The Accidental Mind

From the latest by William Gibson:

"That's where you come in," he said

"I do not."

He smiled.  He had, as ever, a great many very white teeth.

"You have bacon in your teeth," she said, although he didn't.

Covering his mouth with the white linen napkin, he tried to find the nonexistent bacon shard.  Lowering it, he grimaced widely.

She pretended to peer.  "I think you got it," she said doubtfully.  "And I'm not interested in your proposition."

"And it was Hastroll's feeling that, if you were lucky enough to keep love, to talk about it would always seem like bragging, no matter how generous the listener's spirit."

--Adam Ross, Mr. Peanut

Do animals dream?

While we can’t ask them, the answer is almost certainly yes for mammals and birds.  They have REM sleep and they will “act out” complex scenarios that are presumed to be dreams following neurosurgery to disrupt the neural pathway that blocks the commands to muscles during this stage.  Whether lower vertebrates like reptiles and amphibians dream is a more difficult question.  If they do, it is more likely that they have the short, fragmentary dreams found during early-stage non-REM sleep in humans.

Can sleeping people still use their senses? Is it possible to communicate with…

You must be at the..

I love clowns.  I love bears.  I love the very short story "Death Honk" by John P. McCann which features clowns and bears fighting.  Read it at the Journal of Microliterature.

If you're not already sick of my droning on about brain evolution, you're welcome to tune in to National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" on Monday, August 9 to hear me interviewed by Jon Hamilton for the series How Evolution Gave Us The Human Edge.  An article based upon the interview may be read here and the interview audio may be streamed here.

From Sam Sifton's review of the Carroll Gardens restaurant, Prime Meats, in the New York Times.

"And a meal in the restaurant proceeds with all the jollity and good manners of something scripted by Laura Ingalls Wilder and scored by the Grateful Dead.  It is an extremely pleasant place."  

Just now digging into Jonathan Lethem's newest novel Chronic City.  What a delight.  This could turn out to be his best book yet.  And it's rich in neuropharmacological metaphor to boot.

"He had the waitress refill his gallon-sized Coke, too, then, as our afternoon turned to evening, washed it ll down with black coffee.  In our talk marijuana confusion now gave way to caffeinated jags, like a cloud bank penetrated by buzzing Fokker airplanes.  Did I read The New Yorker?  The question had a dangerous urgency.  It wasn't any one writer or article he was worried about, but the font."

I may not know much but I know enough not to write fiction.  That doesn't keep me from enjoying these lists from some of my author-heroes.

From Margaret Atwood:

1 Take a pencil to write with on aeroplanes. Pens leak. But if the pencil breaks, you can't sharpen it on the plane, because you can't take knives with you. Therefore: take two pencils.

2 If both pencils break, you can do a rough sharpening job with a nail file of the metal or glass type.

3 Take something to write on. Paper is good. In a pinch, pieces of wood or your arm will do.

4 If you're using a computer, always safeguard new text with…

Dear American Airlines by Jonathan Miles is one of the funniest books I've read in years.  It also has (pathos and) bonus neuro-nuggets, like this about the narrator's father, a Polish survivor of Dachau:

"One of my father's ironies was his adopted racial attitudes-- he tossed the word NEE-gar around like doubloons from a parade float and was a party-line seg voter.  History, even scalding personal history, doesn't always transmit the expected lessons.  Memory and meaning, I've found, often book separate rooms in the brain."

it's hard to beat a Golgi-stained neuron as your art of choice.

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Via the Science Tattoo Emporium at Carl Zimmer's Loom Blog

Of the four books I read while traveling recently, the most enjoyable by far was Michael Chabon's new collection of autobiographical essays entitled  Manhood For Amateurs.  Dig this splendid nugget.

"My father, born in the gray-and-silver Movietone year of 1938, was part of a generation of Americans who, in their 20s and 30s, approached the concept of intimacy, of authenticity, and open emotion, with a certain tentative abruptness, like people used to automatic transmission learning how to drive a stick shift. They wanted intimacy, but were not sure how far they could trust it to take them. My…

"When the Epiphytes begin to grow on the Power Lines then the End of Days is nigh and a Shadow shall soon fall across the land."

Otavalo, Ecuador, December 19, 2009

I'm enjoying a new book on the history of neuroscience by Prof. Charlie Gross entitled A Hole in The Head(MIT Press, 2009).  It leads off, of course, with a splendid discussion of trepanation through the ages.  My favorite line: "These findings finally established that Neolithic man could carry out survival trepanation but left unresolved the motivation for this operation."

Wonderful, disturbing images abound, like this one from Diderot's Encyclopedia of 1761.  Is that a neck there or is this figure supposed to depict a free-range head?

A parasite walks into a bar and orders a beer.  

The bartender says, "We don't serve parasites here."  

The parasite, deeply offended, replies, "You're a terrible host."

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I'm proud to be included in the new volume Everything I Need To Know I Learned From A Children's Book, edited by Anita Silvey, in which "more than 100 leaders from the arts, sciences, politics, business and other fields recall a children's book they loved, and its impact on their lives."  I'm particularly humbled to be in the company of so many of my heroes-- folks like Alison Gopnik, Pete Seeger, Steve Wozniak, Ursula K. Le Guin, Anne Tyler, Maurice Sendak and Andrew Wyeth.  Proceeds from this book benefit children's literacy programs in the USA.

What was your favorite book as a kid?

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At the National Zoo, Washington D.C.

100% Pumpkin-free!

UPDATE:

But not in Japan where the gourd endures....

When I was in the first grade, I went to an after-school program at the Jewish Community Center in my home town of Santa Monica, California.  In the lobby, they had a large banner soliciting donations to the United Jewish Appeal that read “Give ‘Til It Hurts.”  I didn’t know what it was about, and found the whole thing vaguely disturbing.  Whenever possible, I would navigate around the lobby to avoid looking at it. Several months later it was replaced with a similar banner-- same font, same logo--  that read “Give ‘Til It Feels Good.”  “Freakin’ adults,” I thought.  “Why does everything have…

I love buying songs from the iTunes store even through I know they’re messing with my medial forebrain pleasure circuits.  Quite simply, the folks at Apple have taken the lesson of cocaine and applied it to music.  Pleasure with a fast onset, like smoked cocaine, is more addictive that pleasure with a slow onset, like chewed coca leaf.  When I purchase a song on iTunes, it starts playing on my computer’s speakers within a minute or so.  Sweet, rapid reward.  But do they send the billing statement right away?  Nope.  It’s all done electronically, so the billing statement could arrive by email…

Jane has been feeling totally stressed out.  She is 18 years old and lives with three other girls in a small apartment.  She and her roommates bicker a lot and Jane is clearly at the bottom of the social order.  The others push her around and she tends to avoid them.  Lately, she can’t help but grimace when one of the dominant, bossy girls approaches.  When she lived by herself, Jane was slim and ate a balanced diet, but since she has been in this pressure-cooker of an apartment, she’s taken to snacking all day and all night and choosing high-fat foods over more healthy fare.  Her weight and…

Well, probably not.  If you have an individual or institutional subscription to JN, you can read all about it here. 

My old pal, Paul Lockhart, has written a brilliant critique of contemporary mathematics education entitled "A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form."  

"Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this kind of nightmare. In 

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ideas…

In the future, every synapse will be famous for 15 milliseconds.  In this spirit it is worth noting that Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang briefly mentioned me in their New York Times blog post comparing computers and brains.  Gotta call Mom.

Those of you who are not already sick of the sound of my voice are welcome to check out  a podcast interview I did recently with D.J. Grothe on his show "Point of Inquiry."

Jeff Tweedy, leader of the bands Wilco and Uncle Tupelo, struggled with an addiction to prescription painkillers and cigarettes.  After successful rehab and several years of clean living he had this to say about his life:

“I've never felt better. I've never been healthier. … I run four or five miles, four or five times a week, but I broke both my legs running too much last summer.  I had stress fractures in both my tibias from running too much. You know, once you're an addict, you're always an addict, so just because I found something good to do doesn't mean I'm not going to hurt myself doing…

Over at Worth1000, the new Photoshopping contest theme is "Mad Scientists"  This happy guy just got his grant funded by the NIH.

...but this guy really, really likes the cerebellum.  In sagittal section, no less.

via streetanatomy.com

I'm reading Rivka Galchen's first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, and it's so intelligent and funny and sad that it's giving me a woody.  Tell me that you don't want to read it after this snippet.  I dare you.

"Functionally speaking, Harvey's main problem-- or some might say his "conflict with the consensus view of reality"--  stemmed from a fixed magical belief that he had special skills for controlling weather phenomena, and that he was, consequently, employed as a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology, an institute whose existence a consensus view of reality would (and this…

Steven Rose, reviews The Accidental Mind and some other recent titles in The Guardian (UK) and says:  

"There is no general "command centre"; rather, all regions are connected by multiple bidirectional pathways, making the brain the paradigm of a self-organising distributed system. Linden provides an accessible and up to date guide through this maze, if you can cope with an excessively cheerful transatlantic style."

Excessively cheerful?  Fuck that shit.  From now on, I'm gonna be a curmudgeon.

Amsterdam, December 2008.

My favorite comment from a reader:  What's that on the ground?  A kidney stone?

"The kind of love my mum talks about is full of worry and work and forgiving people and putting up with things and stuff like that.  It's not a lot of fun, that's for sure. If that really is love, the kind my mum talks about, then nobody can ever know if they love somebody, can they?"

--Nick Hornby, Slam

Not all psychoactive drugs are addictive and not all people exposed to addictive drugs will become addicts.  While some drugs have a very high potential for addiction, not even the most dangerous substances typically produce addiction in a single dose—repeated exposure is required.  Addiction can be defined as persistent, compulsive drug use, but addiction doesn’t develop all at once.  Rather, it proceeds in stages.  When a drug-user initially gets high on cocaine or heroin or amphetamines or PCP, the experience produces an intense euphoric pleasure and sense of well-being.  However, repeated…

Clearly, the pleasure circuits of the brain have not evolved just to be activated by implanted electrodes.  Pleasure is central to survival.  We must experience basic behaviors such as feeding, drinking, mating and care of offspring as pleasurable (rewarding) in order to survive and pass along our genes to the next generation.  Of course, this consideration is not unique to humans.  Indeed, rudimentary pleasure pathways appear quite early in evolutionary history.  Even the roundworm C. elegans, which is a millimeter long and has only 302 neurons in its entire body has some basic pleasure…

"Cooks were not supposed to be political.  Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it."

--Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

I was in L.A. last week and was lucky to have dinner with my old hometown pal Attila Giri.  She writes a witty and spirited account of our meal and conversation that's way more interesting than anything I could scribble.

Not Photoshopped!  This is the real current issue of the esteemed scientific journal Nature.  Layout artists have all the fun.

via Blog Around The Clock

From the journal Medical Hypotheses, comes the ground breaking new article: "Ejaculation as a potential treatment of nasal congestion in mature males" by Sina Zarrintan of Tabriz Medical University, Iran.

"As it is seen, ejaculation can be used as a potential treatment of nasal congestion because its emission phase provides a sympathetic stimulation and subsequent vasoconstriction and nasal decongestion. Also, the refractory period serves as a sympathetic reservoir and maintains the decongestive state for a considerable while. This method does not wish to have the adverse effects of…

"For the bow cannot stand always bent, nor can human nature or human frailty subsist without some lawful recreation."

- Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

"Pleasure never comes sincere to man; but lent by heaven upon hard usury."

- John Dryden (Edippus, Act  1, Scene 1)

Noted psychiatrist Lawrence Hartmann, M.D., writes the following in his review of The Accidental Mind in the American Journal of Psychiatry.  

"This thoughtful neuroscientist’s book about brain evolution, structure, and function, which places refreshing emphasis on some relatively messy and ad hoc qualities of brain evolution and on the inefficiencies of brain design and function, seems to me significantly flawed by its frequently brash and breezy style.   For example, the last words of the introduction are “let’s roll.” The author is fond of words such as “downer” and “cool.”

So true, dude.

So, I wrote a "welcome editorial" to mark the beginning of my term as Editor in Chief for the Journal of Neurophysiology.  In it, I briefly laid out a few points-- what I liked about JN and what I thought could be productively changed.  I also preached a bit about author and referee behavior.  I didn't think that any of the ideas therein were particularly provocative-- they echo the sentiments that I hear from my colleagues every day at lunchtime.  Nonetheless, the editorial seems to have sparked some interesting and productive debate and commentary at the science blogs DrugMonkey and The…

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It sounds like the beginning of an elaborate curse, doesn't it?  I recently uncovered a huge stash of old family photos, which I'm just starting to examine.  I dig the tonsorial splendor of these fine fellows, circa 1900.

...is the name of a new podcast series from The University of Texas at San Antonio.  These are roundtable discussions with UTSA Neurobiology faculty and a different guest each week.  Recent guests include Linda Overstreet-Wadiche, Mario Capecchi, John Lisman and yours truly.  These podcasts are intended for an audience of neuroscientists and so they get into the nitty-gritty fairly quickly.

"Phil was probably passed out somewhere, enjoying his dead father's legacy. I found myself wishing I had a loved one who would die and leave me their barbiturates, but I couldn't think of anyone who'd ever loved me that much. My uncle had already promised his to the mail lady."

Donald Ray Pollock, "Bactine"

from his superb collection of stories, Knockemstiff

"I don't deal with inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs. I just get to work."

"Chuck Close: Process and Collaboration" Exhibit

Yesterday, I spoke at a conference entitled "Law of the Body: Implications of Medical Science on Legal Decision Making" at Willamette University College of Law in Salem, Oregon.  One of the other speakers was Bill Harbaugh, an economist and neuroscientist from the University of Oregon.  In addition to doing cool experiments in which he and his colleagues image the brains of women in the process of paying taxes and making charitable donations, he is also the curator of the online "Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art" which features this lovely dissection by Karen Norberg.

My old pal Attila Girl is a fan of the upcoming film from Ben Stein entitled "Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" which was recently screend at the Conservative Political Action Committee meeting in Washington D.C.  I haven't seen the film, but a longish preview is available online.  It purports to tell the story of how academics at American universities are suppressing discussion of Intelligent design creationism, which they claim to be a legitimate scientific theory.

Now, I don't rant that much, but every once in a while, one is called for.  So here it goes.

Hostility to evolutionary biology…

I say...  Our sensory world is anything but pure and truthful. Built and transformed by evolutionary history into a very peculiar edifice, it responds to only one particular slice of possible sensory space. Our brains then process this sensory stream to extract certain kinds of information, ignore other kinds of information, and bind the whole thing together into an ongoing story that is understandable and useful.  Furthermore, by the time we are aware of sensations, they have evoked emotional responses that are largely beyond our control and that have been used to plan actions and understand…

A research group in Australia has determined that, unlike those of sheep and cattle, kangaroo farts don't contain methane, a major contributor to global warming.  The kangaroo stomach is host to bacteria that aid digestion, and do so with great efficiency, but don't produce methane as a byproduct.  Now, efforts are underway to isolate the bug or bugs responsible and then use them to innoculate the digestive systems of cows and sheep in a bid to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  Another group of Australian scientists have proposed a different solution: raise less beef and lamb and eat more…