neurodudes

Neurodudes reader Jason M. sent me some information about a funding agency, IARPA, or Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity, that is funding neuroscience-related research. I had never heard of IARPA before but it has existed since 2006 as something of an intelligence-focused DARPA. There upcoming funding deadline (Aug 21) is for projects on detecting trust signals between humans.

Just last night, I watched the tense but amazing film The Hurt Locker (don’t let the name disuade you, see the phenomenal Metacritic rating), which is about a bomb disposal squad during the recent Iraq War. There is one particularly stirring scene with a suicide bomber who claims that he was forced to wear a vest with explosives and doesn’t want to go through with it. The difficulty in the limited time before the bomb explosion revolves around whether to actually trust the man and the challenge of trusting someone when neither party speaks the other’s language. You can certainly at least understand (putting aside the ethics of war itself) why governments are interested in detecting nonverbal trust cues.

Details about the IARPA call for proposals are after the jump. (more…)

I recently learned about slow lorises, a primate that I had never heard of before. The diversity of species continues to amaze! These particular primates are unfortunately endangered but they have some very endearing, human-like behaviors:

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

The Atlantic’s Joshua Shenk has a fascinating story about a long-running study, started in the 1930s (!), that attempts to discern what makes people happy in life. The study has collected extensive data on subjects over a 70 year period. I couldn’t stop reading the article… what an amazing dataset. But, before I say more about that, here is Shenk’s synopsis of a single case file (ie. actual data) from the study:

Case No. 158

An attractive, amiable boy from a working-class background, you struck the study staff as happy, stable, and sociable. “My general impression is that this boy will be normal and well-adjusted—rather dynamic and positive,” the psychiatrist reported.

After college, you got an advanced degree and began to climb the rungs in your profession. You married a terrific girl, and you two played piano together for fun. You eventually had five kids. Asked about your work in education, you said, “What I am doing is not work; it is fun. I know what real work is like.” Asked at age 25 whether you had “any personal problems or emotional conflicts (including sexual),” you answered, “No … As Plato or some of your psychiatrists might say, I am at present just ‘riding the wave.’” You come across in your files as smart, sensible, and hard-working. “This man has always kept a pleasant face turned toward the world,” Dr. Heath noted after a visit from you in 1949. From your questionnaire that year, he got “a hint … that everything has not been satisfactory” at your job. But you had no complaints. After interviewing you at your 25th reunion, Dr. Vaillant described you as a “solid guy.”

Two years later, at 49, you were running a major institution. The strain showed immediately. Asked for a brief job description, you wrote: “RESPONSIBLE (BLAMED) FOR EVERYTHING.” You added, “No matter what I do … I am wrong … We are just ducks in a shooting gallery. Any duck will do.” On top of your job troubles, your mother had a stroke, and your wife developed cancer. Three years after you started the job, you resigned before you could be fired. You were 52, and you never worked again. (You kept afloat with income from stock in a company you’d done work for, and a pension.)

Seven years later, Dr. Vaillant spoke with you: “He continued to obsess … about his resignation,” he wrote. Four years later, you returned to the subject “in an obsessional way.” Four years later still: “It seemed as if all time had stopped” for you when you resigned. “At times I wondered if there was anybody home,” Dr. Vaillant wrote. Your first wife had died, and you treated your second wife “like a familiar old shoe,” he said.

But you called yourself happy. When you were 74, the questionnaire asked: “Have you ever felt so down in the dumps that nothing could cheer you up?” and gave the options “All of the time, some of the time, none of the time.” You circled “None of the time.” “Have you felt calm and peaceful?” You circled “All of the time.” Two years later, the study asked: “Many people hope to become wiser as they grow older. Would you give an example of a bit of wisdom you acquired and how you came by it?” You wrote that, after having polio and diphtheria in childhood, “I never gave up hope that I could compete again. Never expect you will fail. Don’t cry, if you do.”

What fascinates me is the absolute novelty of this kind of data. Normally, when someone relates their “life story,” we willingly participate in something of a shared lie. Both listener and story-teller know that the “life story” is being told in hindsight: Memory is not perfect and humans sometimes (often, perhaps) add meaning and create unifying themes in stories where they may be none. We emphasize the good parts and try to forget the not-so-good parts. In a sense, history recounted is never truly veridical but instead tainted with everything that happened after. Which is precisely why the availability of an objective history than spans an entire lifetime (or, as objective as possible) of both a qualitative (interview) and quantitative (medical) nature is so novel.

As you might expect, the data is confusing and hard conclusions are not easy to come by. There are however some tangible factors that seemed to correlate/predict success in life, which I’ve included after the jump. (more…)

Neuroscientists often use mouse models to understand learning and neural disease. Much of our understanding of mammalian biology comes from these amazing animals. It is commonly said that highly inbred lab mice are unintelligent. But is it true for wild mice too? In a talk last week at Harvard, Karl Svoboda referred to this fascinating YouTube video showing a mouse trained to complete an obstacle course:

Other training videos from the same trainer are available along with an official website with interesting tips about mouse training. Perhaps highly inbred lab mice are unable to replicate such feats but it is amazing to see in what detail this trainer understands mouse behavior and development:

An absolute necessity for any pet training is to understand the animal’s needs and to know about its generic behaviour, since appropriate animal training is only based on certain natural habits. For mouse agility, this means e.g. their great spatial orientation abilities and spatial memory which is worth bringing to light by relevant trick training. In nature, mice always prefer the familiar (= safe) route to their feeding site, no matter if it’s a long way round. This is also the reason why mice are unbeatable in maze tests – and a mouse agility course is nothing else than a maze without walls!
But many owners forget that if you expect your pet to show some natural habits and abilities, first and foremost the husbandry has to be species-appropriate. If your mice have to live in a small ground level cage, their three-dimensional consciousness and orientation abilities will surely be stunted or never fully develop.

Nature is reporting on potential flaw in multiple imaging (fMRI) studies of social neuroscience. Ed Vul (a graduate student in my dept) and colleagues have a paper in press that says that many of the high correlations between brain regions and social behavior are implausible, given the inherent variability/noise in fMRI. Furthermore, based on a survey of methods from individual investigators, they created a list of papers that commit, in their view, a statistical mistake (non-independence). Naturally, the authors named in the paper aren’t happy and, according to the Nature article, several rebuttals are in the works. At the very least, to my non-expert eyes, this seems like an important discussion to have about data analysis and methodology.

Plants Found to Show Preferences for Their Relatives – NYTimes.com

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?

The concept that the brain holds maps of the surface of the body in the primary sensory and motor cortex is a fascinating but well known fact to the field of neuroscience since the early work of Wilder Penfield. What is less broadly appreciated is the concept of “peripersonal space”. A new book by Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee describes peripersonal space in the following way:

The maps that encode your physical body are connected directly, immediately, personally to a map of every point in that space and also map out your potential to perform actions in that space. Your self does not end where your flesh ends, but suffuses and blends with the world, including other beings. [...] Your brain also faithfully maps the space beyond your body when you enter it using tools. Take hold of a long stick and tap it on the ground. As far as your brain is concerned, your hand now extends to the tip of that stick. [...] Moreover, this annexed peripersonal space is not static, like an aura. It is elastic. [...] It morphs every time you put on or take off clothes, wear skis or scuba gear, or wield any tool. [...] When you eat with a knife and fork, your peripersonal space grows to envelop them. Brain cells that normally represent space no farther out than your fingertips expand their fields of awareness outward, along the length of each utensil, making them part of you.

What I appreciate about this, besides the stretchy comic book characters that it makes me think about, is that it provides a powerful perspective to begin piecing together a mass of disparate neuroscience data, which the Blakeslee’s capitalize on.

(more…)

Apparently, when not busy blowing our minds, bees occupy themselves by…

…brainwashing their youth

• Vergoz et al, 2007, Science
• commentary

…and/or mysteriously disappearing from the face of the earth

• Colony Collapse Disorder

Keeping an eye on species poised to take over the world,
Davie

Postdoctoral/research scientist positions are available in the inter-disciplinary group of Dmitri Chklovskii at the new Janelia Farm Research Campus of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute located in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Candidates are expected to have a PhD in neuroscience, physics, computer science or electrical engineering. Most of the work is theoretical or computational and is done in collaboration with several experimental laboratories. Successful applicants will work on projects centered on neuronal circuits such as high-throughput reconstruction of wiring diagrams as well as combining structural and physiological data to infer circuit function. Salary will be commensurate with qualifications. For more information about research directions in the group please see: http://www.hhmi.org/research/groupleaders/chklovskii.html
Interested applicants should send their CV and a statement of research interests to mitya (at) janelia.hhmi.org, and arrange for three recommendation letters to be emailed to me.

In the provocative-hypothesis-of-the-week department:

Kevin Lafferty, a parasitologist, has put forth the idea that a fairly ubiquitous parasite (infecting O(10%) of Americans, and up to 2/3 of people in places like Brazil) is responsible for some of the diversity of human culures (1). The parasite uses common housecats to increase its transmission to the next host in the life cycle, and has a subtle effect on human personality, with some studies claiming that it even causes neuroticism, and even schizophrenia. (One clinical report (2) claims that “subjects with latent toxoplasmosis had higher intelligence [and] lower guilt proneness.” Hmm!)

Anyway, Lafferty noted that toxoplasmosis varies in prevalence from world region to world region, and then tries to draw correlates between these prevalences and local cultures:

“Drivers of the geographical variation in the prevalence of this parasite include the effects of climate on the persistence of infectious stages in soil, the cultural practices of food preparation and cats as pets. Some variation in culture, therefore, may ultimately be related to how climate affects the distribution of T. gondii, though the results only explain a fraction of the variation in two of the four cultural dimensions, suggesting that if T. gondii does influence human culture, it is only one among many factors.”

I wonder how one could test this hypothesis? Look for recent immigrants from one culture to another, who have lower Toxoplasmosis incidence? (Preferably finding populations that go in opposite directions, as a control.) Track culture change vs. migration vs. climate change?

Unlikely, perhaps. But nice that people are still thinking big

– Ed

(1) Lafferty, K
Can the common brain parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, influence human culture?
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
doi:10.1098/rspb.2006.3641

Picked up by the popular press here

(2) Flegr J, Havlicek J.
Changes in the personality profile of young women with latent toxoplasmosis.
Folia Parasitol (Praha). 1999;46(1):22-8.