NeuroBlog

Sarah Jenks:
Is intelligence learned or is it genetics? Lately researchers have begun studies where they compare MRIs of people's brain to their IQ levels. They studied how the amount of gray matter in the different sections of the brain correlated to how smart they were. This testing worked for men, but the study on women showed a higher correlation to their white matter, indicating that different sexes use different pathways to think. These studies showed a strong connection between high IQ and the size or shape of the superior parietal lobe and the prefrontal cortex. These parts of the brain however are not involved in memory or information storage, but rather in planning, personality, thinking, and perception. This indicates that what makes someone a genius is not their brain's ability to process and store info quickly, but rather their brains use a number of senses to make sure they are most efficient, focusing only on what is needed.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/09/11/gupta.genius/index.html?iref=newssearch

Sarah Jenks:
People with mental illnesses, such as depression or schizophrenia, have also been found to frequently suffer from addictions. Studies have shown that damaged amygdalas lead to impaired behavior and heightened drug responses. Therefore rather than writing off an addiction as a bad coping mechanism for those with a mental illness, people should treat it as another symptom perhaps of a neurological disease.
http://health.msn.com/health-topics/addiction/articlepage.aspx?cp-documentid=100185428

Finally.

As we are about to close our consideration of the anatomical and physiological organization of the visual system, I thought I should make an effort to reemphasize the points I made (or at least tried to make) yesterday. Specifically, I referred to the idea that all neural systems are put together anatomically and functionally (those two together equals synaptically) according to a relatively small set of organizing principles. As a way to emphasize these common principles, I thought I'd direct your attention to this story, which originally aired on CBS news:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKd56D2mvN0

At the risk of revealing what a nerd/goober/dork I am, is anyone else immediately reminded of LaVar Burton's character, Commander Jordi, on Star Trek: Next Generation????

Laugh at me if you must, but if you spend a little bit of time thinking about it, it shouldn't seem at all surprising that application of minute electrical currents onto the tongue (which, from a somatosensory standpoint, is an exquisitely good thing to use for tactile discrimination) can be used by severly sight-impaired people to identify objects in the environment. The only critical thing here is to have some way to tranform an image captured by a camera into a consistent pattern of electrical currents (HA! Optical transduction, electrically engineered!). The somatosensory afferent axons in the epidermis of the tongue don't need to be activated by a mechanical stimulus in order for a sensation to occur. They just need to be activated. Hopefully you know by now that depolarizing current is a great way to generate action potentials.....

This illustrates an important principle that we really didn't discuss. The idea that stimulating a sensory organ or sensory afferents- e.g., retinal photoreceptor cells- with a form of energy other than the 'natural' form- e.g., with current instead of light- will lead to a sensation that is characteristic of the sensory system was developed by an important figure in sensory physiology and one of the pioneers of psychology, Johannes Peter Muller, during the 19th century. This led to the notion of 'adequate stimuli,' which refers to stimulus energy forms to which sensory receptor transduction mechanisms have adapted through evolution, e.g., light is the adequate stimulus for vision, airborne pressure waves are the adequate stimulus for hearing, etc., etc.

The other important principle that is largely hidden in this video example is something that I mentioned (excitedly) about two weeks ago. Specifically, I mentioned when we began our coverage of the visual system that ALL neocortical areas are organized according to a basic principle (which we will consider Monday). This basic principle was postulated by Vernon Mountcastle, who spent his career working at John Hopkins University as a neurophysiologist interested in the somatosensory system. Mountcastle's research led him to conclude that all neocortex is made up of a large number of basic functional modules (called cortical columns) each of which has specific, typically reciprocal, synaptic relationships with a set of other modules both near and far (axonally speaking). The activity within a given module in relationship to the activity of the others to which it is connected is the basis for...cognition. That is, the distributed activity of coritical modules gives rise to all of the perceptutal and intentional capabilties of the neocortex. What that implies is that the cortical mechanisms of, say, language, will at some level be very similar to the cortical mechanisms of learning (or whatever). From an evolutionary perspective, this makes eminent sense: the cortical column is a highly conserved organizational motif.

Vernon Mountcastle is a smart guy (yes, he still lives-- he is around 90 years old), who graduated from another fine liberal arts college in our area-- Roanoke College. Read more about him and his career as a scientist here:

http://www.jhu.edu/~gazette/aprjun98/apr2098/20mount.html

(Perhaps you could send the link to the editors of the Phi and Trident as an example of good student journalism....)

Before you sign off completely, I'd like you to give some thought to how it is that a repeating, basic organizational motif could serve so many seemingly disparate behavioral and cognitve functions. How could one basic functional unit, when put together with others in the right way, do so many different things? Is there anything in your experience that is analgous???? No need to answer these questions literally-- they are simply intended to get you thinking....

This is Clara.
This is an article from SEED magazine
http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2008/03/out_of_the_blue.php

It's tagline is,"Can a thinking, remembering, decision-making, biologically accurate brain be built from a supercomputer?" It raises some pretty cool issues about computational neuroscience and modeling.

Here is a teaser for y'all:
"After assembling a three-dimensional model of 10,000 virtual neurons, the scientists began feeding the simulation electrical impulses, which were designed to replicate the currents constantly rippling through a real rat brain. Because the model focused on one particular kind of neural circuit—a neocortical column in the somatosensory cortex of a two-week-old rat—the scientists could feed the supercomputer the same sort of electrical stimulation that a newborn rat would actually experience.

It didn't take long before the model reacted. After only a few electrical jolts, the artificial neural circuit began to act just like a real neural circuit. Clusters of connected neurons began to fire in close synchrony: the cells were wiring themselves together. Different cell types obeyed their genetic instructions. The scientists could see the cellular looms flash and then fade as the cells wove themselves into meaningful patterns. Dendrites reached out to each other, like branches looking for light. "This all happened on its own," Markram says. "It was entirely spontaneous." For the Blue Brain team, it was a thrilling breakthrough. After years of hard work, they were finally able to watch their make-believe brain develop, synapse by synapse. The microchips were turning themselves into a mind."

This is Bridget

I read this book "The Wretched of the Earth"by Frantz Fanon for my Literary Approaches to Poverty class (sounds wonderfully uplifting, doesn't it?). Just as a little background, Frantz Fanon was a psychologist with a Freudian-style education, and was a Marxist who wrote this novel about decolonization in order to call for the necessity of revolution of colonized countries for them to receive the part of the wealth of the world that belonged to them because of years of exploitation and extermination of culture and identity.
The last section of the novel dealt with mental disorders that seemingly arise due to the traumatic experiences associated with colonial revolution for independence. This brought on the inclusion of some of the scientific theories that were, for the most part, accepted as true during that time regarding the brain. Right along with all of the other falsities that supposedly made colonization and exploitation of people "right", was the idea that it was supposedly proven that the cortex of Africans was actually smaller. Thus, the conclusion, stated with the finality and support of neuroscience, was that Africans were a subhuman race that was incapable of controlling its more animalistic tendencies. According to this scientific theory supporting Social Darwinism, their violence, their aggressiveness, can be explained by the color of their skin and "differences" in the formation of their brains.
When I read this I was quite obviously appalled. It is not that I have not read about crazy theories about physiognomy (how the characteristics of a face can tell about a person's actual character and behavior, even destiny) and other theories that claim to prove that racist beliefs are correct and necessary for human survival. It is just that I have never really read about a founded science, which is supposed to be entirely objective, being used to support an agenda. As a person interested in the sciences, I have been, in a way, naive about its purposes to advance society and understanding for all people. But to read that scientific conclusions, which were supposedly based in fact and data and experiments alone, could be so disgustingly warped was really scary. Science is such an extremely powerful tool; you add the fact that something is supported and proven by an experiment, facts, and data, and many people willingly believe that it is true, without further questioning. When this powerful persuasion is in the wrong hands it can precipitate incredibly dangerous and disheartening consequences.