The Accidental Mind

What is your cat thinking while she watches you have sex?  Well, I’ll tell you.  Even if you are as sexually conventional as they come in this culture-- let’s say you’re in a committed heterosexual relationship and you’re not into all that kinky stuff: you’re not dressed up in a Dick Cheney mask with clamps on your nipples and Wagner’s Ring Cycle playing in the background.  You haven’t inserted a Bluetooth-enabled electrical shock probe in your anus that’s connected to the internet to be triggered by changes in the HangSeng stock index.  Rather, you’re with your partner, in private, in your…

And with all respect to the Fab Four, her version kicks Beatle ass.  With a uke, no less.

Listen here.

via Beatles Complete on Ukulele

Extraterrestrial sighted in 12th century hilltop church!

Yes, my family name is Linden and, yes, I have a lab.  Unfortunately, I don't have anything to do with "Linden Lab", the folks behind the enormously popular online role-playing environment Second Life.  Nonetheless, I couldn't help but laugh when a colleague sent me this image from the Linden Lab web site of a SL avatar called "Neuro Linden."

The funniest site on the internet is oldjewstellingjokes.com

So go already.

Since 1993, a particular woman's DNA has been found at a series of seemingly unrelated crime scenes in Germany, France and Austria.  These have ranged from carjackings to burgularies and have included the scenes of six unsolved murders, the most notorious of which was the killing of a young police officer in Heilbronn Germany.  An enormous international police task force has been chasing this "Phantom of Heilbronn" for years and a 300,000 euro reward has been offered to no avail.  Analysis of markers in her DNA indicated that she was of eastern European origin and it was even speculated from…

When I was in college, circa 1980, I lived down the hall from some guys who had devised a unique form of Friday night recreation.  After each had consumed about 10 beers, they would gather around a huge fishbowl that had been filled about half-full with many types of prescription pills, mostly psychoactive drugs.  The idea was to reach into the bowl and randomly grab two pills, make note of their color and shape and then swallow them immediately.  Then, while waiting for the pills to kick in, they would open the huge reference book next to the fishbowl (the Physician’s Desk Reference which…

From a pop song.

“and the talkin' leads to touchin'

then touchin' leads to sex

and then there is no mystery left”

-Rilo Kiley “Portions for Foxes”

"Whenever I feel sad, the sad feeling tends to manifest in my seeing humans (myself included) as orangutans.  A human ordering coffee, a human offended when someone cuts in line, a human sprinting to refill a parking meter-- in my moods all those people are orangutans.  And this feeling doesn't make more real the secret emotional lives of orangutans-- that would be one option.  Instead it makes all the humans (with their loves, their hates, their haircuts, their beloved unconsciouses) seem sublimely ridiculous.  Normal life, absurd.  She loves you-- who cares?  She left you-- so what? …

That's the headline from a recent story reported by Fox News.  They also said that it was all Obama's fault.  Apparently , a chef who was unlicensed to prepare pufferfish, messed up and served diners portions of the flesh which have a high concentration of a particular neurotoxin...

Announcement on my flight out of Grand Forks, North Dakota this morning:

"Um, yeah, well, so we'd like to offer you coffee or tea on this flight, but someone left the pot full of water and it froze solid last night.  Likewise, the taps in the lavatory are frozen shut so please use the bottle of hand sanitizer instead.  Thanks for choosing Northwest."

Henry Molaison, known to the world during his lifetime by his initials, H.M., was a man who acquired a profound amnesia following brain surgery to correct his otherwise intrctable severe epilepsy in 1953.  He died in late 2008 at age 82.  When studied by neuroscientists Brenda Milner and Suzaane Corkin, it was revealed that Henry had an inability to store new memories for facts and events, an anterograde amnesia.  However, he could still store other forms of memory such as motor memory, procedural memory and subconscious associations (what we now call non-declarative memory).  This was the…

We're making a holiday visit to my sister-in-law and her family.  They live on top of a mountain so four wheel drive is necessary to get up the road to her place if it snows.  I went to Enterprise Car Rental in Boulder, Colorado to pick up the 4WD car I had reserved online.  After I filled out the paperwork they proudly showed my my rental: a brand-new Hummer H3.  

"Well, there goes my environmentalist credibility."

"Sorry-- it's the only 4WD we have left."

"That's OK-- it'll be in interesting change from the Volkswagen I drive at home"

So, I've been hauling my family around the lefty-green…

To date, the evidence for a general, neurobiological model of pleasure is compelling and is only growing stronger as more research is done.  How, then, should we think about the pleasures that animate our lives?  Is that wonderful meal, the night of great sex, that hilarious tipsy night at the bar with your friends all reducible to firing of the ventral tegmental area and dopamine surges?  Well, yes and no.  Yes, in the sense that there seems to be a neural rheostat of reward that's engaged by almost everything we find pleasurable.  No, in the sense that the activity of the pleasure circuit…

If you're not listening to Jesca Hoop, then you're really missing out.

Internet addicts, gambling addicts and sex addicts.   Chocaholics and shopaholics.  Our everyday speech promotes the idea that one can become addicted to any pleasurable activity.  Certainly, there’s a thread of truth— these are all compulsive behaviors that can impact people’s lives to varying degrees.  But how similar are they at a biological level?  Is video game addiction or gambling addiction or food addiction really like drug addiction in terms of life impact or brain function  or are these terms just an example of metaphoric language? 

Both gambling and video game addictions meet many…

Are pleasure circuits really activated in natural behaviors?   When a recording electrode is implanted in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), a key region in the pleasure circuit of a rat, this reveals a burst of neuronal activity when the rat begins to eat.  Furthermore, when biochemical probes that can measure dopamine levels are implanted into the target regions of VTA neurons, eating is found to trigger a surge of released dopamine.  Interestingly, VTA activity and dopamine release were most strongly stimulated by consumption of sweet and highly caloric foods.  When drugs that flood the…

I last lived in Berkeley in 1984, my senior year of college.  One day that Spring, I was sitting in the Cafe Mediterraneum on Telegraph Avenue, when the well-known street poet Julia Vinograd walked up hawking her books.  I was fresh out of cash at that point, having blown my last buck on a cup of oolong.  But I did have a stack of photos of various tissues taken with the electron microscope that very morning.  So we swapped-- one book of poetry for one electron micrograph of cardiac muscle.

Last week, I was back in Berkeley to give a seminar and I wandered into the Med, feeling nostalgic.  Who…

I know what you’re thinking: what does it feel like for a human to have his or her medial forebrain reward circuitry stimulated with an electrode?  Does it produce a crazy pleasure that’s better than food or sex or sleep or even “Seinfeld” reruns?  We know the answer.  However, the bad news is that it comes, in part, from some deeply unethical experiments.   Dr. Robert Galbraith Heath was the founder and Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry and Neurology at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana.  He served from 1949 to 1980 and during that time, one  major focus of his work involved…

Oslo, 1964.  A malaise had settled over the community of neurobiologists investigating the biological substrates of memory.  Obviously, memories can last for the lifetime of an animal.  Thus it was expected that experience should produce long-lasting changes in neuronal function to underlie the memory trace.  The best guess for the aspect of neuronal function changed by experience was synaptic transmission.  Synaptic transmission is the fundamental mode of rapid communication between neurons and so is central to information processing in the brain. The dominant hypothesis was that particular…

Montréal, 1954.  

Fortunately, Peter Milner and James Olds didn’t have perfect aim with their electrodes.  While postdoctoral fellows at McGill University under the direction of the renowned psychologist Donald Hebb, Olds and Milner were conducting experiments which involved implanting electrodes deep into the brains of rats.  The implanting surgery was done under anesthesia and the electrodes, two of them, half a millimeter apart, were then cemented to the skull.  After a few days to recover from the surgery, the rats were fine.  Long, flexible wires were attached to the electrodes at one end…