16 posts · 6,185 views
I'm a neurobiologist working on operant learning in invertebrate animals at the Freie Universität Berlin, Germany.
bjoern.brembs.blog
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- March 15, 2010
- 06:30 AM
- 39 views
Should scientists be in control?
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
The cliché scientist is often portrayed as the laborious worker slogging away days and nights in the lab. In contrast, the cliché for musicians or artists often comprises a bohemian lifestyle, full of parties, drugs and the occasional spurts of genius and frantic artistic expression. Reality, as always, is somewhere in-between. Artists need to work hard and laboriously to get something finished before the concert, recording or exhibition and scientists need to be creative and invest a lot of ........ Read more »
Liston, C., McEwen, B., & Casey, B. (2009) Psychosocial stress reversibly disrupts prefrontal processing and attentional control. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106(3), 912-917. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0807041106
Radley, J. (2005) Repeated Stress Induces Dendritic Spine Loss in the Rat Medial Prefrontal Cortex. Cerebral Cortex, 16(3), 313-320. DOI: 10.1093/cercor/bhi104
- February 17, 2010
- 03:52 AM
- 104 views
When relics are not what they have been proclaimed to be
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
It is still unusual when the Catholic church allows a scientific study of one of their relics. So I was surprised to find the manuscript describing the study of the DNA of the remains of one of Europe's patron saints, St. Birgitta (Bridget of Sweden) in my PLoS One inbox one fine day in May, 2008. I'm a neurogeneticist by training, so I felt competent to take this manuscript on as academic editor. The manuscript stated that they had found through both DNA analysis and carbon dating that not only........ Read more »
Nilsson, M., Possnert, G., Edlund, H., Budowle, B., Kjellström, A., & Allen, M. (2010) Analysis of the Putative Remains of a European Patron Saint–St. Birgitta. PLoS ONE, 5(2). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0008986
- February 16, 2010
- 02:20 PM
- 92 views
Dammit, Jim, I'm a neurobiologist, not a climatologist!
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
Clouds, the sun, volcanoes, the earth's orbit around the sun, ill-defined 'natural cycles' - all have been brought up recently by a range of non-scientists arguing against the current scientific consensus that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are responsible for the global warming observed in the last century. I'm a neurobiologist, so my knowledge about climatology is rather limited, which means I don't really understand too much of the complex mechanisms underlying climate variabilities. Howeve........ Read more »
SAWYER, J. (1972) Man-made Carbon Dioxide and the “Greenhouse” Effect. Nature, 239(5366), 23-26. DOI: 10.1038/239023a0
- February 9, 2010
- 05:20 AM
- 168 views
Evolutionary origins of religion: weak relation to morality
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
It is a long-standing argument among religious believers that religiosity were necessary for morality. In a recent Trends in Cognitive Sciences article (requires subscription), Pyysiäinen and Hauser argue that morality can arise and indeed can be found without and before any religious education and thus religion is a by-product of pre-existing cognitive properties of the brain. Indeed, religion is not ubiquitous, as for instance the Hadza's religion has been described as 'minimal', and yet, coo........ Read more »
Ilkka Pyysiäinen, & Marc Hauser. (2010) The origins of religion: evolved adaptation or by-product?. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. info:/10.1016/j.tics.2009.12.007
- January 25, 2010
- 08:32 AM
- 184 views
How we discovered that an attention drug successfully treats a fruit fly memory mutant
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
Blogging about one's own research always feels good: the amount of your work has accumulated enough to at least provide sufficient material for a story and some figures. It has passed the first hurdle of scientific scrutiny, peer review. On the other hand, now an exciting time begins: what will the colleagues say? Will people find the one major flaw that neither you, your co-authors, the people who proof-read the drafts before submission nor the reviewers caught? Will the results lead to new, ex........ Read more »
van Swinderen, B., & Brembs, B. (2010) Attention-Like Deficit and Hyperactivity in a Drosophila Memory Mutant. Journal of Neuroscience, 30(3), 1003-1014. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4516-09.2010
- January 7, 2010
- 11:11 AM
- 192 views
Social filtering of scientific information - a view beyond Twitter
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
It's not information overload, it's filter failure (Clay Shirky)Bonetta (2009) gave an excellent introduction to the micro-blogging service Twitter and its uses and limitations for scientific communication. We believe that other social networking tools merit a similar introduction, especially those that provide more effective filtering of scientifically relevant information than Twitter. We find that FriendFeed (already mentioned in the first online comment on the article, by Jo Badge) shares al........ Read more »
Bonetta, L. (2009) Should You Be Tweeting?. Cell, 139(3), 452-453. DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2009.10.017
- December 27, 2009
- 11:15 AM
- 248 views
Intrinsic plasticity: the 'other' learning mechanism
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
A quote from Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel in the December 11 issue of Science reminded me of a short article by David Glanzman covering a remarkable paper on pan-neuronal (aka 'intrinsic') plasticity and its involvement in learning and memory. Here is the quote:Q: Synaptic plasticity is a central concept in your work on memory. You've been working with Aplysia since 1962. What else do you think we can learn from these lowly snails? With almost all kinds of synaptic changes, there is a parallel ch........ Read more »
Pulver, S., & Griffith, L. (2009) Spike integration and cellular memory in a rhythmic network from Na /K pump current dynamics. Nature Neuroscience, 13(1), 53-59. DOI: 10.1038/nn.2444
- October 18, 2009
- 02:38 PM
- 269 views
How brains generate variable behavior
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
Animals constantly have to adapt to varying environmental conditions, explore new situations and figure out new strategies to catch prey or avoid predators. On the other hand, they need to be able to behave consistently in a largely deterministic environment. Brains reflect the complex mixture of chance and necessity in the environment in thier structure and function.One great example of this was just explained to me here on a poster at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience (SfN). ........ Read more »
Sasaki, K., Brezina, V., Weiss, K., & Jing, J. (2009) Distinct Inhibitory Neurons Exert Temporally Specific Control over Activity of a Motoneuron Receiving Concurrent Excitation and Inhibition. Journal of Neuroscience, 29(38), 11732-11744. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3051-09.2009
- August 20, 2009
- 01:20 PM
- 419 views
How the brain is and isn't like a muscle
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
Use it or lose it, they say. The saying holds not only for muscle fitness, but also for the brain. The Romans already knew that 'mens sana in corpore sano' and today we know that both physical and mental fitness, exercise and training can stave off many signs of aging. Even debilitating diseases such as Alzheimer's disease can be delayed, or at least their symptoms reduced by staying physically and mentally fit and active. I recently handled a manuscript in my function as Academic Editor for the........ Read more »
Barnes, A., Bullmore, E., & Suckling, J. (2009) Endogenous Human Brain Dynamics Recover Slowly Following Cognitive Effort. PLoS ONE, 4(8). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0006626
Maye, A., Hsieh, C., Sugihara, G., & Brembs, B. (2007) Order in Spontaneous Behavior. PLoS ONE, 2(5). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0000443
- August 3, 2009
- 09:05 AM
- 441 views
Don't stress the scientists!
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
“very absent-minded persons in going in their bedroom to dress for dinner have been known to take off one garment after another and finally to get into bed, merely because that was the habitual issue of the first few movements when performed at a late hour”William James, 1890It is difficult to kick a habit. Like riding a bike – once automated, some behaviors can stay with us for a lifetime. Life-long memories are a familiar trait. After all, they define who we are. We can recall important........ Read more »
Schwabe, L., & Wolf, O. (2009) Stress Prompts Habit Behavior in Humans. Journal of Neuroscience, 29(22), 7191-7198. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0979-09.2009
Dias-Ferreira, E., Sousa, J., Melo, I., Morgado, P., Mesquita, A., Cerqueira, J., Costa, R., & Sousa, N. (2009) Chronic Stress Causes Frontostriatal Reorganization and Affects Decision-Making. Science, 325(5940), 621-625. DOI: 10.1126/science.1171203
Brembs, B. (2009) Mushroom Bodies Regulate Habit Formation in Drosophila. Current Biology. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2009.06.014
- July 13, 2009
- 03:19 PM
- 418 views
The first motor-sensory system?
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
On the first day of last year's Gatsby workshop on "smaller cognitive systems", Gasper Jekely told us about their remarkable work on how the larvae of a marine polychaete worm (Platynereis dumerilii) perform phototaxis. Gaspar introduced his work by saying that these larvae may be very similar to the common ancestor of all bilaterally symmetric animals (Bilaterians), the Urbilaterian. The Urbilaterian being the last common ancestor of vertebrates and invertebrates, this would mean (and I have n........ Read more »
Jékely, G., Colombelli, J., Hausen, H., Guy, K., Stelzer, E., Nédélec, F., & Arendt, D. (2008) Mechanism of phototaxis in marine zooplankton. Nature, 456(7220), 395-399. DOI: 10.1038/nature07590
- May 17, 2009
- 10:21 AM
- 569 views
In which a Nature paper fails on several levels
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
Ok, so what else is new? We all love to rip GlamMag paperz to shreds in our journal clubs. This paper by Hong et al. last year in Nature stands out of the crowd in two main ways. For one, it shows how failing to realize alternative explanations can easily break your entire publication. Moreover, it shows how generating large datasets doesn't replace using your brain when generating and evaluating them. Apparently, the editors and reviewers at Nature handling this particular manuscript failed to ........ Read more »
Hong, S., Bang, S., Hyun, S., Kang, J., Jeong, K., Paik, D., Chung, J., & Kim, J. (2008) cAMP signalling in mushroom bodies modulates temperature preference behaviour in Drosophila. Nature. DOI: 10.1038/nature07090
1. Jean-René Martin, 2. Roman Ernst, & 3. Martin Heisenberg. (1998) Mushroom Bodies Suppress Locomotor Activity in Drosophila melanogaster. Learning and Memory, 179-191. DOI: 10.1101/lm.5.1.179
- May 8, 2009
- 04:28 AM
- 521 views
Noise in the brain?
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
I was recently alerted to a group of theoretical publications which deal with the issue of apparent 'noise' in neuronal populations. The Nature Reviews Neuroscience article "Neural correlations, population coding and computation" by Bruno B. Averbeck, Peter E. Latham & Alexandre Pouget covers this area quite well.Basically, the authors claim that the variability one can see when recording from the brain when the same stimulus is presented repeatedly is noise and must be detrimental for the tra........ Read more »
Averbeck, B., Latham, P., & Pouget, A. (2006) Neural correlations, population coding and computation. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7(5), 358-366. DOI: 10.1038/nrn1888
- October 24, 2008
- 12:24 PM
- 823 views
No brain is too small for a memory
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
I'm trying to catch up with my backlog of research news (~600 unread messages) and what do you know, the first one is already worth blogging about! Researchers from the Brooklyn College in New York have tested classical conditioning in Nautilus. This was an interesting experiment, because Nautilus (which is a cephalopod like squid, cuttlefish and octopus) doesn't have the structures known to be important for forming memories in this group of animals. So in true Pavlovian fashion, they flashed a ........ Read more »
R. Crook, & J. Basil. (2008) A biphasic memory curve in the chambered nautilus, Nautilus pompilius L. (Cephalopoda: Nautiloidea). Journal of Experimental Biology, 211(12), 1992-1998. DOI: 10.1242/jeb.018531
- October 20, 2008
- 12:00 AM
- 783 views
Why people believe weird things? Lack of control.
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
I've been blogging on the evolution of religion before. Initially, I just thought operant behavior would seem like a good explanation for religion: the argument tied together the observation that (1) religious people are less depressed and (2) that learned helplessness is an animal model of depression and (3) that religion helps to create a feeling of control which is known to reduce depression. I later added some ideas prompted by some recent news about geomythology. Basically, the geomyths re........ Read more »
J. A. Whitson, & A. D. Galinsky. (2008) Lacking Control Increases Illusory Pattern Perception. Science, 322(5898), 115-117. DOI: 10.1126/science.1159845
- September 29, 2008
- 11:58 AM
- 915 views
Insect learning: trace conditioning and spike timing-dependent plasticity
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
The most well-known molecular mechanism of learning involves coincidence detection. In post-synaptic LTP, the NMDA receptor only opens fully if a postsynaptic depolarization has removed the magnesium block by the time glutamate arrives at the receptor. In pre-synaptic facilitation, adenylyl cycase only generates large amounts of cAMP when stimulated both by transmitter and by coincident Ca2+ influx. Thus, in both cases, you need neural activity (i.e., action potentials or spikes) to coincide ont........ Read more »
Iori Ito, Rose Chik-ying Ong, Baranidharan Raman, & Mark Stopfer. (2008) Sparse odor representation and olfactory learning. Nature Neuroscience, 11(10), 1177-1184. DOI: 10.1038/nn.2192
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