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By JoAnna Klein I expected a bumpy ride on a whitewater trip, so when I fell off my raft and coughed up the water I’d inhaled, I wasn’t afraid. But at the time I didn’t know I was swimming with a deadly parasite. I’d been at a bachelorette party at the U.S. National Whitewater Center in Charlotte, N.C., but after returning home I learned that I had shared the churning rapids with Naegleria fowleri, a single-celled amoeba found mostly in soil and warm freshwater lakes, rivers and hot springs. An Ohio teenager had contracted the amoeba infection after visiting the center around the same time I did, and some of the waters and sediment at and around the center had tested positive for the bug. News that my friends and I had all been at risk of exposure triggered a few days of worry. The illness is rare and, if infected, symptoms show up between one and 10 days after exposure. Chances were that we were fine (we were), but the experience prompted me to learn more about the parasite. Naegleria fowleri lives in fresh water, but not in salt water. If forced up the nose, it can enter the brain and feed on its tissue, resulting in an infection known as primary amebic meningoencephalitis. Death occurs in nearly all of those infected with the parasite, usually within five days after infection. The 18-year-old Ohio woman who died most likely contracted the parasite when she sucked water through her nose after falling from a raft during a church trip. Samples from a channel at the rafting center, collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, tested positive for the bug. The center’s channels are man-made, and it gets its water from the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities Department and two wells on its property. The center has announced that it disinfects all water with ultraviolet radiation and chlorine, and it added more after the water tests. © 2016 The New York Times Company

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: 22514 - Posted: 08.04.2016

By Libby Copeland Don’t get him wrong: Dean Burnett loves the brain as much as the next neuroscientist. But if he’s being honest, it’s “really quite rubbish in a lot of ways,” he says. In his new book, Idiot Brain, Burnett aims to take our most prized organ down a peg or two. Burnett is most fascinated by the brain’s tendency to trip us up when it’s just trying to help. His book explores many of these quirks: How we edit our own memories to make ourselves look better without knowing it; how anger persuades us we can take on a bully twice our size; and what may cause us to feel like we’re falling and jerk awake just as we’re falling asleep. (It could have something to do with our ancestors sleeping in trees.) We caught up with Burnett, who is also a science blogger for The Guardian and a stand-up comic, to ask him some of our everyday questions and frustrations with neuroscience. Why is it that we get motion sickness when we’re traveling in a plane or a car? We haven’t evolved, obviously, to ride in vehicles; that’s a very new thing in evolutionary terms. So the main theory as to why we get motion sickness is that it’s essentially a conflict in the senses that are being relayed to the subcortical part of the brain where the senses are integrated together. The body and the muscles are saying we are still. Your eyes are saying the environment is still. The balance sense in the ears are detecting movement. The brain is getting conflicting messages from the fundamental senses, and in evolutionary terms there’s only one thing that can cause that, which is a neurotoxin. And as a result the brain thinks it’s been poisoned and what do you do when you’ve been poisoned? Throw up.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 11: Motor Control and Plasticity; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 5: The Sensorimotor System
Link ID: 22508 - Posted: 08.03.2016

By James Gallagher Controlling human nerve cells with electricity could treat a range of diseases including arthritis, asthma and diabetes, a new company says. Galvani Bioelectronics hopes to bring a new treatment based on the technique before regulators within seven years. GlaxoSmithKline and Verily, formerly Google, Life Sciences, are behind it. Animal experiments have attached tiny silicone cuffs, containing electrodes, around a nerve and then used a power supply to control the nerve's messages. One set of tests suggested the approach could help treat type-2 diabetes, in which the body ignores the hormone insulin. They focused on a cluster of chemical sensors near the main artery in the neck that check levels of sugar and the hormone insulin. The sensors send their findings back to the brain, via a nerve, so the organ can coordinate the body's response to sugar in the bloodstream. GSK vice-president of bioelectronics Kris Famm told the BBC News website: "The neural signatures in the nerve increase in type 2-diabetes. "By blocking those neural signals in diabetic rats, you see the sensitivity of the body to insulin is restored." And early work suggested it could work in other diseases too. "It isn't just a one-trick-pony, it is something that if we get it right could have a new class of therapies on our hands," Mr Famm said. But he said the field was only "scratching the surface" when it came to understanding which nerve signals have what effect in the body. Both the volume and rhythm of the nerve signals could be having an effect rather than it being a simple case of turning the nerve on or off. © 2016 BBC

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 3: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 2: Neurophysiology: The Generation, Transmission, and Integration of Neural Signals; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 22507 - Posted: 08.03.2016

By Elahe Izadi It's referred to as the "brain-eating amoeba." Naegleria fowleri resides in warm freshwater, hot springs and poorly maintained swimming pools. When the single-celled organism enters a person's body through the nose, it can cause a deadly infection that leads to destruction of brain tissue. These infections are extremely rare; 138 people have been infected since 1962, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But over the weekend, the amoeba claimed another victim when an 18-year-old died from a meningitis infection caused by N. fowleri, said health officials in North Carolina. Lauren Seitz of Westerville, Ohio, died from a suspected case of primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), and officials are investigating whether she contracted the infection while whitewater rafting in Charlotte during a church trip, the Charlotte Observer reported. The N. fowleri infection "resulted in her developing a case of meningitis ... and inflaming of the brain and surrounding tissues, and unfortunately she died of this condition," Mecklenburg County Health Department director Marcus Plescia told reporters Wednesday. Plescia said that, while they were still gathering information from health officials in Ohio, they do know one of the stops Seitz's group made was to the U.S. National Whitewater Center.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 22355 - Posted: 06.24.2016

Gary Stix Unlike biochemistry and psychology, brain science did not exist as a separate academic field until the middle of the 20th century. In recent decades, neuroscience has emerged as a star among the biological disciplines. In 2014 a workshop organized by the National Academy of Medicine met to ponder the question of whether all bodes well for the scientists-to-be who are now getting their PhDs and laboring away at postdoctoral fellowships. Will the field be able to absorb this wealth of new talent—and is it preparing students with the quantitative skills needed to understand the workings of an organ with some 86 billion neurons and hundreds of trillions of connections among all of those cells? Steven Hyman of the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, who helped with the planning of the workshop and was recently president of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN), welcomed the flood of doctoral students choosing neuroscience, but warned: “Insofar as talented young people are discouraged from academic careers by funding levels so low that they produce debilitating levels of competition or simply foreclose opportunities, the U.S. and the world are losing an incredibly precious resource.” I got in touch with one member of the National Academy of Medicine panel, Huda Akil of the University of Michigan Medical School, the lead author on a paper in Neuron that summarized the workshop’s findings. Akil, also a former SfN president, is a noted researcher in the neurobiology of emotions. © 2016 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 22338 - Posted: 06.20.2016

By Monique Brouillette The brain presents a unique challenge for medical treatment: it is locked away behind an impenetrable layer of tightly packed cells. Although the blood-brain barrier prevents harmful chemicals and bacteria from reaching our control center, it also blocks roughly 95 percent of medicine delivered orally or intravenously. As a result, doctors who treat patients with neurodegenerative diseases, such as Parkinson's, often have to inject drugs directly into the brain, an invasive approach that requires drilling into the skull. Some scientists have had minor successes getting intravenous drugs past the barrier with the help of ultrasound or in the form of nanoparticles, but those methods can target only small areas. Now neuroscientist Viviana Gradinaru and her colleagues at the California Institute of Technology show that a harmless virus can pass through the barricade and deliver treatment throughout the brain. Gradinaru's team turned to viruses because the infective agents are small and adept at entering cells and hijacking the DNA within. They also have protein shells that can hold beneficial deliveries, such as drugs or genetic therapies. To find a suitable virus to enter the brain, the researchers engineered a strain of an adeno-associated virus into millions of variants with slightly different shell structures. They then injected these variants into a mouse and, after a week, recovered the strains that made it into the brain. A virus named AAV-PHP.B most reliably crossed the barrier. © 2016 Scientific American,

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System; Chapter 4: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 1: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 3: The Chemistry of Behavior: Neurotransmitters and Neuropharmacology
Link ID: 22313 - Posted: 06.13.2016

By Jane E. Brody Truth to tell, sometimes I don’t follow my own advice, and when I suffer the consequences, I rediscover why I offer it. I’ve long recommended drinking plenty of water, perhaps a glass with every meal and another glass or two between meals. If not plain water, which is best, then coffee or tea without sugar (but not alcoholic or sugary drinks) will do. I dined out recently after an especially active day that included about five miles of walking, 40 minutes of lap swimming and a 90-minute museum visit. I drank only half a glass of water and no other beverage with my meal. It did seem odd that I had no need to use the facilities afterward, not even after a long trip home. But I didn’t focus on why until the next day when, after a fitful night, I awoke exhausted, did another long walk and swim, and cycled to an appointment four miles away. I arrived parched, begging for water. After downing about 12 ounces, I was a new person. I no longer felt like a lead balloon. It seems mild dehydration was my problem, and the experience prompted me to take a closer look at the body’s need for water under a variety of circumstances. Although millions of Americans carry water bottles wherever they go and beverage companies like Coke and Pepsi would have you believe that every life can be improved by the drinks they sell, the truth is serious dehydration is not common among ordinary healthy people. But there are exceptions, and they include people like me in the Medicare generation, athletes who participate in particularly challenging events like marathons, and infants and small children with serious diarrhea. Let’s start with some facts. Water is the single most important substance we consume. You can survive for about two months without food, but you would die in about seven days without water. Water makes up about 75 percent of an infant’s weight and 55 percent of an older person’s weight. © 2016 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: 22192 - Posted: 05.09.2016

Scott O. Lilienfeld1*, Katheryn C. Sauvigné2, Steven Jay Lynn3, Robin L. Cautin4, Robert D. Latzman2 and Irwin D. Waldman1 The goal of this article is to promote clear thinking and clear writing among students and teachers of psychological science by curbing terminological misinformation and confusion. To this end, we present a provisional list of 50 commonly used terms in psychology, psychiatry, and allied fields that should be avoided, or at most used sparingly and with explicit caveats. We provide corrective information for students, instructors, and researchers regarding these terms, which we organize for expository purposes into five categories: inaccurate or misleading terms, frequently misused terms, ambiguous terms, oxymorons, and pleonasms. For each term, we (a) explain why it is problematic, (b) delineate one or more examples of its misuse, and (c) when pertinent, offer recommendations for preferable terms. By being more judicious in their use of terminology, psychologists and psychiatrists can foster clearer thinking in their students and the field at large regarding mental phenomena. Scientific thinking necessitates clarity, including clarity in writing (Pinker, 2014). In turn, clarity hinges on accuracy in the use of specialized terminology. Clarity is especially critical in such disciplines as psychology and psychiatry, where most phenomena, such as emotions, personality traits, and mental disorders, are “open concepts.” Open concepts are characterized by fuzzy boundaries, an indefinitely extendable indicator list, and an unclear inner essence (Pap, 1958; Meehl, 1986). © 2007 - 2015 Frontiers Media S.A

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: 22096 - Posted: 04.12.2016

By Neuroskeptic Do you want to be more successful? Happier? More intelligent? Don’t despair. The answer, we’re told, is right in front of your nose—or rather, right behind it. It’s your own brain. Thanks to neuroscience, you can hack your gray matter. According to the sales pitch, almost anything is possible, if you can master your brain—and if you can afford to buy the products that promise to help you do that. But how many of these neuroproducts are neurobullshit? And what makes neuroscience so attractive to people with something to sell? I’m a neuroscientist who has been blogging about the brain for the past eight years. Over this time I’ve noticed a steady increase in the number of neuroscience-themed commercial products. There are brain pills to optimize your mental focus. There are futuristic-looking headbands that promise to measure or stimulate your neural activity in order to make you smarter, or help you sleep better, or even meditate better. There is no end of “brain training” apps and neuroscience-themed self-help books. These products tend to have names based around “Neuro” or “Brain.” And they will come advertised as being “created by neuroscientists,” “based on the latest brain research,” or at least endorsed by some leading brain expert. Once you look beyond the “neuro” gloss, however, you’ll see that many of these products aren’t new at all, but just old products in new packaging. A recent, and notorious, example of this was “Fifth Quarter Fresh,” a brand of chocolate milk.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 22090 - Posted: 04.11.2016

Fergus Walsh Medical correspondent When I picked up the human brain in my hands, several things ran through my mind. My immediate concern was I might drop it or that it would fall apart in my hands - fortunately neither happened. Second, I was struck by how light the human brain is. I should say this was half a brain - the right hemisphere - the left had already been sent for dissection. The intact human brain weighs only around 3lbs (1.5kg) - just 2% of body-weight, and yet it consumes 20% of its energy. The brain I was holding had been steeped in formalin, a preserving fluid, for about three weeks and is one of several hundred brains donated every year for medical research. It was only after I'd got used to the feel of the brain in my hands that I could then start to wonder about how such a simple-looking structure could be capable of so much. This brain had experienced, processed, interpreted an entire human life - the thoughts, emotions, language, memory, emotion, cognition, awareness, and consciousness - all the things that make us human and each of us unique. You may think yuck, but I'm with the scientists and surgeon who declare: "Brains are beautiful". The pathology team at the Bristol Brain Bank had kindly allowed us to film as part of the BBC "In the Mind" season, looking at many aspects of mental health. My brief was to examine some of the latest advances in neuroscience. There is a genuine sense of excitement among researchers about the direction and progress being made in our knowledge of the brain. © 2016 BBC.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 19: Language and Lateralization
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20: ; Chapter 15: Language and Lateralization
Link ID: 21904 - Posted: 02.17.2016

By Brian Owens Guy Rouleau, the director of McGill University’s Montreal Neurological Institute (MNI) and Hospital in Canada, is frustrated with how slowly neuroscience research translates into treatments. “We’re doing a really shitty job,” he says. “It’s not because we’re not trying; it has to do with the complexity of the problem.” So he and his colleagues at the renowned institute decided to try a radical solution. Starting this year, any work done there will conform to the principles of the “open-
science” movement—all results and data will be made freely available at the time of publication, for example, and the institute will not pursue patents on any of its discoveries. Although some large-scale initiatives like the government-funded Human Genome Project have made all data completely open, MNI will be the first scientific institute to follow that path, Rouleau says. “It’s an experiment; no one has ever done this before,” he says. The intent is that neuroscience research will become more efficient if duplication is reduced and data are shared more widely and earlier. Opening access to the tissue samples in MNI’s biobank and to its extensive databank of brain scans and other data will have a major impact, Rouleau hopes. “We think that it is a way to accelerate discovery and the application of neuroscience.” After a year of consultations among the institute’s staff, pretty much everyone—about 70 principal investigators and 600 other scientific faculty and staff—has agreed to take part, Rouleau says. Over the next 6 months, individual units will hash out the details of how each will ensure that its work lives up to guiding principles for openness that the institute has developed. They include freely providing all results, data, software, and algorithms; and requiring collaborators from other institutions to also follow the open principles. © 2016 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: 21813 - Posted: 01.23.2016

Laura Sanders Faced with a shortage of the essential nutrient selenium, the brain and the testes duke it out. In selenium-depleted male mice, testes hog the trace element, leaving the brain in the lurch, scientists report in the Nov. 18 Journal of Neuroscience. The results are some of the first to show competition between two organs for trace nutrients, says analytical neurochemist Dominic Hare of the University of Technology Sydney and the Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health in Melbourne. In addition to uncovering this brain-testes scuffle, the study “highlights that selenium in the brain is something we can’t continue to ignore,” he says. About two dozen proteins in the body contain selenium, a nonmetallic chemical element. Some of these proteins are antioxidants that keep harmful molecules called free radicals from causing trouble. Male mice without enough selenium have brain abnormalities that lead to movement problems and seizures, neuroscientist Matthew Pitts of the University of Hawaii at Manoa and colleagues found. In some experiments, Pitts and his colleagues depleted selenium by interfering with genes. Male mice engineered to lack two genes that produce proteins required for the body to properly use selenium had trouble balancing on a rotating rod and moving in an open field. In their brains, a particular group of nerve cells called parvalbumin interneurons didn’t mature normally. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015.

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: 21640 - Posted: 11.18.2015

Sarah Schwartz With outposts in nearly every organ and a direct line into the brain stem, the vagus nerve is the nervous system’s superhighway. About 80 percent of its nerve fibers — or four of its five “lanes” — drive information from the body to the brain. Its fifth lane runs in the opposite direction, shuttling signals from the brain throughout the body. Doctors have long exploited the nerve’s influence on the brain to combat epilepsy and depression. Electrical stimulation of the vagus through a surgically implanted device has already been approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as a therapy for patients who don’t get relief from existing treatments. Now, researchers are taking a closer look at the nerve to see if stimulating its fibers can improve treatments for rheumatoid arthritis,heart failure, diabetes and even intractable hiccups. In one recent study, vagus stimulation made damaged hearts beat more regularly and pump blood more efficiently. Researchers are now testing new tools to replace implants with external zappers that stimulate the nerve through the skin. But there’s a lot left to learn. While studies continue to explore its broad potential, much about the vagus remains a mystery. In some cases, it’s not yet clear exactly how the nerve exerts its influence. And researchers are still figuring out where and how to best apply electricity. © Society for Science & the Public 2000 - 2015.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 2: Functional Neuroanatomy: The Cells and Structure of the Nervous System; Chapter 13: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 1: Cells and Structures: The Anatomy of the Nervous System; Chapter 9: Homeostasis: Active Regulation of the Internal Environment
Link ID: 21633 - Posted: 11.14.2015

By James Gallagher Health editor, BBC News website A mass vaccination programme against meningitis A in Africa has been a "stunning success", say experts. More than 220 million people were immunised across 16 countries in the continent's meningitis belt. In 2013 there were just four cases across the entire region, which once faced thousands of deaths each year. However, there are fresh warnings from the World Health Organization that "huge epidemics" could return unless a new vaccination programme is started. The meningitis belt stretches across sub-Saharan Africa from Gambia in the west to Ethiopia in the east. In the worst epidemic recorded, in 1996-97, the disease swept across the belt infecting more than a quarter of a million people and led to 25,000 deaths. Unlike other vaccines, the MenAfriVac was designed specifically for Africa and in 2010 a mass vaccination campaign was started. "The disease has virtually disappeared from this part of the world," said Dr Marie-Pierre Preziosi from the World Health Organization. The mass immunisation programme was aimed at people under 30. However, routine vaccination will be needed to ensure that newborns are not vulnerable to the disease. Projections, published in the journal Clinical Infectious Diseases, showed the disease could easily return. Dr Preziosi told the BBC News website: "What could happen is a huge epidemic that could sweep the entire area, that could target hundreds of thousands of people with 5-10% deaths at least. © 2015 BBC

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 21624 - Posted: 11.11.2015

Jon Hamilton For a few days this week, a convention center in Chicago became the global epicenter of brain science. Nearly 30,000 scientists swarmed through the vast hallways of the McCormick Place convention center as part of the annual Society for Neuroscience meeting. Among them were Nobel Prize winners, the director of the National Institutes of Health, and scores of researchers regarded as the international rock stars of neuroscience. "It's amazing. I'm a bit overwhelmed," said Kara Furman, a graduate student from Yale who was attending her first Society for Neuroscience meeting. Furman was just one of several hundred neuroscientists I found standing in lines outside the center one afternoon, waiting for shuttle buses. She was pondering a presentation from a few hours earlier that she found "pretty mind-blowing." What was it about? "Using MRI techniques to access dopamine release at the molecular level," she told me, deadpan. Welcome to the five-day annual event that's become known simply as "The Neuro Meeting." It's where brain scientists from around the world come to present their own work and discover the "mind-blowing" research others are doing. And there are thousands of presentations to choose from. "I prepared an itinerary based on my interests and that ran into 20 pages," said Srinivas Bharath from the National Institute of Mental Health and Neurosciences in Bangalore, India. © 2015 npr

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 21553 - Posted: 10.23.2015

By Melissa Dahl Next time you feel you are in danger of losing an argument, make some obscure reference to the brain. Any nod to neuroscience will do, even if it doesn’t actually illuminate the problem at hand or prove anything that halfway resembles a point. People tend to find explanations that include references to the brain very convincing, even if those references are mostly nonsense, according to the latest episode of "Psych Crunch," a podcast hosted by psychologist (and Science of Us contributor) Christian Jarrett. Jarrett interviews Sara Hodges, a research psychologist at the University of Oregon and the co-author of a study published this May on the appeal of “superfluous neuroscience information.” In it, Hodges and her colleagues presented students with a variety of explanations for various psychological phenomena. Some of these explanations were not really explanations at all, but rather just a restatement of the facts already presented. The students considered explanations for various quirks of human behavior from the fields of social science, biological science, and neuroscience, and rated how convincing they found each explanation. “The social sciences would refer to something about how people were raised, and the hard-science explanation referred to changes in DNA, the structure of DNA,” Hodges explained to Jarrett. The neuroscience explanation, on the other hand, would pretty much just name an area of the brain thought to be associated with the behavior at hand and leave matters at that, without really explaining anything. Even still, Hodges said, the “neuroscience explanations always came out on top — better than no explanation, better than social science, better than the hard science.” © 2015, New York Media LLC

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 21552 - Posted: 10.23.2015

by Ben Cipollini Thanks to Ms. Amazing, it’s now cliche to say, but hey… I really love SfN. For the uninitiated SfN is a thirty thousand person international conference for neuroscience–a conference so large, only a few cities in the US can handle it. Yes, that’s a giant C-SPAN2 bus that's dwarfed by this small section of the “Great Room”. For many, SfN evokes fear and dread; it’s truly overwhelming in its size, breadth, and depth. For me, it was love at first “OM*G!!!”. Don’t believe me, scientists? Let’s review the data: I loathe running, but I actually do it at SfN. One needs wheels to get from talks to posters to talks again. We filled the New Orleans convention center in 2012; it’s so long you you can actually get directions from one end of it to the other on Google Maps. Yes, that map does say “1.0 kilometers”. I hate crowds, but I will fight through the poster session crowds like a salmon heading upstream to spawn, just to get to one more poster before the end of the session. SfN may have more human traffic jams than China has vehicle jams during Golden week… but that won’t stop me from finding out how callosal connections have properties similar to those of long-range lateral connections, or to understand how hemispherectomy affects functional organization. You’d better too; you never know when one of your research heroes might be presenting the poster, or you’ll find yourself standing in front of a poster that winds up in Science just a few months later.

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 21522 - Posted: 10.17.2015

James Gorman If spiders had nightmares, the larvae of ichneumonid wasps would have to star in them. The wasp lays an egg on the back of an orb weaver spider, where it grows fat and bossy, and occupies itself with turning the spider into a zombie. As Keizo Takasuka and his colleagues point out in The Journal of Experimental Biology, this is a classic case of “host manipulation.” Using more colorful language, he described the larva turning the spider into a “drugged navvy.” The larva forces the spider to turn its efforts away from maintaining a sticky, spiral web to catch prey, and to devote itself to building a safe and sturdy web to serve as a home for the larva’s cocoon, in which it will transform itself into a wasp. This process was well known, but Dr. Takasuka and Kaoru Maeto at Kobe University, working with other Japanese researchers, wanted to explore how the wasp overlords controlled their spiders. They suspected that the larvae were co-opting a natural behavior of the spiders. Turning on a behavior already in the spiders’ repertoire would be much easier than controlling every step of modifying a sticky web. So they compared the cocoon web to one that the spiders themselves build to rest in when they are molting. It’s called a resting web. The similarities were striking. In both the resting and cocoon webs, the sticky, spiraling threads that make the webs of orb weavers so appealing were gone. Instead, the spokes of the web remained, decorated with fibrous spider silk that the researchers found reflected ultraviolet light. That would be a highly useful quality to warn away birds and some large insects from flying into the web because those creatures can see in the ultraviolet spectrum. The strength of the two silk webs was also similar. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook; Chapter 6: Evolution of the Brain and Behavior
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 21403 - Posted: 09.14.2015

By GREGORY COWLES Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and acclaimed author who explored some of the brain’s strangest pathways in best-selling case histories like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” using his patients’ disorders as starting points for eloquent meditations on consciousness and the human condition, died on Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 82. The cause was cancer, said Kate Edgar, his longtime personal assistant. Dr. Sacks announced in February, in an Op-Ed essay in The New York Times, that an earlier melanoma in his eye had spread to his liver and that he was in the late stages of terminal cancer. As a medical doctor and a writer, Dr. Sacks achieved a level of popular renown rare among scientists. More than a million copies of his books are in print in the United States, his work was adapted for film and stage, and he received about 10,000 letters a year. (“I invariably reply to people under 10, over 90 or in prison,” he once said.) Dr. Sacks variously described his books and essays as case histories, pathographies, clinical tales or “neurological novels.” His subjects included Madeleine J., a blind woman who perceived her hands only as useless “lumps of dough”; Jimmie G., a submarine radio operator whose amnesia stranded him for more than three decades in 1945; and Dr. P. — the man who mistook his wife for a hat — whose brain lost the ability to decipher what his eyes were seeing. Describing his patients’ struggles and sometimes uncanny gifts, Dr. Sacks helped introduce syndromes like Tourette’s or Asperger’s to a general audience. But he illuminated their characters as much as their conditions; he humanized and demystified them. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 21361 - Posted: 08.31.2015

By BENEDICT CAREY The past several years have been bruising ones for the credibility of the social sciences. A star social psychologist was caught fabricating data, leading to more than 50 retracted papers. A top journal published a study supporting the existence of ESP that was widely criticized. The journal Science pulled a political science paper on the effect of gay canvassers on voters’ behavior because of concerns about faked data. Now, a painstaking yearslong effort to reproduce 100 studies published in three leading psychology journals has found that more than half of the findings did not hold up when retested. The analysis was done by research psychologists, many of whom volunteered their time to double-check what they considered important work. Their conclusions, reported Thursday in the journal Science, have confirmed the worst fears of scientists who have long worried that the field needed a strong correction. The vetted studies were considered part of the core knowledge by which scientists understand the dynamics of personality, relationships, learning and memory. Therapists and educators rely on such findings to help guide decisions, and the fact that so many of the studies were called into question could sow doubt in the scientific underpinnings of their work. “I think we knew or suspected that the literature had problems, but to see it so clearly, on such a large scale — it’s unprecedented,” said Jelte Wicherts, an associate professor in the department of methodology and statistics at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. More than 60 of the studies did not hold up. Among them was one on free will. It found that participants who read a passage arguing that their behavior is predetermined were more likely than those who had not read the passage to cheat on a subsequent test. © 2015 The New York Times Company

Related chapters from BN: Chapter 1: Introduction: Scope and Outlook
Related chapters from MM:Chapter 20:
Link ID: 21355 - Posted: 08.28.2015