by Marta Paterlini Tourists visiting the famous Spanish Steps in Rome on Saturday were treated to an unusual spectacle: Some 30 researchers suddenly showed up, unfolded banners and placards in different languages, and stood motionless on the steps for several minutes. Their flash mob was part of an unprecedented series of events across Italy to protest what organizers say is an antiscientific attitude in Italy and widespread "misinformation" about science in the media. Saturday's event, called Italy United for Correct Scientific Information, was organized by young researchers in response to an attack against an animal facility at the University of Milan in April, in which animal rights activists released mice and rabbits and ruined experiments. Some 300 researchers had already demonstrated on 1 June in Italy to defend animal experimentation; the new protests, which included flash mobs and conferences in 15 cities, were aimed more broadly. "We want to show that we do not live in an ivory tower," says organizer Dario Padovan, a biologist at the University of Trieste. "We are not afraid to defend our research and understand the need of communicating it correctly." Press coverage of April's attack showed again that in Italy, important scientific topics "are often addressed and reported by the media in a superficial, or even wrong, way" says Federico Baglioni, one of the organizers of Saturday's events. Previous examples were the conviction of Italian researchers for their failure to warn about the risk of a deadly earthquake in L'Aquila and the recent debate about the Stamina Foundation, which offers stem cell therapies that many scientists say aren't scientifically proven. In such debates, Italian media tend to focus on the emotional side of the story and fail to delve into the scientific facts, Baglioni says. © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 18254 - Posted: 06.11.2013

By Jason G. Goldman Within the wildlife conservation community, both in the field (“in situ“) as well as in captive settings (“ex situ“), there is a great deal of folk knowledge about the best methods for animal care as well as species protection and restoration. Increasingly, however, empirical knowledge from psychology and cognitive science can be brought to bear on husbandry, management, and conservation-related issues and can inform best practices. Here’s one small example. At the Los Angeles Zoo, I recently participated in a study with on the effects of environmental enrichment on meerkat behavior. Thoughtfully designed environmental enrichment programs, it is thought, allow captive animals to display a wider variety of naturalistic behaviors. A wealth of evidence suggests that when animals exhibit their natural behaviors, zoo visitors have a better and more educational experience, and animal welfare is increased. Unfortunately, one side effect of captivity is the possible emergence of non-naturalistic repetitive or stereotypic behaviors. Stereotypic behaviors vary according to the species, but might include swaying, coprophagy, regurgitation and reingestion, or pacing. When combined with stereotypic swimming patterns, pacing may actually be the most common form of stereotypy across species in modern zoos. While these behaviors may in fact be more stressful for zoo visitors than for the animals themselves, zoos still have a responsibility to minimize them as much as possible. Other stereotypies may feature or result in various forms of self-harm, which are of course more dangerous. Birds pluck their feathers, horses nip at their flanks, canids, felids, and bears over-groom themselves, turtles may bite their legs, and snakes may chew on their tails. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 18245 - Posted: 06.08.2013

by Debora MacKenzie YOUR eye colour is a product of your DNA, but what about your IQ? The biggest-ever search for genes that affect intelligence, and the first to give reproducible results, has found 10 variations in DNA that seem to influence intelligence – but not by much. Studies of families show intelligence is 40 to 50 per cent inherited, and otherwise depends on environment. Since mass-analysis of DNA variations became possible, a number of studies have sought the genes involved in this inheritance, and some papers have claimed strong associations between particular genes and IQ. Yet results have varied widely and none have been replicated. "Many of the published findings of the last decade are wrong," says John Hewitt of the University of Colorado in Boulder, who was not involved in the new study. So if intelligence is inherited, where are the genes hiding? The research may have hit problems because each gene linked with IQ has only a tiny effect on overall intelligence. This means you need data on a large number of people to reliably distinguish such effects from measurement error. Most studies have involved between 100 and 2000 subjects. Now, some 200 researchers have assembled 54 sets of data on more than 126,000 people who have had their genomes analysed for 2.5 million common, small mutations called SNPs. Information was also available for how long they spent in education and the level they reached. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Intelligence; Genes & Behavior
Link ID: 18242 - Posted: 06.06.2013

People with higher IQs are slow to detect large background movements because their brains filter out non-essential information, say US researchers. Instead, they are good at detecting small moving objects. The findings come in a study of 53 people given a simple, visual test in Current Biology. The results could help scientists understand what makes a brain more efficient and more intelligent. In the study, individuals watched short video clips of black and white bars moving across a computer screen. Some clips were small and filled only the centre of the screen, while others filled the whole screen. The participants' sole task was to identify in which direction the bars were drifting - to the right or to the left. Participants also took a standardised intelligence test. The results showed that people with higher IQ scores were faster at noticing the movement of the bars when observing the smallest image - but they were slower at detecting movement in the larger images. Michael Melnick of the University of Rochester, who was part of the research team said the results were very clear. "From previous research, we expected that all participants would be worse at detecting the movement of large images, but high IQ individuals were much, much worse. The authors explain that in most scenarios, background movement is less important than small moving objects in the foreground, for example driving a car, walking down a hall or moving your eyes across the room. BBC © 2013

Keyword: Intelligence; Attention
Link ID: 18189 - Posted: 05.25.2013

Jeremy Laurance Iodine deficiency is widespread amongst pregnant women in the UK and may be harming the cognitive development of their children, scientists have found. The first large study of the problem in the UK has revealed that two-thirds of expectant mothers had a mild to moderate deficiency in the mineral, which was associated with significantly lower IQ and reading ability in their children at the ages of eight and nine. Iodine is essential for growth and development of the brain, and pregnant women need 50 per cent more. Researchers said women should ensure they are getting enough from their diet – milk, yogurt and fish are the best sources – and that any pregnancy supplement they take contains iodine. But they warned that kelp and seaweed supplements should be avoided as they contain variable levels of iodine and could lead to overdose. Severe iodine deficiency is known to cause brain damage and is the biggest cause of mental deficiency in the developing world. But mild to moderate iodine deficiency has been little studied – until now. Researchers from the Universities of Surrey and Bristol examined records of 1,000 mothers who were part of the Children of the 90s study which has followed the development of children born to 14,000 mothers in Avon since 1990-91. They found that 67 per cent of the mothers had levels of iodine below that recommended by the World Health Organisation. Their children were divided into groups according to how well they performed on IQ and reading tests at eight and nine. The results showed those whose mothers had low iodine levels were 60 per cent more likely to be in the bottom group. © independent.co.uk

Keyword: Intelligence; Development of the Brain
Link ID: 18183 - Posted: 05.22.2013

By Maia Szalavitz There are many roads to greatness, but logging 10,000 hours of practice to help you perfect a skill may not be sufficient. Based on research suggesting that practice is the essence of genius, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell popularized the idea that 10,000 hours of appropriately guided practice was “the magic number of greatness,” regardless of a person’s natural aptitude. With enough practice, he claimed in his book Outliers, anyone could achieve a level of proficiency that would rival that of a professional. It was just a matter of putting in the time. But in the years since Gladwell first pushed the “10,000-hours rule,” researchers have engaged in a spirited debate over what that rule entails. It’s clear that not just any practice, but only dedicated and intensive honing of skills that counts. And is there magic in that 10,000th hour? In an attempt to answer some of these questions, and to delve further into how practice leads to mastery, Zach Hambrick, associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, and his colleagues decided to study musicians and chess players. It helps that both skills are amenable to such analysis because players can be ranked almost objectively. So in their research, which was published in the journal Intelligence, they reanalyzed data from 14 studies of top chess players and musicians. They found that for musicians, only 30% of the variance in their rankings as performers could be accounted for by how much time they spent practicing. For chess players, practice only accounted for 34% of what determined the rank of a master player. © 2013 Time Inc. All rights reserved

Keyword: Learning & Memory; Intelligence
Link ID: 18182 - Posted: 05.22.2013

Ed Yong The US adolescents who signed up for the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) in the 1970s were the smartest of the smart, with mathematical and verbal-reasoning skills within the top 1% of the population. Now, researchers at BGI (formerly the Beijing Genomics Institute) in Shenzhen, China, the largest gene-sequencing facility in the world, are searching for the quirks of DNA that may contribute to such gifts. Plunging into an area that is littered with failures and riven with controversy, the researchers are scouring the genomes of 1,600 of these high-fliers in an ambitious project to find the first common genetic variants associated with human intelligence. The project, which was launched in August 2012 and is slated to begin data analysis in the next few months, has spawned wild accusations of eugenics plots, as well as more measured objections by social scientists who view such research as a distraction from pressing societal issues. Some geneticists, however, take issue with the study for a different reason. They say that it is highly unlikely to find anything of interest — because the sample size is too small and intelligence is too complex. Earlier large studies with the same goal have failed. But scientists from BGI’s Cognitive Genomics group hope that their super-smart sample will give them an edge, because it should be enriched with bits of DNA that confer effects on intelligence. “An exceptional person gets you an order of magnitude more statistical power than if you took random people from the population — I’d say we have a fighting chance,” says Stephen Hsu, a theoretical physicist from Michigan State University in East Lansing, who acts as a scientific adviser to BGI and is one of the project’s leaders. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group,

Keyword: Genes & Behavior; Intelligence
Link ID: 18159 - Posted: 05.15.2013

Nathan J. Winograd People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) is an organization that publicly claims to represent the best interest of animals -- indeed their "ethical treatment." Yet approximately 2,000 animals pass through PETA's front door every year and very few make it out alive. The vast majority -- 96 percent in 2011 -- exit the facility out the back door after they have been killed, when Pet Cremation Services of Tidewater stops by on their regular visits to pick up their remains. Between these visits, the bodies are stored in the giant walk-in freezer PETA installed for this very purpose. It is a freezer that cost $9,370 and, like the company which incinerates the bodies of PETA's victims, was paid for with the donations of animal lovers who could never have imagined that the money they donated to help animals would be used to end their lives instead. In fact, in the last 11 years, PETA has killed 29,426 dogs, cats, rabbits, and other domestic animals. Most animal lovers find this hard to believe. But seeing is believing. And if it is true that a picture speaks a thousand words, the following images speak volumes about who and what PETA really stands for. The PETA headquarters is on the aptly named Front Street. While claiming to be an animal rights organization, PETA does not believe animals have a right to live. Instead, it believes that people have a right to kill them, as long as the killing is done "humanely," which PETA interprets to mean poisoning them with an overdose of barbiturates, even if the animals are not suffering. In 2012, 733 dogs entered this building. They killed 602 of them. Only 12 were adopted. Also in 2012, they impounded 1,110 cats. 1,045 were put to death. Seven of them were adopted. They also took in 34 other companion animals, such as rabbits, of which 28 were put to death. Only four were adopted. © 2013 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 18060 - Posted: 04.23.2013

Alison Abbott Activists occupied an animal facility at the University of Milan, Italy, at the weekend, releasing mice and rabbits and mixing up cage labels to confuse experimental protocols. Researchers at the university say that it will take years to recover their work. Many of the animals at the facility are genetic models for psychiatric disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. No arrests have been made following the 12-hour drama, which took place on Saturday, although the university says that it will press charges against the protesters. The activists took some of the animals and were told during negotiations that they would be permitted to come back later and take more. The attack was staged by the animal-rights group that calls itself Fermare Green Hill (or Stop Green Hill), in reference to the Green Hill dog-breeding facility near Brescia, Italy, which it targets for closure. Five activists entered laboratories in the university’s pharmacology department on Saturday morning. The lack of signs of a break-in suggests that the activists may have used an illegally acquired electronic card, says pharmacologist Francesca Guidobono-Cavalchini, who works there. They prised open the reinforced doors of the facility on the fourth floor, and two of them chained themselves by the neck to the main double doors such that any attempt to open the doors could have endangered their lives. © 2013 Nature Publishing Group

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 18059 - Posted: 04.23.2013

By Suzy Gage When I started my PhD a few years ago, I thought that certain psychological findings were established fact. The next four years were an exercise in disillusionment. If the effects I was seeking to explore were so reliable, so established, why could I not detect them? There is growing interest in the need to improve reliability in science. Many drugs show promise at the design and pre-clinical phases, only to fail (at great expense) in clinical trials. Many of the most hyped scientific discoveries eventually cannot be replicated. Worryingly for science (but somewhat comforting for my self-esteem as a researcher) this may be because many of the conclusions drawn from published research findings are false. A major factor that influences the reliability of science is statistical power. We cannot measure everyone or everything, so we take samples and use statistical inference to determine the probability that the results we observe in our sample reflect some underlying scientific truth. Statistical power determines whether we accurately conclude if there is an effect or not. Statistical power is the ability of a study to detect an effect (eg higher rates of cancer in smokers) given that an effect actually exists (smoking actually is associated with increased risk of cancer). Power is related to the size of the study sample (the number of smokers and non-smokers we test) and the size of the real effect (the magnitude of the increased risk associated with smoking). Larger studies have more power and can detect smaller, more subtle effects. Small studies have lower power and can only detect larger effects reliably. © 2013 Guardian News and Media Limited

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 18019 - Posted: 04.11.2013

By Tina Hesman Saey Mice are poor stand-ins for people in experiments on some types of inflammation, a new study concludes. But some scientists say that critique discounts the value of mouse studies, many of which simply couldn’t be done without the animals. More attention — and money — should go toward studying disease in people than on mouse research, a consortium of scientists contends online February 11 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Too often, researchers make a discovery in mice and assume that humans will react in the same way, says study coauthor Ronald Tompkins, chief of the Massachusetts General Hospital burn service. “The presumption is not justifiable,” he says. As a result, drug trials — often based heavily on data gleaned from studies with mice — can fail. But other scientists say that critique isn’t new and is overstated. Clinical trials are unsuccessful for many reasons, says Derry Roopenian, an immunologist and mouse geneticist at the Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine. “There’s frailty all along the process. That’s not a failure of the mouse.” He and other critics worry that the study, conducted with a generic strain of laboratory mouse called Black6, unfairly tarnishes the reputation of all mice, even ones engineered to be as much like humans as possible. The group’s conclusions, were they accepted by policy makers, could set back biomedical research by jeopardizing funding for mouse studies, critics warn. “Without the mouse, progress is going to be slowed to a standstill,” Roopenian says. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2013

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 17785 - Posted: 02.12.2013

by Michael Marshall Humans aren't built for giving birth. Babies' heads are big to accommodate their big brains, but the mother's hips are small because they walk upright. As a result, birth takes hours and is extremely painful – and midwives almost always help out. Other animals may find birth difficult, particularly if the babies have been gestating for a long time and have grown large. Nevertheless, most mammals have it easier than humans. Monkeys give birth in less than ten minutes. So it is a surprise that female black snub-nosed monkeys may be assisted by "midwives" when they give birth. This behaviour has only been seen once in this species, but it suggests that it's not just human mothers that need help giving birth. Black snub-nosed monkeys live in societies called bands, which can be over 400 strong. Each is divided into smaller groups of around 10 monkeys. Most groups contain one male and several females plus offspring, but there are also all-male groups. Wen Xiao of Dali University in Yunnan, China, and colleagues have been observing black snub-nosed monkeys in the province for years, but had never seen one give birth: the monkeys normally deliver at night. Then on 18 March last year, they got lucky. © Copyright Reed Business Information Ltd.

Keyword: Evolution
Link ID: 17781 - Posted: 02.11.2013

By Samuel McNerney How much does environment influence intelligence? Several years ago University of Virginia Professor Eric Turkheimer demonstrated that growing up in an impoverished and chaotic household suppresses I.Q. – without nurture, innate advantages vanish. What about genes? They matter too. After decades of research most psychologists agree that somewhere between 50% and 80% of intelligence is genetic. After all, numerous studies demonstrate that identical twins raised apart have remarkably similar I.Q.’s. A 2008 paper out of the University of Michigan turned all of this on its head. The researchers led by Susanne M. Jaeggi and Martin Buschkuehl, now at the University of Maryland, found that participants who engaged in short sessions of “cognitive training” that targeted working memory with a simple but difficult game known as the n-back task boosted a core feature of general intelligence called fluid intelligence. Crystalized intelligence improves with age and experience. Fluid intelligence, in contrast, is the capacity to make insights, solve new problems and perceive new patterns to new situations independent of previous knowledge. For decades researchers believed that fluid intelligence was immutable during adulthood because it was largely determined by genetics. The implication of the 2008 study suggested otherwise: with some cognitive training people could improve fluid intelligence and, therefore, become smarter. This brings me to a brand new paper recently published in the journal Neuroscience by DRDC Toronto researcher and Adjunct Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto-Scarborough, Oshin Vartanian. In the study, Vartanian and his team asked if working memory training improved performance on a test of divergent thinking known as the Alternate Uses Task. Psychological research demonstrates that divergent thinking “loads” on working memory, meaning that when people engage a divergent thinking task their working memory capacity is accessed accordingly. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Intelligence; Learning & Memory
Link ID: 17771 - Posted: 02.06.2013

By Gareth Cook Just about every dog owner is convinced their dog is a genius. For a long time, scientists did not take their pronouncements particularly seriously, but new research suggests that canines are indeed quite bright, and in some ways unique. Brian Hare, an associate professor in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology and the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University, is one of the leading figures in the quest to understand what dogs know. The founder of the Duke Canine Cognition Center, Hare has now written a book, “The Genius of Dogs,” with his wife, the journalist Vanessa Woods. Hare answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. Cook: What is the biggest misconception people have about the dog mind? Hare: That there are “smart” dogs and “dumb” dogs. There’s still this throwback to a uni-dimensional version of intelligence, as though there is only one type of intelligence that you either have more or less of. In reality there are different types of intelligence. Different dogs are good at different things. Unfortunately, the very clever strategies some dogs are using are not apparent without playing a cognitive game. This means people can often underestimate the intelligence of their best friend. The pug drooling on your shoe may not look like the brightest bulb in the box, but she comes from a long line of successful dogs and is a member of the most successful mammal species on the planet besides us. Rest assured – she is a genius. © 2013 Scientific American

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 17770 - Posted: 02.06.2013

by Virginia Morell The male Eurasian jay is an accommodating fellow. When his mate has been feasting steadily on mealworm larvae, he realizes that she'd now prefer to dine on wax moth larvae, which he feeds her himself. The finding adds to a small but growing number of studies that show that some animals have something like the human ability to understand what others are thinking. "It's great for a first test of this ability in birds," says Thomas Bugnyar, a cognitive biologist at the University of Vienna in Austria who was not involved in the work. Scientists still debate about whether even our closest ape relatives can attribute an unseen, mental desire to another; some continue to argue that this is a peculiarly human talent. "But some of us think that some aspects of this ability should be found here and there in different species," Bugnyar says, "and so it is good to have this jay study to compare" with the other studies on primates, humans, and human children. Male Eurasian jays feed their mates during courtship displays, says Ljerka Ostojić, a comparative psychologist and postdoc at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom who led the study. Because of that behavior, Ostojić and her colleagues thought that the jays might be good subjects for testing whether these birds understand their mates' desires. The group's previous research had shown that Eurasian jays and scrub jays can plan for the future. "It is commonly thought that any action animals take is determined solely by whatever they want at that moment," Ostojić says, "but the jays also plan for needs in the future." © 2010 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Keyword: Intelligence; Evolution
Link ID: 17766 - Posted: 02.05.2013

Jordan Heller The note, which threatened to kidnap O'Leary and went on to reference myriad tortures including dismemberment, disembowelment, Drano and napalm, was published on Negotiation Is Over (NIO), a website that acts as a one-stop shop for animal rights extremists looking to gather intelligence on potential targets. In addition to labeling O'Leary—a professor at Detroit's Wayne State University whose studies on congestive heart failure involve experiments on rodents and occasionally dogs—a sadistic animal torturer, it published his photo and home address. In an email to O'Leary alerting him of the post, Camille Marino, who until last month ran NIO out of her home in Wildwood, Fla., told the professor that some of her "associates" would be paying him a visit to take pictures of his home. "Then you can join ‘NIO's most wanted,'" she wrote. "I hope you die a slow and painful death." Arson, Cracked Testicles, and Internet Death Threats: How Animal Rights Extremists Are Learning From the People Who Murdered George TillerAnimal right activist Camille Marino, who has done stints as an investment banker and law student, was convicted last year of repeatedly threatening a medical researcher. In December, a Michigan judge sentenced Marino, 48, to six months in prison and three years probation for charges related to her off- and online stalking of O'Leary, who at trial called Marino a "clearly disturbed individual, who was threatening me personally, threatening my children, threatening my home."

Keyword: Animal Rights
Link ID: 17694 - Posted: 01.19.2013

By Ashutosh Jogalekar As marijuana is being legalized in Washington and Colorado states, its proliferation and use raise legitimate issues regarding its dose-dependent and long-term effects. One key question is whether pot leads to cognitive decline and a lowering of IQ, especially if its consumption is started at an early age. Answering this question is important for users, families and policy makers to have a realistic idea of personal and legal policies regarding widespread cannabis use. Last year, Madeline Meier and her group from Duke University reported results from the so-called Dunedin study which tracked a group of 1037 people from their birth to age 38. These volunteers’ pot smoking histories were monitored at periodic intervals from age 18 onwards. The study found a troubling decline of IQ and cognitive abilities among regular pot smokers, especially those whose habit kicked in during their teens. No explicit causal relationship was assigned between the two facts, but the correlation was positive and significant. The study naturally raised a lot of questions regarding the wisdom of early pot use, especially in light of its current legalization in two states. Now a study by Ole Rogeberg from the Ragnar Frisch Center for Research in Norway has called this study into question, both for its methodology and its conclusions. The first thing to realize about any such study, even if you don’t know the details, is that there are going to be several confounding socioeconomic factors in assessing any relationship between cannabis use and IQ. Medicine and psychology are not exact sciences, and following a large sample of people for 38 years and assessing correlation – let alone causation – between any two factors is going to be confounded by a large number of other correlated and uncorrelated variables in an inherently uncontrolled experiment. © 2013 Scientific American,

Keyword: Drug Abuse; Intelligence
Link ID: 17690 - Posted: 01.17.2013

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS In a world of proliferating professions, S. Matthew Liao has a singular title: neuroethicist. Dr. Liao, 40, the director of the bioethics program at New York University, deploys the tools of philosophy, history, psychology, religion and ethics to understand the impact of neuroscientific breakthroughs. You’re a philosopher by training. How did philosophy lead to neuroethics? Mine’s the typical immigrant’s story. My family moved to Cincinnati from Taiwan in the early 1980s. Once here, my siblings gravitated towards the sciences. I was the black sheep. I was in love with the humanities. So I didn’t go to M.I.T. — I went to Princeton, where I got a degree in philosophy. This, of course, worried my parents. They’d never met a philosopher with a job. Do you have any insight on why scientific careers are so attractive to new Americans? You don’t need to speak perfect English to do science. And there are job opportunities. Define neuroethics. It’s a kind of subspecialty of bioethics. Until very recently, the human mind was a black box. But here we are in the 21st century, and now we have all these new technologies with opportunities to look inside that black box — a little. With functional magnetic imaging, f.M.R.I., you can get pictures of what the brain is doing during cognition. You see which parts light up during brain activity. Scientists are trying to match those lights with specific behaviors. At the same time this is moving forward, there are all kinds of drugs being developed and tested to modify behavior and the mind. So the question is: Are these new technologies ethical? © 2012 The New York Times Company

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 17614 - Posted: 12.18.2012

By Dwayne Godwin and Jorge Cham Dwayne Godwin is a neuroscientist at the Wake Forest University School of Medicine. Jorge Cham draws the comic strip Piled Higher and Deeper at www.phdcomics.com. © 2012 Scientific American

Keyword: Miscellaneous
Link ID: 17504 - Posted: 11.19.2012

Neuroscientists at the University of Ingberg have found a brain region that does absolutely nothing. Their research, presented at the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting, showed that a small region of the cortex located near the posterior section of the cingulate gyrus responded to ‘not one of our 46 experimental manipulations’. Dr. Ahlquist was rather surprised at the finding. “During a pilot study we noticed that this small section of the cortex did not show differential activity in any of our manipulations. Out of curiosity, we wanted to see whether it actually did anything at all. Over the months that followed we tried every we knew, with over 20 different participants. IQ tests, memory tasks, flashing lights, talking, listening, imagining juggling, but there was no response. Nothing. We got more desperate, so we tried pictures of faces, TMS, pictures of cats, pictures of sex, pictures of violence and even sexy violence, but nothing happened! Not even a decrease. No connectivity to anywhere else, not even a voodoo correlation. 46 voxels of wasted space. I know dead salmons that are more responsive. It’s an evolutionary disgrace, that’s what it is.” Some neuroscientists are disappointed by the regions’ lack of response: ‘This is exactly the type of cortical behavior that leads to this popular science nonsense about using only 10% of our brain. Frankly, I am outraged by this lazy piece of brain. It’s the cortical equivalent of a spare tyre. If anyone wants to have it lobotomized, I am happy to break out the orbitoclast and help them out. That’ll teach it.”

Keyword: Brain imaging
Link ID: 17464 - Posted: 11.07.2012