Monday, October 31, 2011
Saturday, October 22, 2011
Follow your Dreams
http://www.globotreks.com/features/19-reasons-ignore-everybody-follow-your-dreams/
Tuesday, October 18, 2011
Tuesday, October 4, 2011
Myelin in invertebrates!
http://www.pbrc.hawaii.edu/~danh/InvertebrateMyelin/invertebrate_myelin.html
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=6134604
More Links
His life history is an inspiration!
Ruina on writing, witty humorous and gets the point across: http://www.webcitation.org/query?url=http%3A%2F%2Fruina.tam.cornell.edu%2Fresearch%2Fjoining%2FPractical_Writing_advice.html&date=2011-08-15
Transgressing the boundaries: http://physics.nyu.edu/sokal/transgress_v2/transgress_v2_singlefile.html
Nobel or IgNobel: http://www.improbable.com/ig/winners/#ig2010
Sunday, October 2, 2011
- Herman Hesse
Friday, September 30, 2011
Human at Fire: Spontaneous Human Combustion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spontaneous_human_combustion
http://www.bmj.com/content/1/4041/1340.2.full.pdf
http://www.springerlink.com/content/l70867820t45u713/
http://heinonline.org/HOL/LandingPage?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/jclc42&div=113&id=&page=
Monday, September 26, 2011
Does Science Suck?
'The term "suck" originated in San Francisco and New York City of the late sixties. It was used as a critical description of the relative merit of rock bands. If a band used material or styles from other bands, they "sucked", or were derivative, un-original.
Anyone who has experimented with psychedelic drugs knows exactly what I'm talking about. A drug-associated perception, or an hallucination, is a product of one's senses when altered to perceive a greater field of view than under normal circumstances, an artifact of one's own senses. Many mistakenly derive emotional turbulence through the perception of altered states and reacting accordingly, do themselves or others harm. These perceptions are "unreal".
Science, however, attempts to establish a truer reality, a more exact understanding, that while it mimics "expanded consciousness" insofar as expanding the perimeters of perception, attempts to correct misperception or misunderstanding and just plain ignorance. Science is therefore the very opposite of "suck". Not only does science avoid imitation of what has gone before, but science '.goes boldly where no mind has gone before..', and rejects unreality.
The scientific mind ignores the artifacts of perception itself, knowing that our perception can be limited and distorted, dogged by "groupthink", canonical dictates, the arbitrary winds of cultural approval. The scientist, then, is the true explorer, the true original thinker, and the best approximation of the truest perceiver.
"The real reason science sucks is that it makes us look bad. It makes us bit players in the Big Story of the universe…. Look at it this way: Before science, we humans had dominion over Earth, the center of the universe. Now we're just a bunch of hairless apes on a wet rock orbiting a minor star in a marginal galaxy." ,
Archimedes
An interesting article on Archimedes: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/degrees-of-freedom/2011/09/20/archimedes-and-euclid-like-string-theory-versus-freshman-calculus/?WT_mc_id=SA_DD_20110920
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Interesting Articles
That irritating sound in your ear: Yang S, Weiner BD, Zhang LS, Cho SJ, & Bao S (2011). Homeostatic plasticity drives tinnitus perception in an animal model. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 108 (36), 14974-9 PMID: 21896771
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/2011/09/13/tingling-neurons-titillate-your-tinnitus/?WT_mc_id=SA_CAT_MB_20110914
Kropotikin and theory of social evolution: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/primate-diaries/2011/09/13/prince-of-evolution/?WT_mc_id=SA_CAT_MB_20110914
http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100908/pdf/467146a.pdf
Awesome caption, Peacock Spider: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/video-of-the-week/2011/09/14/peacock-spider/?WT_mc_id=SA_CAT_MB_20110914
Illusions
http://cvcl.mit.edu/hybrid_gallery/gallery.html
Friday, September 2, 2011
How do you sleep?
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Friday, August 26, 2011
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Episodic Memory in Animals
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
On the Origin of Cooperative Species: New study reverses a decade of research claiming chimpanzee selfishness
Sunday, August 21, 2011
On the Extinction of Species
by Hilaire Belloc
The Dodo used to walk around,
And take the sun and air.
The sun yet warms his native ground–
The Dodo is not there!
The voice which used to squawk and squeak
Is now for ever dumb–
Yet may you see his bones and beak
All in the Mu-se-um.
In the 17th century the origin of fossils as the bones of once living animals was fiercely discussed from author to author, the proposed explanations ranged from remains of mythical beings such as dragons, giants and unicorns, to victims of the global food of Noah and to simple inanimate forms generated spontaneously by the earth itself. One reason of the insecurity of scholars concerning this question was the surprisingly limited anatomical knowledge, even considering common animals such as domestic horses and cattle, at these times.
During the 18th century scientific progress makes it obvious that the fossil bones can be compared with bones of modern animals – which raise even more questions. Many identified fossils belong to animals unknown in Europe but found on other continents, why did these species disappear on the old continent?
Thomas Molyneux, an Irish priest, in 1695 assumes in his “A Discourse Concerning the Large Horns Frequently Found under Ground in Ireland…[]” that the giant antlers found in the soil of Ireland are related to the North American elk, extinct locally in Ireland due human hunting, but still alive in other parts of the world (instead the antlers belong, as we now know to Megaloceros, an extinct deer species).
Fig.2. Depiction of Megaloceros skull, from MOLYNEUX 1695.
However some bones are not comparable to anything known even to the greatest European explorers and anatomists – could it be that these species went outright extinct?
Impossible – the third American president and naturalist Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) explains that if a species can become extinct in a perfect divine creation such a creation can’t possibly be so perfect all along, worse – the continuous loss of species would inevitable bring this imperfect creation to a gloomy end.
“The movements of nature are in a never ending circle. The animal species which has once been put into a train of motion, is still probably moving in that train. For if one link in nature’s chain might be lost, another and another might be lost, till this whole system of things should be evanish by piece-meal; a conclusion not warranted by the local disappearance of one or two species of animals, and opposed by the thousands and thousands of instances of the renovating power constantly exercised by nature for the reproduction of all her subjects, animal, vegetable, and mineral.” JEFFERSON, T. (1797): A Memoir on the Discovery of Certain Bones of a Quadruped of the Clawed Kind in the Western Parts of Virginia. American Philosophical Society Transactions.
Jefferson argued with his research against a new upcoming hypothesis: in February 1796 French naturalist George Cuvier presents during a lecture about known modern and fossil elephants a new species - Elephas primigenius – an extinct creature of distant past unlike every living elephant.
Cuvier not only accepted extinction, but used the disappearance and appearance of fossils in the stratigraphic column of the Tertiary strata of France to divide the history of earth in various, successive faunas, every one destroyed by a revolution of the earth’s surface. After the catastrophic event earth got soon repopulated with new species of organisms – however this spontaneous generation wasn’t explained by Cuvier- there was a gap in his hypothesis filled by a possible supernatural creation.
Victorian geologist Charles Lyell, who tried to establish geology as serious science without such miraculous interference, tried first to deny and then minimize the role of these single extinction events in earth history. Lyell’s hostility against extinction in general was also a consequence of his deny of organic progression (as most naturalists at these times) – implying that organism, or even entire animal classes could go lost, brings to the conclusion that new species must somehow generated and without claiming for divine creation only a transmutation of species would be possible.
Lyell accepted a local extinction of species as consequences of climatic change, concurrence and human activity (like in the case of the Dodo), however these local extinctions were reversible, surviving animals could spread again from a refuge when the conditions were favourable again (…no species may be lost…LYELL 1842).
The apparent distinct succession of fossil faunas, so Lyell, was an artefact of former distribution of land and sea, the missing preservation of land-organisms in marine deposits and the general incompleteness of the geological record. Lyell showed that various sharp boundaries between marine and terrestrial strata, as proposed in Cuviers model of the Tertiary of France, were in fact separated by sediments deposited in lakes and rivers, there was therefore no sudden change, but by slow rise the sea became first a swamp and later land.
Charles Darwin became strongly influenced by the geology of Lyell. Observing at his first stop during the Voyage of the Beagle on the Cape Verde islands (January 16, 1832) sediments enclosed by lava flows and raised above the sea level, but with fossils similar to the shells in the sea nearby (implying no substantial change of acting natural forces and habitats over time), he applied the principles proposed by Lyell and became convinced of the slow, minute and gradual changes of earth surface. Darwin adopted his gradual change model of earth on the biological evolution of life; evolution did not need catastrophic events to explain extinction. He stated that one of the main factors contributing to the evolution of organisms was perpetual concurrence in an overcrowded world, catastrophic events (like a drought) could occur, killing many individuals, but nevertheless this local and rare events were outstripped by the much more significant role of long-lasting, gradual natural selection, where the less adapted organism became extinct by the concurrence and success of the modified variations. As Lyell, Darwin considered the apparent sudden transitions of fossil faunas as an artefact of the imperfection of the geological record – in principle he denied mass extinctions as we today see it in the stratigraphic record.
In 1831 the Scottish horticulturalist Patrick Matthew (1790-1874) published in an appendix of his book “Naval Timber and Arboriculture” a theory about transmutation in nature, which resembles the concept of variation, concurrence and selection adopted also by Darwin and Wallace:
“There is a natural law universal in nature, tending to render every reproductive being the best possibly suited to its condition…As the field of existence is limited and pre-occupied, it is only the hardier, more robust, better suited to circumstance individuals, who are able to struggle forward to maturity…“
Matthew however, in explaining the forces that influenced this process, gave to catastrophic events a significant role, maintaining that mass extinctions were crucial to the process of evolution by eliminating concurrence, and enabling organism to radiate in the now “free world“:
” ..all living things must have reduced existence so much, that an unoccupied field would be formed for new diverging ramifications of life… these remnants, in the course of time moulding and accommodating … to the change in circumstances.“
When published, Matthew’s book raised little interest, and even if both Darwin and Wallace later recognized his contribution, Matthew “evolutionary” interpretation of the geological record, including extinction events, became almost forgotten.
After “Origin of Species” the main interest of palaeontologists focused on the evolution of species, rather then their extinction. Despite proclaiming to accept Darwin’s evolution, many naturalists of the second half of the 19th century struggled with the idea of “random” natural selection (intended as a process without end destination, especially not the human species). This led to the concept of a sort of guided evolution, resembling much more the transmutation of Lamarck, where single species pass trough a development process, with generation, spreading, adaption and finally overspecializiation or degeneration, leading them to extinction. The aberrant ammonites of the Cretaceous sea and the gigantic dinosaurs were seen of such examples of overdevelopment.
Fig.3. “Aberrant” ammonites from NICHOLSON 1877.
The idea of a distinct extinction event acting worldwide remained a neglected idea for the rest of the 19th century and most of the 20th century, even when large scale geological changes, as for example an ice-age, were accepted in the scientific community.
Monday, July 25, 2011
Sunday, July 24, 2011
The Case for Parallel Universes
By Alexander Vilenkin
Saturday, July 23, 2011
Manifestos
Via Gretchen Rubin, we discovered this manifesto from architect Frank Lloyd Wright, written as a series of “fellowship assets” meant to guide the apprentices who worked with him at his school, Taliesin. I particularly love number 10, the idea that working with others should come naturally.
1. An honest ego in a healthy body.
2. An eye to see nature.
3. A heart to feel nature.
4. Courage to follow nature.
5. The sense of proportion (humor).
6. Appreciation of work as idea and idea as work.
7. Fertility of imagination.
8. Capacity for faith and rebellion.
9. Disregard for commonplace (inorganic) elegance.
10. Instinctive cooperation.
2. The Marketer: Seth Godin
The always insightful Seth Godin shared his “Unforgivable Manifesto” with artistHugh MacLeod a few years ago. His observation about the short-run vs the long-run in point 5 is particularly incisive, as is the notion that we’re all marketers in point 7 – it's just that some of us don’t own it.
1. The greatest innovations appear to come from those that are self-reliant. Individuals who go right to the edge and do something worth talking about. Not solo, of course, but as instigators of a team. In two words: don’t settle.
2. The greatest marketers do two things: they treat customers with respect and they measure.
3. The greatest salespeople understand that people resist change and that ‘no’ is the single easiest way to do that.
4. The greatest bloggers blog for their readers, not for themselves.
5. There really isn’t much a of ‘short run’. It quickly becomes yesterday. The long run, on the other hand, sticks around for quite a while.
6. The internet doesn’t forget. And sooner or later, the internet finds out.
7. Everyone is a marketer, even people and organizations that don’t market. They’re just marketers who are doing it poorly.
8. Amazing organizations and people receive rewards that more than make up for the effort required to be that good.
9. There is no number 9.
10. Mass taste is rarely good taste.
3. The Designer: John Maeda
RISD president John Maeda’s slim book, The Laws of Simplicity, is one of my all-time favorites, with broad-reaching insights that apply as easily to arranging your living room as to designing a visionary product. In 100 pages, Maeda elaborates on 10 laws for business, design, and life:
1. Reduce: The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction.
2. Organize: Organization makes a system of many appear fewer.
3. Time: Savings in time feel like simplicity.
4. Learn. Knowledge makes everything simpler.
5. Differences: Simplicity and complexity need each other.
6. Context: What lies in the periphery of simplicity is definitely not peripheral.
7. Emotion: More emotions are better than less.
8. Trust: In simplicity we trust.
9. Failure: Some things can never be made simple.
10. The One: Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.
4. The Writer: Leo Tolstoy
While they betray a bit of the self-hating introvert, Tolstoy’s “rules for life,” originally written when he was 18 years old, do contain some useful gems. In particular, the notion of managing your energy and prioritizing based on goals (no. 5), and of managing your finances wisely by always keeping a low overhead (no. 9 & 10).
1. Get up early (five o'clock).
2. Go to bed early (nine to ten o'clock).
3. Eat little and avoid sweets.
4. Try to do everything by yourself.
5. Have a goal for your whole life, a goal for one section of your life, a goal for a shorter period and a goal for the year; a goal for every month, a goal for every week, a goal for every day, a goal for every hour and for every minute, and sacrifice the lesser goal to the greater.
6. Keep away from women.
7. Kill desire by work.
8. Be good, but try to let no one know it.
9. Always live less expensively than you might.
10. Change nothing in your style of living even if you become ten times richer.
5. The Company: Apple
1. We believe that we're on the face of the earth to make great products.
2. We're constantly focusing on innovating.
3. We believe in the simple, not the complex.
4. We believe we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products that we make and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.
5. We believe in saying no to thousands of projects so that we can focus on the few that are meaningful to us.
6.We believe in deep collaboration and cross pollination in order to innovate in a way others cannot.
7. We don't settle for anything other than excellence in any group in the company.
8. We have the self-honesty to admit when we're wrong and the courage to change.
John Steinbeck
Friday, July 22, 2011
Mark Twain
judiciously; to lie with a good object, and not an evil one; to lie
for others' advantage, and not [y]our own; to lie healingly,
charitably, humanely, not cruelly, hurtfully, maliciously; to lie
gracefully and graciously, not awkwardly and clumsily; to lie firmly,
frankly, squarely, with head erect, not haltingly, tortuously, with
pusillanimous mien, as being ashamed of [y]our high calling.
Sunday, June 26, 2011
Rainer Maria Rilke
René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke (4 December 1875 – 29 December 1926), better known as Rainer Maria Rilke, was a Bohemian–Austrian poet. He is considered one of the most significant poets in the German language. His haunting images focus on the difficulty of communion with the ineffable in an age of disbelief, solitude, and profound anxiety: themes that tend to position him as a transitional figure between the traditional and the modernistpoets.
He wrote in both verse and a highly lyrical prose. Among English-language readers, his best-known work is the Duino Elegies; his two most famous prose works are the Letters to a Young Poet and the semi-autobiographical The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. He also wrote more than 400 poems in French, dedicated to his homeland of choice, the canton of Valais in Switzerland.
Rilke had chosen as his own epitaph this poem:
Rose, oh reiner Widerspruch, Lust,
Niemandes Schlaf zu sein unter soviel
Lidern.Rose, oh pure contradiction, delight
of being no one's sleep under so
many lids.
A myth developed surrounding his death and roses, which we see as a constant motif in his work. It was said: "To honour a visitor, the Egyptian beauty Nimet Eloui, Rilke [had] gathered some roses from his garden. While doing so, he pricked his hand on a thorn. This small wound failed to heal, grew rapidly worse, soon his entire arm was swollen, and his other arm became affected as well", and so he died.
http://www.hunterarchive.com/fileS/Poetry/Elegies/Duino_Elegies.html
http://www.hunterarchive.com/files/Poetry/SonnetsToOrpheus.html
Salutation
O generation of the thoroughly smug
and thoroughly uncomfortable,
I have seen fishermen picnicking in the sun,
I have seen them with untidy families,
I have seen their smiles full of teeth
and heard ungainly laughter.
And I am happier than you are,
And they were happier than I am;
And the fish swim in the lake
and do not even own clothing.
Ezra Pound
Wednesday, June 22, 2011
Oliver Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village:
Princes and Lords may flourish, or may fade :
A breath can make them, as a breath has made.
But a bold peasantry, their country’s pride,
When once destroyed, can never be supplied.
Friday, June 17, 2011
Friday, April 15, 2011
Huge natural stone arch discovered in Afghanistan
One of the world's largest natural stone arches has been discovered in the central highlands of Afghanistan. Wildlife Conservation Society staff were tracking the area for wildlife when they chanced on this natural bridge in late 2010. They measured it in February and found that it's 64 meters wide and more than 18 meters tall.
It now ranks as the 12th largest natural bridge in the world, usurping Outlaw Arch in Utah's Dinosaur Natural Monument. Researchers named the feature Hazarchishma Natural Bridge after a nearby village.
The arch includes rock from the Jurassic period, 200 million to 145 million years ago, and the Eocene epoch, 55 million to 34 million years ago. Ancient water running through the now dry Jawzari Canyon carved out the underside of the bridge.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Lie
Memorization
Ray Carver, known primarily as a writer of short fiction, also wrote poetry. Carver once explained the dear value of his poems by saying that he remembered sharply the writing of each of them. This was meant as evidence from Carver of the importance of writing poetry to him, evidence of how powerful the experience of writing a poem was to him.
Yet I can recall none of his poems, none at all, and nothing of them. And I think this is good in a way. Otherwise, I am overwhelmed by the thought of his memorization of the events of creating poems, and it seems to me a way to suggest poetry is something merely magical, and not at all real, not of the body, even inhuman. I don’t remember the composition of all my poems, and I hardly remember the composition of any of them at all. My process of creating them is intense, and it is a process of the mind and the body. I lean into the making of a poem. I enter the poem so that I can make it. I am surrounded by the poem.
What I recall of their composition is general. I remember the places I normally sit to write, and when I recall something more specific I recall only an instant of the composition or a single blink of existence where I caught the inspiration for a single line. Poetry is of the body, and the body remembers dully and inexactly. Even the scars of my body tell me little about the experiences of the body. The red keloid over my sternum tells me my heart was resurrected but little else. I carry scars I know well but without remembering the occasion of their creation.
A poem is a creature of the body and recalled only glimmeringly from the body. A poem is excreted by the body, either to vanish into air or to persist as a record. We need to forget all but the outlines of the poem so that when we read it again it is suddenly a new and reborn experience.'
- http://dbqp.blogspot.com/
Abstract
http://dbqp.blogspot.com/
Tuesday, March 22, 2011
Which Way Is the Future?
If you had four pictures of a person at different ages, how would you lay them out in chronological order? As an English speaker, you would almost certainly put childhood scenes on the left and pictures from old age on the right. But if you spoke another language, you might arrange the photos in a column or even from east to west.
Almost every culture in the world uses space to think about time, but the visualizations vary widely. A November paper in Psychological Science describes the first culture known to tie time’s march to the cardinal directions.
The Pompuraawan, a remote tribe in Australia, do not have terms for spatial relationships such as “left” or “in front of.” Instead they use the directions as descriptors, such as “my south arm.” They think of time the same way, the new study found. When asked to arrange four pictures showing a person’s life, Pompuraawans laid the photos in a line from east to west.
Three main factors affect how people imagine time, says Stanford University psychologist Lera Boroditsky, an author of the study. One influence is how the culture thinks spatially; for instance, the Pompuraawans often gesture to the sun to indicate the time of day, Boroditsky says.
The layout of the written word also plays a role. Israelis tend to think of time as flowing from right to left, Boroditsky concluded in a study last year—the same direction Hebrew is written.
Last, a language’s metaphors can have an effect. Mandarin Chinese associates “up” with the past and “down” with the future. And research shows Mandarin speakers often put photos in a column with the earliest at the top.
Visualizing the passage of time may be a human universal, but these studies show just how differently that can play out. Whereas we look forward to the future, the Pompuraawans say that the west is yet to come.
Thursday, February 24, 2011
Understanding the Brain's "Brake Pedal" in Neural Plasticity
Which makes it all the more surprising that the venom, or something very close, is found in our heads. Recent work from Professor Takao Hensch’s Harvard lab shows that a close molecular cousin of the krait’s toxin, called Lynx1, serves as a kind of brake in the brain. Rather than silencing neurons outright, molecules like Lynx1 help hold them in check, suppressing their tendency to grow and otherwise change with experience. In the absence of these brakes, our brains’ circuits are sprawling and adaptable, but also somewhat unstable.
When we are young, we live through a biological “critical period” -- a time when there is little braking, and the brain is extraordinarily adaptable. Certain kinds of learning seem to just happen without much special attention or practice. None of us learned our native tongue by memorizing rules and exceptions for juggling different parts of speech. Instead, our brains seemed somehow ready for the necessary information, and the information found its way in.
As the brain ages, it is much less willing to meet the world halfway. Instead of easily re-molding itself to accommodate new kinds of inputs, the older brain is more constrained - a biological truth known to anyone who’s struggled to pick up a new language later in life. While many processes contribute to this change in the brain’s learning potential, scientists believe that some of the changes are brought about by the gradual accumulation of molecules, like Lynx1, that limit the brain’s adaptability.
Of course, it might seem like a raw deal to be ‘bitten’ by your own brain, and have your neural prowess slowly snuffed out. But in fact, this is the necessary - if less exciting - second half of a process that stores knowledge in a format that’s accessible for life. Without some kind of insulation from change, the youthful neuronal clay would never set, making life’s lessons unstable and prone to degrade. So although Lynx1 and other molecules cut off our critical period by hitting the brakes on plasticity, they also help lock in knowledge for the long term.
Naturally, scientists have long been interested (reviewed here) in understanding the specifics of how these brakes work, and, perhaps one day, how to control them. With their investigation of Lynx1, the Hensch group has found what may be one of the major factors responsible for closing the door on plasticity after the critical period. In addition, they demonstrate a strategy for lifting the brake to enhance adult plasticity and repair wiring errors in the brain. This could have major implications for the treatment of developmental disorders and brain injuries, and may eventually provide ways to augment cognition in later life.
The first step in investigating Lynx1’s properties was to ask if it accumulated at the right time to function as a plasticity brake. By labeling and collecting samples of Lynx1 and its precursors from the brains of mice at different ages, the researchers tracked how its levels changed over time. Its concentration was low and steady at young ages - within the known critical period for mice -- and ramped up with age.
Of course, many molecules are expected change their concentration over the critical period, and many of them could be just going along for the ride without playing a role in critical period closure. If Lynx1 really was a brake, then letting up on it should enhance plasticity in older brains.
Using genetic engineering techniques, Hensch’s group went a step further -- they removed this brake in mice, and asked if their brains were still plastic past the usual critical period. Could these older brains be rewired by experience, in the manner usually seen only in young brains? To answer this, Dr. Hensch and his colleagues modified a classic experimental paradigm developed by Drs. David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel - the Nobel prize winning duo who did foundational work on the neurobiology of critical periods in the visual system.
The basic experimental approach is to record from neurons of the visual cortex of an animal - in this case a mouse - some time after one of its eyes has been sutured shut. As you might expect, depriving the visual cortex of half of its expected input is a major change in experience that can trigger changes in brain organization. Over time, more neural real estate is devoted to handling inputs from the good eye, at the expense of the bad eye. This is known as a change in “ocular dominance.”
The team found that, unlike control mice, which only undergo ocular dominance shifts if an eye is closed early in life, mice without Lynx1 still showed these shifts for eye manipulations well into adulthood. Thus, an old brain without Lynx1 is still plastic, as if the critical period had never closed. In another experiment, the group also showed that a brain without Lynx1 was also more adept at repairing itself.
While genetically eliminating Lynx1 is a sure-fire way to promote plasticity, this is unlikely to ever be the basis of ‘plasticity therapy’ in humans. Practically speaking, we can’t be re-engineered to lack Lynx1. However, another way of getting at a similar end - and one with more potential as a therapy - is to find out what the plasticity brake is acting on, and try to artificially boost the process being suppressed.
Using pharmacological and molecular labeling studies, Hensch and his colleagues found that Lynx1 works by blocking receptors for the neurotransmitter acetylcholine. Acetylcholine is infused broadly throughout the brain during intense concentration or arousal, and essentially delivers a wake up call to neurons that can prompt them to change their response properties and physical organization. By deafening neurons to these alerts, Lynx1 effectively cuts off the brain’s ability to change.
At the same time, this suggests that plasticity in later life can be enhanced by delivering drugs that boost acetylcholine levels. Indeed, Dr. Hensch’s group found that infusions of drugs that raise acetylcholine could make the mice’s brains more adaptable.
Although directly applying this to humans is probably still a ways off, it raises certain tantalizing possibilities. Naturally, most thoughts turn to some kind of ‘brain boosting’ that would help us learn certain kinds of skills with the same ease we enjoyed when we were younger. Who wouldn’t want a bit more neuro-mojo, or to be able to soak up a handful of new languages just by casually hanging out in countries we’ve always wanted to visit?
It’s not clear, though, that removing Lynx1 would necessarily spell happy times for learning complex skills and languages. These may be subject to additional, or simply different forms of regulation. Still, this research might also help with more immediate, if more modest, goals. It may be possible, for example, to use acetylcholine boosters to increase the effectiveness of brain training programs for staving off senescence and cognitive decline with age.
Friday, February 18, 2011
Mental Blizzard
Turkish novelist and 2006 Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk found inspiration from daydreams for works such as Snow (2004, Knopf). In a speech titled “the Implied Author” that Pamuk gave when he received the Puterbaugh literary prize in 2006 , Pamuk declared: "I long for inspiration to come to me (as poems did to Coleridge—and to Ka, Snow's hero) in dramatic ways, preferably in scenes and situations that might sit well in a novel. If I wait patiently and attentively, my dream comes true. To write a novel is to be open to these desires, winds and inspirations, and also to the dark recesses of our minds and their moments of mist and stillness.
For what is a novel but a story that fills its sails with these winds, that answers and builds upon inspirations that blow in from unknown quarters, and seizes upon all the daydreams we've invented for our diversion, bringing them together into a meaningful whole?"
Tuesday, February 1, 2011
Willi Dansgaard in Memoriam
Willi Dansgaard, the great Danish paleoclimatologist, died on January 8. His passing has received remarkably little notice in the world press, though the New York Times published an appreciative obituary today. Were there a Nobel Prize in the earth sciences, he surely would have been a recipient. As it was he had to content himself with the Tyler Prize, the highest award given for environmental research, which he shared with Hans Oeschger, the Swiss glaciologist with whom his work was closely linked, and Claude Lorius, a French scientist. It was Dansgaard who discovered that the temperature of the earth's atmosphere could be inferred from the isotopic composition of rainwater and snow, and who then realized that the past temperatures of the atmosphere could be extracted from ice cores. Oeschger made himself the world's foremost expert on the measurement of carbon dioxide and other gases found in ice cores. Their work led eventually to a complete year-by-year reconstruction of the earth's climate going back a million years, through a handful of ice ages, showing a powerful linear relationship between greenhouse gas levels and temperatures. Lorius led a team that produced an early version of that record, going back hundreds of thousands of years, based on drilling in Antarctica.
Dansgaard and Oeschger also discovered cycles in which drastic climate changes were found to occur much more rapidly than anybody had imagined--on the scale of decades, rather than hundreds or thousands of years. Though Dansgaard was a rather apolitical person, the discovery of abrupt climate change put it on the global agenda, leading to language in the Rio Framework Convention on Climate Change calling for measures to prevent "dangerous" climate change.
It's regrettable that we don't have a Nobel prize in the geosciences, and not merely for personal reasons. There's altogether too little appreciation of the fact that a revolution occurred in the earth sciences in the second half of the twentieth century, as science historian Spencer Weart has observed, and that the study of the biosphere remains one of the most dynamic of the physical sciences today. Yet earlier this week the Washington Post published an excellent article detailing how most of the major U.S. satellites dedicated to monitoring changes on the Earth's surface and in its atmosphere are behind schedule and under-funded. These include the Global Precipitation Measurement mission, the latest Landsat satellite, Hydros, and the NPOESS satellite set.