Aaron E. Carroll If there is one health myth that will not die, it is this: You should drink eight glasses of water a day. It’s just not true. There is no science behind it. And yet every summer we are inundated with news media reports warning that dehydration is dangerous and also ubiquitous. These reports work up a fear that otherwise healthy adults and children are walking around dehydrated, even that dehydration has reached epidemic proportions. Let’s put these claims under scrutiny. I was a co-author of a paper back in 2007 in the BMJ on medical myths. The first myth was that people should drink at least eight 8-ounce glasses of water a day. This paper got more media attention (even in The Times) than pretty much any other research I’ve ever done. It made no difference. When, two years later, we published a book on medical myths that once again debunked the idea that we need eight glasses of water a day, I thought it would persuade people to stop worrying. I was wrong again. Many people believe that the source of this myth was a 1945 Food and Nutrition Board recommendation that said people need about 2.5 liters of water a day. But they ignored the sentence that followed closely behind. It read, “Most of this quantity is contained in prepared foods.” Water is present in fruits and vegetables. It’s in juice, it’s in beer, it’s even in tea and coffee. Before anyone writes me to tell me that coffee is going to dehydrate you, research shows that’s not true either. Although I recommended water as the best beverage to consume, it’s certainly not your only source of hydration. You don’t have to consume all the water you need through drinks. You also don’t need to worry so much about never feeling thirsty. The human body is finely tuned to signal you to drink long before you are actually dehydrated. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 21335 - Posted: 08.25.2015

Emily M. Keeler How smart are you? Would you be smarter if you ate more blueberries, played better video games, learned another language, or read the novels of Proust? What about if you did more crosswords? Took some pills? Electrically stimulated your brain? Or are you smart enough as is? Patricia Marx is, of course, pretty smart already. She’s a Guggenheim fellow, and a New Yorker Staff writer. She’s also funny as hell. Marx was the first woman elected to the Harvard Lampoon, and is a former writer for Saturday Night Live. Her new book, Let’s Be Less Stupid, takes readers on a chatty nosedive into her own neurological functioning, in the hopes that maybe, just maybe, we’ll all become a little smarter along the way. The book is the most recent entrant in the burgeoning field of pop-neuroscience, but with a liberal helping of humour. For four months, Marx did everything she could to add a few points to her IQ, including becoming adept with Luminosity, a video game app intended to improve cognitive function, and learning a little Cherokee in the hopes of multilingualism giving her brain a competitive advantage against the inevitable decline. When I called Marx to chat about her brain, she said she was sure her four months of compulsively chasing brain health hadn’t done her much good; in fact, she sheepishly admitted she’d already forgotten most of what she’d learned about the incredibly complex organ folded up inside our skulls. © 2015 National Post

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 21169 - Posted: 07.15.2015

By VIRGINIA HUGHES An extraterrestrial dropping into a modern-day hospital might be forgiven for thinking it was run by machines. Against a techno soundtrack of whirs and beeps, sleep-deprived doctors file in and out of exam rooms. They ask patients a series of standard questions, and make a few clicks on a computer to order a blood test or chest X-ray or pain meds. Then they hustle out the door to repeat the protocol on the impossibly large number of other patients under their watch. When their shifts end, some 12 or 18 or even 28 hours later, these zombies in blue scrubs are replaced by others, while the unflappable computers ease the handoff. The tech-centric approach to medicine has its benefits, to be sure. Imaging machines and genetic screening give doctors biological clues otherwise hidden. Computers can make hospitals more efficient, and prevent dumb mistakes. But the practice of medicine cannot be reduced to algorithms, pixels and protocols, as the neurologist Dr. Allan H. Ropper subtly argues in his entertaining book, “Reaching Down the Rabbit Hole.” (Read excerpt.) To Dr. Ropper, medicine is a craft — an art — that depends on the human interaction between doctor and patient. Like an episode of the popular television series “House,” the book presents mysterious medical cases from the behemoth Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. The 10th floor holds the neurology inpatient ward, a place where, as Dr. Ropper and his co-author, Brian David Burrell, put it, “the strangest and most challenging cases are sent to be sorted out.” © 2015 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 21138 - Posted: 07.07.2015

Anthony Kulkamp Dias, a 33-year old Brazilian bank worker, performed a Beatles classic for the team of surgeons operating on his brain tumour. The video shot by one of the medical team shows Dias horizontal, strumming on a guitar and singing the Beatles’ iconic song ‘ Yesterday’. The lyrics, “yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away…” had added pertinence considering the unique situation Dias found himself in. There was a medical explanation behind the impromptu singsong with doctors keeping Dias awake in order to conduct ‘cerebral monitoring’, which a spokesperson reportedly said is “important to prevent injuries that occur in the sensory, motor and speech areas of the brain.” Through his performance, Dias was able to provide real-time feedback about how the surgery was affecting his brain. © independent.co.uk

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 21019 - Posted: 06.06.2015

Neurosurgeon Henry Marsh has opened heads, cut into brains and performed the most delicate and risky surgeries on the part of the body that controls everything — including breathing, movement, memory and consciousness. "What is, I think, peculiar about brain surgery is it's so dangerous," Marsh tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross. "A very small area of damage to the brain can cause catastrophic disability for the patient." Over the course of his career, Marsh, a consulting neurosurgeon at Atkinson Morley's/St. George's Hospital in London since 1987, has learned firsthand about the damage that his profession can cause. While many of the surgeries he has performed have been triumphs, there is always a risk of leaving the patient severely disabled. In the memoir Do No Harm, Marsh confesses to the fears and uncertainties he's dealt with as a surgeon, revisits his triumphs and failures and reflects on the enigmas of the brain and consciousness. Despite his decades on the job — or perhaps because of them — Marsh says that much of the brain remains beyond his grasp. He likens the mystery of the brain to that of the big-bang theory. "We're all sitting on an equally great mystery within ourselves, each of us, in this microcosm of our own consciousness, and I find that a quite nice thought," he says. You can nick the liver, you can remove bits of the lung, you can remove bits of the heart and the organ goes on working. But with the brain, although some areas can suffer some damage without terrible consequences for the patient, in general terms, it's very dangerous. Which means the decision-making is very important and ... in my experience over the years, when things have gone wrong, it's not because of [we] cut the wrong blood vessel or dropped an instrument or something like that. The mistakes made — the mistakes are in the decision-making — whether to operate or when to operate. © 2015 NPR

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 20987 - Posted: 05.27.2015

Backyard Brains. For 235 years we have been trying to isolate, understand, and analyze the elusive action potential, and here we tell the story that continues today. The progress of understanding Action Potentials can be classed into three main endeavors: 1. Amplification The amplifiers that gave us the first hint of the electrical impulses generated by neurons came from biological tissue itself! Scientists of the 18th and early 19th century used the contractions of muscles as "bioamplifiers" to indirectly measure neural firing. Using friction machines (spark generators), Leyden jars (primitive capacitors), or Voltaic Piles (the first batteries), electrical stimuli could be delivered to motor neurons that were still attached to muscles. The electrical stimulation would cause the nerve to fire action potentials (so people hypothesized), the muscle would then contract, and the force of contraction could be measured with a spring. With increasing electrical stimuli strength (thus more action potentials in the motor neurons), the muscle would contract with increasing force. This technique worked, but led to vigorous debates as to whether the neural tissue was actually generating its own action potentials at all, or whether the muscle contraction was just a direct result of electrical stimulation. By the mid-19th century, galvanometers had been invented, and it was possible to see that nerves were indeed generating their own action potentials. These galvanometers exploited the then new technology of electromagnets. For example, Emil de Bois-Reymond built by hand a type of galvanometer with 24,000 turns around an iron plate. When the nerve fired action potentials, a metal needle suspended by the plate would deflect. These devices worked, but the needle movement was not fast enough to separate the 1 ms individual action potentials, and the machines occupied a lot of time to construct. © 2009-2015 Backyard Brains

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 3: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Link ID: 20944 - Posted: 05.18.2015

By Jonathan Webb Science reporter, BBC News Scientists have stumbled upon one of the secrets behind the big gulps of the world's biggest whales: the nerves in their jaws are stretchy. Rorquals, a family that includes blue and humpback whales, feed by engulfing huge volumes of water and food, sometimes bigger than themselves. Researchers made the discovery by inadvertently stretching a thick cable they found in the jaw of a fin whale. Most nerves are fragile and inelastic, so this find is first for vertebrates. The work is reported in the journal Current Biology. A Canadian research team had travelled to Iceland to investigate some of these whales' other anatomical adaptations to "lunge feeding" - things like their muscles, or the remarkable sensory organ in their jaws, discovered in 2012. They were working with specimens in collaboration with commercial whalers. "It's probably one of the only places in the world where you can do this sort of work, because these animals are so huge that even getting in through the skin is something you can't do without having heavy machinery around," said Prof Wayne Vogl, an anatomist at the University of British Columbia and the study's first author. When you are working with a 20m fin whale, it's important to have the right equipment, he said. "If a heart falls on you, it could kill you." © 2015 BBC.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 1: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System
Link ID: 20889 - Posted: 05.05.2015

By Emily Underwood NASA hopes to send the first round-trip, manned spaceflight to Mars by the 2030s. If the mission succeeds, astronauts could spend several years potentially being bombarded with cosmic rays—high-energy particles launched across space by supernovae and other galactic explosions. Now, a study in mice suggests that these particles could alter the shape of neurons, impairing astronauts’ memories and other cognitive abilities. The concern about cosmic rays is a long-standing one, prompting NASA (and science fiction writers) to spend a lot of time discussing ways of protecting astronauts from them. (A buffer of water around the spacecraft’s hull is one popular idea.) But scientists don’t really know how much of a threat the radiation poses. It’s not feasible to study the effects of cosmic rays on real astronauts, such as those living in the International Space Station, because many variables, including the stress of living on a spaceship, can affect cognition, says Patric Stanton, a cell biologist at New York Medical College in Valhalla. It’s also impossible to control the level of radiation astronauts are exposed to, making it difficult to do rigorous experiments, he says. To overcome those challenges, several NASA-funded research groups are testing cosmic radiation on mice. In the new study, published today in Science Advances, Charles Limoli, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Irvine, and colleagues took male mice to a particle accelerator at the NASA Space Radiation Laboratory in Upton, New York. There, they catapulted oxygen and titanium ions down a 100-meter transport tunnel and into the restrained rodents’ brains at roughly two-thirds the speed of light. The dose of high-energy particles resembled the radiation likely to pass through the unprotected hull of a spaceship over the course of a mission to Mars, Limoli says. © 2015 American Association for the Advancement of Science

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 20873 - Posted: 05.02.2015

|By Gareth Cook The wait has been long, but the discipline of neuroscience has finally delivered a full-length treatment of the zombie phenomenon. In their book, Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep?, scientists Timothy Verstynen and Bradley Voytek cover just about everything you might want to know about the brains of the undead. It's all good fun, and if you learn some serious neuroscience along the way, well, that's fine with them, too. Voytek answered questions from contributing editor Gareth Cook. How is it that you and your co-author came to write a book about zombies? Clearly, it is an urgent public health threat, but I would not have expected a book from neuroscientists on the topic. Indeed! You think you're prepared for the zombie apocalypse and then—BAM!—it happens, and only then do you realize how poorly prepared you really were. Truly the global concern of our time. Anyway, this whole silly thing started when Tim and I would get together to watch zombie movies with our wives and friends. Turns out when you get some neuroscientists together to watch zombie movies, after a few beers they start to diagnose them and mentally dissect their brains. Back in the summer of 2010 zombie enthusiast and author—and head of the Zombie Research Society—Matt Mogk got in touch with me to see if we were interested in doing something at the intersection of zombies and neuroscience. © 2015 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 20772 - Posted: 04.10.2015

Christian Jarrett November 2013, I proudly launched the Brain Watch blog here at WIRED. This will be my final post. For seventeen months I’ve used the blog to report on new neuroscience findings, to reflect on how neuroscience is influencing the public and media, to investigate the claims of brain products, to explore neurological abnormality and death, and to debunk misconceptions about the brain. I loved reading your comments and I was thrilled when I found my ideas from here quoted in other publications. It’s been a lot of fun. Here’s some of what I learned: Brain myths die hard When the movie Lucy came out last year, it provided me an opportunity to challenge the 10% brain myth and explore its origins (the idea we only use 10% of our brains is a premise of the film). With such tired myths, it’s easy to wonder if anybody believes them anymore. Writing this blog, I learned not to underestimate their staying power! Consider the vitriol my 10% post attracted from a neuroscience grad student at Yale. In an email dripping with disdain she told me “You … should feel ashamed for releasing such a misinformed article. … There are misinformed and uneducated people all over the internet trying to disprove this 10% notion, but that is expected. This is certainly NOT something I expected from someone allegedly as well educated as yourself.” Brain science is confusing and complicated Hardly a revelation, you might say. But writing this blog brought home to me the messy reality of neuroscience. Consider how tabloid papers like dividing the world into those activities and technologies that cause brain shrinkage and those that cause brain growth – the implicit assumption always being that growth is good and shrinkage bad.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 15: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20: ; Chapter 11: Emotions, Aggression, and Stress
Link ID: 20706 - Posted: 03.21.2015

If you missed the great dress debate of 2015 you were probably living under a rock. Staffrooms across the globe threatened to come to a standstill as teachers addressed the all-important question – was the dress white and gold or blue and black? This is just one example of how our brains interpret things differently. So, with the 20th anniversary of Brain Awareness Week from 16 to 22 March, this week we bring you a collection of ideas and resources to get students’ synapses firing. The brain is one of our most interesting organs, and advances in technology and medicine mean we now know more about it than ever before. Brain Awareness Week is a global campaign to raise awareness of the progress and benefits of brain research. The organisers, the Dana Foundation, have put together an assortment of teaching materials for primary and secondary students. For children aged five to nine, the Mindboggling Workbook is a good place to start. It includes information on how the brain works, what it does and how to take care of it. There’s also a section on the nervous system, which you could turn into a fun group activity. Ask one student to lie down on a large sheet of paper while others trace around them. Add a drawing of the brain and the spinal cord. Use different coloured crayons to illustrate how neurons send messages around your body when you a) touch something hot, b) get stung on the leg by a wasp, and c) wriggle your toes after stepping in sand. Can students explain why the brain is described as being more powerful than a computer? © 2015 Guardian News and Media Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 20673 - Posted: 03.10.2015

By Neuroskeptic There is a popular view that all of the natural sciences can be arranged in a chain or ladder according to the complexity of their subjects. On this view, physics forms the base of the ladder because it deals with the simplest building-blocks of matter, atoms and subatomic particles. Chemistry is next up because it studies interacting atoms i.e. molecules. Biology studies complex collections of molecules, i.e. cells. Then comes neuroscience which deals with a complex collection of interacting cells – the brain. Psychology, perhaps, can be seen as the next level above neuroscience, because psychology studies brains interacting with each other and with the environment. So this on this model, we have a kind of Great Chain of Science, something like this: This is an appealing model. But is biology really basic to neuroscience (and psychology)? At first glance it seems like biology – most importantly cell and molecular biology – surely is basic to neuroscience. After all, brains are comprised of cells. All of the functions of brain cells, like synaptic transmission and plasticity, are products of biological machinery, i.e. proteins and ultimately genes. This doesn’t imply that neuroscience could be ‘reduced to’ biology, any more than biology will ever be reduced to pure chemistry, but it does seem to imply that biology is the foundation for neuroscience.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 20664 - Posted: 03.09.2015

Dr. Lisa Sanders. On Wednesday, we challenged Well readers to take on the case of a 21-year-old college student with chronic headaches who suddenly became too dizzy to walk. She had a medical history that was complicated by back surgery and a subsequent infection, and chronic headaches after a car accident. More than 300 of you wrote in with suggested diagnoses, but only a handful of you noticed the clue that led the medical student who saw the patient to the right answer. The cause of the young woman’s dizziness was… Postural tachycardia syndrome, or POTS. The first reader to make this diagnosis was Theresa Baker, a retired bookkeeper and mother from Philomath, Ore. She said she immediately recognized the disorder because her young niece has suffered from it for over a decade. Her episodes of dizziness and fainting had started when she was just 13. Well done, Ms. Baker! The Diagnosis Postural tachycardia syndrome — also called postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome — is an unusual condition in which simply being upright causes symptoms of lightheadedness, sometimes to the point of fainting, along with an increase in heart rate faster than 130 beats per minute, all of which improves when the patient lies down. These basic symptoms are often accompanied by fatigue, which is often worst after any type of exertion, along with a loss of concentration, blurred or tunnel vision, difficulty sleeping or nausea. POTS is considered a syndrome rather than a disease because it has many possible causes. It can be transient — a side effect of certain medications or a result of loss of conditioning, acute blood loss or dehydration — and in these cases it resolves when the trigger is removed. Other types of POTS are more persistent — which turned out to be the case for this patient — lasting months or years. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 9: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 6: Hearing, Balance, Taste, and Smell
Link ID: 20575 - Posted: 02.13.2015

By DENISE GRADY An electrical device glued to the scalp can slow cancer growth and prolong survival in people with the deadliest type of brain tumor, researchers reported on Saturday. The device is not a cure and, on average, adds only a few months of life when used along with the standard regimen of surgery, radiation and chemotherapy. Some doctors have questioned its usefulness. But scientists conducting a new study said the device was the first therapy in a decade to extend life in people with glioblastomas, brain tumors in which median survival is 15 months even with the best treatment. The disease affects about 10,000 people a year in the United States and is what killed Senator Edward M. Kennedy in 2009. It is so aggressive and hard to treat that even seemingly small gains in survival are considered important. The new findings mean the device should become part of the standard care offered to all patients with newly diagnosed glioblastomas, the researchers conducting the study said. The equipment consists of four pads carrying transducer arrays that patients glue to their scalps and change every few days. Wires lead to a six-pound operating system and power supply. Except for some scalp irritation, the device has no side effects, the study found. But patients have to wear it more or less around the clock and must keep their heads shaved. It generates alternating, low-intensity electrical fields — so-called tumor-treating fields — that can halt tumor growth by stopping cells from dividing, which leads to their death. The researchers said the technology might also help treat other cancers, and would be tested in mesothelioma and cancers of the lung, ovary, breast and pancreas. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 3: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals; Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals; Chapter 20:
Link ID: 20319 - Posted: 11.17.2014

By Anna North Do you devour the latest neuroscience news, eager to learn more about how your brain works? Or do you click past it to something else, something more applicable to your life? If you’re in the latter camp, you may be in the majority. A new study suggests that many people just don’t pay that much attention to brain science, and its findings may raise a question: Is “neuro-literacy” really necessary? At Wired, Christian Jarrett writes, “It feels to me like interest in the brain has exploded.” He cites the prevalence of the word “brain” in headlines as well as “the emergence of new fields such as neuroleadership, neuroaesthetics and neuro-law.” But as a neuroscience writer, he notes, he may be “heavily biased” — and in fact, some research “suggests neuroscience has yet to make an impact on most people’s everyday lives.” For instance, he reports, Cliodhna O’Connor and Helene Joffe recently interviewed 48 Londoners about brain science for a paper published in the journal Science Communication. Anyone who thinks we live in an era of neuro-fixation may find the results a bit of a shock. Said one participant in the research: “Science of the brain? I haven’t a clue. Nothing at all. I’d be lying if I said there was.” Another: “Brain research I understand, an image of, I don’t know, a monkey or a dog with like the top of their head off and electrodes and stuff on their brain.” And another: “I might have seen it on the news or something, you know, some report of some description. But because they probably mentioned the word ‘science,’ or ‘We’re going to go now to our science correspondent Mr. Lala,’ that’s probably when I go, okay, it’s time for me to make a cup of tea.” According to the study authors, 71 percent of respondents “took pains to convey that neuroscience was not salient in their day-to-day life: it was ‘just not really on my radar.’” Some respondents associated brain research with scientists in white coats or with science classes (asked to free-associate about the term “brain research,” one respondent drew a mean-faced stick figure labeled “cross teacher”). And 42 percent saw science as something alien to them, removed from their own lives. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 18: Attention and Higher Cognition
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20: ; Chapter 14: Attention and Higher Cognition
Link ID: 20315 - Posted: 11.15.2014

By Bec Crew Mike meet everyone, everyone meet Mike. No, no, don’t wave. He can’t see, you’re just making this awkward. Also known as Miracle Mike, Mike the Headless Chicken was a plump, five-year-old cockerel when he was unceremoniously beheaded on 10 September 1945. Farmer Lloyd Olsen of Fruita in Colorado did the deed because his wife Clara was having her mother over for dinner that night, and Olsen knew she’d always enjoyed a bit of roast chicken neck. With that in mind, Olsen tried to save most of Mike’s neck as he lopped his head off, but in doing so, he accidentally made his axe miss Mike’s jugular vein, plus one ear and most of his brain stem, and to his surprise, Mike didn’t die. In fact, Mike stuck around for a good 18 months without his head. Immediately after it happened, Mike reeled around like any headless chicken would, but soon settled down. He even started pecking at the ground for food with his newly minted stump, and made preening motions. His crows had become throaty gurglings. Olsen, bewildered, left him to it. The next morning, when Olsen found Mike asleep in the barn, having attempted to tuck his head under his wing as he always had, the farmer took it upon himself to figure out how to feed this unwitting monstrosity. Mike had earned that much. All Olsen had to do was deposit food and water into Mike’s exposed oesophagus via a little eyedropper. He even got small grains of corn sometimes as a treat. © 2014 Scientific American

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 20126 - Posted: 09.29.2014

One of the best things about being a neuroscientist used to be the aura of mystery around it. It was once so mysterious that some people didn’t even know it was a thing. When I first went to university and people asked what I studied, they thought I was saying I was a “Euroscientist”, which is presumably someone who studies the science of Europe. I’d get weird questions such as “what do you think of Belgium?” and I’d have to admit that, in all honesty, I never think of Belgium. That’s how mysterious neuroscience was, once. Of course, you could say this confusion was due to my dense Welsh accent, or the fact that I only had the confidence to talk to strangers after consuming a fair amount of alcohol, but I prefer to go with the mystery. It’s not like that any more. Neuroscience is “mainstream” now, to the point where the press coverage of it can be studied extensively. When there’s such a thing as Neuromarketing (well, there isn’t actually such a thing, but there’s a whole industry that would claim otherwise), it’s impossible to maintain that neuroscience is “cool” or “edgy”. It’s a bad time for us neurohipsters (which are the same as regular hipsters, except the designer beards are on the frontal lobes rather than the jaw-line). One way that we professional neuroscientists could maintain our superiority was by correcting misconceptions about the brain, but lately even that avenue looks to be closing to us. The recent film Lucy is based on the most classic brain misconception: that we only use 10% of our brain. But it’s had a considerable amount of flack for this already, suggesting that many people are wise to this myth. We also saw the recent release of Susan Greenfield’s new book Mind Change, all about how technology is changing (damaging?) our brains. This is a worryingly evidence-free but very common claim by Greenfield. Depressingly common, as this blog has pointed out many times. But now even the non-neuroscientist reviewers aren’t buying her claims. © 2014 Guardian News and Media Limited

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 16: Psychopathology: Biological Basis of Behavior Disorders
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20: ; Chapter 12: Psychopathology: The Biology of Behavioral Disorders
Link ID: 20011 - Posted: 08.30.2014

By Erik Schechter The folks who brought us the giant, smartphone-controlled cyborg cockroach are back—this time, with a wired-up scorpion. Be afraid. Backyard Brains, a small Michigan-based company dedicated to spreading the word about neuroscience, has been running surgical experiments on these deadly arachnids for the past two months, using electrical current to induce them to strike. Dylan Miller, a summer intern working the project, insists it's the first time that an electrical current has ever been used to remotely induce a scorpion to strike with its pedipalps (claws) and tail. "I was originally looking at how scorpions sense the ground vibrations of their prey," says Miller, a neuroscience major at Michigan State University, "and I just kind of stumbled on this defensive response." In retrospect, it's easy to see how Miller got there. Scorpions use vibrations and their tactile sense to navigate the world, identifying both prey and predator. A touch on the leg, for instance, tells a scorpion that it's under attack, provoking a defensive fight-or-flight reaction—either fleeing from danger or going full-out Bruce Lee. In nature, the scorpion would have to be physically touched for that to happen. But in the lab, an electrode to the leg nerves and a tiny, remote-controlled function generator feeding a signal will do the trick. The scorpion experiments build on the earlier work Backyard Brains has done with cockroaches, namely RoboRoach. A Kickstarter project back in June 2013 and now a real for-sale home kit, RoboRoach enables purchasers to surgically implant a live roach with three sets of electrodes and then control its movement with a smartphone app via a Bluetooth control unit worn on the roach's back. The controversial kit has been criticized as cruel by people like cognitive ethologist Marc Bekoff, but the company argues that RoboRoach's educational "benefits outweigh the cost." Undaunted by the criticism, Backyard Brains co-founder Gregory Gage was already tossing around the idea of robo-scorpions last October. ©2014 Hearst Communication, Inc

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 3: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Link ID: 19891 - Posted: 07.29.2014

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN PHILADELPHIA — Clambering upward in dim violet light, stepping from one glass platform to another, you trigger flashes of light and polyps of sound. You climb through protective tubes of metallic mesh as you make your way through a maze of pathways. You are an electrical signal coursing through a neural network. You are immersed in the human brain. Well, almost. Here at the Franklin Institute, you’re at least supposed to get that impression. You pass through this realm (the climbing is optional) as part of “Your Brain” — the largest permanent exhibition at this venerable institution, and one of its best. That show, along with two other exhibitions, opens on Saturday in the new $41 million, 53,000-square-foot Nicholas and Athena Karabots Pavilion. This annex — designed by Saylor Gregg Architects, with an outer facade draped in a “shimmer wall” of hinged aluminum panels created by the artist Ned Kahn — expands the institution’s display space, educational facilities and convention possibilities. It also completes a transformation that began decades ago, turning one of the oldest hands-on science museums in the United States (as the Franklin puts it) into a contemporary science center, which typically combines aspects of a school, community center, amusement park, emporium, theater, international museum and interactive science lab — while also combining, as do many such institutions, those elements’ strengths and weaknesses. That brain immersion gallery gives a sense of this genre’s approach. It is designed more for amusement, effect and social interaction (cherished science center goals) than understanding. So I climb, but I’m not convinced. I hardly feel like part of a network of dendrites and axons as I weave through these pathways. I try, though, to imagine these tubes of psychedelically illuminated mesh filled with dozens of chattering children leaping around. That might offer a better inkling of the unpredictable, raucous complexity of the human brain. © 2014 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 19730 - Posted: 06.14.2014

In a new study, scientists at the National Institutes of Health took a molecular-level journey into microtubules, the hollow cylinders inside brain cells that act as skeletons and internal highways. They watched how a protein called tubulin acetyltransferase (TAT) labels the inside of microtubules. The results, published in Cell, answer long-standing questions about how TAT tagging works and offer clues as to why it is important for brain health. Microtubules are constantly tagged by proteins in the cell to designate them for specialized functions, in the same way that roads are labeled for fast or slow traffic or for maintenance. TAT coats specific locations inside the microtubules with a chemical called an acetyl group. How the various labels are added to the cellular microtubule network remains a mystery. Recent findings suggested that problems with tagging microtubules may lead to some forms of cancer and nervous system disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease, and have been linked to a rare blinding disorder and Joubert Syndrome, an uncommon brain development disorder. “This is the first time anyone has been able to peer inside microtubules and catch TAT in action,” said Antonina Roll-Mecak, Ph.D., an investigator at the NIH’s National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke (NINDS), Bethesda, Maryland, and the leader of the study. Microtubules are found in all of the body’s cells. They are assembled like building blocks, using a protein called tubulin. Microtubules are constructed first by aligning tubulin building blocks into long strings. Then the strings align themselves side by side to form a sheet. Eventually the sheet grows wide enough that it closes up into a cylinder. TAT then bonds an acetyl group to alpha tubulin, a subunit of the tubulin protein.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System; Chapter 3: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 1: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 2: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals
Link ID: 19729 - Posted: 06.14.2014