, viruses and bacteria can cause mental illness - schizophrenia might be caused by a virus. I know little of how the blood-brain barrier is formed, but presumably, for example, if a pregnant woman has a virus, it might be easier for it to cross the BBB and wreak all sorts of shit.

I am not sure about how encephalitis and other brain-affecting disorders affect the neuroimmune system, but there seems to be a major role filled by cytokine RNA in detecting it. Cytokines, for those of you who don't know what they are, are proteins that are used in cellular signaling. Activation of them can affect sleep and disposition, and their actions are controlled to an extent by psychological triggers. Presumably, this is probably the biological basis of 'laughter is the best medicine' and other sorts of adages which are the same in meaning.

The entire immunological makeup of a person, however, will affect the brain. Human Genome Sciences, for example, is developing a treatment called belimumab, a human monoclonal antibody, for the treatment of lupus. Lupus has neurological symptoms, among them seizures, psychosis, and abnormalities of the CSF. Given the fact that lupus is triggered by environmental factors, belimumab should be effective in minimizing the development of lymphocytes which act against the body; specifically, it inhibits the b-lymphocyte stimulator. Given the interaction of lupus with the nervous system, one can make a few inferences about how this drug might act: the drug will keep B cells from interacting with the cytokines and chemokines in the nervous system, since it will reduce the B cell count, and reduces the amount of harmful B cells in the cerebrospinal fluid (since the CSF acts as immunological protection).

Florida sucks, and the evolutionary significance of amusing gastric phenomena .

2008-05-11T16:46:00.001-07:00

Florida should not be a state.

Luckily, however, we have one more piece of evidence to add to the already-quite-massive amount of evidence for evolution: hernias, farts, and hiccups prove we evolved.

Farts: our surprising ally in the quest for a more reasonable America.

Auditory processing.

2008-05-11T10:59:00.000-07:00

Via Pure Pedantry, an article on the double dissociation of 'what' and 'where' in the auditory cortices of cats.

We are just another species

2008-05-11T09:29:00.000-07:00

I haven't driven this point enough: humans are just animals. I hate using the word 'people', because it implies we're elevated above every other species.

Elevating ourselves above another organism may be our way of emotionally reconciling the fact that we have to eat another organism to survive - vegetarians, for example, won't eat meat, because they are causing the death of a living, possibly sentient organism, and it has been ground into us from birth that murder is wrong. I, for example, am not vegetarian, but will not eat animals that have been demonstrated to have intelligence equivalent to a human's at any age - I will not eat ham, beef, or octopus - or that have not lived their full life - I will not eat veal or lamb. (I have no problem eating chicken, turkey, and fish - they're fairly stupid animals, and I am perfectly happy to help eliminate the world's population of stupid.)

We have to consume organisms, though, because we can't eat rocks - we require certain molecules to survive, and these molecules are only found in organisms.

So there is a quandary about whether specific morality that we apply towards humans ought to be morality that we apply towards other organisms. I see the problem that if we acknowledge that species we share the planet with are our equals, we will effectively have less resources to draw from because we will have to allocate enough resources to them to survive - pets and animals in zoos would be tantamount to slaves (I have no problem with getting rid of zoos and replacing them with educational centers on the premises of an animal rehabilitation center, but I have a problem with the whole pet thing on a personal level - my folks have a dog and it's pretty much a member of the family, and they're domesticated so they can't very well survive in the wild unless they're more genetically identical to wild canine animals.), and civilization will go to shit because it would not exist unless we had agriculture, which involves essentially enslaving entire populations of species (except non-conscious organisms who don't have a fully-developed nervous system or who don't have one at all; I don't give a shit about the ones no other organism needs to consume to survive nor do I give much of a shit about embryonic organisms, they're effectively non-living).

Spreading across the galaxy would be little help, since it would just create the opportunity for more humans and more planets full of 6.8 billion idiots, so we need a better solution to conducting ourselves sanely, maintaining human rights, and respecting the other species that we share the universe with.

1) Higher intelligence. I have devoted my life to researching the neurogenetics of intelligence, and together with those who prefer researching mechanical ways of improving intelligence, we can make people more able of accurately processing the information we receive.

2) Better perception. We need better eyes, better noses, better ears, better tongues, better senses of touch, better senses of balance, better senses of temperature, and better senses of what's going on in our bodies.

3) Less people. Make birth control more economical, make elective sterilization free and legal on demand for all ages, make abortion free and legal on demand everywhere that it isn't, and counsel people on how much money it actually takes to raise a well-educated, competent person - and institute a licensure system for people who want to reproduce, because frankly, nobody has the right to raise a neglected, undereducated kid, and put MASSIVE pressures on groups who are idiotic enough to be reticent about making sure people have reproductive freedom. (This has the added advantage of mostly getting rid of the poverty and abuse problem - more resources and better-adjusted people.) Populations are already declining in some countries, but they're declining in the wrong countries among the wrong people.

4) Better education. To paraphrase Bush-o-lini, the nation's children is not learning.

5) More money for research. We need to halve the defense budget and divide the money which the government saves evenly among the Department of Education, the Department of Energy, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of the Interior , and the NSF. Science is the backbone of civilization.

6) Better healthcare. There is an entire continent where 99% of its population receives substandard healthcare. This is stupid. (Let's take away asshole Mugabe's fortune for a day and make him live like the poorest people in his country - see how he likes it. Kim Jong Il, the Burmese junta, and the janjaweed blow just as much.)

7) No religion. I think, if you read my blog, you can see why I subscribe to antitheism and why I'm an atheist. We do not need mass superstition or cults.

8) A very inculcated respect for everything we share the world with (the Native Americans got this right). This will be difficult, but this is vital to the success of our species in the long run.

Some of these are obvious; I wish these were more obvious.

Right now, the universe is a bad joke that keeps telling itself; we need to make the universe a more amusing place.

I find it funny how the topic of humans being another species leads, quite simply, to a very general solution for lots of other problems.

Beating down the fundamentalist jihad

2008-05-10T12:03:00.000-07:00

I have no more tolerance for the creationists - especially the way they behave toward me and my fellow atheists.

I say we start protesting.

They want to wage wars? Let's wage our own war of reason.

Depression and drugs

2008-05-09T14:23:00.000-07:00

Apparently, the gub'mint has released a statement that depression and marijuana are not to be mixed, particularly in people between the ages of 12 and 17. Is it based on sound science, though?

While drug use in anyone under the age of 18 is completely idiotic, the report is poorly cited and makes poor logical conclusions:

Millions of American teens* report experiencing weeks of hopelessness and loss of
interest in normal daily activities, and many of these depressed teens are making
the problem worse by using marijuana and other drugs. Some teens use marijuana
to relieve the symptoms of depression (“self-medicate”), wrongly believing it may
alleviate these depressed feelings. In surveys, teens often report using marijuana
and other drugs not only to relieve symptoms of depression, but also to “feel good,”
or “feel better,” to relieve stress, and help them cope.
However, recent studies show that marijuana and depression are a dangerous
combination. In fact, using marijuana can worsen depression and lead to more
serious mental health disorders, such as schizophrenia, anxiety, and even suicide.
Weekly or more frequent use of marijuana doubles a teen’s risk of depression and
anxiety. Depressed teens are more than twice as likely as their peers to abuse or
become dependent on marijuana.
Alarmingly, the majority of teens who report feeling depressed aren’t getting
professional help. They have not seen or spoken to a medical doctor or other
professional about their feelings. For parents, this means they need to pay closer
attention to their teen’s behavior and mood swings, and recognize that marijuana
and other drugs could be playing a dangerous role in their child’s life.

Nowhere in the paper are the citations even mentioned, and to my knowledge, a lot of people use drugs because they're depressed - biochemically, however, THC binds a cannabinoid receptor - CB1 - neuropharmacologists are currently debating the causality of the correlation of psychotic symptoms and THC (for the record, since neuropharmacology is an entirely different field of neuroscience than the field of neuroscience which I am studying, I can only give my personal experience - I have known a few stoners, and to my knowledge, they are not psychotic). The most common hypothesis is the self-medication hypothesis, which attributes the use of marijuana among depressed individuals to substance abuse by many who are mentally ill and who do not have access to the proper treatment. More disturbing is the list of statements made by the DEA without assessment of information:

Executive Summary
Two million teens report feelings of depression and loss of interest in
daily activities during the past year.
Depressed teens are twice as likely as non-depressed teens to use
marijuana and other illicit drugs.
Depressed teens are more than twice as likely as their peers to abuse
or become dependent on marijuana.
Using marijuana can cause depression and other mental illnesses.
Marijuana use can worsen depression and lead to more serious
mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, anxiety, and even suicide.
Teens who smoke marijuana at least once a month are three times
more likely to have suicidal thoughts than non-users.
The percentage of depressed teens is equal to the percentage
of depressed adults, but depressed teens are more likely than
depressed adults to use marijuana and other drugs.
Teen girls who use marijuana daily are more likely than girls who do
not use marijuana to develop depression.

There the feds go again with their causality. I wonder if NIMH and NINDS have started any sort of stink about this - SAMHSA is independent of the NIH, though, which is highly suspect, and their citations don't say anything about causal implication.

Here's the report - though I do not condone or support marijuana use by anyone who is not legally an adult, I think it is fallacious and idiotic to make unsupported statements about a drug .

PZ Myers is coming to Madison

2008-05-08T17:23:00.000-07:00

PZ Myers, proprietor of Pharyngula and the most awesome evolutionary biology professor in the United States (tied with Sean Carroll), is coming to Madison in September, provided I can set stuff up properly.

Maybe we can get in touch with his younger son and see if there's anything else we might need to know.

Also - pimping his daughter Skatje's blog, Lacrimae Rerum - it's some good shit. The Myerses may just be my favorite atheist family.

Neuroscience jobs for the pre-doctoral student (graduate and undergraduate)

2008-05-07T08:18:00.000-07:00

So, as I have said before, I am an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. I have been trying to find a lab job, even one as small as dishwashing that has the chance to turn into a research project.

It's pretty hard to find one - couple that with the fact that due to financial constraints I have to visit my folks this summer in their hole in Northern Virginia, which makes me more hard up for a lab job due to the fact that it is much easier to get a lab job at my university than it is to get a summer internship for the NIH or a biotech company which most likely demands at least a bachelor's degree or a freaking 4.0 GPA, and I'm trying to get at least two years of research experience before grad school because it is competitive. (Mom, I know you read this because your IP shows up on my sitemeter; try to understand my plight before you bring down the NO-YOU-MUST-VISIT-ME-THIS-SUMMER hammer.)

This is not nearly as difficult as the situation of a friend of mine who has even stricter financial constraints than I do. I honestly feel bad for her and have been trying to help her when I can by searching for resources.

I am fishing for comments on this post; please comment if you have tips or possible job postings or anything that might help a financially strapped student (even scathing but constructive criticism is welcome, I won't fault you if it's genuinely constructive and will usually learn from it!). Or, if you know my email, email me.

Epidemics

2008-05-06T15:23:00.001-07:00

The vast majority of people don't know this, but neurology has been known to have its own pandemics to deal with . While the world is on the subject of H5N1, I'll post about some neurological diseases that have developed into epidemics.

-Encephalitis and encephalomyelitis
-Kuru
-Meningitis
-Polio
-Trypanosomiasis

Encephalitis - this is a nasty disease and is an inflammation of the brain. There are two main encephalitides that have developed into epidemics: Japanese encephalitis and La Crosse (yes, Wisconsin has its very own encephalitis!) encephalitis. The main symptoms of encephalitides are sudden fever, headache, vomiting, stiff neck and back, impaired judgment, drowsiness, weak muscles, a clumsy and unsteady gait, and irritability (from NINDS Fact Sheet on meningitis and encephalitis). Epidemics occur in East and Southeast Asia, where 30,000-50,000 cases occur annually. Case fatality is anywhere from 0.3-60%, depending on the population and age.

Kuru - also known as the zombie disease, due to the fact that it mostly occurred among cannibalistic tribes of Papua New Guinea via eating a dead person's brain. This is a prion disease, and is similar to CJD in that it produces spongiform encephalopathy. Luckily, this disease was wiped out by 1980.

Meningitis - Also a nasty disease and is the inflammation of the meninges, which are the membranes surrounding the brain (arachnoid, dura mater and pia mater; this is one of the two diseases here which every college student is or ought to be vaccinated for. It occurs sometimes in college dormitories, and has many of the same symptoms as encephalitis. Case fatality is low, but it occasionally kills in as little as 48 hours!

Polio - The FDR disease. Most people in the United States are vaccinated against this. Polio, oddly enough, was endemic to Europe for thousands of years until it hopped across the pond, and it preferentially infects motor neurons - which means that when you get it, you may stop breathing and be quite paralyzed. Iron lungs were used quite frequently for this; nowadays, biphasic cuirass ventilation replaces the iron lung in situations where patients cannot breathe (see also Ondine's curse for another interesting and sad condition where people cannot breathe, albeit not autonomically.)

Trypanosomiasis - What we call trypanosomiasis is called by laymen sleeping sickness and Chagas's disease. This disease makes people sleepy and is caused by a small parasite in the saliva of tsetse flies, in the case of sleeping sickness, and mosquitoes, in the case of Chagas's disease. Its symptoms are fever, headaches, and joint pains; in addition, Chagas's disease causes conjunctivitis.

Enjoy wondering how it might be to get one of these little suckers.

A rant on funding, again

2008-05-01T09:19:00.000-07:00

We need a science White House. At this point, I am almost past caring whether it is Democratic (though I would prefer a Democratic White House) or Republican (OH SWEET REASON NO), I just want them to give more money to the NIH and NSF. The Department of Defense doesn't need all the crap it gets. No military in the world is nearly as technologically advanced as ours.

The reason I say this is because there is good research that is getting tossed by the wayside because it doesn't have enough money or there are laboratories that cannot afford to hire an adequate number of researchers.

For example, John McCain showed his ignorance of all but the most obvious research when he made a snide comment about a bear DNA investigation that was part of investigating ecological dynamics in a key species. McCain is a man who has no understanding of science, although we can't fault him more than a reasonable amount because he's not science-educated.

There are plenty of PhDs who are unemployed because of the shortage of fundings. GrrlScientist is an ornithologist who has been unemployed for the past while, for example, and she delivers an interesting and rather exquisite rant on her own unemployment.

This is research not getting done because of governmental ignorance. How much development would we have had if Bush was not in office? Let's think of research topics that might be done if the government gave us more money:

- topics concerning keystone species which are vital to their environment
- research into rare diseases
- more investigation of the neural bases of intelligence
- MORE STEM CELL RESEARCH

There is also a lamentable lack of science education. We American-born scientists (in this number are also counted mathematicians, computer scientists, and engineers in addition to biology, chemistry, physics, and medicine) are a small bunch; apparently, we have to import the rest of our colleagues from Asia and Europe because the vast majority of the rest of you can't be arsed to have as motivation for your job anything other than money. I don't give a flying crap how much I earn as long as I'm doing neuroscience; I would live in a space similar to my friend Bill's crusty old attic if I had to (although with sufficient weatherproofing and maybe a space heater).

We would have more American-born scientists if the vast majority of the aforementioned rest of you stopped being greedy and had some discipline and actually knew something about science. (Interestingly, this reminds me of a discussion I had at Atheists, Humanists, and Agnostics at UW-Madison, the atheist group that I am a member in, when we were talking about the theists' so-called 'miracles'. None of the theists who were arguing this point - I say this because the only theist who usually sides with us, my friend Rachel the Spinozan panentheist, is as far as I know majoring in science and wasn't really participating in the conversation, and the theists I personally know who are scientists are comparably sane to my fellow scientist atheists - were majors in science, and Chris, Nick, Travis and I, who are all science majors and all atheists - well, Chris is also a philosophy major - were using probably the most substantive arguments which arise mainly from science to argue that the rather fundamentalist theists were full of shit, and our arguments apparently went over their heads - they apparently went over the heads of the other atheists, too.)

And no, we're not going to resort to framing and marketing it like some sort of product. Is the American public really this stupid?

Seriously, if it gets much worse, I WILL bail on the United States after I get my PhD, as one more scientist who takes their talent to where it will be acknowledged. You can say hello to me in Amsterdam.

The problems with phenomenology

2008-04-26T15:12:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the lack of posts for a week. I've been under stress.

In philosophy club Saturday, we discussed whether the scientific method was a method which produces most truth.

I argued that it was about the best thing we've got, and we can't understand what it's like to be anything else - for example, to use the classic philosophy of mind example, we can't understand what it is like to be a bat . We cannot echolocate, we do not have very good hearing, and we cannot fly.

Phenomenology examines first-person experiences. I think phenomenology is going to be stuck between what we learn of consciousness in the next decades and the fact that you cannot reproduce an individual's experience because it is so complex at the moment. We have a limited ability to reason logically which is constrained by our perceptions.

So can we in fact know what it's like to be a bat? Well, there are two factors in this:

- the bat's neurological milieus
- the bat's experiences

Generalizing from one bat to all bats is dangerous; there are different species of bats, and each one has different abilities. For example, a hawknose bat does not know what a vampire bat's perception of blood is, and within species, I suspect one bat does not know how exquisitely satisfying another bat's recent meals were.

The research by Tristan Bekinschtein, whose work I have cited before in this blog, deals with consciousness in patients with 'disorders of consciousness' - dementia, PVS and Alzheimer's. His research seems to suggest that there are significant impairments in affective cognition and theory of mind in such individuals (for those of you who don't know what theory of mind is, here is a Wikipedia article that describes it extremely well.)

This does not seem to mesh with how philosophers define consciousness, though, which is to say, they don't limit it to simple awareness of the self and of one's environment.

Subjective experience, by definition, is how we perceive a thing. Now, in my studies of neuroscience, our perception of something first goes through our sensory system. To use a complex example from my own experiences, say you are at a party, you are sober, and you are sitting next to someone who is drinking a beer. Your senses are not impaired, so you perceive the situation as accurately as possible. You smell the alcohol, see the color of the bottle, and see the person who is drinking it. The visual, olfactory, auditory, tactile, possibly gustatory, proprioceptive, nociceptive, and thermoceptive aspects of the situation all trigger certain responses in your sensory system. These varied responses are compared to your previous experiences, whether you have experienced it firsthand or heard about it.

You know, I think this can be best summed up in one angry sentence: Philosophy uninformed by science is sophistry.

Everyone, go to http://expelledexposed.com .

2008-04-16T09:06:00.000-07:00

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From Pharyngula .

A thought

2008-04-16T08:57:00.000-07:00

Atheists: If it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, and acts like a duck, then it's probably a duck.

Fundies: If it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, and acts like a duck, it's God.

Race and intelligence

2008-04-14T08:22:00.000-07:00

I'm gonna get more fire on this one. I'm not going to talk about this from a comparative standpoint but am going to present general information; I am not going to talk about this in controversial terms until I'm a professor and I've got tenure, because I know who probably reads this blog and I need to make it clear, in no uncertain terms, that I am an individual of no significant prejudices. ('No prejudices' would be a misnomer, because everybody's got them.)

Race is undoubtedly a factor in intelligence because members of certain cultural groups tend to mate with people of their own cultural group - interracial offspring are becoming more common, yes, but there is still a strong trend in organisms to stick to their own. An example of selection for intelligence is Steven Pinker's article in The New Republic (admittedly a conservative paper which I usually will not read because of its sheer stupidity, but Steven Pinker writes mostly good stuff, though I still thoroughly disagree with him on his rather sexist defense of Larry Summers) about selection for intelligence in individuals of Ashkenazi Hebrew background ('Jewish' is a misnomer; 'Jewish' describes an adherent of a religion, not a member of an ethnicity.) Pinker writes:

The appearance of an advantage in average intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews is easier to establish than its causes. Jews are remarkably over-represented in benchmarks of brainpower. Though never exceeding 3 percent of the American population, Jews account for 37 percent of the winners of the U.S. National
Medal of Science, 25 percent of the American Nobel Prize winners in literature,
40 percent of the American Nobel Prize winners in science and economics, and so
on. On the world stage, we find that 54 percent of the world chess champions have had one or two Jewish parents.
Does this mean that Jews are a nation of meinsteins? It does not. Their average IQ has been measured at 108 to 115, one-half to one standard deviation above the mean. But statisticians have long known that a moderate difference in the means of two distributions translates into a large difference at the tails. In the simplest case, if we have two groups of the same size, and the average of Group A exceeds the average of Group B by fifteen IQ points (one standard deviation), then among people with an IQ of 115 or higher the As will outnumber the Bs by a ratio of three to one,
but among people with an IQ of 160 or higher the As will outnumber the Bs by a ratio of forty-two to one. Even if Group A was a fraction of the size of Group B to begin with, it would contribute a substantial proportion of the people who had the highest scores.

The CH&H theory can be divided into seven hypotheses. The first is that the Ashkenazi advantage in intelligence is genetic in the first place. Many intellectuals dismiss this possibility out of hand, having been convinced by Stephen Jay Gould's book The Mismeasure of Man that general intelligence does not exist and that there is no evidence for its heritability. But a decade ago, the American Psychological Association commissioned an ideologically and racially diverse panel of scientists to review the evidence. They reported that IQ tests measure a stable property of the
person; that general intelligence reflects a real phenomenon (namely, that measures of different aspects of intelligence intercorrelate); that it predicts a variety of positive life outcomes; and that it is highly heritable among individuals within a group. This does not imply that differences between groups are also genetic, since one group may experience a difference across the board, such as in wealth, discrimination, or social and cultural capital.
The most obvious test of a genetic cause of the Ashkenazi advantage would be a cross-adoption study that measured the adult IQ of children with Ashkenazi biological parents and gentile adoptive parents, and vice versa. No such study exists, so CH&H's evidence is circumstantial. The Ashkenazi advantage has been found in many decades, countries, and levels of wealth, and the IQ literature shows no well-understood environmental factors capable of producing an advantage of that magnitude. It remains possible that the advantage is caused by some poorly understood environmental cause. Environmental hypotheses tend to get a free pass in intellectual life, but they must be scrutinized as well. The possibility that Jewish mothers produce smarter children is unlikely in light of abundant evidence that families have no lasting effect on intelligence. Siblings reared together are no more correlated in IQ than siblings who were separated at birth, and adopted siblings are not correlated at all. Growing up in a given home within a culture seems to leave no
lasting stamp on intelligence.
But parents are just one aspect of the environment, and the cultural milieu is surely more important. Yet it cannot be taken for granted that Jewish culture favors achievement in physics, philosophy, or chess. ...

Also worth remembering is the saying that if wishes were horses, beggars would ride. Mere expectations cannot produce a brilliant mind. So an environmental explanation of the Ashkenazi advantage in intelligence is also unproven, though it certainly cannot be ruled out.

The second hypothesis is that Ashkenazim tended to marry their own during most of their formative history. This is necessary, because natural selection cannot change the genetic composition of a population if new genes are constantly flowing in from the neighbors and diluting its effects. CH&H cite the Jewish traditions of avoiding intermarriage, proselytization, or conquest. They mention historical accounts attesting that intermarriage was indeed rare, and genetic evidence pointing to an admixture of about 0.5 to 1 percent of neighboring genes per generation. Note that over many centuries this is enough to make Ashkenazim genetically similar to their European neighbors, so the notion of a distinct "Jewish race" is indeed nonsense. But the two populations are not identical: the genetic overlap due to interbreeding is around one-third to one-half, depending on which genes you look at.

The third hypothesis is that Ashkenazim were concentrated in mercantile, managerial, and financial occupations at a time when their neighbors were likely to be peasant farmers, craftsmen, or soldiers. Jews presumably had an accidental head start in these occupations because of their religious obligation of literacy, their ability to network with one another across far-flung communities, and their role as a go-between amid Christian and Islamic civilizations. In the Middle Ages they were funneled into middlemen professions by their exclusion from guilds, their inability to own land, and the niche opened up by the Christian prohibition of usury. CH&H cite historians who have documented that a majority of Jews were middlemen during the Middle Ages, many of them moneylenders.
The fourth hypothesis is that in traditional Ashkenazi occupations higher intelligence led to greater economic success. CH&H cite contemporary data that IQ predicts income and occupational success in every profession, and that the minimum IQ requirements for financial and managerial occupations are higher than those for farming, crafts, and the military. Presumably, numeracy, verbal skill, problem solving, and social intelligence are invaluable in calculating slim profits and interest
rates, in assessing creditworthiness, in anticipating trends, and in meeting other cognitive demands of the middleman niche. Cultural historians have noticed that these skills seem to be cultivated among contemporary middleman minorities.
The fifth hypothesis is that richer people had more surviving children during the centuries in which Ashkenazim were middlemen. Today the wealthy tend to have fewer children, but before the demographic transition (which began with the industrial revolution) wealth brought better nutrition and healthier surroundings, and hence more children who survived to adulthood. CH&H cite historians who made this point about the Ashkenazim in particular.
The sixth hypothesis is that the common Ashkenazi diseases are a product of natural selection rather than genetic drift, the other mechanism of evolutionary change. In any finite population, some genes can go extinct and others can take over the population by sheer chance. Imagine an island on which a lightning bolt happened to kill everyone but the redheads; the descendants would found a redheaded race, despite the lack of any advantage to redheadedness. As the example suggests, drift is most potent in small populations. It can leave a genetic stamp on an inbred community that was founded by a small number of pioneers, or that suffered a bottleneck in population size and subsequently rebounded, multiplying copies of whatever genes were possessed by the few lucky survivors.
Most medical geneticists believe that drift is to blame for Ashkenazic genetic diseases. CH&H respond with two lines of evidence, based on the logic that drift affects all genes equally, be they advantageous, neutral, or deleterious. Bottlenecks tend to reduce heterozygosity, or the state of having different versions of a gene from one's mother and father. That is because if only a few ancestors were around at some point in the past, they would have had fewer gene variants to leave to their descendants, increasing the chance that a gene would meet a copy of itself when a couple conceives a child. CH&H adduce evidence that Ashkenazim, unlike other small populations, have degrees of heterozygosity similar to their more numerous European neighbors. They also suggest that Ashkenazim have a distribution of neutral genes similar to that of Europeans in general. A problem in evaluating this hypothesis is that arguments for and against genetic bottlenecks are often sensitive to assumptions built into the models, and we can expect CH&H to be debating their critics for some time.
Perhaps the most interesting biological fact addressed by CH&H is that Ashkenazi
genetic diseases tend to cluster in a small number of metabolic pathways. Genes involved in different stages of a single biochemical assembly line are often scattered throughout the genome. The presence of mutations in a set of these genes is a fingerprint of natural selection, because the only common denominator is their effect on the organism, which is what selection, and selection alone, can "see." Random drift is unlikely to collect genes scattered hither and yon that just happen to take part in the same biochemical process.
It has long been known that Ashkenazi diseases cluster in groups with a common
metabolic pathway. They include disorders of storing sphingolipids ("sphinx-like fats"), such as Tay-Sachs and Gaucher's, and disorders of DNA repair, including the BRCA1 gene, which increases the odds of breast cancer. Using a functional genomic database, CH&H try to calculate the a priori probability that these clusterings could have arisen at random, and dismiss it as infinitesimal.

The seventh and really pivotal hypothesis is that the common Ashkenazi diseases are by-products of genes that were selected because they enhance intelligence. The alternative is that they were selected for something else, such as resistance to infectious disease. CH&H discount disease resistance for most of the genes in question because the genes are not shared by other Europeans, who must have been victims of the same germs.
Harmful genetic by-products can arise in two major ways. In heterozygote advantage, a gene confers an advantage on possessors of one copy (heterozygotes or carriers), which outweighs the disadvantage it encumbers on possessors of two copies (homozygotes). The best-known example is the sickle cell gene, prevalent in malaria-ridden parts of Africa, which leads to malaria resistance in homozygotes but to anemia in heterozygotes. CH&H suggest that a similar trade-off could have produced the Ashkenazi diseases, though the evidence is paltry. They note that increased levels of sphingolipids foster neural growth in developing rodent brains, and that the normal version of the BRCA1 gene inhibits neural growth; but that is a long way from human intelligence.
The other kind of by-product comes from antagonistic pleiotropy: a single copy of a gene has multiple effects, the good ones outweighing the bad ones on average. The
evidence here is a bit better. People with the genes for torsion dystonia,
non-classical congenital adrenal hyperplasia, and Gaucher's disease tend to have higher average IQs, or tend to be concentrated in professions such as physics and engineering. But the numbers are small. So the evidence that Ashkenazi disease genes boost intelligence is extremely iffy. Still, the hypothesis is testable: compare the IQs in a large sample of sibling pairs, one of whom is a carrier of a disease gene, the other a non-carrier. If the carriers are not smarter, the hypothesis is wrong. The study could easily be done in Israel, with its centralized records of health care, education, and military service.

Pinker's hypotheses seem to state that certain genes are going to be selected for in certain populations and some populations are more prone to select for intelligent genes. So there are, certainly, some mild genetic correlations, but I have to issue a warning: this does not mean one race has superior intelligence to another. Even if one race has a higher average IQ, you cannot generalize from a population to an individual. The mean is not the median. People of different races are very spread out among the continuum of IQ.

One of my favorite academics in my field is J. Philippe Rushton, an evolutionary neurogeneticist at the University of Western Ontario. Dr. Rushton nearly lost his job because of his article 'Evolutionary Biology and Heritable Traits (With Reference to Oriental-White-Black Differences)' . Pinker and Rushton make the point that there are clearly differences between people of different ethnic backgrounds, but that there is potential for misuse. Intelligence researchers will have to deal with - and I am absolutely afraid of having to deal with this in the future, but I will need to deal with this - human rights groups such as the NAACP. Their purpose is noble and I am a LOUD supporter of civil rights for folks, but censoring science because they may not want to know information gathered in an ethical, honest way is going too far - and they will most likely misinterpret it, because frankly, not too many people in most human rights groups about anything lately have any science background, and people in general are also morons.

Before we tackle race and intelligence, though, we still have to figure out the neurological basis of it. As I said, I aim to be one of the researchers who does significant work in this area. We have a tiny list of genes, and a comprehensive neurologic model of intelligence is not going to be possible until we have the rest of the genes.

Stephen Hawking communicates my attitude perfectly

2008-04-12T15:26:00.000-07:00

I'm a disciple of science
I know the universe is in full compliance with natural laws,
but many place reliance on the psuedo-science of quacks and
morons and fools because
their education's deficient,
they put faith in omniscient
make-believe beings who control their fate,
but the Hawk ain't with it, dig it,
their Holy writ ain't the least bit legit,
it's a bunch of bullshit.

They need to read a book that ain't so damn old,
let reason take hold,
though truth to be told,
they're probably already too far gone,
withdrawn, the conclusion foregone.
But maybe there is still hope for the young,
if they reject the dung being slung from the tongues
of the ignorant fools who call themselves preachers,
and listen instead to their science teachers.

Chorus
Upon blind faith they place reliance,
what we need more of is science!

Trash Talk
Uh yeah, that's right!
Fundamentalist assholes!
Screw the whole lot of them.

Verse 2
Look, I ain't Thomas Dolby,
science doesn't blind me,
think you're smart? Form a line behind me,
you won't find me, truth to tell,
to be a man who suffers fools very well.
Quite the opposite in fact,
I ain't got time to interact
with crystal wearing freaks in need of a smack.
New age motherfuckers? Don't get me started,
I made more sense than them last time I farted.

Not to put too fine a point upon it,
but the whole new age movement is full of shit.
Please allow me to elaborate,
explicate, expatiate.
From astral projection to zygomancy it's a
mish-mash of idiocy.
Instead of the archaic worship of seasons,
they should explore logic and reason.

Chorus

Trash Talk
Fucking new-agers!
Is there any amount of bullshit they won't swallow?
It's two-thousand-aught-three goddammit!
When are these morons gonna join us in the 21st century?

On being human

2008-04-11T16:49:00.001-07:00

This is one of those hopefully rare posts where I get EXTREMELY serious.

Human beings have a surprising amount of hubris.

We are a remarkably arrogant species; we say there is a purpose for everything, we say we are the masters of Earth, we say we are going to conquer everything.

This makes me laugh.

We are another species; we are born, we eat, we socialize, we have sex, some of us breed, and we die. The fact that we seem to be remarkably aware of this, though, is rather interesting, which does, in fact, make humans rather unique among other animals. Nature is a fickle, enigmatic... thing.

We are a remarkably varied species. Unique among animals - but not special - we have conquered an entire planet and devised ways using our brains, not the rest of our bodies, to adapt - a sort of technoadaptation, if you will, as opposed to a genoadaptation. As a white person, my ancestors came from climates where there was less sun, which decreased the need for melanin in our skin to protect us from ultraviolet.

Our minds in particular are driven partially by genetics and partially by environment - but we underestimate the magnitude of both. Our genetics give us a propensity to certain behaviors, but at birth, our minds are very much tabulae rasae. The complexity of our own minds may, in fact, be beyond our own capacity to understand them, but they are as complex as the society that is composed of beings which have them. I like to think of things as little microcosms; human beings house bacterial civilizations, our societies seem a little bit similar to human brains, and our bodies function similarly to our cells. Nature has an odd organization.

I propose a solution to the madness that is humanity, which others have already brought forth: stop being human. Progress beyond it. Humanity is still evolving. I wish I could see what humanity will look like in the future. Perhaps my family's descendants (I don't plan on having children, myself) will barely resemble me. Forsake the limitations of our silly bodies; go beyond the flesh. Willfully refuse to do what society demands of you, if it is the right thing to do. Be willing to be a pariah for the sake of truth. (I am going to do this by studying cognitive neurogenetics and devoting my life to deciphering intelligence - hopefully, this information will be used to make people smarter, because right now, most human beings are woefully stupid - case in point, George Bush.) It is difficult - I have been there and still am, and quite willfully - but it builds in you formidable strength.

We all need to work toward making humanity extinct - by becoming something else. Perhaps, even, gods.

It is not beyond our reach.

The Large Hardon Collider

2008-04-11T13:47:00.001-07:00

No, that was not a typo.

(NSFW)

Why philosophy of mind is an utterly pointless discipline

2008-04-10T13:23:00.000-07:00

I'm going to draw some fire for this one.

tl;dr: LET NEUROSCIENTISTS STUDY THE BRAIN, PLEASE. YOU PHILOSOPHERS CAN GO BACK TO YOUR KANT AND HUME AND DESCARTES (AND KEEP YOUR BLOODY DUALISTS), WE'LL KEEP TO OUR RAMON Y CAJAL AND HODGKIN AND HUXLEY, THANKS.

Philosophy of mind is an utterly pointless discipline.

Philosophy in general irks the hell out of me in several ways; it looks for things that have really been only rationalized to exist by philosophers and haven't been proven to exist any other way (which makes them sound like fundamentalists of some theistic religion and frankly makes me not take them seriously at all); I can think of too many philosophers whose only source of proof was the logical assumptions made by their brains. Ethics, logic, and thought experiments are great, but postulating about things such as mathematics and the mind makes philosophers look like remoras of the intellect.

Consciousness is an especially contentious thing - David Chalmers, for one, has this silly notion of 'qualia', which are 'the way things seem to us'. These are, according to Chalmers, ineffable, intrinsic, private, and directly apprehensible in consciousness. Say you see a red cup which contains beer. Chalmers says that 'redness' is a quale of the cup, as is the 'brownness' of the beer or the 'liquidness' of the beer or the 'truncated conicness' of the cup.

These phenomena are easily explainable by the fact that the chemicals which compose the plastic and the beer reflect the colors red and brown, and that beer exists at room temperature in a liquid state (since it is mostly water) and that the plastic was poured into a mold and hardened that way, since it is solid at room temperature. The reason we see red and brown is the fact that human eyes are designed to see those colors. This is how the electromagnetic spectra reflected by these substances looks to our eyes and how our eyes process them. If we were dogs, we would see shades of gray, and if we were bees, we would see some funky purple stuff. The reason we have those colors is that that is what people have called them over time, and, well, we can't do much about the electromagnetic spectrum, that's just the way it is and there's no 'why' to it. There is essentially no 'why' to the most basic aspects of existence.

Also, this 'zombie' thing: If zombies were physically similar to us, they would be conscious. Consciousness is a physical property which exists because of our neurophysiology. There is no supernatural woo-woo explanation to it, and any supernatural woo-woo assumptions are about as good as saying there's a big flying teapot on the other side of the universe. (OBVIOUS CONNECTION TO THE ABSURDITY OF THEISM FOR THE WIN)

The Chinese room experiment is about the only plausible thing I have ever seen come out of philosophy of mind; for the answer as to why this is plausible, see Developing Intelligence.

...AAAAAAARGH.

Speculating about the future of intelligence research

2008-04-09T07:08:00.000-07:00

Since this field is very near and dear to me - I will make some speculation about the future of it.

I see a future full of questions - some controversial, some not. (I will attack the controversial ones head on.) Probably the most pressing question is 'How do we get from our small list of genes that may be correlated to intelligence to a whole-brain model of intelligence?' We will probably follow the rest of consciousness research in this respect, since consciousness research is largely done in non-integrated pieces at the moment; you can't integrate it until you have enough information. (I'm curious about the work of Tristan Bekinschtein from Cambridge; apparently, he does work on patients with 'consciousness disorders' - persistent vegetative state, frontotemporal dementia, etc. - which is really fraught with ethical issues but is very interesting - about behavior such as affective decision-making and emotional processing. ) A lot of research is done - for example - on identical twins separated at birth, which - in correction from my last post - is a VITAL component of studying the neurogenetics of intelligence, and this gives a window into how much environment and genetics influence intelligence. (Genetics influences one's intelligence a LOT. ) A major concern is communicating this information to the public correctly - studies about race and intelligence have caused uproar - white supremacist groups have tried to co-opt their incorrect interpretations of some studies (for example) to further their own horribly racist aims.

One problem that, frankly, is going to have to be dealt with harshly is the field of philosophy of mind. My beef with philosophy of mind is that it approaches something that is clearly physical with the attitude that it is not; we neuroscientists stick to what we can prove with the support of observable, at least somewhat empirical, and testable evidence, whereas philosophers of mind go all over the place - my advisor, for the record, thinks philosophy of mind is an idiotic field, or at least that was his impression when I told him of some of philosophy of mind's stupidities. (If you recall my review of Jaegwon Kim's Philosophy of Mind, you recall I was not amused.) Has anyone considered the notion that the brain is more complex than we are aware of? (If we can find biological bases for several functions, we can put a whole lot of philosophers out of work. Say goodbye to your job, David Chalmers. - if you can't tell already, I think philosophy of mind is silly.) There are aspects of the brain that we haven't discovered yet, I bet, and I think there's potentially a complex multi-level integration of system, cell, molecule, and gene that may need to be completely explained before we make a model for consciousness. (Fuck, I'm sounding like a string theorist, but at least I'm not postulating the existence of anything that doesn't; I'm merely bringing a possible hypothesis and interaction and function of systems which we know exist.) I am a little afraid of what philosophers of mind might postulate about intelligence and whether it might be broadly accepted by the public.

I may be dead by the time there is a working model of intelligence. I may be decomposed. The idea is that complex and unresearched. There are hundreds of papers about it, but intelligence research isn't even in its infancy - it is embryonic .

The sad state of intelligence research

2008-04-07T13:43:00.000-07:00

I just spent an hour looking for PhD advisors. I'm planning to get my PhD in neuroscience and research the neurogenetics of intelligence.

Every, and I mean EVERY intelligence researcher I've seen is a psychologist. This is incredibly sad - because it means that none of them are looking at intelligence from a strictly neuroscientific point of view. Psychology flows from neuroscience, and intelligence is determined partially by genetics, so one would think people would be all over the genetic aspects of intelligence.

NOT SO. I can name a couple of genes and not much more that influence intelligence:

COMT
DTNBP1
SNAP-25
CHRM2
Human neuropsin
FADS2
IGF2R
Dysbindin-1
and a small amount of genes on chromosome 4

There are no comprehensive, published models of how these things work? Psychologists can research all this stuff to hell, but until we neuroscientists get cracking on researching the neurogenetics of intelligence, we're all going to be dumber about being smart.

Even the neuroscientists I know of who are researching this are only focusing on systems research - John Duncan at Cambridge (who I am going to contact as a possible PhD advisor) is the only one I know of who's focusing specifically on intelligence. (Let's see if I get in Cambridge - foreign students need a 3.5 to even be considered. My GPA is currently not quite that high, and that worries me a lot)

Robert Plomin is another possible PhD advisor at King's College London (I suspect I am going to England for grad school) who discovered IGF2R's role in intelligence. Of course, right now he's working on a twin study and that just doesn't make me happy.

Are people perhaps AFRAID of the controversial issues behind intelligence research? I say get some cojones and start researching - I don't care if we get epithets slung at us by the masses who don't know any better!

Controversy is an engineer of progress.

Atheist Statistics 2008

2008-04-05T09:06:00.001-07:00

This warms my heart.

Controversial frontiers in cognition

2008-04-05T08:40:00.001-07:00

There are some topics which understandably will rile people a bit.

One is the topic of intelligence, which I am devoting my life to researching - I already know that I will get hit with a lot of crap when I investigate the neurogenetics of it. There is a book called The Bell Curve which makes several inferences about correlation of intelligence by race, sex, height, and familial environment; it is a devastating but eye-opening commentary, even if much of the reasoning is flawed; the data is unmistakable. Studies on intelligence frequently hearken back to old-school eugenics, particularly Nazi-era eugenics which made assumptions based on those who were not members of the 'master race' that Hitler was so fervent about - his madness was fatal on an epic scale to masses of innocent individuals, and part of the reason was because he was so misinformed and out of his tiny little mind. Mengele, particularly, practiced eugenics in his sickening and inhumane experiments on those who were in concentration camps. (As an aside - if you are one of the probably few people who don't know the evil shit that Mengele did, you might be informed about how bad it was when I say many people who cite Mengele's experiments in their works often include an aside about the sheer cruelty of his experimentation.) New-school eugenics lacks the general inhumanity of old-school eugenics, and in many cases, can be good; take, for example, gene therapy, which is broadly an eugenic practice. It modifies a genome in order to weed out an undesirable condition. Intelligence will apply to this in the manner that if we can find a way to make people smarter, people will be smarter - and, frankly, I see no harm in that. It's not culling a population of less intelligent people that should be the aim - it's bringing everybody up to speed with the smartest people so we're all, honestly, geniuses.

Another is consciousness - some people, I suspect, are afraid at what this is going to do to our society. Perhaps it will make them feel less special. I have nothing but pity for these people (the condescending kind).

Another is neurotheology - for example, the God helmet experiment conducted by Michael Persinger showed that so-called 'religious experiences' are merely hyperactivations in the temporal lobe. If you disagree with this conclusion, let me inform you of one prominent comparison between subjects: Richard Dawkins and a priest both were in the experiment. Richard Dawkins' temporal lobe was not activated; the priest however exhibited signs of thinking frantically in the face of evidence that he in fact was temporally hyperactive.

I enjoy controversy.

Commenting is OKAY

2008-04-02T08:11:00.001-07:00

Seriously, folks, I blog because I want to foster discussion.

Please comment! Contribute to the discussion !

Dick to the Dawk to the PhD

2008-03-31T18:51:00.001-07:00

UPDATE: This apparently features an equal amount of ID as evolution. Ergo, video = fail.

UPDATE 2: This movie was apparently made by the producers of Expelled. I refuse to disseminate creationist bullshit.

Nailing one's self to a cross cannot be healthy

2008-03-30T13:52:00.000-07:00

A bunch of Christians doing silly and unsafe things for their beliefs.

Categorized as humor because I find it funny, in a sick, misanthropic way.

Via Evolved and Rational.

Carnival of the Godless

2008-03-30T13:47:00.000-07:00

Carnival of the Godless #88 is up at Atheist FAQ.

Post for someone I know

2008-03-30T08:21:00.000-07:00

I used to know Tope Awe when I lived in Chadbourne Residential College. She was the Multicultural Resident Liaison when I was there.

She is in danger of being deported to Nigeria, a place she hasn't seen for twenty years, because her father's medical visa has expired.

Tope is a third-year pharmacy student, the Multicultural Resident Liaison, a founder of the African Students Association, and someone whom I and many others acknowledge has contributed a lot to UW-Madison.

She deserves to finish her education!

The Wisconsin State Journal has an article about her - please take the time to read it.

If you live in Madison, please, PLEASE send a message of support for Tope, if you can, to our senators and representative.

Large hadron colliders

2008-03-28T13:00:00.000-07:00

XKCD makes me lol.

Synesthesia

2008-03-27T10:07:00.001-07:00

I am a synesthetic, and so are a few other people I know. Neuroscience is massively awesome to me already, since I'm a neuroscience student; it becomes so much more thoroughly amazing when there is a personal aspect to a topic.

Synesthesia is a phenomenon where two senses are linked neurologically in a way that stimulating one gives not only stimulation of that sense but another sense - for example, thinking words have a color, feeling noise, et cetera. I do not experience it as strongly as some; I have a sort of olfactory-visual synesthesia, in that I instantly associate a smell with a color, but do not really see the color - I have an inkling of what shade or what kind of hue it might be, but do not know a color.

The 'clinical diagnosis for synesthesia is as follows (http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-10-cytowic.html):

4.2 Synesthesia is involuntary but elicited. It is a passive experience that happens to someone. It is unsupressable, but elicited by a stimulus that is usually identified without difficulty. It cannot be conjured up or dismissed at will, although circumstances of attention and distraction may make the experience seem more or less vivid.

4.3 Synesthesia is projected. It is perceived externally in peri-personal space, the limb-axis space immediately surrounding the body, never at a distance as in the spatial teloreception of vision or audition. My subject DS, for example, is a college teacher who, on hearing music, also see objects - falling gold balls, shooting lines, metallic waves like oscilloscope tracings - that float on a "screen" six inches from her nose. Her favorite music, she explains, "makes the lines move upward."

4.4 Distinguishing the experience of perception as "near" (e.g., chemosensation, touch, proprioception, body schema, the orientation of one's body within Euclidean space) or "distant" (e.g., seeing, hearing) is concordant with concepts of classical neurology and neuroanatomy. This idea was most clearly articulated by Paul Yakovlev (1894-1983) who mapped "three spheres of motility" onto three anatomical divisions of the neuraxis (Yakovlev, 1948, 1970).

4.5 Synesthetic perceptions are durable and generic, never pictorial or elaborated. "Durable" means that the cross-sensory associations do not change over time. This has been shown many times by test-retest sessions given decades apart without warning. "Generic" means that while you or I might imagine a pastoral landscape while listening to Beethoven, what synesthetes experience is unelaborated: they see blobs, lines, spirals, and lattice shapes; feel smooth or rough textures; taste agreeable or disagreeable tastes such as salty, sweet, or metallic.

4.6 Though synesthetes are often carelessly dismissed as being just poetic, it is we who must be cautious against unjustifiably interpreting their comments. For example, my index case MW described the shape of mint as "cool glass columns." On analysis, this turned out to be his shorthand way of trying to convey the quality of the tactile experience - "what is it like." When pressed to elaborate the sensations he felt, he said:
I can reach my hand out and rub it along the back side of a curve. I can't feel where the top and bottom end: so it's like a column. It's cool to the touch, as if it were made of stone or glass. What is so wonderful about it, though, is its absolute smoothness. Perfectly smooth. I can't feel any pits or indentations in the surface, so it must not be made of granite or stone. Therefore, it must be made of glass.

It must be noted that hippocampal seizures can induce sensations similar to synesthesia. The Preserved Neural Connectivity theory, mentioned by Simon Baron-Cohen in his book Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens: How Synaesthetes Color Their World, states that

beyond the normal human fetal stage, the brain does not have direct neural connections between the auditory and visual areas. This theory goes on to suggest that, probably for genetic reasons, in individuals with synesthesia the pathways between the auditory and visual areas of the brain exist beyond the early embryonic stage, when normally such connections would die off. Certainly there is evidence that these connective pathways between the auditory and visual areas of the brain exist during fetal development in other species, such as the macaque monkey and the domestic cat. These pathways, or projections, are transient; typically, they disappear approximately three months after birth. There is some evidence that they may exist in human newborns and, as in cats and macaques, get pruned as the brain biologically matures.

We in cognitive science do not know the complete mechanisms by which synesthesia works, but certainly, the Preserved Neural Connectivity theory posits an idea about the developmental neurological aspects of this - synesthesia almost always manifests before age 4, and persists into one's adulthood.

Richard E. Cytowic, a cognitive scientist at Monash University in Australia, asserts that the limbic system is the critical brain center for synesthesia. PET and fMRI could serve as useful in evaluating this. Eraldo Paulesu at London University tested this by examining color-noise synesthesia in a PET scanner, giving subjects words or tones. Two brain areas of particular interest emerged: the posterior inferior temportal cortex and the parietal-occipital junction.

The posterior inferior temporal cortex participates in visual processing, particularly face recognition, sentence comprehension, writing, and spelling.

The parietal-occipital junction participates in understanding hearing.

Both of these areas activated in the brain while a synesthete listened to words. In a non-synesthetic person, neither area activated. The limbic system didn't activate either so Cytowic's theory was debunked, but new areas emerged as the focus for synesthesia.

Sensory research isn't my field, but the effects of this on cognitive processes contain some mental gymnastics, according to Simon Baron-Cohen, for those who have it.

Both as a neuroscience student and a synesthete, I can say that this has some implications for the future of developmental neuroscientific research, especially where comparisons are drawn between brains and a computer.

Four thousand dead

2008-03-24T18:33:00.000-07:00

Let me take a moment to register my extreme dissatisfaction - no, outrage - at my government.

The four thousandth soldier has been killed. The Iraq death toll - Coalition members, Iraqis, and insurgents - is 655,000.

As my friend Chris says, it's a fucking milestone, but not a good one.

"That's bullshit, get off it
This war is for profit
Violence and occupation
Do not bring liberation"

A thought

2008-03-24T10:42:00.000-07:00

Nature is not so much a majestic righteous force as it is an enigmatic and amoral opportunist. And morality is based on evolutionarily advantageous behavior.

Thoughts on morality?

On deception in religion

2008-03-21T06:45:00.000-07:00

PZ Myers wins the internet today for being ejected from a screening of the creationist propaganda film Expelled while Richard Dawkins was let in.

Speaking of propaganda, let me talk about deception.

Several months ago, there was a website called everybadger.com, which seemed to be an innocuous secular website until you visited it and found out there was GOD GOD GOD GOD plastered all over it.

A lot of conservative Christian groups employ such tactics - there is a group at Wisconsin called Primetime which does not bill itself as Christian, but is very obviously, if you read more about it, a worship service. Chi Alpha, in addition (and I actually visited one of their stupid things before learning they were Christian and politely getting the fuck out of the room), does not bill itself as Christian until you notice the fine print and see that they are affiliated with Campus Crusade.

Notably, our favorite cult-we-love-to-hate, Scientology, also does this by way of their 'free stress tests', which are nothing more than their opportunity to push Dianetics on you and use one of their 'e-meters', which are nothing more than multimeters. You can fuck with these by coating your hands in silicone!

Oddly enough, I have never seen any of this from another religious group.

Why, then, are groups such as these employing deceptive tactics?

They both know well that they're incredibly despised, perhaps, but hoodwinking someone into getting affiliated is not the way to go and not the way to get someone who's going to actually come to your cause. The best organizations I know - here I'm talking about secular organizations - don't employ misinformation.

Incidentally, this is a characteristic of cults - refer to these characteristics from religioustolerance.org:

Various groups within the ACM have differing concepts about what defines a cult. They often list a group of factors that a cult exhibits. In their list of "Characteristics of a Destructive Cult," reFOCUS lists five. ₃They do not say how many of the 5 must be present in order for a faith group to be called a cult:

An authoritarian power structure, with control concentrated at the top.

Charismatic or messianic leader(s) (They define Messianic as meaning that the leaders identify themselves as God or state that they are the only persons capable of interpreting the Bible properly.)

The use of deceitful methods in recruitment of new members and/or raising of money.

Isolation of their membership from society; filtering of information.

The use of mind control methods on the membership.

Certainly, a number of these groups - I can think of a few Christian ones offhand - fit 1, 2, and 3 - not so much 4 and 5, those are reserved for the most damaging groups. Certainly, a number of fundamentalist groups do not fit these criteria. Certainly, a number of fundamentalist groups do, some of which are in the mainstream.

It defies logic to recruit members via knowingly - the key word is knowingly - feeding them falsehoods and hiding information; that implies something is VERY wrong with the organization - corruption, power structure, damaging beliefs, et cetera. I wonder if the fundies have actually thought about these things.

This scares me not only as an atheist but as a human being who cares for the well-being of her classmates.

The Atheist Apocalypse !

2008-03-20T12:52:00.001-07:00

I have never seen anything this full of win.

On sanity

2008-03-20T09:10:00.001-07:00

My friend Chris has a great post on sanity. My take on his post is that sanity is an entirely subjective thing and that what is really needed is maturity, which a great many adults do not have.

Most of you who read this have probably gathered by now that I think about 99% of people are insane, and in this particular little post I'm going to talk about it.

Insanity, that is.

What seems to pass for insanity these days is a number of things: limited perspective, bias, mob mentality, and any number of other stupid things which make people idiots but are unfortunately part of humanity.

For example, the Scientologists - make no mistake, they are a cult, and I think Anonymous is the best thing that has ever happened to the poor people they abuse - have fooled a whole lot of people into joining them. Most low-level Scientologists, what the Scientologists would call 'non-OT' or 'OT-I' or 'OT-II', don't know anything about the organization and simply say what the organization tells them to say. They are labeled insane frequently, and indeed, they act kooky, but one has to consider the fact that they're under a very complex form of control and that their problem is one of ignorance and being belittled and hoodwinked by Midget Miscavige and his cabal.

By the way, folks, go to the sites www.enturbulation.org, www.xenu.net, www.whyaretheydead.net, and www.youfoundthecard.com - I absolutely implore you, educate yourselves about the abuse that these people perpetrate. They're worse than the fundies, in many respects, and I didn't even think that was possible until I learned about what THESE assholes do. This atheist blogger says 'Go Anonymous!'

Also, politicians tend to be full of it. Chris's post has a lot on this.

Evolutionarily, humans are social animals. Our brains, particularly our limbic systems, are wired for certain behaviors. Mob mentality arises from this, since it is evolutionarily advantageous for a group to act the same way in certain situations, and so is a child listening unconditionally to its parents, since more often than not, parents have their child's best interest in mind. Religion arose out of humanity's discomfort with the unknown; atheism is the provenance of we who are more comfortable with it and prefer accuracy. I do not know about whether there are neural correlates to being susceptible or not susceptible to herd behavior, but the differences are usually extremely pronounced.

I wonder if we could postulate about the 'evolvedness' of human brains - are the more logical brains more advanced on the evolutionary spectrum? Greta Christina made a post about atheist morality vs. theist morality that makes a good point - our morality is largely hard-wired by evolution.

Dr. Dawkins comes to Madison

2008-03-12T10:38:00.001-07:00

RICHARD DAWKINS CAME TO MADISON

There were two lectures - a private lecture and a public lecture.

I went to both. AHA turned up about half an hour early for the lecture, and I nearly giggled when I saw Dr. Dawkins, who is a rather short man but possibly the most cantankerous person you will ever meet, and he signed my book.

Chris and I, notably, showed up in Scarlet Letter t-shirts and we got in the first two questions:

I asked a question about neurotheology. Dr. Dawkins didn't seem to be familiar at all with the terms and explained to the audience what the God helmet experiment was, but he didn't answer the question. (Chris, Karl, please correct me if I'm wrong - I probably didn't hear the tail end of the question, as I can get slightly ADD sometimes if someone rambles on for more than a couple minutes.)

Chris asked a question about a Kantian characteristic in Dawkins' book The God Delusion, which sad to say I have not read yet partially because I think I've heard all the arguments and, frankly, I agree with Dawkins on virtually everything he says. I am not familiar with Kant, so go to Chris's blog if you want to know more about this.

Ally asked a question about the His Dark Materials series of books by Philip Pullman, which is notable for its anti-religion, particularly anti-Catholic, motif. Dawkins said he did not, in fact, think the book was atheist, but rather anti-religion, and apparently has read the whole series. (The movie was apparently more explicitly anti-religion than the book.)

Someone asked a question about the Catholics' new set of deadly sins, which include such apparent vagaries as pollution, genetic engineering, and contraception. (Ratzinger is a fucking joke!) Dr. Dawkins said something along the lines of the fact that human genetics is certainly something to pay attention to ethical stuff about, but that Ratzinger is in fact a dogmatic asshole.

Someone asked a question about the fallacy from human imagination. Obviously, not enough people understand that people are idiots and cannot perceive everything.

I also pissed off Dawkins (which mortified me, as I didn't know whether his response was humorous or serious) when asking him about his appearance in South Park and his erstwhile marriage to Janet Garrison, who he labeled a 'bald transvestite'. (I was a little bit concerned about the fact that he used the term 'bugger' to describe the act of anal sex, but he isn't homophobic, to my knowledge. Dawkins is an obstinate old Englishman.) The point of the question was to ask him about whether he thought anything might trigger a schism in atheists down the road.

"Define satire!"
"[South Park] is a poorly animated, poorly drawn, poorly written, no-good two-bit excuse for a show!"
"You want good satire? Do you know about Monty Python's Life of Brian?"
Parker, Stone, you have been warned.

Karl wishes he had a tape recorder. Damn you, Karl. (I just about died.)

The public lecture was awesome. AHA made an amazing 85 bucks. Dawkins talked about the fact that you can't put a label on a child, about the fact that there are many fallacies which religious people use to attempt to back up their notions, and that religion is destructive. I am sure anyone sitting around me saw me cringe when the picture of female genital mutilation was up on screen.

Marcus Brigstocke's rant about the Abrahamic religions was awesome:

"I'd like to start this week with a request, and this one goes out to the followers of the three Abrahamic religions: the Muslims, Christians, and Jews. It's just a little thing, really, but do you think that when you've finished smashing up the world and blowing each other to bits and demanding special privileges while you do it, do you think that maybe the rest of us could sort of have our planet back? I wouldn't ask, but I'm starting to think that there must be something written in the special books that each of you so enjoy referring to that it's okay to behave like special, petulant, pugnacious pricks.
Forgive the alliteration, but your persistent, power-mad punch-ups are pissing me off. It's mainly the extremists obviously, but not exclusively. It's a lot of 'main-streamers' as well. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about.
Muslims: listen up my bearded and veily friends! Calm down, okay? Stop blowing stuff up. Not everything that said about you is an attack on the prophet Mohammed and Allah that needs to end in the infidel being destroyed. Have a cup of tea, put on a Cat Stevens record, sit down and chill out. I mean seriously, what's wrong with a strongly-worded letter to The Times?
Christians: you and your churches don't get to be millionaires while other people have nothing at all. They're your bloody rules; either stick to them or abandon the faith. And stop persecuting and killing people you judge to be immoral. Oh, and stop pretending you're celibate -- it's a cover-up for being a gay or a nonce. Right, that's two ticked off.
Jews! I know you're god's 'Chosen People' and the rest of us are just whatever, but when Israel behaves like a violent, psychopathic bully and someone mentions it that doesn't make them anti-semitic. And for the record, your troubled history is not a license to act with impunity now.
Please don't kill us, seriously. As far as I'm concerned this is the only chance we get. When we die it's all over - there's no virgins and pearly gates waiting for us, no big, beardy man saying: [in deep, echoing voice and upper class accent] "Right, so how do you think that went, then? Killed a lot of people in my name I see. Not really what I had in mind. Um, tell you what, have another go as a worm."

I am going to be more brutally honest and be less 'respectful' of other people's views and stop caring about how they feel about their deeply-held religious beliefs being attacked - they attack my atheism all the time; I have the right to attack their Christianity or their Judaism or their Islam or their Hinduism or their Buddhism (I know they're full of shit anyway). Religion should be examined as thoroughly as scientific hypotheses are. People can have their perspectives, but I like to rip perspectives apart.

Bugger what everyone else thinks.

Neurotheology

2008-03-10T08:36:00.000-07:00

Something that has boggled my mind is the question of why 90% of people are religious. The answer to this question intrigues me, both as a neuroscientist and an atheist, precisely because it is not understood from either a neuroscientific viewpoint or an atheist viewpoint, both of which are the viewpoints I have on it.

Neurotheology is a booming new subset of neuroscience, devoted to the study of the neural bases of why people have the beliefs they do, in fact pioneered by UW's own Richard Davidson, who did studies on Buddhist monks back in 2002 (he's chums with the Dalai Lama, I think). Richard Davidson conducted a study in which he performed an EEG on both Buddhist monks and college students, instructing each to meditate, and found that the Buddhist monks had much more active gamma waves than the college students.

Michael Persinger, a neuroscientist at Laurentian University in Canada (and in fact an alumnus of UW), did an experiment called the 'God helmet' experiment. People who suffer from temporal lobe epilepsy experience sensory hyperstimulation, and individuals will interpret what they see in the context of their perspectives on society (for example, seeing Ronald Reagan's face in a potato chip as opposed to, say, Nixon's or Muammar Ghadhafi's). Individuals who are religious will probably perceive a sensory hyperstimulation as what they think is a spiritual experience. Persinger's tests on people such as nuns showed they were extremely sensitive in their temporal lobes. Famously, Richard Dawkins's experience wearing the 'God helmet' gave him no hyperstimulation, and his temporal lobe was found to be less sensitive. (Persinger also pioneered the Tectonic Strain theory, in which the magnetic field of the earth produces piezoelectric signals that create UFOs; this idea was challenged by Chris Rutkowski of the University of Manitoba, who had an Earthlight theory which replaced 'piezoelectric signals ' with 'triboluminescence'.

So perhaps we atheists have less sensitive temporal lobes, and religious people probably have hypersensitive ones.

This is something to ask Dr. Dawkins about tomorrow when he visits. And yes, I will actually have the chance to ask him this in person. (It's great, being a regular at my campus's atheist society.) But he's an evolutionary biologist, so I don't know much how he's going to answer this.

I think it's a combination of temporal lobe sensitivity, overexposure to religion, underexposure to secular society and differences of opinion, and flexibility of mind that makes people more religious, and that atheists are not as temporally hypersensitive and have a better balance of exposure and a more flexible mind .

On misanthropy

2008-03-08T16:25:00.000-08:00

I admit it - I am a misanthrope. I sit here and laugh, sardonically, at the foibles of my own species.

I have a damned good reason to, too.

Humans are, and I will be blunt, incredibly stupid creatures. We all have our problems. The more average of the species usually have some prejudices, even some they're not willing to confront - look at all the racists, sexists, homophobes, and other assorted morons.

Even the better and more learned and well-adjusted of us still have problems. To give a slightly less, uh, gravitas-laden example, I am still trying to reconcile the very 'straight-acting' image of a friend who just revealed he was gay with my prior image of people who are gay. A thought on this particular image might be that such a revelation made me think of all the other so-called 'straight-acting' guys I've known in my time on this campus who turned out to be gay, and how that totally threw a wrench into my gaydar. Masculinity and femininity are fluid things - I'm a fairly androgynous woman, by a lot of standards; all my major interests are ones that many think of as traditionally masculine, and gender is something I do not take into account when I define myself. (I can think of a few friends I have who exhibit some very androgynous qualities too - mostly the people that I'm closer to, in our campus atheist society, than others.) I used to have a more uniform perception of gay men as universally less masculine than non-gay men. I was wrong on that count. I've even known more effeminate straight men.

We suck. Really. Lest you think I am being depressing, step OUT of your self-created rose colored world and look, LOOK at what is going on. I am not being depressing. I am being realistic. Depressing would be neglecting of the small but significant amount of GOOD things we've done.

As I said, we've done good things, but we've done bad things that make a lot of the good things look mediocre in magnitude. For example, this was posted on an e-mail group that I occasionally read:

"my mother is very very very ill.? her sixth pregnancy, after that she tried to kill me a couple times.? I am the oldest and she identified with me.? that was bad b/c she hates herself.

and then in a very unfortunate piece of timing - her seventh pregnancy, I became the victim of a group of young adults who tried with fairly good seriousness to kill me over the next several months.? due to sheer luck the initial murder attempts didn't work.? but then they kept coming back.? I ended up pregnant, with a forced abortion, two STDs, and brain injury/weakness when I was 12 - and nothing was done.

that's what I mean.? I was literally abducted over and over from home, school and NOTHING was done about it.? nothing.

CPS (child protective services) was involved and did - nothing.? and then denial and denial and denial and denial and denial and denial..

I really thought I was the crazy one.? but in my case there is proof.? I learned to look for proof.? that was the only way out of denial."

This is only one example of many, many more that the human race has produced.

No wonder cynicism is so prevalent in the 21st century. Diogenes would laugh from his tub. (Little known fact about Diogenes: He was a frequent public masturbator and ate onions every day. Great minds can be colorful.)

What can we do about this?

For one, I want to make people smarter. That is essentially what I want to do with my life.

For two, we need to educate people at every possible opportunity. Require college education. Be vehement about encouraging reasoned debate, annihilating misinformation and deception, and making it CLEAR that science and reason reign supreme. Provide a baseline of services to people, allowing them to get better services if they can afford it. Distribute birth control worldwide. Learning never hurts.

For three, we need to be cognizant, to deal with our problems in the short term, of how far humanity has come. We have modern medicine, universities, democracy, the scientific method, and we're not completely extinct.

We're a species and we need to start evolving in the RIGHT direction.

SSRIs

2008-03-05T06:07:00.000-08:00

From Action Potential, the Nature Neuroscience blog, there's a post on SSRIs and their effectiveness.

If the placebos are only marginally less effective than SSRIs, might we use placebos to wean individuals off a drug? There is, of course, the fact that SSRIs actually block the receptors, but placebos might do wonders for the psychological aspects of the problem - there is, after all, a mental component to illness - if you're more optimistic about dealing with an illness, you're more likely to get better (this decreases in more severe illnesses, but stress takes a toll on the body).

One of the comments also mentioned Chantix, an antismoking drug. Chantix works on the nicotinic receptors and blocks them, which is why I think this drug will actually work - because it does things to the reward pathway.

Whee, drugs.

Richard Dawkins

2008-03-05T05:29:00.000-08:00

Richard Dawkins is coming to Wisconsin next week! I bought a ticket and will be showing up in the scarlet letter A t-shirt from his website. Also, AHA is doing a table there. I am excited, and will be bringing my The God Delusion book in the hope of getting it signed by Richard Dawkins, who is one of my heroes.

I encourage all of you to visit the OUT Campaign website, where there is a bunch of good merchandise for purchase.

We watched a documentary on the Dover trial last night, and it provided a glimpse into how ignorant people can be - even Michael Behe, a surprisingly credentialed biochemist (surprisingly credentialed as in 'how the fuck did he get his credentials?'.), who apparently thinks the bacterial flagellum did not evolve from the poison spine on Yersinia pestis when the author of the only article he cited to make his statement says the flagellum DID evolve from the poison spine.

I have an idea. It is a radical one, but one that I think needs to be implemented.

Require that every college student takes a full year of biology, chemistry, and physics. Require everyone who teaches anything, from the university level down to the elementary level, to have a PhD. Abolish religious schools (it is abominable to brainwash young people). Require that every citizen get a college education, and support them when they have familial or financial hardship. (This includes the Amish - I don't give a shit what they think about education and their imaginary friend, we do not need uneducated people running around the country.)

If we can make our university system anything similar to the Irish university system in this respect, where anyone who has the ability can go to college there, that would be a big step.

Animal cognition

2008-03-03T12:06:00.000-08:00

Humans are not special. This simple four words sums up quite well what we in science have been saying all along that most people have ignored out of their own insecurity.

From National Geographic:

In 1977 Irene Pepperberg, a recent graduate of Harvard University, did something very bold. At a time when animals still were considered automatons, she set out to find what was on another creature's mind by talking to it. She brought a one-year-old African gray parrot she named Alex into her lab to teach him to reproduce the sounds of the English language. "I thought if he learned to communicate, I could ask him questions about how he sees the world."
When Pepperberg began her dialogue with Alex, who died last September at the age of 31, many scientists believed animals were incapable of any thought. They were simply machines, robots programmed to react to stimuli but lacking the ability to think or feel. Any pet owner would disagree. We see the love in our dogs' eyes and know that, of course, Spot has thoughts and emotions. But such claims remain highly controversial. Gut instinct is not science, and it is all too easy to project human thoughts and feelings onto another creature. How, then, does a scientist prove that an animal is capable of thinking—that it is able to acquire information about the world and act on it?
"That's why I started my studies with Alex," Pepperberg said. They were seated—she at her desk, he on top of his cage—in her lab, a windowless room about the size of a boxcar, at Brandeis University. Newspapers lined the floor; baskets of bright toys were stacked on the shelves. They were clearly a team—and because of their work, the notion that animals can think is no longer so fanciful.
Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others' motives, imitating others, and being creative. Bit by bit, in ingenious experiments, researchers have documented these talents in other species, gradually chipping away at what we thought made human beings distinctive while offering a glimpse of where our own abilities came from. Scrub jays know that other jays are thieves and that stashed food can spoil; sheep can recognize faces; chimpanzees use a variety of tools to probe termite mounds and even use weapons to hunt small mammals; dolphins can imitate human postures; the archerfish, which stuns insects with a sudden blast of water, can learn how to aim its squirt simply by watching an experienced fish perform the task. And Alex the parrot turned out to be a surprisingly good talker.

What about humans is so different that these same behaviors in humans are thought to be higher cognition whereas these behaviors in nonhuman animals are not? Certainly, there is some hubris inherent in that assumption. I'm curious about whether they've done any brain-wave studies on these animals, or whether they've put any through fMRI.

I sort of wish I got that job at the Harlow Primate Laboratory now.

On neurogenetics

2008-03-03T05:36:00.000-08:00

Robert Plomin, in 2003, saw that the gene IGF2R (allele 5 .) is correlated with high intelligence - it occurred in 26% of people within 1 standard deviation of average IQ, currently set at 85-115, and in 53% of people with an IQ of 140 or above. IGF2R, insulin growth factor 2 receptor gene, is on chromosome 6 and codes for metabolism of glucose in the brain.

Dysbindin-1, a gene implicated in schizophrenia, has also been linked to impaired cognitive function.

In my emails with Richard Haier, professor emeritus of psychology and a faculty member of the UC Irvine hospital, I have been told that epigenetics is important in finding the neurogenetic bases of intelligence.

So where do we proceed from these two genes? There are as many as 100 other genes implicated in intelligence, and many more which are implicated indirectly in cognitive impairment. It is easier to destroy than to augment an organism, they say.

Possible sources of genetic material may be other genes on chromosome 6, other genes implicated in neurological and psychological illness, and genes on chromosome 2. I make note of chromosome 2 because it is the one chromosome that is completely peculiar to humans; early in our genetic history two chromosomes fused at their telomeres, evidenced by the abundance of telomeric material in the middle of the chromosome and two groups of centromeric material in the chromosome. Interaction between each gene might give rise to peculiar features that only humans possess, and since we share 99% of genetic material with chimpanzees, this fusion might have produced some peculiarities in cognition of people.

There are of course more pieces of evidence that say we are not as cognitively different from other animals as once thought.

There is a comic from XKCD which depicts a stick figure bent over a PC. A voice, presumably the stick figure's partner, asks the stick figure if it is coming to bed. The stick figure says 'No! Someone is wrong on the internet!' Replace 'on the internet' with 'about neuroscience', and you pretty much have part of how I hope to communicate after I earn my PhD .

Philosophy of Mind by Jaegwon Kim

2008-03-02T19:42:00.000-08:00

As a neuroscience major reading this book, I kind of felt a little bit like this book was meant more for laypeople.

I'm currently borrowing this text from a friend - Chris, my good friend and also the president of our campus atheist society and organizer of our campus's philosophy club (of 'The Uncredible Hallq' fame). I was curious about what philosophers of mind had to say about things they probably hadn't done any research about.

Descartes was an idiot about the mind. Dualists = fail! Presupposing that the mind is separate from the body fails to answer the question of 'So where is the mind, then?', and claims the mind is a separate entity. It is very simple common knowledge that the mind is simply a bunch of cognitive functions. His list of arguments:
'I am such that my existence cannot be doubted. My body is not such that its existence cannot be doubted. Therefore, I am not identical with my body. Therefore, the thinking thing that I am is not identical with my body.'
Is it just me, or does this remind me of the argument of someone who is dissociating?
'My mind is transparent to me - that is, nothing can be in my mind without my knowing that it is there. My body is not apparent to me in the same sense. Therefore, my mind is not identical with my body.'
First of all, transparency of mind is only achieved when one knows oneself, and one can have things in their mind without being completely aware that it is there at a point in time. Also, this statement smacks of ignorance of anatomy.
'Each mind is such that there is a unique subject who has direct and privileged access to its contents. No material body has a specially privileged knower - knowledge of material things is in principle public and intersubjective. Therefore, minds are not identical with material bodies.'
Again, incredibly bad logic and a twisting of the definition of knowledge.
'My essential nature is to be a thinking thing. My body's essential nature is to be an extended thing in space. My essential nature does not include being an extended thing in space. Therefore, I am not identical with my body. And since I am a thinking thing (namely a mind), my mind is not identical with my body.'
... okay, now this just smacks of really bad logic. A child can figure out the fallacies and bad connections in this shit. I'm almost tempted to stop pointing out the flaws and just make fun of this, because the flaws in these arguments should be readily accessible.
'If anything is material, it is essentially material. However, I am possibly immaterial - that is, there is a world in which I exist without a body. Hence, I am not essentially material. Hence, it follows (with the first premise) that I am not material.'
Ho ho ho, now dualism is getting into things that haven't been proven to exist. Smacks a bit of religiosity to me.
'Suppose I am identical with this body of mine. In 1995 I existed. In 1995 this body did not exist. Hence, from the first premise, it follows that I did not exist in 1995. But this contradicts the second premise, and the supposition is false. Hence, I am not identical with my body.'
This requires a definition of existence. The general fact that we exist for more than seven days is generally accounted for by a continuity of mental processes and biological processes - not every cell is replaced at one time. Bad definition of existence.
'Suppose I am identical with this body of mine. Then, by (NI), I am necessarily identical with this body - that is, I am identical with it in every possible world. But that is false, for (a) in some possible worlds I could be disembodied and have no body, or at least (b) I could have a different body in another possible world. So it is false that I am identical with this body in every possible world, and this contradicts the second line. Therefore, I am not identical with my body.'
One of my problems with modern philosophy, and part of why I tend to stay the hell away from any part of it that doesn't appear to be well-informed by science, is that it postulates about 'possible worlds'. Look, folks, there is no possible other world that we know of. Postulating another possible world is like assuming there's some sort of deity, and that's just bad science. Russell's teapot.

Bluntly put, I do not respect dualists.

The rest of the book makes me wonder whether this Dr. Kim has read much in the way of neuroscience texts.

I give it maybe three stars.

On transhumanism

2008-03-02T19:17:00.000-08:00

A little about myself:

I am planning to earn a PhD in neuroscience.

I am hoping to find the rest of the genes which influence intelligence (Robert Plomin et al. have started the work already, and I hope to help finish the work!), and with that information, I'd like to make people smarter.

I am a supporter of transhumanism, which is a doctrine that says humanity deserves to be 'better than well' (see http://www.aleph.se for a small introduction). A large part of this entails improvement of the human body by mechanical and biological means. There is already some fusing of the human body with technology, such as the use of prostheses and implants, a few of which interface with the neural network (there are chips in existence which allow the blind to 'see' with their tongue), and Wisconsin's own professor Paul Bach-y-Rita, who is sadly the late Paul Bach-y-Rita, pioneered the use of neuroprosthetics particularly as they relate to neuroplasticity. If we can use these for therapeutic functions, why not for enhancement?

The general arguments against transhumanism seem to stem from the religious or bioconservative groups (bioconservative meaning 'don't touch biology, let it be the way it was before Homo sapiens put its pink fleshy hands on it!'). Religious groups seem to claim transhumanists want to 'play (insert imaginary friend of choice here)', largely because transhumanist technology would impart unto folks qualities that religious people usually ascribe to their deities or qualities that are 'superhuman', such as super strength or the ability to manipulate certain material. The bioconservative motivation is self-explanatory, so I won't explain that much more.

Personally, I'm all for uploading my brain and becoming one with the Series o' Tubes!

First post.

2008-03-02T19:14:00.001-08:00

This is a blog about neuroscience, atheism, philosophy, neurotheology, transhumanism, and lots of things.

I am currently studying neuroscience at the University of Wisconsin - Madison.