neurodudes

His Holiness has spoken. He wants neuro-drugs to take and electrodes stuck in his brain so that he doesn’t have to spend hours meditating each day. (Enlightenment now!) If you want to do hot stuff, study physics or brain science. His interest in neuroscience stems from a long-standing interest in body hair. Yes, body hair. Americans need to figure their own way through this whole intelligent design business. Not all antidepressants are alike; for instance, the Dalai Lama is against tranquilizers. Definitely against tranquilizers. And, perhaps most surprisingly, His Holiness, approves of animal research — when it’s done right and with respect.

Minute-by-minute liveblog follows after the jump.
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We’ve made it through the abstruse and strangely ineffective security (in addition to the insane herd mentality of charging neuroscientists) and we’re ready to blog. Your spirtual enlightment will be forthcoming.

While you’re waiting, His Holiness has an op-ed piece in today’s NYT.

In keeping with these fancy new Internet trends, I will attempt to do some live-blogging from the Society for Neuroscience 2005 Annual Meeting that starts on Saturday in DC. The big event is of course the Dalai Lama’s talk on Saturday afternoon. I give my poster presentation pretty early on (Sunday morning- D22, come say hi), so I should be able to find some time to blog.

I’ll be flying out tomorrow to DC but, until the real action kicks off, those curious can look at my itinerary. If you know of any cool posters/talks that I’ve missed, post it in the comments. My full itinerary after the jump…
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New genetically encoded fluorescent voltage-sensitive dye.

Sensitivity: up to 34% change (delta F/F) per 100 mV.
Time constant: .5 ms.
Phototoxicity: You can expose the cells to light for up to 100 seconds without much effect; over 200 seconds is noticably damaging.
Location: specific to cell membranes.
Not ratiometric (if you don’t know what that is, don’t worry about it).

Excerpt from figure caption: “(c) Confocal section of HEK293 cells expressing eGFP-F shows very little fluorescence from internal membranes. Scale bar, 20 mum. (d) Fluorescence response (shown as colored increments) of hVOS on voltage pulses from -120 to +120 mV in steps of 20 mV from a holding potential of 0 mV in patch-clamped HEK293 cells.”

Baron Chanda, Rikard Blunck, Leonardo C Faria, Felix E Schweizer, Istvan Mody and Francisco Bezanilla. A hybrid approach to measuring electrical activity in genetically specified neurons. Nature Neuroscience 8, 1619 – 1626 (2005)

The nice NYT article on the function of sleep follows on a recent NIH-funded Nature insight series.

Some interesting facts from the NYT article:

• Sleep patterns vary greatly. Some bats sleep 20 hours, giraffes get 2 hours. (hmmm… grad students might be evolving toward giraffes…)
• Sleep has recently been found to occur in invertebrates too. Alternatively stated: Sleep is evolutionarily very old.
• Slow wave sleep is also found in fruit flies. (Divergence from fruit flies for us was 600 million years ago.)
• Some people don’t have any REM sleep. Behaviorally, these people are entirely normal, implying that it’s purpose might not be as obvious as one had thought (ie. required for the preservation of new memories, etc.)
• If you put a bunch of ducks in a row, the ones on the inside will sleep more often with both eyes closed. The ones on the outside will sleep with one eye open and it is (always?) the eye facing outward from the huddle. They are able to “sleep” one half of the brain at a time and, apparently, this sleeping with one eye open was lost in higher mammalian evolution. Fascinating.

Neurodudes reader John sent us this nice link to a high-resolution online atlas with human, macaque, and mouse brains.

I haven’t explored the site very much, but the quality seems very impressive and you really can’t beat the price. It also looks like the authors are planning to expand the atlas soon and have already started building desktop tools for easy 2D and 3D navigation. Thanks, John!

> > This is a reminder that the Early Registration Deadline for the Neural
> > Information Processing Systems Conference and Workshops is:
> >
> > Thursday, November 3, 2005
> >
> > To register, log on to the NIPS website: http://www.nips.cc/

Some folks have created NeuroTree to document the advisor-advisee relationships (i.e., “so-and-so was a grad student of that guy, and that guy postdoc’d with someone else”) of neuroscience. With this information, one can draw “family trees” like this.

Here is the FAQ.

Importantly, this is a collaborative effort, so add your name if it’s not there already.

-John O’Leary

The Pablo Picasso Alzheimer’s Therapy – New York Times

Interesting connection: Art appreciation seems to ease Alzheimer’s symptoms. Less memory loss. Less repetition.

Super interesting… there’s a lot to say here. There are of course many documented cases of particular brain lesions causing marked changes in personality or hobbies. But this appears to be something different. There is both an interest change (ie. people are more interested in art) but the neurological disease itself is somehow lessened (temporarily) by the interest itself.

The article mentions that there is very little research in the area. Does anyone know of any studies? It’s fascinating to think that such a simple, non-invasive therapy could be so powerful.

Either that, or it just means that art critics (“It’s like he’s trying to tell a story using words that don’t exist” — critic or patient?) have something in common with those with neurodegenerative disease.

Although Bayle and I are always surprised when we see how many people are actually reading Neurodudes every day (“you really like us! you really do!”), I think we realized we had hit a new milestone when Ray Kurzweil’s book agent called to give us an advance copy of his new book. Let me be clear here: We will gladly review any AI-/neuro-related books you send us. Free books are great! (Heck, we’ll even do an occasional historical biography, if you send us one.)

There’s a lot to say about Kurzweil”s new book, The Singularity is Near (book website; book on Amazon). This book is similar to his previous books (Age of Intelligent Machines, Age of Spiritual Machines) in style and research but the thesis here is that we are on the precipice of a major change in human civilization: We are soon going to create entities of superior intelligence in all aspects to our own selves. This is the Singularity.

Full book review after the jump (more…)