pomp and circumstance

what the hell?

this is just weird.

hey sam, the presents go UNDERNEATH the tree.

a classic

College-Radio DJ Thinks He Has Cult Following

CHARLESTON, IL-College-radio disc jockey Jordan Haley is convinced that “Rock Blossom,” his show airing Thursdays from midnight to 2 a.m. on WEIU 88.9 FM, has a devoted cult following, the Eastern Illinois University senior told reporters Monday.

yet another reason to love ‘daily dose of imagery’

In my post-synapse, pre-Christmas, bored at work phase I really cannot find it in me to blog very critically these days.  Something more serious will come up soon, but, quite frankly, I love Daily Dose of Imagery now more than ever and would rather hang around his beautiful images.

testify!

if you haven’t seen PhD Comics, now’s the time.

synapse13

is a neuroscience carnival devoted to all areas of neuroscience, including neurobiology, psychology, psychiatry, and neural systems — healthy brains to perverse minds — neurotransmitters to theories of mind.

To kick off the final installment of The Synapse before the new year, Corpus Callosum gets a little Popperian on the falsification of hypotheses and the connection between antidepressants and suicide. In the same vein, the Neurocritic bites into an antidepressant study and outlines why some of the claims being made are hard to swallow.

Bearing in mind Corpus Callosum’s reiteration that ‘correlation does not imply causation’, we turn to Vaughan’s submission of an fMRI study related to psychopathy at Mind Hacks.  Non Causa Pro Causa has interesting implications for the old nature/nurture debate and makes neuroimaging studies all the more nuanced. For more on psychopathy, I’d recommend Inside the Mind of a Psychopath on CBC’s Quirks & Quarks.

On Autism, Dr. Deborah Serani, host of the previous Synapse, highlights a paper on genetic mutation and its link to the risk of Autism.

Musings on Neurology and Lenitives In Simplistic Art outlines his top 5 strategic areas for research in neuroscience. Is the NIH accepting grant proposals in blog format? While quite broad in scope, there are some sympathies on this end to neuroinformatics and making conversion between file formats easier or potentially adopting a more standard format (imaging people, I know you sympathize. Oh, to be back in the DICOM days). Hat tip on Neuroethics, look north.

On touching brains in a bad way, the Neurophilosopher elaborates on every neuroscientist’s perennial favourite:  Phineas Gage.  A lot seems to fall out of rod-shaped objects piercing one’s head, although tamping irons may not be that common these days.  What, you ask, might be?  Chopsticks of course!

Could a young man like this (and his chopsticks) be a key contributor to stem cell research? Shelley at Retrospectacle says yes! 

On touching brains in a good way, Jake at Pure Pedantry looks at brain stimulation and the therapeutic value of brain stimulation for Parkinsonism.  For coverage of Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS), including a talk by a Parkinson’s patient, check out the Dana Centre’s webcast on DBS during the 2006 Brain Awareness Week at the Science Museum in London.

Transcranial direct current stimuliation (tDCS) is another good touch, albeit less invasive.  The Fibromyalgia Research Blog reviews a paper on tDCS as a treatment for fibromyalgia pain.

For a more magnetic touch, consider the Neurocritic’s post on repetative transcranial magnetic stimulation, or rTMS.

Alvaro at SharpBrains interviews Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg on brain fitness and cognitive training and looks at what successful traders and students have in common. I concur on the point of bloated textbooks here in North America. That said, if you’d really like to know what Penfield or Newton thought, read them! Don’t just read a synopsis in a textbook! It’s unfortunate that there are not more programs like St. John’s Great Books program out there.

Outside of print, I Am A Scientist! caught up with Dr. Mary Harrington from Smith College at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) conference in Atlanta this past October.  Listen to a discussion on the Faculty for Undergraduate Neuroscience live online, Sunday, December 10th at Noon (GMT -0600) on CKUW 95.9 FM.  Unable to listen?  The show will be archived on the show website.  In the meantime, lend your ears to another discussion at SfN, this time with Dr. Gladys Maestre from the University of Zulia in Maracaibo, Venezuela on neuroscience and developing countries.  Part 1 / Part 2 (MP3).

And heck, I’ll be hosting The Motel 6 later this morning (sigh, it’s late) live on CKUW 95.9 FM and ckuw.ca starting at 10AM (GMT -0600) on Sunday. Tune in!

Should you listen to the interview with Dr. Harrington, circadian rhythms will likely be on your mind. A Blog Around The Clock points to the refinement of questions in circadian rhythm research.

And, speaking of the molecular level, PZ Myers gives a near textbook explanation of the notch receptor.

While Sandy at The Mouse Trap makes his conjectures on the evolutionary trajectory of colour vision, Pete at Brain Hammer brings us back to philosophy and reminds us that a scientific theory, necessarily being falsifiable, is only as good as the predictive power it holds.

And it looks like that’s a wrap folks. Thanks for stopping by, see you in the new year, and in the words of the infamous Ivan Hrvatska, See you at party!

Weeee!

UPDATE
Synapse and Encephalon are consolidating! Regular and potential contributors to The Synapse are encouraged to submit posts here or by emailing encephalon.host at gmail.com. The next Encephalon will be held at Neurotopia on December 18th.

virtual tour of oxford

right here.

clive wearing

parts:
1a 1b full
2a 2b 2c 2d

The Observer The Telegraph Sixty Minutes Spiegel

Spiked on inspiration

A nice review of what inspired a bunch of scientists.

I was particularly surprised when I saw Stuart Derbyshire’s story.  My first encounter with Derbyshire was his neuroimaging and pain review.  Who knew being blindfolded as a kid brought him to where he is today?

Excerpt from ‘The Body Has A Head’

Gem Alert!

I picked up Gustav Eckstein’s book ‘The Body Has A Head’ at a used bookstore in Minneapolis this spring with nothing to go on other than the pretty obvious title. Well, duh. I have a head. The book is far from a collection of obvious statements, although Eckstein has a way of taking the obvious and adding a little more zing to it. Eckstein (not the Marxist, the physician) covers the human body, it’s physiology, it’s development, and it’s destination–the head–first by historical overview, then system by system. The spine of the book is thick, however Dr. Eckstein’s style lies somewhere between jotting down lecture notes and good-humoured prose. I reckon I’ll post more of Eckstein’s vignettes in the future. In the meantime, here he is reviewing What Is Life?

PHYSICIST

“Wherein There Is Life”

To the physicist—what is life?

He may be the lean Princetonian. He may be the MIT engineer. He gazes not so much outward into incredible space as inward into the incredible atom.

Erwin Schrödinger was a physicist, died not long ago, born Austrian, small-bodied, had a roaming imagination, highly cultured, could reflect over the whole area that a good mind reflects over, in mid-life thought once he would change his profession from physics to philosophy, teach physics and think philosophy. He was thirty-nine years old, to be exact. He stumbled, one feels, onto his equation for wave mechanics, became one of the world’s greatest physicists, won a Nobel Prize, for nearly twenty years remained an émigré in Ireland, returned to Vienna to live out what was left, not much. From Dublin where he was teaching at the university he released the manuscript of a short book, What Is Life?, that quickly became a minor classic. It did not require the reader to be a physicist, and he would learn what Schrödinger thought the physicist might contribute to the question.

Electricity, magnetism, gravitation, heat were chapters in our old physics textbooks. Today’s textbooks take up the same themes in the light of later developments, also take regular side-trips into the atom and over the chalkboards is written piously Einstein’s E = mc2.

None of this seems promising as contributing to the question. Schrödinger too thought that the old physics we studied in high school and the Soviets study in kindergarten would not help much. The old was based on statistics. He described situations where the disorder of random movements is given statistical order. Life is not like that. Life draws order from order. One need not be a physicist to see orderliness persisting in families over centuries, as the Hapsburg lip, Hapsburger Lippe, which fascinated Schrödinger as it might anyone who in some museum has stood before the portraits of Velazquez, fearlessly painting those Hapsburgers who marched on parade before him. But, right in our own neighborhood, despite crossbreeding, reckless diluting of wives with husbands, there will bob up in a thirty-second cousin an unmistakable pair of blue eyes.

Schrödinger considered the unit of that old physics to have a pattern that kept repeating, like wallpaper. The unit of the new had no such repeating pattern. It was like a tapestry of Raphael. The chromosome belonged to the new.

Each chromosome—and this now was unexpected—Schrödinger suggested, was an aperiodic crystal. The physicist studies crystals. The aperiodic would be those where the facets do no repeat. (Since the publication of Schrödinger’s book the study with the X ray of crystallized organic molecules has made possible the most important genetic discovery of our time.) Inside that aperiodic crystal would be the genes, that make us what we are, characteristic for characteristic, and by ceaseless duplication keep us what we are, you and I and the kangaroo. Those cocky gene-molecules bequeath our past to our future, predict and produce each member of the President’s cabinet, each player on the Detroit baseball team, each pilgrim in the Canterbury Tales. Each gene-molecule to the physicist is as clear as the tip of Manhattan, though that tip is large and the atom small. Schrödinger asked: Why is an atom so small? He answered: It is because we measure everything in relation to our own body, which is large. He repeated the story of the English King who stretched his arm and established the yard as the distance between his chest and his fingertips. Nowadays we accept that a grouping of atoms joined with other groupings of atoms can produce in nine months a summing-up like Johnny Appleseed.

Schrödinger touched then on evolution. He called our the age of the evolutionary idea, his carefulness placing evolution not in the realm of reality, where of course he thought it was, but in the realm of ideas. The new species resulted not as a selection from among the continuous slight variations always occurring in the living, as Darwin believed, because those slight ones are not inherited, result from quantum jumps. Nature for some still unexplained reason operates in jumps. If quantum does apply to evolution, and it does, that again justifies the physicist trying to help us comprehend the life that is in us, though our passion to comprehend more than we already do, in a bad hour strikes us as pathetic—large comprehending brains but a span of life too short.

Schrödinger does with his vivid writing get into us a picture of a physicist peering at life.

He concludes with entropy. He defines it. He clarifies it. He employs some mathematics, but he never allows it to become too difficult. By the dictionary entropy is the number that expresses the unavailable energy in a thermodynamic system, not an exhilarating definition. What Schrödinger does is emphasize the tendency of all physical systems to go into disorder. Order goes toward disorder. It goes toward what he calls positive entropy. The living is not like that. In the living, order goes to order. Life has absolute order. Life draws order from order. The living creature, or that molecule, that aperiodic crystal, is the most orderly thing on earth. How does the living keep up its order? By feeding on negative entropy, Schrödinger says. And so long as it does it avoids maximum positive entropy, which is death. Sounds like the reasoning of a medieval monk in a black habit and a black hood. The regularly-added can be tea with a slice of cake. The winner of the Nobel Prize suggests just that: the positive entropy that is the cost of living is canceled out by the negative entropy brought in on a dinner plate by the white-coated waiter. Nothing topsy-turvy in preventing death by adding life, though it surprises us that it should be woven into a physicist’s What Is Life? It surprises us also that this is not a romantic science-writer writing the book but a neat-minded mathematically-minded physicist. Schrödinger was above all a poet, able to feel wonder, state wonder. Already in the eighteenth century Marie Francois Xavier Bichat, another poet, came to a similar conclusion, defined life as the sum of the forces that resist death.

Link to amazon