The Accidental Mind

The folks at winningstate.com, who would like to sell you a series of books designed to help you achieve success in competitive sports, have made a huge neuroscientific discovery:  'doubt," that old devil, is located in the mesencephalon.  And it will fuck you up, Jack.

"She was just a normal professor," he told The Associated Press during an interview at his home Monday.

I looked up from my desk on Monday to find I had some company here on the 9th floor of the Hunterian Building.

aka juvenile Nazca Booby.  Genovesa Island, Galapagos, December 2009.

Boy with Sea Lion.  Espanola Island, Galapagos, December 2009

What happens in our brains when we fall in love?  For that matter, what happens to scientists that study the act of falling in love?  There’s something about this topic that makes otherwise hard-nosed biologists and anthropologists get all mushy and literary and start quoting the impassioned lines of Shakespeare, Ovid and Dante in their scientific papers.  In this spirit. I would like to offer my all-time-favorite love poem.  In my view, it gets to the heart of the matter.

I don’t want a physical relationship.

I just want someone to fuck with my mind.

                -Personal ad in the “L.A.…

"Though, as my reader will learn in the pages to follow, I am, when circumstances dictate, able to adopt the most plastic of morals, the strangulation of children rests firmly in the category of things I will not tolerate."

               -David Liss, The Devil's Company

Min Tan and co-workers provide a seminal contributiuon to the scientific literature, with their new report "Fellatio by Fruit Bats Prolongs Copulation Time" which recently appeared in the journal PLoS One.  The key detail here is that, for the short-nosed fruit-bat Cynopterus sphinx, the fellatio is not foreplay.  It actually happens during intercourse as shown below:

The money quote: "Female bats often lick their mate's penis during dorsoventral copulation. The female lowers her head to lick the shaft or the base of the male's penis but does not lick the glans penis which has already…

My old pal Jan Steckel has written a wonderful story called "Protection" that hits all of the great literary themes: infectious disease, wise old Jewish grandmas and dog-fucking.  Read it here at the "Zygote in My Coffee" online magazine.

When I was in high school in the 1970s I couldn't get enough of his poetry-- I thought Living At The Movies was just about the best book ever.  

your fingers like another's darkness. it's true,

you are always too near and I am everything

that comes moaning free and wet

through the lips of our lovely grind

excerpted from "Blue Poles"

His punk band had a certain appeal as well.  And he never let the fact that he couldn't quite sing get in the way...

Obituary: New York Times.

Paul slumped back in his chair.  "You should see him eat a banana," he said.  "It cures you of any love you might still have for the human race."

     --  Marjorie Kernan, The Ballad of West Tenth Street

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…

The afternoon rains have ended leaving the air briefly free of smog and allowing that distinctive Thai perfume, frangipani with a faint note of sewage, to waft over the shiny streets.  It’s the early evening.  I hail a tuk-tuk, a 3-wheel motorcycle taxi, and hop aboard.  My young driver has an entrepreneurial smile as his turns around.

“So….you want girl?”

“No.”

“I see.” 

Long pause, eyebrows slowly raised. “You want boy!”

“Uh, no.”

Longer pause.  Sound of engine sputtering at idle.  “You want ladyboy?”

“No.”

“I got cheap cigarettes…Johnnie Walker...”

“No thanks.”

Voice lowered.  “You want ganja?”

…

For those of you who just can't get enough of me running my mouth on the topic of brain evolution, here's a podcast from the American Physiological Society aka The Home Team.  It's episode 12 of the "Life Lines" series and it also features kewl nooz on athletic blood doping and fetal alcohol syndrome.

Phil Hogan, writing in The Observer (UK), says he's made it up to Chapter 5 in The Accidental Mind and offers this useful summary of the book so far...

"Now, where was I? Ah, the book, The Accidental Mind by David J Linden. It's brilliant, I'm sure, though the more I read the less I know. I gather from his general thesis that brains are not as brilliantly engineered as we like to think. We might have a hundred billion cells going at it round the clock but they're constantly misfiring or getting the wrong end of the stick. Brains are more Heath Robinson than Bill Gates, having evolved over the…

.

Apparently, The Accidental Mind has won the Silver Medal in the "Science" category at the 2008 Independent Publisher Book Awards.  I didn't even know I was entered and only learned about the award through the dubious practice of self-googling (which is prohibited in many of the world's religious traditions).

On Monday, I unlocked the door to my office and found the place totally trashed.  My scanner was smashed to bits, books were strewn everywhere, my desk and chair were crushed.  My first thought was, "Damn.  Those creationists who've been sending me all the death threats since The Accidental Mind was published managed to get in here."  Then, I realized that all the mayhem resulted from a single action- the huge wall-mounted cabinets full of books had broken loose and had come crashing down (one would have neatly bisected my cranium, had I been sitting at my desk.) Examination of the cabinets…

From the promotional material for Gary Marcus' new book Kluge:

"Are we noble in reason? Perfect, in God's image? Far from it, says New York University psychologist Gary Marcus. In this lucid and revealing book, Marcus argues that the mind is not an elegantly designed organ but rather a "kluge," a clumsy, cobbled-together contraption. He unveils a fundamentally new way of looking at the human mind -- think duct tape, not supercomputer -- that sheds light on some of the most mysterious aspects of human nature."

Damn, that's clever.  I wish I had thought of that.   From Chapter 1 of The…

"Closure is a greasy little word which, moreover, describes a nonexistent condition.  The truth, Venus, is that nobody ever gets over anything."

--Martin Amis, House of Meetings

The Times of London reports that British neurosurgeon Henry Marsh has been visiting Kiev in the Ukraine, twice a year, in order to assist and train a Ukrainian colleague.  In London, Marsh would use an expensive  (30,000 pound) specialized medical drill to create holes on the skull.  But, due to lack of funds in Kiev, he and his colleague have made do with a handheld Bosch drill favored by home hobbyists.  Cost: 30 pounds.  If this cheapskate solution becomes known in the USA, I'm afraid that the insurance companies will reimburse for nothing else.

From Germany comes the latest in backpacker cuisine, the cheeseburger in a can.  A steal at 3.95 euros.

To paraphrase Michael Pollan...

"Eat beef.  Processed in a factory.  With lots of packaging."

Update:  they also sell dehydrated wine.  I swear.  I couldn't make this up if I tried.

In my family, when we get our teeth into a joke, we don't like to let go until it's good and dead.

This amazing little dude looks like a Pokémon, but is really a long-eared jerboa, an endangered nocturnal hopping rodent from the Gobi Desert.

via BBC News.

The New York Times released its list of "100 Notable Books of 2007" a few days ago.  Lots of good stuff there.  Novels by Ha Jin, Richard Russo and Haruki Murakami.  Stories by William Trevor and Alice Munro.  History, Biography, Politics.  How about Science?  Well, no.  Out of a selection of 100 books published this year, the number of "notable" science books was zero. Go team.

Tree of Smoke is the title of a kick-ass-wonderful new novel by Denis Johnson.  Set in a CIA Psy Ops Group in Vietnam in 1967, it offers this nugget of neurophilosophy:

"Something's warping you," Jimmy told the lieutenant.  "Maybe it's your perception of how the brass will see you-- but they're not seeing you at all right now, so it's a perception of a nonperception, man, which is a perception of nothing, which is nothing, man."

from the amazing Joe Sayers.

So, I know that I've hit the big time now that I'm featured in the November issue of Real Simple magazine.  Did they want my great recipe for Moroccan Lamb Tagine?  My helpful hints for getting rid of stubborn stains using only natural ingredients?  No.  They wanted to talk about brain activation in memory and dreaming.

From the article by Kristyn Kusek Lewis:

"When scientists do brain scans on subjects during REM sleep they find that the visual center of the brain, the dominant area that processes all the new information people encounter while awake, is shut down.  The visual memory center,…

Deathswitch.com is website that offers an interesting and unique service.  From their description: 

"Imagine that you die with computer passwords in yur head, leaving coworkers without access to critical files.  Imagine that your loved ones cannot find your bank accounts, or that you die with a secret that that you longed to reveal in your lifetime.  A deathswitch is an automated system that prompts you for your password to make sure you are still alive.  When you do not enter your password for some [user determined] period of time, the system prompts you again several times.  With no reply,…

...has a sign which announces the following (as an ad for their spa).

"Foot soaking in Springtime will strengthen Yang and reinforce vital energy.  In Summer, it will dispel disease caused by heat and dampness.  In Autumn, it will lubricate the intestines and in Winter, it will warm the pubic region."

Well, I'm sold.  Dude, sign me up.

.

 .