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A neuroscience blog.
Mo
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- October 20, 2008
- 02:40 PM
- 3,173 views
The staggering beauty of biology
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
When confronted with threatening stimuli and predators, the crayfish responds with an innate escape machanism called the startle reflex. Also known as tailflipping, this stereotyped behaviour involves rapid flexions of the abdominal muscles which produce powerful swimming strokes that thrust the small crustacean through the water and away from danger. In the struggle for existence, the speed of this response response can mean the difference between life and death, and the crayfish has evolved an........ Read more »
D. Mellon, & K. Christison-Lagay. (2008) A mechanism for neuronal coincidence revealed in the crayfish antennule. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 105(38), 14626-14631. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0804385105
- April 3, 2009
- 02:11 PM
- 2,104 views
New cells in the adult brain migrate long distances by crawling along blood vessels
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
The journey undertaken by newly generated neurons in the adult brain is like the cellular equivalent of the arduous upstream migration of salmon returning to the rivers in which they were hatched. Soon after they are born in the subventricular zone near the back of the brain, these cells migrate to the front-most tip of of the olfactory bulb. This is the furthest point from their birth place, and they traverse two-thirds of the length of the brain to get there.
The first leg of this epic journe........ Read more »
Snapyan, M., Lemasson, M., Brill, M., Blais, M., Massouh, M., Ninkovic, J., Gravel, C., Berthod, F., Gotz, M., Barker, P.... (2009) Vasculature Guides Migrating Neuronal Precursors in the Adult Mammalian Forebrain via Brain-Derived Neurotrophic Factor Signaling. Journal of Neuroscience, 29(13), 4172-4188. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4956-08.2009
- October 2, 2009
- 11:15 AM
- 1,996 views
Circadian and social cues regulate sodium channel trafficking in electric fish
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
SEVERAL hundred species of fish have evolved the ability to generate electric fields, which they use to navigate, communicate and home in on prey. But this ability comes at a cost - the electric field is generated continuously throughout life, so consumes a great deal of energy, and it can also attract predators which are sensitive to it. Electrogenic fish species therefore utilize various strategies to save energy and to minimize the likelihood of being detected. Some generate irregular pulses ........ Read more »
Markham, M., McAnelly, M., Stoddard, P., & Zakon, H. (2009) Circadian and Social Cues Regulate Ion Channel Trafficking. PLoS Biology, 7(9). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1000203
- January 9, 2009
- 09:26 AM
- 1,974 views
The harmonic duets of mosquitoes in love
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
The familiar buzzing sound made by a mosquito may be irritating to us humans, but it is an important mating signal. The sound, produced by the beats of the insect's wings, has a characteristic frequency called the "flight tone"; when produced by a female, it signals her presence to nearby males, thereby attracting potential mates.
Attraction is not simply a matter of the male hearing and homing in on the female's flight tone. Females were long believed to be deaf, but two years ago, it was foun........ Read more »
L. J. Cator, B. J. Arthur, L. C. Harrington, & R. R. Hoy. (2009) Harmonic Convergence in the Love Songs of the Dengue Vector Mosquito. Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.1166541
- March 3, 2009
- 04:24 PM
- 1,935 views
Anatomy of a 300 million year-old brain
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
Nervous tissue is extremely fragile, and so is very well protected. The brain, which has a jelly-like consistency, is encased in the skull, and is surrounded by cerebrospinal fluid, which acts to cushion it against blows that might cause it to come into contact with the inside of its bony case. Likewise, the spinal cord is surrounded by the vertebrae, the series of bones which runs down from the base of the skull.
Being so soft, the brain and spinal cord decompose quickly. When an animal........ Read more »
Pradel, A. et al. (2009) Skull and brain of a 300-million-year-old chimaeroid fish revealed by synchrotron holotomography. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci.
Pradel, A. et al. (2009) Skull and brain of a 300-million-year-old chimaeroid fish revealed by synchrotron holotomography. Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci.
- December 30, 2008
- 10:40 AM
- 1,857 views
Monkeys categorize objects in the same way as humans
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
Being so closely related to our own species, monkeys serve as important model organisms, and have provided many insights into the workings of the human brain. Research performed on monkeys in the past 30 years or so has, for example, been invaluable in the development of brain-machine interfaces.
Monkeys have also contributed a great deal to our understanding of the visual system - they were the subjects in many of the classic experiments of Hubel and Wiesel, which showed that the primary........ Read more »
N KRIEGESKORTE, M MUR, D RUFF, R KIANI, J BODURKA, H ESTEKY, K TANAKA, & P BANDETTINI. (2008) Matching Categorical Object Representations in Inferior Temporal Cortex of Man and Monkey. Neuron, 60(6), 1126-1141. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2008.10.043
- January 20, 2009
- 12:52 PM
- 1,815 views
The delusional brain
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
Delusions are pathological beliefs which persist despite clear evidence that they are actually false. They can vary widely in content, but are always characterized by the absolute certainty with which they are held. Such beliefs reflect an abnormality of thought processes; they are often bizarre and completely unrelated to conventional cultural or religious belief systems, or to the level of intelligence of the person suffering from them.
The delusions experienced by psychiatric patients are so........ Read more »
O. Devinsky. (2009) Delusional misidentifications and duplications: Right brain lesions, left brain delusions. Neurology, 72(1), 80-87. DOI: 10.1212/01.wnl.0000338625.47892.74
- June 7, 2010
- 06:55 PM
- 1,794 views
Hair pulling is a neuroimmunological condition
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
TRICHOTILLOMANIA (or hair pulling) is a condition characterised by excessive grooming and strong, repeated urges pull out one's own hair. It is classified as an obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), and is relatively common, affecting about 2 in 100 people. Sufferers normally feel an increasing sense of tension before pulling out their scalp hair, facial hair, and even pubic hair, eyelashes or eyebrows. This provides gratification, but only briefly.
Hair pulling is usually thought of as being ps........ Read more »
Chen, S., Tvrdik, P., Peden, E., Cho, S., Wu, S., Spangrude, G., & Capecchi, M. (2010) Hematopoietic Origin of Pathological Grooming in Hoxb8 Mutant Mice. Cell, 141(5), 775-785. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2010.03.055
- November 4, 2008
- 08:00 AM
- 1,783 views
You cannot be serious! Perceptual errors by professional tennis referees
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
The Men's Final of the 1981 Wimbledon Tennis Championships is one of the most memorable events in sporting history. John McEnroe, who was playing against Bjorn Borg, famously challenged one of the referee's calls by throwing a tantrum, during which he shouted the immortal line "You cannot be serious!"McEnroe's outburst was controversial, and he was almost eliminated from the championship because of it. But he may have been right to challenge the referee after all: according to a new study publis........ Read more »
D WHITNEY, N WURNITSCH, B HONTIVEROS, & E LOUIE. (2008) Perceptual mislocalization of bouncing balls by professional tennis referees. Current Biology, 18(20). DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2008.08.021
- December 1, 2008
- 11:30 AM
- 1,782 views
Tactile-emotion synaesthesia
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
Synaesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimuli of one sensory modality evoke experiences in another modality. This is thought to occur as a result of insufficient "pruning" during development, so that most of the pathways connecting parts of the brain mediating the different senses remain in place instead of being eliminated. Consequently, there is too much cross-talk between sensory systems, such that activation of one sensory pathway leads simultaneously to activity in another........ Read more »
V. S. Ramachandran, & David Brang. (2008) Tactile-emotion synesthesia. Neurocase, 14(5), 390-399. DOI: 10.1080/13554790802363746
- November 25, 2008
- 10:23 AM
- 1,757 views
Blind people are better at finding their way
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
For most of us, visual perception is crucial for spatial navigation. We rely on vision to find our way around, to position ourselves and localize objects within the surroundings, and to plan our trajectory on the basis of the layout of the environment. Blind people would therefore seem to be at a disadvantage. Unable to rely on vision, they depend instead upon different sorts of cues to form their representations of space. They rely, for example, proprioception, which provides a sense of the loc........ Read more »
M. Fortin, P. Voss, C. Lord, M. Lassonde, J. Pruessner, D. Saint-Amour, C. Rainville, & F. Lepore. (2008) Wayfinding in the blind: larger hippocampal volume and supranormal spatial navigation. Brain, 131(11), 2995-3005. DOI: 10.1093/brain/awn250
- January 19, 2009
- 12:08 PM
- 1,757 views
Cellular "tug-of-war" breaks brain symmetry
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
The brains of vertebrates are asymmetrical, both structurally and functionally. This asymmetry is believed to increase the efficiency of information processing - one hemisphere is specialized to perform certain functions, so the opposite is left free to perform others. In the human brain, for example, the left hemisphere is specialized for speech. This has been known since the 1860s, when the French physician Paul Broca noted that the aphasia (or inability to speak) which is a common sympt........ Read more »
J REGAN, M CONCHA, M ROUSSIGNE, C RUSSELL, & S WILSON. (2009) An Fgf8-Dependent Bistable Cell Migratory Event Establishes CNS Asymmetry. Neuron, 61(1), 27-34. DOI: 10.1016/j.neuron.2008.11.030
- October 28, 2008
- 01:15 PM
- 1,729 views
An eye-opening view of visual development
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
The pioneering experiments performed by Hubel and Weisel in the late 1950s and early 60s taught us much about the development of the visual system. We now know, for example, that neurons in the visual cortex are organized into alternating ocular dominance columns which receive inputs from either the left or right eye and that groups of cells within each of these columns respond selectively to bars or edges of a specific orientation moving in a specific direction.
Hubel and Weisel also found tha........ Read more »
Ye Li, Stephen D. Van Hooser, Mark Mazurek, Leonard E. White, & David Fitzpatrick. (2008) Experience with moving visual stimuli drives the early development of cortical direction selectivity. Nature. DOI: 10.1038/nature07417
- February 5, 2009
- 08:45 PM
- 1,727 views
The genetics of synaesthesia
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
When Sir Francis Galton first described the "peculiar habit of mind" we now call synaesthesia, he noted that it often runs in families. Modern techniques have confirmed that the condition does indeed have a strong genetic component - more than 40% of synaesthetes have a first-degree relative - a parent, sibling or offspring - who also has synaesthesia, and families often contain multiple synaesthetes.
Synaesthesia is known to affect females more than males, and although the female predominance ........ Read more »
Julian E. Asher,1,2,* Janine A. Lamb,3 Denise Brocklebank,1 Jean-Baptiste Cazier, Elena Maestrini,, & Laura Addis, Mallika Sen, Simon Baron-Cohen, and Anthony P. Monaco. (2009) A Whole-Genome Scan and Fine-Mapping Linkage Study of Auditory-Visual Synesthesia Reveals Evidence of Linkage to Chromosomes 2q24, 5q33, 6p12, and 12p12. TheAmericanJournal ofHumanGenetics.
Julian E. Asher,1,2,* Janine A. Lamb,3 Denise Brocklebank,1 Jean-Baptiste Cazier, Elena Maestrini,, & Laura Addis, Mallika Sen, Simon Baron-Cohen, and Anthony P. Monaco. (2009) A Whole-Genome Scan and Fine-Mapping Linkage Study of Auditory-Visual Synesthesia Reveals Evidence of Linkage to Chromosomes 2q24, 5q33, 6p12, and 12p12. TheAmericanJournal ofHumanGenetics.
Julian E. Asher,1,2,* Janine A. Lamb,3 Denise Brocklebank,1 Jean-Baptiste Cazier, Elena Maestrini,, & Laura Addis, Mallika Sen, Simon Baron-Cohen, and Anthony P. Monaco. (2009) A Whole-Genome Scan and Fine-Mapping Linkage Study of Auditory-Visual Synesthesia Reveals Evidence of Linkage to Chromosomes 2q24, 5q33, 6p12, and 12p12. TheAmericanJournal ofHumanGenetics.
- December 22, 2008
- 07:57 AM
- 1,725 views
Rats know their limits with border cells
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
Spatial navigation is the process on which we rely to orient ourselves within the environment and to negotiate our way through it. Our ability to do so depends upon cognitive maps, mental representations of the surrounding spaces, which are constructed by the brain and are used by it to calculate one's present location, based on landmarks in the environment and on our movements within it, and to plan future movements.
The term "cognitive map" was first used in a landmark 1948 paper, in wh........ Read more »
T. Solstad, C. N. Boccara, E. Kropff, M.-B. Moser, & E. I. Moser. (2008) Representation of Geometric Borders in the Entorhinal Cortex. Science, 322(5909), 1865-1868. DOI: 10.1126/science.1166466
- February 10, 2009
- 10:15 PM
- 1,725 views
Brain & behaviour of dinosaurs
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
Bones have been big news recently, following the publication of two papers which document remarkable fossil finds. First, a group of palaeontologists led by Phil Gingerich of the University of Michigan described Maiacetus inuus, a primitive whale which lived in the water but gave birth on land, and which marks the transition between modern whales and their terrestrial ancestors. This was quickly followed by the report, from Jason Head's group at the University of Toronto, of Titanoboa cerrejone........ Read more »
Lawrence M. Witmer, & Ryan C. Ridgely. (2008) The Paranasal Air Sinuses of Predatory and Armored Dinosaurs (Archosauria: Theropoda and Ankylosauria) and Their Contribution to Cephalic Structure. The Anatomical Record: Advances in Integrative Anatomy and Evolutionary Biology, 291(11), 1362-1388. DOI: 10.1002/ar.20794
- February 19, 2009
- 07:30 PM
- 1,724 views
Reading the contents of working memory
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
Working memory refers to the process by which small amounts of information relevant to the task at hand are retained for short periods of time. For example, before cellular phones became so ubiquitous, calling someone usually involved first finding the number and then remembering it for a just few seconds by repeating it to oneself several times. Once the digits had been dialled, they are immediately forgotten.
Very little is known about the neural mechanisms underlying working memory, but very........ Read more »
Harrison, S.A. . (2009) Decoding reveals the contents of visual working memory in early visual areas. Nature.
Harrison, S.A. . (2009) Decoding reveals the contents of visual working memory in early visual areas. Nature.
- September 11, 2008
- 07:20 PM
- 1,718 views
Neurobiology of a hallucination
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
Hallucinations are often associated with psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia or with LSD and related drugs. Hearing voices is a characteristic symptom which is reported by about 70% of schizophrenic patients, as well as by some 15% of patients with mood disorders such as depression; and those under the influence of LSD often experience extreme spatial distortions and surreal visions.Most common are auditory and visual hallucinations, but the other senses can also produce mirages. Tempor........ Read more »
D FFYTCHE. (2008) The hodology of hallucinations. Cortex, 44(8), 1067-1083. DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2008.04.005
- October 13, 2008
- 09:45 AM
- 1,714 views
Silver nanorod microscopy
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
Japanese researchers have developed a design concept for a light microscope which could in principle be used for imaging of nanoscale objects. The device would rely on a novel subwavelength imaging technique which allows for the visualization of objects that are smaller than the wavelength of the photons used in the device.
Once thought to be impossible, subwavelength imaging can now be performed because of the development of nanostructured metamaterials with a negative refractive index, which ........ Read more »
Satoshi Kawata, Atsushi Ono, & Prabhat Verma. (2008) Subwavelength colour imaging with a metallic nanolens. Nature Photonics, 2(7), 438-442. DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2008.103
- October 12, 2009
- 02:50 PM
- 1,699 views
Kicking performance affects perception of goal size
by Mo in Neurophilosophy
ATHLETES who are on a winning streak often claim that they perceive their targets to be bigger than they actually are. After a run of birdies, for examples, golfers sometimes say that the cup appeared to be the size of a bucket, and baseball players who have a hit a few home runs say that the ball is the size of a grapefruit. Conversely, targets are often reported to be smaller than they actually are by athletes who are performing badly.
Research carried out in the past 5 years suggests that th........ Read more »
Witt, J., & Dorsch, T. (2009) Kicking to bigger uprights: Field goal kicking performance influences perceived size. Perception, 38(9), 1328-1340. DOI: 10.1068/p6325
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