neurodudes

Neville told me about this neat article from ’04. It presents a way to offer rewards to people taking a poll in such a way so as to motivate them to be honest, with no prior information about what the distribution of correct answers is. Apparently, previous such techniques are based on the idea of rewarding people for agreeing with other people’s answers. This new thing about this technique for calculating the reward is that it provides people with an incentive to tell their true opinion even if they know that they hold a minority viewpoint.

Drazen Prelec. A Bayesian Truth Serum for Subjective Data. Science 15 October 2004: Vol. 306. no. 5695, pp. 462 – 466. DOI: 10.1126/science.1102081

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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…)

In this paper at arXiv, Yin et al. report on an analysis of the abstracts from the SfN meetings from 2001 to 2006. It sounds like their analysis uncovered several interesting trends: Two they mention in their abstract are that 60% of authors appear in only one year’s abstracts over the studied period, and that systems neuroscience seems to be on the rise relative to cellular and molecular neuroscience.

-John O’Leary

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

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/08/magazine/08sociability-t.html

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Read on for a guest-posted ad for WNYC’s radio lab (http://www.radiolab.org)

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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.

A Resilient, Low-Frequency, Small-World Human Brain Functional Network with Highly Connected Association Cortical Hubs (Achard et al., 2006)

A study on network properties of the whole brain (functional connectivity data from fMRI)… interesting to see this type of work published in J. Neurosci. Building on previous fMRI/whole brain connectivity studies, the authors use a set of wavelet basis functions to estimate the correlations between different anatomical regions.

Also includes some analyses on resiliency of the system (via a metric like “largest connected cluster”) to random and targeted attack (ie. node deletion). It would be neat if they also did some analysis of common stroke damage. I would think that a stroke probably doesn’t qualify as a “targeted attack”, in the traditional sense, but, due to the predefined structure of the major circulatory structures (eg. circle of Willis), there are likely regions that are near the most commonly blocked arteries, etc. Perhaps someone with some medical qualifications could weigh in here?

There is also a nice discussion of why the human brain does not appear to be a scale-free network: That nodes do not seem to follow the “rich-get-richer” rule of preferential attachment. Evolutionarily recent structures like prefrontal seem to be among the hubs of the system and older structures like limbic regions do not dominate. Here’s a picture of the connectivity map from the paper:

Full abstract after the jump.
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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

Have You Heard? Gossip Turns Out to Serve a Purpose – New York Times

From the article:

Gossip not only helps clarify and enforce the rules that keep people working well together, studies suggest, but it circulates crucial information about the behavior of others that cannot be published in an office manual. As often as it sullies reputations, psychologists say, gossip offers a foothold for newcomers in a group and a safety net for group members who feel in danger of falling out.