After the jump some more from Junger and a nice talk from Robert Sapolsky about similar behaviors in chimps.

Another example from soldiers in Afghanistan is the “blood-in, blood-out” ritual for increasing group cohesiveness and testing individual sacrifice for the group, as Junger describes near the end of this Daily Show clip:

All of these explanations and rituals reminded me of Robert Sapolsky’s and Frans de Waal’s observations of similar behavior that is reported in baboon/chimp groups.

In the clip below (from Stanford’s Class Day 2009 speech), Sapolsky describes several “uniquely human” behaviors (or at least ones that had been thought to be “uniquely human”) which really are shared by these close relatives. Starting around 12:20 (the clip below will auto-start there), he talks about aggression and the organized group killing done by “border patrols”. The entire talk by Sapolsky (~35 mins) is worth watching too!

Watch it online at the TED website.

I’m a fan of it because it is an open-access journal featuring a “tiered system” and more.  From their website:

The Frontiers Journal Series is not just another journal. It is a new approach to scientific publishing. As service to scientists, it is driven by researchers for researchers but it also serves the interests of the general public. Frontiers disseminates research in a tiered system that begins with original articles submitted to Specialty Journals. It evaluates research truly democratically and objectively based on the reading activity of the scientific communities and the public. And it drives the most outstanding and relevant research up to the next tier journals, the Field Journals.

I’m a big fan of the variety of specialty journals they have:

• Aging Neuroscience
• Behavioral Neuroscience
• Cellular Neuroscience
• Computational Neuroscience
• Enteric Neuroscience
• Evolutionary Neuroscience
• Human Neuroscience
• Integrative Neuroscience
• Molecular Neuroscience
• Neural Circuits
• Neuroanatomy
• Neuroenergetics
• Neuroengineering
• Neurogenesis
• Neurogenomics
• Neuroinformatics
• Neuromethods
• Neuropharamacology
• Neuroprosthetics
• Neurorobotics
• Synaptic Neuroscience
• Systems Neuroscience

It is nice how YouTube can be both educational and entertaining!

Also, it looks like Neanderthals share the FOXP2 variant that humans have:

Archaeologists have long debated whether Neanderthals could speak, and they have eagerly awaited Dr. Pääbo’s analysis of the Neanderthal FOXP2, a gene essential for language. Modern humans have two changes in FOXP2 that are not found in chimpanzees, and that presumably evolved to make speech possible. Dr. Pääbo said Neanderthals had the same two changes in their version of the FOXP2 gene. But many other genes are involved in language, so it is too early to say whether Neanderthals could speak.

UPDATE: A few days ago, I heard Wolf Enard, one of Paabo’s postdocs, speak on a fascinating project, where human version of FOXP2 was knocked in to mice (replacing the endogenous mouse version). Although the phenotypic effects were subtle, the approach itself is quite revolutionary: Putting human versions of genes into model organisms to see how the subsequent evolution of the gene changes its function. I wonder what other genes might be amenable to this approach.

The article’s conclusion should be posted as a caveat under every political speech of those seeking office. And it should serve as the epitaph for the Bush administration: “People who lack the knowledge or wisdom to perform well are often unaware of this fact. That is, the same incompetence that leads them to make wrong choices also deprives them of the savvy necessary to recognize competence, be it their own or anyone else’s.”

Slate had a story (“Why is every neuropundit such a raging liberal?“) about how neuroscience and neuromarketing are changing political consulting (also here’s a link to a similar story in NYT last week):

According to a study of political psychology published last Thursday in Science, conservatives tend to be the jumpier lot.

The researchers called 46 political partisans into their laboratory at the University of Nebraska, affixed electrodes to their fingertips and eyelids, and measured sweat output and eye blinks in response to a series of startling stimuli. (Subjects were forced to endure images of bloody faces and maggot-infested wounds, as well as sudden blasts of white noise.) The results: Social conservatives—those who supported the death penalty, the Patriot Act, prayer in school, and the like—sweated more, and blinked more intensely, than the liberals.

The Slate and NYT articles in particular suggest something that I have long believed to be true. The Republican “story” is, from a neuroscience perspective, simply better because it tends to view the world in clear-cut terms with no middle ground and, thus, is more effective at rallying emotional processing areas of the brain (eg. limbic system). It is well-known in neuroscience that emotionally salient events that activate these limbic structures are better remembered than less charged memories. The Democratic “story” tends to be more complicated with shades of gray and therefore requires higher-level processing (eg. cortical areas involved in conflict resolution). Clearly, I’m oversimplifying things here a bit (see, I’m designing this post to appeal to your limbic system!) but I think that this hypothesis might have some legs.

Of course, if it’s true, why doesn’t everyone vote Republican if that story is the neurally more rewarding one? Or perhaps the more relevant question: Is it even possible for the Democrats to tap into the similar evolutionarily older limbic structures that seem to dominate the Republican story?

Also, although I prefer Neurodudes to stick with the science over any partisan politics, I must say I found this statistic interesting (from the Slate article):

in 2002, Daniel Klein and Andrew Western tallied the political affiliations of professors at Berkeley and Stanford and found that even in the hard sciences, Democrats outnumbered Republicans by a factor of almost 8 to 1. Among professors of neurology and neuroscience, Klein and Western counted 68 registered Democrats against just six Republicans.

Two amazing things here:

1. Plants missing photosynthetic enzymes of their own that migrate directionally toward “victim” plants. This behavior has an uncanny resemblance to axon guidance. Make sure to view the time-lapse video in the NYT article. Here’s an image from the PSU website:
   
   
2. Plants capable of identifying kin and “being nice” to kin while going into a competitive mode of root growth with non-kin. Amazing.

It refreshing to see this kind of interesting behavior without any neurons involved. It makes me think (realize) that the idea of a neuron or a neural system has many components and there might not be any good reason to assume that a single cell must have all of those properties or none of them. Something like a neuron-like cell that’s not a neuron in the classical sense. Anyone know of other examples?

Ground squirrels not only heat up their tails to deter snake attacks — but they also seem to use the strategy selectively against infrared-sensitive snakes — leading us to the ultimate conclusion that when the bees are gone, the squirrels will inherit the earth…

You can check out an infrared-eye-view of squirrel/snake battles here because I don’t know how to post movies on the internet yet

–Davie

The man had a normal job and is a married father of two children.

Nature news

Lionel Feuillet, Henry Dufour and Jean Pelletier. Brain of a white-collar worker. The Lancet, Volume 370, Issue 9583, 21 July 2007-27 July 2007, Page 262.

Evidence supporting the view that nervous system centralization evolved separately include:

• the central nerve cord is dorsal in chordates but ventral in non-chordates
• CNS patterning in each of the fruitfly and the nematode, both in Bilateria, are significantly different from chordates, although there are also similarities
• hemichordate worms, also in Bilateria and quite close to chordates, have a decentralized nervous system

However, there is recent genetic evidence that in fact all of Bilateria shares a common evolutionary origin for some of its CNS patterning machinery. Experiments show that there are significant similarities between the general patterning of the CNS in chordates and in annelids. Further experiments show that some patterning in the medial forebrain is conserved between chordates and annelids as well; specifically, some genetics related to a class of cells which are both photoreceptors and neurosecretory.

The authors suggest that annelids are closest to the common bilateria ancestor, that chordata is relatively close, and that insects and nematodes have evolved relatively “more” since then, which is why annelids are more similar to chordates even where insects and nematodes are dissimilar.

I’m not an expert in this stuff and I might have gotten this all wrong. Please lemme know if so.

Go invert! (-ebrate neurobiology)

the “general” patterning study:

A. Denes, G. Jékely, P. Steinmetz, F. Raible, H. Snyman, B. Prud’homme, D. Ferrier, G. Balavoine, D. Arendt. Molecular Architecture of Annelid Nerve Cord Supports Common Origin of Nervous System Centralization in Bilateria. Cell, Volume 129, Issue 2, Pages 277-288.
Commentary: Maximilian J. Telford, A Single Origin of the Central Nervous System?, Cell, Volume 129, Issue 2, 20 April 2007, Pages 237-239.
Press release

the photoreceptors/neurosecretory cell patterning study:

Kristin Tessmar-Raible, Florian Raible, Foteini Christodoulou, Keren Guy, Martina Rembold, Harald Hausen and Detlev Arendt, Conserved Sensory-Neurosecretory Cell Types in Annelid and Fish Forebrain: Insights into Hypothalamus Evolution, Cell, Volume 129, Issue 7, 29 June 2007, Pages 1389-1400.
Press release
Related weblog post at The Other 95%