42 posts · 33,976 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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- January 25, 2013
- 07:20 AM
- 205 views
Are we incentivizing hype in science? A case study
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
There is a lively discussion going on right now in various forums on the incentives for scientists to publish their work in this venue or another. Some of these discussions cite our manuscript on the pernicious consequences of journal rank, others don't. In our manuscript, we speculate that the scientific community may be facing a deluge of fraud and misconduct, because of the incentives to publish in high-ranking journals, a central point of contention in the discussions lnked to above. An exam........ Read more »
Wasserman, S., Salomon, A., & Frye, M. (2013) Drosophila Tracks Carbon Dioxide in Flight. Current Biology. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2012.12.038
- December 28, 2012
- 07:40 AM
- 230 views
Human learning systems interact much like fly learning systems
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
When we discovered a novel learning system in the fruitfly Drosophila (Brembs & Plendl, 2008) and then found out how it interacted with the one learning system which is described in all relevant textbooks (Brembs 2009), we weren't quite sure how general these findings would be for other animals and humans. In the subsequent years, genetically similar processes were discovered in the marine snail Aplysia, songbirds and mice, so we started to be quite confident that we had discovered something........ Read more »
Shmuelof, L., Huang, V., Haith, A., Delnicki, R., Mazzoni, P., & Krakauer, J. (2012) Overcoming Motor "Forgetting" Through Reinforcement Of Learned Actions. Journal of Neuroscience, 32(42), 14617-14621. DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.2184-12.2012
- December 26, 2011
- 05:26 PM
- 525 views
Impact factor predicts unreliability of research papers
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
Last week, we've already seen that the most prominent way of ranking scholarly journals, Thomson Reuters' Impact Factor (IF), isn't a very good measure for predicting how many citations your scientific paper will attract. Instead, there is evidence that IF is much better at predicting the chance that your paper might get retracted.Now, I've just been sent a paper (subscription required) which provides evidence that the reliability of some research papers correlates negatively with journal IF. In........ Read more »
Munafò, M., Stothart, G., & Flint, J. (2009) Bias in genetic association studies and impact factor. Molecular Psychiatry, 14(2), 119-120. DOI: 10.1038/mp.2008.77
- December 14, 2011
- 05:37 AM
- 2,401 views
Science without journals: More evidence that journal rank is a poor predictor of citations
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
In response to my last post, Dwight Kravitz from the NIH alerted me to his paper on a similar topic: Toward a new model of scientific publishing: discussion and a proposal. His paper contains some very interesting data, such as this analysis of citations and journal rank:The left-skewed form of the data is of course nothing new, but their analysis of how predictive journal rank is for actual citations opens a new aspect, I think:Our evaluation reveals that far from a perfect filter, the distr........ Read more »
Kravitz, D., & Baker, C. (2011) Toward a New Model of Scientific Publishing: Discussion and a Proposal. Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience. DOI: 10.3389/fncom.2011.00055
- November 22, 2011
- 09:58 AM
- 520 views
What does determinism have in common with gods, the flying spaghetti monster and pink, invisible unicorns?
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
I usually don't blog about physics. Actually, I don't think I ever have, which is not surprising given that I'm not a physicist. This unusual post was prompted by an ongoing series of encounters with people asking me how I can be so sure that the universe is indeterministic. I'm explicitly writing this as an interested layperson, even though I took elementary quantum mechanics as special subject in high school and was supervised during my PhD by Martin Heisenberg, the youngest son of Werner Heis........ Read more »
Wilson, C., Johansson, G., Pourkabirian, A., Simoen, M., Johansson, J., Duty, T., Nori, F., & Delsing, P. (2011) Observation of the dynamical Casimir effect in a superconducting circuit. Nature, 479(7373), 376-379. DOI: 10.1038/nature10561
Brembs, B. (2010) Towards a scientific concept of free will as a biological trait: spontaneous actions and decision-making in invertebrates. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 278(1707), 930-939. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2010.2325
- November 4, 2011
- 05:28 AM
- 460 views
Is FoxP a coin with autism on one side and schizophrenia on the other?
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
The FOXP2 gene is well-known for its involvement in language disorders. We are just getting ready to publish our discovery that a relative of this gene in the fruit fly Drosophila, dFoxP, is necessary for a learning mechanism that resembles language learning in a lot of ways, operant self-learning. This discovery traces one of the evolutionary roots of language back to the 'Urbilaterian', the last common ancestor of invertebrates and vertebrates, more than half a billion years before the first w........ Read more »
Crespi, B., Stead, P., & Elliot, M. (2009) Comparative genomics of autism and schizophrenia. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(suppl_1), 1736-1741. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0906080106
- October 31, 2011
- 08:29 AM
- 391 views
'The neurobiology of self-learning' - the birth of a new field in neuroscience?
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
It's been a while since I've last been so excited about a new finding by someone else And until today, this paper from last week even flew completely under my radar. I had seen the title and decided it's not relevant. A collaborator of mine sent it to me after she found it searching for a current affiliation of a former postdoc of hers - which was how she realized how pertinent this work was to our research and sent it to me (which says something about the way scientists are able to stay on to........ Read more »
Rochefort, C., Arabo, A., Andre, M., Poucet, B., Save, E., & Rondi-Reig, L. (2011) Cerebellum Shapes Hippocampal Spatial Code. Science, 334(6054), 385-389. DOI: 10.1126/science.1207403
- September 27, 2011
- 08:38 AM
- 416 views
In which creationism threatens patients
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
Republican presidential hopeful and Texas governor Rick Perry is pushing hard in support for unapproved stem-cell therapies in Texas and allegedly had such a therapy performed on himself. In this case not coincidentally, Perry is also a self-professed creationist. There are many reasons why stem-cell therapies might be dangerous, the two recently reported deaths are among the so far unidentified causes. One other, recently discovered potential risk of stem-cell therapies involves mutation and se........ Read more »
Laurent, L., Ulitsky, I., Slavin, I., Tran, H., Schork, A., Morey, R., Lynch, C., Harness, J., Lee, S., Barrero, M.... (2011) Dynamic Changes in the Copy Number of Pluripotency and Cell Proliferation Genes in Human ESCs and iPSCs during Reprogramming and Time in Culture. Cell Stem Cell, 8(1), 106-118. DOI: 10.1016/j.stem.2010.12.003
Hussein, S., Batada, N., Vuoristo, S., Ching, R., Autio, R., Närvä, E., Ng, S., Sourour, M., Hämäläinen, R., Olsson, C.... (2011) Copy number variation and selection during reprogramming to pluripotency. Nature, 471(7336), 58-62. DOI: 10.1038/nature09871
- September 13, 2011
- 08:38 AM
- 781 views
Programming Free Will: creative robots
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
I wasn't planning to comment on Kerri Smith's piece on Free Will (probably paywalled) in the last issue of Nature magazine. However, this morning I read a paper on Free Will in robots (or rather 'agents'), which urged me to suggest some updates to the sadly (otherwise Ms. Smith is producing outstanding work, especially her podcasts!) outdated discussion in the Nature article.Her article starts out with a modern variation of Libet's famous experiments. These experiments can be caricatured like th........ Read more »
Smith, K. (2011) Neuroscience vs philosophy: Taking aim at free will. Nature, 477(7362), 23-25. DOI: 10.1038/477023a
- August 18, 2011
- 03:59 AM
- 668 views
Retractions correlate better with 'Impact Factor' than citations
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
Thomson Reuters' Impact Factor (IF) is supposed to provide a measure for how often the average publication in a scientific journal is cited and thus a quantitative basis for ranking journals. However, there are (at least) three major problems with the IF:The IF is negotiable and doesn't reflect actual citation counts (source)The IF cannot be reproduced, even if it reflected actual citations (source)The IF is not statistically sound, even if it were reproducible and reflected actual citations (so........ Read more »
Fang, F., & Casadevall, A. (2011) RETRACTED SCIENCE AND THE RETRACTION INDEX. Infection and Immunity. DOI: 10.1128/IAI.05661-11
Seglen PO. (1997) Why the impact factor of journals should not be used for evaluating research. BMJ (Clinical research ed.), 314(7079), 498-502. PMID: 9056804
- July 18, 2011
- 03:42 AM
- 645 views
Assessing ancient traumatic brain injury
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
Last month, a group of researchers led by Marcel Kamp in Düsseldorf. Germany, rose to fame by studying traumatic brain injury brought about by acts of violence like this:The group analyzed over 700 injuries recorded in the 34 Asterix comic books and published their results in the official journal of the European Association of Neurosurgical Societies, known as Acta Neurochirurgica. For some odd reason, I only was made aware of this groundbreaking study now. Well worth reading!Kamp, M., Slott........ Read more »
Kamp, M., Slotty, P., Sarikaya-Seiwert, S., Steiger, H., & Hänggi, D. (2011) Traumatic brain injuries in illustrated literature: experience from a series of over 700 head injuries in the Asterix comic books. Acta Neurochirurgica, 153(6), 1351-1355. DOI: 10.1007/s00701-011-0993-6
- June 13, 2011
- 12:27 PM
- 560 views
Is the sensorimotor hypothesis based on laboratory artifacts?
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
Most neuroscientists would subscribe to the sensorimotor hypothesis, according to which brains mainly evaluate sensory input to compute motor output. For instance, Mike Mauk wrote now over ten years ago: “brain function is ultimately best understood in terms of input/output transformations and how they are produced” [1]. Tony Dickinson recognized already in 1985 that “Indeed, so pervasive is the basic assumption of this model that it is common to refer to any behaviour as a ‘response’ ........ Read more »
Mauk, M. (2000) The potential effectiveness of simulations versus phenomenological models. Nature Neuroscience, 3(7), 649-651. DOI: 10.1038/76606
Dickinson, A. (1985) Actions and Habits: The Development of Behavioural Autonomy. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 308(1135), 67-78. DOI: 10.1098/rstb.1985.0010
Raichle, M. (2010) Two views of brain function. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(4), 180-190. DOI: 10.1016/j.tics.2010.01.008
- April 29, 2011
- 08:28 AM
- 1,000 views
What can the spinal cord teach us about learning and memory?
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
Only very few laboratories in the world perform operant conditioning of spinal reflexes. In fact, a quick PubMed search reveals there is only a single lab which has published in this field in the last decade, the lab of Jonathan Wolpaw. Jonathan's review "What Can the Spinal Cord Teach Us about Learning and Memory?" in The Neuroscientist shows what neuroscience is missing out on by not investing more in this fascinating field.Operant conditioning of spinal reflexes is probably the most con........ Read more »
Wolpaw, J. (2010) What Can the Spinal Cord Teach Us about Learning and Memory?. The Neuroscientist, 16(5), 532-549. DOI: 10.1177/1073858410368314
- April 28, 2011
- 08:18 AM
- 873 views
The neurobiology of operant conditioning
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
It turns out, operant conditioning is very different from other forms of learning, all the way from the genes up. When I started my research on operant conditioning in 1995, I did so with the opposite hypothesis, namely that the underlying mechanism of all learning processes was always synaptic plasticity with the well-known molecular pathway: Ca++, cAMP, PKA, CamK, CREB and so on. After all, wasn't that pathway conserved all the way from flies, snails and mice to humans? By the time I finished ........ Read more »
Brembs, B. (2011) Spontaneous decisions and operant conditioning in fruit flies. Behavioural Processes. DOI: 10.1016/j.beproc.2011.02.005
- April 19, 2011
- 12:12 PM
- 1,011 views
Creationists, this is the evidence you have to beat
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
The last decades of research on human evolution have provided an astounding body of converging evidence for an African origin of the human lineage just under about 200k years ago, with a subsequent migration across the globe starting around 60k years ago until all the main regions of this planet were inhabited by humans at around 15k years ago. Compare this scenario to the creationist story, where humans were shaped by a magic man out of clay about 6k years ago, which means it happened just a........ Read more »
Green, R., Krause, J., Ptak, S., Briggs, A., Ronan, M., Simons, J., Du, L., Egholm, M., Rothberg, J., Paunovic, M.... (2006) Analysis of one million base pairs of Neanderthal DNA. Nature, 444(7117), 330-336. DOI: 10.1038/nature05336
Linz, B., Balloux, F., Moodley, Y., Manica, A., Liu, H., Roumagnac, P., Falush, D., Stamer, C., Prugnolle, F., van der Merwe, S.... (2007) An African origin for the intimate association between humans and Helicobacter pylori. Nature, 445(7130), 915-918. DOI: 10.1038/nature05562
Atkinson, Q. (2011) Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa. Science, 332(6027), 346-349. DOI: 10.1126/science.1199295
- February 9, 2011
- 10:19 AM
- 715 views
Even in science, sometimes it really seems there is nothing new under the sun
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
In this week's journal club, we talked about an old paper from 1918! "The reactions to light and to gravity in Drosophila and its mutants" by Robert McEwen, in the Journal of Experimental Zoology.As the title says, the author studied how the fruit fly Drosophila responds to light and gravity. He tested this in walking flies and compared flies both with intact wings and clipped wings, wing mutations, clipped antennae, glued wings or clipped middle legs. He discovered that flies without wings or ........ Read more »
McEwen, R. (1918) The reactions to light and to gravity in Drosophila and its mutants. Journal of Experimental Zoology, 25(1), 49-106. DOI: 10.1002/jez.1400250103
Zhu, Y., & Frye, M. (2009) Neurogenetics and the "fly-stampede": dissecting neural circuits involved in visual behaviors. Fly, 3(3), 209-211. DOI: 10.4161/fly.3.3.9139
Gaudry, Q., & Kristan, W. (2009) Behavioral choice by presynaptic inhibition of tactile sensory terminals. Nature Neuroscience, 12(11), 1450-1457. DOI: 10.1038/nn.2400
Maimon, G., Straw, A., & Dickinson, M. (2010) Active flight increases the gain of visual motion processing in Drosophila. Nature Neuroscience, 13(3), 393-399. DOI: 10.1038/nn.2492
Chiappe, M., Seelig, J., Reiser, M., & Jayaraman, V. (2010) Walking Modulates Speed Sensitivity in Drosophila Motion Vision. Current Biology, 20(16), 1470-1475. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2010.06.072
Haag, J., Wertz, A., & Borst, A. (2010) Central gating of fly optomotor response. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(46), 20104-20109. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1009381107
Tang, S., & Juusola, M. (2010) Intrinsic Activity in the Fly Brain Gates Visual Information during Behavioral Choices. PLoS ONE, 5(12). DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0014455
- January 31, 2011
- 12:55 AM
- 591 views
Do fruit flies dream of electric bananas?
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
That's the title of my 'Thought Experiment' column in the next issue of 'The Scientist', due to appear on February 1. Sarah Greene from The Scientist approached me in my role as F1000 faculty member at this year's SfN annual meeting in San Diego and asked me if I didn't want to write something for The Scientist.The short article is about visualizing neuronal activity in small brains. I've recently applied for a starting grant at the European Research Council to develop a microscope which can rec........ Read more »
Cheng, A., Gonçalves, J., Golshani, P., Arisaka, K., & Portera-Cailliau, C. (2011) Simultaneous two-photon calcium imaging at different depths with spatiotemporal multiplexing. Nature Methods, 8(2), 139-142. DOI: 10.1038/nmeth.1552
- December 15, 2010
- 02:35 PM
- 678 views
Towards a scientific concept of free will
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
Today, the Royal Society published my article reviewing the invertebrate data supporting a scientific concept of free will. In it, I first reiterate that the metaphysical concept of free will is long dead (since the 1970s). Then I emphasize that determinism has been dead for even longer (basically since quantum mechanics). Finally, I propose that the ability to behave differently in identical circumstances forms the basis for a scientific concept of free will. Basically, IMHO, free will is a bi........ Read more »
Björn Brembs. (2010) Towards a scientific concept of free will as a biological trait: spontaneous actions and decision-making in invertebrates. Proc. R. Soc. B. info:/
- December 6, 2010
- 04:09 AM
- 606 views
Unquestioning dogma: the gatekeepers of science
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
This morning my friend Ramy reminded us of the recent spats over PLoS One publications (Darwinius, Red Sea) and how they were used to question the 'reputation' of PLoS One as a journal. Of course, it is about as meaningful to talk about the reputation of a journal as it is to talk about the reputation of the cover of a book. Journals are containers which say very little about their content. But on to the really relevant point:Specifically, Ramy pointed out how the current spat about a publicati........ Read more »
Wolfe-Simon, F., Blum, J., Kulp, T., Gordon, G., Hoeft, S., Pett-Ridge, J., Stolz, J., Webb, S., Weber, P., Davies, P.... (2010) A Bacterium That Can Grow by Using Arsenic Instead of Phosphorus. Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.1197258
- October 25, 2010
- 04:28 AM
- 725 views
The brain creates something out of nothing
by Björn Brembs in bjoern.brembs.blog
Brains are what mathematicians call "information sources". At least this is one of the results of a set of elaborate experiments together with sophisticated analyses and computations reported in the current issue of Nature Neuroscience (subscription required). The article, entitled "Intrinsic biophysical diversity decorrelates neuronal firing while increasing information content", studies a set of neurons in the brain's main olfactory center, the olfactory bulb. These ne........ Read more »
Padmanabhan, K., & Urban, N. (2010) Intrinsic biophysical diversity decorrelates neuronal firing while increasing information content. Nature Neuroscience, 13(10), 1276-1282. DOI: 10.1038/nn.2630
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