Psychonomics...

Is anyone going to the Psychonomic Society Annual Meeting in November?

Chang Tzu Ping - moves conjoined twins mouth

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Teaching chimps

I just got a funny picture in my head when I read this article...but it looks like I can't find it on google image. I wanted a picture of a chimp teaching a class of other chimps - seems like it should have been on one of those chimp tv shows at some point - ohh well this is what I got.

Chimpanzees can pass knowledge from one individual to the next with nearly perfect accuracy through several "generations" of teacher and learner, a new study shows. This ability, which has never been demonstrated in chimps before, means that these apes have one of the key skills needed to create and maintain true cultural differences among groups.

No God spot in the brain..

whew... I thought something was missing in my brain ;)

The human brain does not contain a single "God spot" responsible for mystical and religious experiences, a new study finds. Instead, the sense of union with God or something greater than the self often described by those who have undergone such experiences involves the recruitment and activation of a variety brain regions normally implicated in different functions such as self-consciousness, emotion and body representation. The finding, detailed in the current issue of Neuroscience Letters, contradicts previous suggestions by other researchers that the there might be a specific region in the brain designed for communication with God.

Uh Oh... it looks like I may have not just one missing brain area, but a whole messed up system ;)

The study found that mystical experiences activate more than a dozen different areas of the brain at once. One of the regions, called the caudate nucleus, has been implicated in positive emotions such as happiness, romantic love and maternal love. The researchers speculate that activation of this brain region during mystical experiences is related to the feelings of joy and unconditional love the nuns described.

Where is it? What is it? and What's going on?!

Or... Differential parahippocampal and retrosplenial involvement
in three types of visual scene recognition

Russell A. Epstein & J. Stephen Higgins
Department of Psychology and Center for Cognitive Neuroscience
University of Pennsylvania
In press, Cerebral Cortex
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Human observers can quickly and accurately interpret the meaning of complex visual scenes. The neural mechanisms underlying this ability are largely unexplored. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure cortical activity while subjects identified briefly-presented scenes as either specific familiar locations ("Houston Hall"), general place categories ("kitchen"), or general situational categories ("party"). Scene responsive voxels in the parahippocampal place area (PPA) and retrosplenial cortex (RSC) were highly sensitive to recognition level when identifying scenes, responding more strongly during location identification than during place category or situation identification. In contrast, the superior temporal sulcus, cingulate sulcus, and supermarginal gyrus displayed the opposite pattern, responding more strongly during place category and situtation identification. Consideration of results from four experiments suggest that the PPA represents the visuospatial structure of individual scenes, while RSC supports processes that allow scenes to be localized within a larger
extended environment. These results suggest that different scene identification tasks tap distinct cortical networks. In particular, we hypothesize that the PPA and RSC are critically involved in the identification of specific locations but play a less central role in other scene recognition tasks.

Someone is pretty pissed off at scienceblogs.com

I like this submitted digg link..haha... and the linked article is pretty pissed off at scienceblogs in general.

Scienceblogs.com is like NPR with the market share of Microsoft

submitted by toomuchbrew 8 minutes ago (via http://realscienceblogs.blogsp…)

I haven't read them much because if I want to insult religious people I'll go back to Mass and do it myself but this guy reads them. It's some kind of hissy fit going on among scientists. pretty soon they will be breaking test tubes.

The Steve's of science

Well since I'm a Steve I guess I have to post this comic I found on Retrospectacle (which you should visit)

Parietal cortex for categorization

Interesting...

New research from Harvard Medical School (HMS) investigators has identified an area of the brain where such memories are found. They report in the advanced online Nature that they have identified neurons that assist in categorizing visual stimuli. They found that the activity of neurons in a part of the brain called the parietal cortex encode the category, or meaning, of familiar visual images and that brain activity patterns changed dramatically as a result of learning. Their results suggest that categories are encoded by the activity of individual neurons (brain cells) and that the parietal cortex is a part of the brain circuitry that learns and recognizes the meaning of the things that we see.

For those of you with access - here's the article

Guinea pig costumes

Well since I've been on a wacky animal kick lately I thought I'd share this link from clinkshrink.

It seems that somebody thought it would be a good idea to create dozens of guinea pig costumes of all shapes and sizes. There is even a bit on how to measure your piggie.

Sizing: The guinea pig models wearing the costumes in my photos are full grown over a year old (approx. measurements: 8-9" from back of ears to their bottom, 10-11" waist) that will help you judge the size of the costumes. Most costumes will fit an average size adult guinea pig. If the guinea pig is too young/small, they will walk out of the costumes.

According to clinkshrink...

Many years ago a fellow by the name of John Cade decided to give lithium to manic patients because he noticed that the substance seemed to calm agitated guinea pigs. (Don't ask me how he could tell the guinea pigs were agitated. As far as I can tell all guinea pigs do is squeak and munch alfalfa pellets, or occasionally chuckle while peeing on the visitor's lap but that's a story for another day.) Anyway, the lithium worked.

Perhaps these guinea pigs are actually schizophrenic and have some sort of delusions where they think they are nurses, pirates, and swimsuit models (does a guinea pig have breasts to put the bikini top onto?).

Dissociation between cat brain and cat's anatomy

Graded regulation of the Kv2.1 potassium channel

via Coturnix: This is exciting for two reasons: 1) changing persepctive to seeing things in a graded, variable continuum rather than just viewing things as an on/off, either/or switch, and 2) using #1 to be able to apply it to produce possibly groundbreaking work to address complexities of how even single neurons—-not to mention an entire brain—- may function:

“We’ve shown that brains cells regulate activity in an incremental way, with thousands of different possible levels of activity,” explained James Trimmer, senior author of the paper and professor of medical pharmacology and toxicology at UC Davis School of Medicine. He and his colleagues studied an ion channel that controls neuronal activity called Kv2.1, a type of voltage-gated potassium channel that is found in every neuron of the nervous system.

“Our work showed that this channel can exist in millions of different functional states, giving the cell the ability to dial its activity up or down depending on the what’s going on in the external environment,” said Trimmer. This regulatory phenomenon is called ‘homeostatic plasticity’ and it refers, in this case, to the channel protein’s ability to change its function in order to maintain optimal electrical activity in the neuron in the face of large changes within the brain or the animal’s environment. “It’s an elegant feedback system,” he added.

[snip] The current study is the first to combine mass spectrometry-based proteomics and ion channel biophysics to the study of living brain cells. “This is an important biological question that couldn’t have been answered any other way,” Trimmer said.

Most cells in the body can get by with on/off-like switches, allowing them grow and proliferate when needed. In fact, examples of these ‘switches’ include the well-studied products of oncogenes, proteins that get stuck in the ‘on’ position and cause cancer. Brain cells, however, must multi-task, receiving and processing signals from various sources, both inside and outside the body. “This ability to deal with a variety of signals involves some fairly sophisticated and subtle regulation of neuronal activity,” Trimmer said.

The original article is called Graded regulation of the Kv2.1 potassium channel by variable phosphorylation (Park KS, Mohapatra DP, Misonou H, and Trimmer JS; Science, 2006 Aug 18;313(5789):976-9), which I looked up on PubMed. Words emphasized bring to bear the dynamic, graded nature of this study:

Dynamic modulation of ion channels by phosphorylation underlies neuronal plasticity. The Kv2.1 potassium channel is highly phosphorylated in resting mammalian neurons. Activity-dependent Kv2.1 dephosphorylation by calcineurin induces graded hyperpolarizing shifts in voltage-dependent activation, causing suppression of neuronal excitability. Mass spectrometry-SILAC (stable isotope labeling with amino acids in cell culture) identified 16 Kv2.1 phosphorylation sites, of which 7 were dephosphorylated by calcineurin. Mutation of individual calcineurin-regulated sites to alanine produced incremental shifts mimicking dephosphorylation, whereas mutation to aspartate yielded equivalent resistance to calcineurin. Mutations at multiple sites were additive, showing that variable phosphorylation of Kv2.1 at a large number of sites allows graded activity-dependent regulation of channel gating and neuronal firing properties.

We have billions of neurons. Various readings suggest 100-200 billion!

A ground breaking discovery in bovine linguistics!

I wasn't aware that there was active bovine linguistic research - but in any case this must be a huge breakthrough for them. It should be published in Nature Cows or something similar.

In a major breakthrough in bovine linguistic research, experts have confirmed that cows moo with accents distinct to their herd, the BBC reports.

John Wells, professor of Phonetics at the University of London, examined West Country farmers' claims that their beasts were mooing with a local twang.

Lloyd Green of Glastonbury said: "I spend a lot of time with my ones and they definitely moo with a Somerset drawl. I've spoken to the other farmers in the West Country group and they have noticed a similar development in their own herds. It works the same as with dogs - the closer a farmer's bond is with his animals, the easier it is for them to pick up his accent."

Professor Wells confirmed Green's observations, explaining: "This phenomenon is well attested in birds. You find distinct chirping accents in the same species around the country. In small populations such as herds you would encounter identifiable dialectical variations which are most affected by the immediate peer group."

Fallacies in Comp. Neuro

The CVCN Laboratory has kindly furnished this guide to computational neuroscience.

Fallacious styles of reasoning have been studied and classified from ancient antiquity. Example terms are: "Slippery Slope", "Appeal to Authority", and so forth--See Classical logical Fallacies. New fields, such as Computational Neuroscience, have their own set of fallacious styles of reasoning, whose study has only just begun.

G.I.G.O

Garbage in, garbage(or gospel) out. Well known problem with all computational models.

UNITY GAIN SIMULATION

You build an elaborate model of a simple phenomena, including many redundant mechanisms to get out the phenomena. If done well, you get the result that you wired in, but learn nothing, hence unity gain. If done poorly, reduces to G.I.G.O. True unity gain, although not interesting, is technically difficult, and requires some skill.

TIBETAN PRAYER WHEEL

Building merit by turning cycles (on your computer). Your model is conceptually simple, and/or of little interest, but it required a supercomputer to run it. Legitimizing your model by emphasizing that it required the "world's largest computer" to run....

TWO CARD MONTE

The street card game (shell game) played in academia: you sell the computer scientists that your model is an important contribution to biology, and you sell the biologists that your model is an important contribution to computer science. But it is neither. Works even better with more than two disciplines involved. The more remote they are, the better.

THE DEVIL MADE ME (NOT) DO IT

Your implausible and/or poorly constructed model (conveniently) can't be realistically tested due to computational complexity.

PSEUDO BIOLOGICAL DETAIL (PBD)

Related to two card monte. Overload your model with irrelevant biological parameters and metaphors, in an attempt to direct attention away from conceptual weakness.

BRUNO'S LEMMA

When it is pointed out that the fundamental idea of your model strongly violates basic facts, you claim that your model can be fixed, since it is a model of the brain, and the "brain can do it".

PROOF BY SALES RECEIPT

I'm a neuroscientist. I bought ten MACS (Suns, PC's,etc.) on my grant. Therefore, I'm a computational neuroscientist.

KLAUS'S TRANSFORM

A colleague publishes a simple version of your complex mechanism. You then claim his simplyfing idea as your own, and cite his (simplification of your model) as one of many complex models explained by "your" simplifying assumption.

CARGO CULT

"My network babeled like a baby while it was learning...." therefore my network is mimicking the learning process in a baby... See "totemic model" below.

TOTEMISM

The totem is believed to (magically) take on properties of the object. The model is legitimized based on superficial and/or trivial resemblance to the system being modeled.

HAIL MARY

You have a fragment of an idea, but don't know how to state, develop, or support it. But, if true, you will be famous. So, embed it in a far-fetched "model" and publish it, in the hope that your "model" will be proven "correct", somehow, someday.

BIG GAME FISHING IN THE GOLDFISH BOWL

You claim "predictions" for your model which are actually trivial and/or unavoidable properties of the nervous system: "A prediction of my model is ... the existence of lateral inhibition in the pulvinar".

NEURO-BAGGING

You assert that an area of physics or mathematics familiar to few neuroscientists solves a fundamental problem in their field. Example: "The cerebellum is a tensor of rank 10^12; sensory and motor activity are contravariant and covariant vectors". Related to 2-card monty (above), but distinguished by more extreme bodaciousness.

SCIENTIFIC POINTILLISM

Your "humanoid robot" is really a pair of active vision camera's and robot arms bolted together, with a flashy plastic body. The rhetoric describing it is laden with terms indicating its humanoid abilities: it "interacts" with humans (and even graduate students); it has emotions. However, when looked at more closely, the thing is supported by simple software that appears to be ten or fifteen years behind the state of the art. If done well, you can enjoy the feeling of metaphorically, as well as literally, being the "star of your own movie".

The secret of anti-gravity

I thought I'd share this little gem.

Q: If you drop a buttered piece of bread, it will fall on the floor butter-side down. If a cat is dropped from a window or other high and towering place, it will land on its feet, But what if you attach a buttered piece of bread, butter-side up to a cat's back and toss them both out the window? Will the cat land on its feet? Or will the butter splat on the ground?

A: Even if you are too lazy to do the experiment yourself you should be able to deduce the obvious result. The laws of butterology demand that the butter must hit the ground, and the equally strict laws of feline aerodynamics demand that the cat can not smash its furry back. If the combined construct were to land, nature would have no way to resolve this paradox. Therefore it simply does not fall.

And of course this goes on for a bit more...
And here's the wikipedia article on the matter.

Math genius...more info

It's pretty funny - what this guy is doing is having the complete opposite effect on the media and the people that read it. If he wanted no attention he should have just accepted it and said nothing.

Interviewed in St Petersburg last week, Dr Perelman insisted he was unworthy of all the attention, and was uninterested in his windfall. "I do not think anything that I say can be of the slightest public interest," he said.

"I am not saying that because I value my privacy, or that I am doing anything I want to hide. There are no top-secret projects going on here. I just believe the public has no interest in me."

Dr Perelman also said he had no interest in self promotion. "I do not regard it as a positive thing. I realised this a long time ago and nobody is going to change my mind," he said.

"Newspapers should be more discerning over who they write about. They should have more taste. As far as I am concerned I can't offer anything for their readers."

Ohh.. by the way - he's living on 74$ a month with his mother in St. Petersburg.

Lost moon tapes.

Not too smart of the smithsonian eh?! Someone requests film of the moon landing and they send him original footage - then lose the rest?

"A week later a delivery came to my film studio in Los Angeles with the can of film. When I opened it up I was gobsmacked because instead of getting a couple of minutes I got nearly half an hour of a complete film.

"So I took a couple of shots out of it and cut it together with the Dark Side Of The Moon demo for the Floyd film. But I was so busy I never got a chance to finish it and the film just went into the vaults.

"I didn't think another thing about it until a few nights ago when I was watching television and it came on the news. And I thought, 'I have got that stuff.' "

Mr Clifton's business partner and catalogue manager Drew Thompson said their 16-millimetre film version of the Apollo 11 landing contains images never released to the public.

Drunk Animals

Political Science gets science

I was always curious what was 'science' about political science - they didn't seem to do experiments - use the scientific method - etc etc etc. It looks like they might be changing that a bit (of course we've seen all those fMRI politics studies - and you can guess what I think of them).

(AP) - Is there any science in political science? For decades, scholars in the field have battled over how negative campaign ads affect voter turnout, whether people become more conservative with age, whether opposition to welfare and affirmative action is an expression of principled ideology or veiled racism, and a host of other fundamental questions. None is truly resolved.

That has made a number of researchers conclude they've been going about it the wrong way. "Until a few years ago, political scientists didn't even do experiments," says Barry Burden of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "They conducted surveys. But it's very hard to discover causation from a survey. For instance, there is a correlation between being partisan and being more likely to vote, but does being partisan make you vote, or does voting make you more partisan? Or are they not causally related?"

Now political scientists have caught experiment fever, and more, applying well-vetted principles of psychology and even doing brain scans. "The direction is toward cognitive science and neuroscience," says James Druckman of Northwestern University.

Bring Me the Head of Charlie Brown

Charlie Brown is on the run from the Peanuts Gang after the Great Pumpkin puts a bounty on his head in this wild animated student short by Jim Reardon.

Turn down that loud rock-and-roll! @#%$%!!!

Check out this segment on All things considered where:

Robert Sapolsky, a distinguished neuroscientist in his 40s, had a young assistant who played different music every day, from Sonic Youth to Minnie Pearl. That made Sapolsky crazy -- and curious about why his aging ears still crave the music he loved in college. Is there a certain age when the typical American passes from the novelty stage to utter predictability?

Multi Voxel Pattern Recognition

Here's an interesting article from Discover about Ken Norman and a bit about Frank Tong's fMRI pattern recognition research. Ken has an article coming out in TICS about this - looks interesting.

"MVPA is asking a different question," said Kenneth Norman, lead author of the paper. "Instead of asking, ‘What does this little piece of brain do?’ MVPA looks at lots of voxels at once and asks, ‘What information is represented in the pattern of activity distributed across the brain?’"

Norman, an assistant professor of psychology at Princeton University, explained to Discovery News that pattern classification and data mining techniques used for handwriting recognition are now being applied to functional magnetic resonance imaging of the brain.

For example, a researcher may ask someone to think about certain faces, locations and objects. The researcher then records the brain patterns associated with each thought. When subjects are asked to repeat the exercise, computer software can match the prerecorded brain patterns to the current ones, which may tell the classifier what the person is thinking.

Researchers can also see certain thoughts developing, even before they become full-blown, conscious ideas. Around 5.4 seconds before a person recalls something seen, heard, or experienced earlier in the study, category-specific patterns of brain activity start to emerge, which help investigators predict what the person is going to remember.

Redheads get more nookie...

I was going to just add this to the del.icio.us links - but then I saw the alternate explanation at the bottom of the article and figured I'd share...Here's almost the entire article from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

"The sex lives of women with red hair were clearly more active than those with other hair colour, with more partners and having sex more often than the average. The research shows that the fiery redhead certainly lives up to her reputation."

He added that women who dyed their hair red from another colour were signalling they were looking for a partner, and added: "Even women in a fixed relationship are letting their partners know they are unhappy if they dye their hair red. They are saying that they are looking for something better."

Psychologist Christine Baumanns said however that it may not be the women who were to blame for the better sex lives of redheads.

She said: "Red stands for passion and when a man sees a redhead he will think he is dealing with a woman who won't mess around, and gets straight to the point when it comes to sex."

Do you all like the alternative explanation as much as I do?!

Seeing through cats' eyes.

Or more appropriately through cats' neurons. The top row is the original image and the bottom the one generated from the car. It's a little bit blurry - but hey! close enough. It's from a while ago (1999) - so some of you might have seen this before - but it's pretty cool huh?!

These are the first pictures from an extraordinary experiment which has probed what it is like to look through the eyes of another creature.

As reported on BBC News Online last week, a team of US scientists have wired a computer to a cat's brain and created videos of what the animal was seeing.

By recording the electrical activity of nerve cells in the thalamus, a region of the brain that receives signals from the eyes, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley were able to view these shapes.

The team used what they describe as a "linear decoding technique" to convert the signals from the stimulated cells into visual images.

Younger siblings are clowns

Ahh so maybe this is why I'm so darn funny! haha..

Just over half of younger siblings questioned said it was easy to be humorous, compared with just a third of those who were first-born. And just 11% of only children had the skill, according to the study of 1,000 people by psychologist Richard Wiseman. Experts said younger children were more likely to feel the need to compete for parental attention. And being funny continues into adulthood.

It's a little curious that the measure was whether the kids thought it was "easy to be humorous." What if they just think they're humorous - like all those bad singers on American Idol think they are good singers?!

This kid doesn't look very entertaining (or entertained) to me. What facial expression is that anyway? The makeup messes things up a bit.

The post central traffic condition gyrus.

So evidently "Studies show that talking on a cellphone cuts a driver's brain activity in half in a key area of the brain needed for noticing traffic conditions."
I wonder if this area is evolutionarily defined? or is acquired through drivers education class in H.S.?

Gotta love the monkey.

Bloggers

From Pearls Before Swine. [Thanks Eudae for identification!]

Neuroeconomics, oxytocin and trust

Via Brain Waves:

A soon to be published paper (Neuroactive Hormones and Interpersonal Trust: International Evidence, Zak & Fakhar, in press) links societal levels of happiness with the hormone oxytocin which plays a role in bonding and increased interpersonal trust.

The authors contend that higher levels of oxytocin in a society makes that society more trusting - and happy.

The major finding is that factors that raise overall levels of oxytocin and/or estrogens (which increase oxytocin uptake) affect country-level measures of trust...While the causation is likely bidirectional, we now know that trusting people are happier.

[Oxytocin levels are boosted by, among other things, physical contact (mothers bonding with their babies during breastfeeding, etc.) so I'll leap to silly conclusions and suggest that petting your cat a lot engenders trust of cats, and trusting cats may make it easier for toxoplasma gondii to propogate. HMM. It's all coming together now...]

Cogsci webcomic

From Birdsworth Comics: read the whole comic and amuse yourself with others featured on the website. There's a series on cognitive science, philosophy and AI, subjects not known for humour, but there it is...

How to Improve your Memory

via Mind Hacks:

I've just been invited to blog here among other neurogeeks, and I'm so excited to contribute, especially among such great company!

Memory: I always have trouble remembering names of things. Memory seems like a fickle thing, at least to me, when I struggle with names of molecules or proteins. Well, Mind Hacks reports that the BBC had a program on memory, and now they have a site dedicated to the study of memory (expanded off the program). And speaking of memory, Eric Kandel's new book In Search of Memory is an excellent read. Neurophilosopher gives a review of the book; I highly recommend it, as I just finished this summer. As a hopeful neuroscience grad student, the book has a lot of insight for someone on "the track", whose thoughts and experiences intersect with the science they study; for non-science people, it will show the reader how the path of a life is connected to the path of science.

Rollerbots Unite

Remember Rosie, the domestic rolling robot, from the 80's cartoon "The Jetson's"? Well researchers from Carnegie Mellon's robotics institute have built something with a similar means of locomotion, except that this robot relies on only a single wheel (actually, a ball) to move around!

See this page for more information, and be sure to view the videos here and here.

Cat parasites control society

"Cat parasite may control cultural traits in human populations," CogNews reports. New research published in PNAS on the brain parasite toxoplasma gondii, commonly found in cat faeces, offers some creative analysis:

Evidence for subtle long-term effects on an individual's personality, reported by researchers in the Czech Republic, inspired [Kevin Lafferty, a USGS scientist at UC Santa Barbara] to explore whether a shift in the average, or aggregate, personality of a population might occur where Toxoplasma has infected a higher proportion of individuals. Infection with Toxoplasma varies considerably from one population to another; in some countries it is very rare, while in others nearly all adults are infected. To test his hypothesis, Lafferty used published data on cultural dimension and aggregate personality for countries where there were also published data on the prevalence of Toxoplasma antibodies in women of childbearing age. Pregnant women are tested for antibodies because of the serious risk posed by toxoplasmosis to fetuses, which lack their own immune systems.

The results of previous work suggested that Toxoplasma could affect specific elements of human culture. Toxoplasma is associated with different, often opposite, behavioral changes in men and women, but both genders exhibit guilt proneness (a form of neuroticism). Lafferty's analysis found that countries with high Toxoplasma prevalence had a higher aggregate neuroticism score, and western nations with high prevalence also scored higher in the 'neurotic' cultural dimensions of 'masculine' sex roles and uncertainty avoidance.

"There could be a lot more to this story. Different responses to the parasite by men and women could lead to many additional cultural effects that are, as yet, difficult to analyze," said Lafferty.

Different research on cats and toxoplasma gondii suggests a causal link to schizophrenia. Pregnant women who are exposed to cat faeces seem to risk children developing schizophrenia later in life. Read more.

[Pictured above: cats are also learning to hack computers. Beware!]

Barking at Prozac

Barking At Prozac: How the Drug Changed Some Dogs' Lives is a dead-on parody of issues surrounding SSRIs. It even gets into neuroethics and "cosmetic canine pharmacology." Written in 1995 by Mitch Lemus, the only thing different in 2006 is barking from yet more polarized groups.

The drug has been useful in treating obsessive compulsive disorders, as well. Dot, a Dalmatian, would spend hours trying to scratch her spots off. But after just five days on Prozac, her nervous habit ceased. "I spent a fortune on trainers, therapy, and new-age diets, but nothing ever worked until my vet suggested I share my Prozac with Dot. All I can say now is that she's better than well," raved Dot's owner.

But not everyone endorses the practice of dispensing drugs designed for humans to pets. When one owner sought Prozac to keep her Beagle from licking his testicles, her vet threw her out of his office. "It's disturbing how some people insist on meddling with normal animal behavior," says Dr. Murray Muzzleman. "Yes, dogs lick their balls. Why? Because they can."

Dr. Muzzleman shares his bias against psychotropic drugs with the Church of Zooinology. Zooinologists charge that Prozac can unleash violent tendencies in otherwise passive pooches...

Winki, President of Pooches Union of Prozac Poppers (PUPP), feels the decision to take mood-lifting drugs should be left up to the individual animal. "As a Chihuahua, I used to be shy and easily intimidated, yapped the diminutive five-pounder. "But on Prozac, I feel like top dog. Now I don't take crap from nobody, be it a Doberman, Pit Bull Terrier, or authoritarian human being."

Perhaps the controversy is best put into perspective by Dr. Barkowitz, the animal psychiatrist, who asks, "What does it mean to live a dog's life, anyway?"

Door County

So I got a bag of potato chips the other day (those fancy shmancy kettle cooked thingees) and they had the history of the chip company on the back. They were from Door county Wisconsin - it sounded pretty nice - so well... I'm going there this weekend haha...
I wonder what else I'd do on the advice of a chip bag ;)

Green lawns and good neighbors

I think the Hatfield's and McCoy's would disagree - although I guess a blood feud could be considered socializing (extreme though it may be).

Contrary to the old adage, green grass may make for better neighbors, not jealous ones. According to preliminary results from an ongoing long-term study of landscapes and human interaction, neighbors are more likely to be social when living among lush lawns. These results from six mini-neighborhoods in Phoenix may not bode well for the ongoing conflict between environmental and social wants.

So perhaps people are more likely to go outside and meet neighbors?

Psychics predict panda pregnancy

I'm not sure why I'm always attracted to these crazy stories - but here it is.

Lun Lun the giant panda may be pregnant.
That, at least, is the consensus of two psychics, enlisted Friday by Zoo Atlanta to predict the 8-year-old female panda's pediatric prospects.Atlanta-born psychic Helene Frisch said she telepathically connected with Lun Lun using "tone vibration," the release said. Frisch said she discerned that not only is Lun Lun pregnant, but she will likely bear a male cub by September 4.Another psychic -- Andy Liu, a native of China -- used the ancient I Ching to calculate a 65 percent chance that Lun Lun is pregnant.

Ok.. It's not as bad as it sounds... the zoo artificially inseminated the Panda and did this as a publicity stunt ;) Smart PR person!

Get rid of your memories of your ex and live longer for only 49$

For a limited time of only three weeks I’m offering you a special price of NOT $99, $69 $59, Only $49. After three weeks I'm going to convert all the materials in to other format and sell at higher price probably $197 or higher... You can wait if you want but you have only three weeks, unless you want to have your pain for six or more months.So it's only 49$ to forget about your ex boy/girlfriend?!

Wow.. well what kind of backup does this guy have? Well this guy talked to Jane! Here's what he has to say about her and her evidence.

Janet graduated from the university of Kansas with a degree of biology. She continues her further studies on neuroscience (a field of study that deals with the structure, function, development, genetics, biochemistry, physiology, pharmacology, and pathology of the nervous system), which is kind of boring.

Jane is very charming and is one of the very few in her field (neuroscience) to have fun with. You know the one those who have a high level of education in medical science or engineering are very boring. Anyway…

Jane conducted a research to find out why little children learn faster. She studied 23,000 children in different neighborhoods in Kansas City metro area (both Missouri and Kansas).

She spent 10 years doing this research and she found that, children learn faster because their brain is not getting much interaction with other things. You see when we grow older we tend to get involved with too many things and neuroscientists say that

Our Brain Cannot Handle too Many additional Things at the Once.

Ohh but it gets even better... Supposedly:

People, Who are Divorced, Dumped are at Higher Risk of having Mental Disease than those who are in Good Relationship.

It is very dangerous not to know that your mind is corrupted.

Jane continues to explain that one of the biggest worms that overload our brain is bad thoughts or bad memories. In the same study done by Dr Benjamin Malzberg in 1936 divorced men die 10 years younger than married men.

Keeping Your Ex Memories Could Cause Your Death Sooner.

Seems worthwhile to me! hahaha.... (great writing as well!)

Remote control people

So it looks like there's a way of stimuliating the vestibular system of people by remote control which indicates which way they should go.

There's just one snag. If you want to be guided blindfolded round obstacles by someone holding a remote control, you'll have to tilt your head back or forward. If your head is upright, the same electrical stimulus will simply make you fall over.

This story made me think of the real life Pac-Man that people were playing in cities - perhaps they should add these remote controls to the mix.

Mind-legislative body problem

Adam Kolber of the fascinating Neuroethics and Law blog found this abstract on Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN). NeuroCongress by Richard W. Murphy, William Mitchell College of Law:

This mercifully brief excursion into philosophy of (congressional) mind starts with the premise that, although it is common to speak of legislative intent, an entity cannot form an intent without a mind to generate it. For those of a speculative bent who find themselves in work-voidance mode, this observation may spark questions concerning the mind/legislative-body problem. These questions apply broadly to all legislative bodies, but, without loss of generality and for ease of reference, one can focus them on Congress. Could Congress have a mind of its own? If it does, what is the qualitative nature of its mental experience - i.e., with due apologies to Professor Nagel, what is it like to be Congress? And what can reflection on the nature of such experience teach us about congressional intent?

Some short answers: Given how little we know about why some bits of organized matter generate consciousness, we cannot exclude the logical possibility that Congress does lead some sort of mental life. But, alas, we will never be able to determine with any clarity what it is like to be Congress - the nature of its intents, sense impressions, or feelings will remain forever obscure. That said, there is no good reason to think that being Congress is like being Albert Einstein, John Malkovich, or any particular congressperson. And, in the cheap-shot department, there is a tempting argument to be made that Congress's intents are about as rich and complex as a roundworm's.