Blogging on the Brain

If you haven’t read Freakonomics, you should. If you have read Freakonomics, you should read their blog. If you’ve read the book and the blog, you should listen to their podcasts.

If you’ve done all of those things, then you should eagerly anticipate the production of the Freakonomics documentary, like me! (To be produced by the same people that brought us Man on Wire and Food, Inc.)

For those of you back in the first category (those unfamiliar with Freakonomics), it’s this crazy fun book filled with what they refer to as “the hidden side of everything.” The authors work together (one is a journalist, the other an economist) to present data in a way I promise you’ve never thought of before. For instance, in one of their podcasts (which just recently started up), they talk about the dangers of increased safety measures. They look at the number of injuries, specifically concussions, in football players since the advent of good helmet technology – counter to what you might think, concussions are on the rise. Why? Mostly because football players now feel safe enough to use their heads as battering rams. They talk about the same sort of effect in Nascar – the cars are getting safer and safer, so the drivers are becoming more and more reckless.

In a different podcast, they talk about what the country would look like if economists ran it. One ecnonomist, when asked what the first thing he would do would be, replied something to the effect of “Well, I’d get rid of the Department of Education, because they’re not really doing any good, and I’d legalize all drugs and tax them.” So, that probably won’t get him elected, but it’s super interesting to hear about the numbers that really do back up the stuff they’re talking about.

This week’s podcast is about the authors’ first trip to Hong Kong – can’t wait to hear what they have to say!

Well, I finally did it. I may have been the last person in the world to do it, but I finally saw Avatar. My overall reaction: very pretty. Because I waited so long to see it, I was primed to think about several different things I’d heard about it over the past months – not the least of which was that it shares pretty much the exact same plot as Disney’s Pocahontas (which, as it turns out, seems pretty true).

The movie also left me with several questions, the first of which is who on the production team was responsible for sneaking so much marine life onto Pandora. I’ll explain – well, first I should mention that, in the pursuit to fulfill my childhood dream of becoming a marine biologist, I took a marine biology course at Wheaton for part of my biology minor. The bulk of the course was covered in a Spring Break trip to Belize, where we stayed on a tiny island a few miles off the coast, and went on several snorkeling dives every day (including one night dive – still one of the most alien experiences I’ve ever had) but anyway, there were a lot of shout-outs to marine life on the planet Pandora that I began to notice pretty early in the film:

Obviously there was a lot of bioluminescence happening throughout the world, which has been well documented in marine life, especially algae, etc. (in Belize, it would sometimes look like patches of water were glowing because of that) but it was something in one of the very first scenes in the forest that tipped me off to the marine life influence – when Jake first takes his avatar into the forest, he encounters some strange, spiral-y looking plants. When I saw them, I leaned over to my husband and excitedly told him that those plants looked exactly like my favorite (gorgeous) little marine critter, the Christmas Tree Worm (Spirobranchus giganteus), which often grows on brain coral (which, of course, I also have an affinity for). You can imagine my surprise, then, when Jake tries to touch the plant, and it sucks itself back down into its hole…exactly what a Christmas Tree Worm does when it feels something approaching in the water! Don’t believe me? Check out this video...and long live the Christmas Tree Worm!

First off, I apologize for the massive delay in posts from SfN. As I mentioned before, my access was very spotty, and I found that jumping back into normal life mid-week (I got back late Tuesday night) left little time for blogging. Anyway, I figure I’ll take the next few days to catch up and clear out the archive before the NMC conference next week!

So the highlight of the first day of the conference was the annual “Dialogues between Neuroscience and Society” talk, which has in the past  featured people everywhere from the Dalai Lama (who I assume spoke about meditation, etc.), to architects (like Frank Gehry) and choreographers. This year the talk featured two internationally known magicians, Eric Mead and Apollo Robbins, who spoke about how magic utilizes known perceptual/attentional/memory functions to trick people into thinking they’ve seen/heard/remembered something that didn’t (or couldn’t) really happen.

Eric Mead spoke first, and spoke mostly about memory and attention. He brought up a very good-natured audience member and had her memorize several geometric shapes he had drawn on an index card. He then took the card away and had her close her eyes while he took her through a mental visualization of being on the beach with the sun setting, a sail boat going by, and a house behind her. When she opened her eyes, he asked her to name the shapes on the card, and she said there were three items – a circle, a triangle, and a square. In actuality, there had been four items – circle, triangle, square, and star – but his story had only reinforced three of them – the sun (circle), sailboat (triangle), and house (square).

He went on to describe how important it is for magicians to be able to get people to forget important details about what they’re seeing. He used the example of getting something out of his coat pocket without the audience noticing. He said a bad magician would just try to misdirect attention by doing something with his left hand while reaching into his pocket with his right hand. A better magician will put both hands in his pockets like a casual gesture, then pull them out with the required object in his right hand. A good magician will actually make a habit of putting his hands in his pockets and taking them out often, so the audience gets so used to him doing it without anything happening immediately afterward that they won’t even encode it in the first place.

Apollo Robbins – known as “The Gentleman Thief” – was up next. He started with a very entertaining performance with another very good-natured audience member, in which he managed to remove the man’s watch and wallet while doing several other tricks without the volunteer or any of the several thousand people in the audience noticing. It was pretty impressive. He obviously spends a lot of time working with the art of deception, and he often works with ex-thieves to learn their tricks, then consults with police departments to help educate them in how pickpockets and theives really do their work.

He walked through several different ways that thieves (and magicians) work to obtain access to either the participant/victim’s pockets, or their memory and attention. First he talked about proximity – it’s hard to steal a wallet if you can’t get within arm’s reach of the person. So to do that, there are a couple of steps that he demonstrated with a very large man onstage. First, if you approach from the front, drop eye contact, which will automatically make the situation more comfortable. You can also turn to the side and come up next to him, which is much more comfortable than standing squared off in front of him, plus it puts you in closer proximity to his pockets.

The second thing he mentioned were ways to keep people’s eyes where you want them. He actually sounded like he knew what he was talking about, and he mentioned controlling saccades (the way our eyes move in sort of jerky steps and not in smooth motions, even though we perceive a smooth pan across a scene) as a way to keep attention where you want in. This could be as simple as making a more interesting movement with the hand you want people to be watching – if you move in a straight line, people can anticipate where it’ll end up, and our eyes (and attention) will bounce back to the starting point. If, however, you do something as simple as making that straight line into an arch, people are much more likely to continue following the arch with their eyes, and therefore not see what you’re trying to conceal.

The third (and I think most interesting) thing he mentioned was the difference between misdirection of attention and actual control of attention, and the ability to actually direct the interior dialogue of the audience/volunteer/victim. First of all, he talked about the importance of framing memories. For example, a lot of people think that pickpockets will bump into you and grab your wallet as they do. According to Mr. Robbins, only the crudest and least experienced pickpockets would try this. More often, you’ll find people who work in teams, so let’s say you’re going up an escalator, and the person in front of you drops a bag and bends over to pick it up. You would then back up to avoid running into the person in front of you, and you would bump into the person behind you. What you wouldn’t know is that the person in front of you was working with the person behind you and that when you bumped into the guy, he took your wallet. The difference is that you wouldn’t have even encoded the fact that you bumped into the guy as a possible situation for theft. Pretty cool, huh?

The other way to control attention (more in the magic-show setting than the thievery setting) is to very carefully word the way that you give directions. The example he used was, if you were doing a card trick where you wanted a little time to go by between the start and finish of a trick so the audience would forget some of the details of the first part, you would hand the cards to the volunteer and NOT say “shuffle the cards,” but say “show me how you shuffle.” This will end up directing their thoughts to what may or may not be important about their shuffling ability, and more importantly, won’t give them time to think about the details of the trick.

So it was a very entertaining presentation, and it ended with some discussion between the two magicians, the president of SfN, and one of the leading researchers in perceptual illusions. The basic question was how any of this might be applied to research. During the presentation, Eric Mead had made the point that a lot of what magicians do is very similar to how memory research is done. He mentioned the very well-known work of Elizabeth Loftus, in which she doctored photos to make it look like participants had been in a hot-air balloon as kids, and by the end of the study, almost every single one expressed that they had actual memories of this experience that never actually happened. He then added, while that was great work and everything, that he and most other magicians implant false memories every time they perform – whether it’s getting people to remember that they put a card back in a stack instead of him, or that they shuffled when really he did – they have a step-by-step process that works almost every single time. Whether or not that could actually be applied to research, he wasn’t sure.

It was pretty funny to watch people the rest of the day – even walking out of the main hall – everyone was chatting excitedly about the presentations…and clutching their wallets and purses. And on that note, here’s a little intro video to Apollo Robbins, Gentleman Thief.

I found an article from the NYT that caught my attention stating that redheads are more sensitive to pain than people with other haircolors. Interesting, right? Here’s the deal: the melanocortin-1 gene (MC1R) is normally responsible for the production of melanin which, in turn, pigments hair and skin. In redheads like myself, however, there is a mutation in MC1R that causes the gene to produce pheomelanin instead of melanin which causes the red hair/fair skin combo. In addition to producing pigments, the family of genes that MC1R belongs to is responsible for pain perception in the brain; thus the mutation that leads to red hair may also lead to altered experience of pain.

Apparently this work started as an attempt to disprove an urban myth: that it takes more anesthetic to knock out redheads than people of other haircolors, and that redheads tend to avoid dental work more than the average person (which, from my experience as a redhead, is certainly true). As it turns out, the urban legend was true, and redheads on average require about 20% more anesthetic than people of other haircolors! Part of me wants to be a little proud of that…but mostly it makes me even more scared to head to the dentist.

Happy Fourth of July, all! So while the 4th doesn’t rank very high on my list of favorite holidays (especially in this kind of heat), I am looking forward to some good barbeque and maybe a cold beer today. And in lieu of fireworks, I’ve found something much more interesting to fulfill the bright-and-colorful quota of the day – it’s a technique I recently heard about called “brainbow.”

Brainbow has apparently been around since about 2007 (I think the original article was published in Nature…I haven’t gotten around to that yet), but I just found out about it after following several links from my google reader feed, eventually ending up at a post explaining the background of the technique. At first I was just drawn in by the amazing images, but when I started reading about the technique, I realized it utilized a recombinant genetic technique I had learned about the same day in my molecular genetics class! I love when that happens.

So without going into too much detail, the basic idea is that you use a common site-specific recombinant system called Cre/lox. Cre is an enzyme that will, when in contact with lox sequences, splice out or switch around the genes sitting between two lox sequences. The cool part – putting four different chromatic sequences between the lox sites so that any combination of them may be expressed in any given cell.

The result: Around 100 unique color possibilities, plus the ability to visually identify cells that came from the same precursor/stem cell because they’ll all be the same color (which could prove incredibly useful, especially for developmental research). The technique is obviously much more complicated than that, and apparently pretty difficult to execute, but man, the results are easily the coolest visualizations of neurons I’ve ever seen. Take a look, and have a happy 4th!

This first one is neurons from the cortex – hard to believe this is gray matter, huh?

The one after is the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus…and is currently the desktop background on my computer.

Confocal image by Tamily Weissman. Mouse by Jean Livet and Ryan Draft

Dr. Tamily Weissman - Nikon Small World Competition 2008

This week I had the pleasure of going to a fantastic talk from Dr. Antoine Bechara, one of the foremost scientists working in addiction and decision making. I introduced myself to Dr. Bechara before the talk (and got a little nervous and tongue-tied in the process), and he was kind enough to let me record his presentation on one of the cool little recorders we have in the ATL, so hopefully we’ll get that posted soon and anyone who’s interested can give it a listen.

Earlier this week all of us in the Psy/Neuro department were emailed a copy of Dr. Bechara’s CV; a common practice to familiarize ourselves with a visiting lecturer’s work before his or her presentation. So I sat down a few days ago to peruse his work, and found that his CV was a stunning 39 pages long. Currently, mine is almost 2 (and my name is in a really big font, too). He has over 110 publications, including several in Nature and Science, and is considered one of the top 400 scientists in the world based on citations of his papers – and I might have heard this wrong, but I think the figure was that his papers have been cited over 75,000 times!

Now, as a graduate student in the infancy of my career, this seems pretty intimidating. I know that I’m not expected to have a 30 page cv at this point, and I’m sure a lot of people never do, but could I be one of those people? Should I even bother aspiring to that or am I reaching too far?

I also ended up thinking a lot about how many times, people sort of stumble upon some discovery or correlation that ends up being the centerpiece of their research. It seems that’s at least partly what happened with Dr. Bechara. He’d been working with stroke patients, and it was a pretty common occurrence for patients to quit smoking after a stroke. Most doctors assumed this was because, well, they’d just had strokes, and quitting smoking is generally a good idea if you’d like to avoid having another stroke. But Dr. Bechara noticed that some of these patients didn’t really choose to quit –they just stopped craving them and never smoked again. We’re talking multiple-packs-a-day, 20-year smokers that wake up the morning after their stroke and never smoke or crave another cigarette again.

So what does Dr. Bechara do? Well, he looks at scans of the damage in those patients, and realizes that all of them have essentially completely lost an area of the brain called the insula. In addition, he found that those patients that struggled to quit or didn’t try at all did not have damage in the insula. Aaaand…TADA! There’s one of those Science papers I mentioned.

I now find myself wondering if I had been in that situation, would I have noticed the differences between the patients? Would I have thought to compare the damage? Or would I have let a potentially career-changing discovery slip by under the radar? Have I already?

And how many other discoveries have gone un-discovered because nobody was paying attention?