The Accidental Blog

"This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness." - The Dalai Lama

"Free your mind and your ass will follow" - George Clinton

Montréal, May 2009

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Feline Revulsion

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…

Poor Jane

Jane has been feeling totally stressed out.  She is 18 years old and lives with three other girls in a small apartment.  She and her roommates bicker a lot and Jane is clearly at the bottom of the social order.  The others push her around and she tends to avoid them.  Lately, she can’t help but grimace when one of the dominant, bossy girls approaches.  When she lived by herself, Jane was slim and ate a balanced diet, but since she has been in this pressure-cooker of an apartment, she’s taken to snacking all day and all night and choosing high-fat foods over more healthy fare.  Her weight and…

Leah Siegel Covers "In My Life"

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

Listen here.

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via Beatles Complete on Ukulele

Whole Lotta Merda Goin' On: Pisa, Italy

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News Flash:  Barga, Italy May 18, 2009

Extraterrestrial sighted in 12th century hilltop church!

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Gender bias in the peer review process at Journal of Neurophysiology?

Well, probably not.  If you have an individual or institutional subscription to JN, you can read all about it here

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Not That Linden Lab

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."

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Mathematics Education Reimagined

My old pal, Paul Lockhart, has written a brilliant critique of contemporary mathematics education entitled "A Mathematician's Lament: How School Cheats Us Out of Our Most Fascinating and Imaginative Art Form."  

"Sadly, our present system of mathematics education is precisely this kind of nightmare. In fact, if I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done— I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul crushing

ideas…

Laugh Like Hell

The funniest site on the internet is oldjewstellingjokes.com

So go already.

15 milliseconds of fame

In the future, every synapse will be famous for 15 milliseconds.  In this spirit it is worth noting that Sandra Aamodt and Sam Wang briefly mentioned me in their New York Times blog post comparing computers and brains.  Gotta call Mom.

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Huge Forensic Molecular Biology Fuckup

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…

Center for Inquiry Podcast

Those of you who are not already sick of the sound of my voice are welcome to check out  a podcast interview I did recently with D.J. Grothe on his show "Point of Inquiry."

You!  Outta the Gene Pool!

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…

Tweedy Academic

Jeff Tweedy, leader of the bands Wilco and Uncle Tupelo, struggled with an addiction to prescription painkillers and cigarettes.  After successful rehab and several years of clean living he had this to say about his life:

“I've never felt better. I've never been healthier. … I run four or five miles, four or five times a week, but I broke both my legs running too much last summer.  I had stress fractures in both my tibias from running too much. You know, once you're an addict, you're always an addict, so just because I found something good to do doesn't mean I'm not going to hurt myself doing…

The Futility of Intimacy Distilled & Explained So That Even I Can Understand It.  

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”


Here's looking at you, kid

Over at Worth1000, the new Photoshopping contest theme is "Mad Scientists"  This happy guy just got his grant funded by the NIH.

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Man of The Forest

"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? …

I thought I liked the cerebellum...

...but this guy really, really likes the cerebellum.  In sagittal section, no less.

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via streetanatomy.com

"Poisonous fish testicles send 7 Japanese diners to hospital"

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...

The voltage-sensitive sodium channel which initiates neuronal spikes is a key target. Interfere with it and you block essentially all signaling in the brain (and the rest of the nervous system too). Sodium channel toxins have evolved independently in widely different species, but the most famous one is the toxin…

Secret Agent Man

I'm reading Rivka Galchen's first novel, Atmospheric Disturbances, and it's so intelligent and funny and sad that it's giving me a woody.  Tell me that you don't want to read it after this snippet.  I dare you.

"Functionally speaking, Harvey's main problem-- or some might say his "conflict with the consensus view of reality"--  stemmed from a fixed magical belief that he had special skills for controlling weather phenomena, and that he was, consequently, employed as a secret agent for the Royal Academy of Meteorology, an institute whose existence a consensus view of reality would (and this…

Cold Cruel World

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."

Rose colored glasses

Steven Rose, reviews The Accidental Mind and some other recent titles in The Guardian (UK) and says:  

"There is no general "command centre"; rather, all regions are connected by multiple bidirectional pathways, making the brain the paradigm of a self-organising distributed system. Linden provides an accessible and up to date guide through this maze, if you can cope with an excessively cheerful transatlantic style."

Excessively cheerful?  Fuck that shit.  From now on, I'm gonna be a curmudgeon.

Henry Molaison, Amnesiac, R.I.P.

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…

Rocky Mountain National Park, December 2008

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Drill, Baby, Drill

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…

All that Heineken has to go somewhere

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Amsterdam, December 2008.

My favorite comment from a reader:  What's that on the ground?  A kidney stone?

Pleasure without color or depth

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…

Brussels, December, 2008

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Hoop Dreams

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

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Lurve

"The kind of love my mum talks about is full of worry and work and forgiving people and putting up with things and stuff like that.  It's not a lot of fun, that's for sure. If that really is love, the kind my mum talks about, then nobody can ever know if they love somebody, can they?"

--Nick Hornby, Slam

A general theory of pleasure and addiction?

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…

(Your Brain on) Drugs and the Memory of Drugs

Not all psychoactive drugs are addictive and not all people exposed to addictive drugs will become addicts.  While some drugs have a very high potential for addiction, not even the most dangerous substances typically produce addiction in a single dose—repeated exposure is required.  Addiction can be defined as persistent, compulsive drug use, but addiction doesn’t develop all at once.  Rather, it proceeds in stages.  When a drug-user initially gets high on cocaine or heroin or amphetamines or PCP, the experience produces an intense euphoric pleasure and sense of well-being.  However, repeated…

Obesity, Food Addiction & Blunted Pleasure

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…

The worms play pinochle on your snout

Clearly, the pleasure circuits of the brain have not evolved just to be activated by implanted electrodes.  Pleasure is central to survival.  We must experience basic behaviors such as feeding, drinking, mating and care of offspring as pleasurable (rewarding) in order to survive and pass along our genes to the next generation.  Of course, this consideration is not unique to humans.  Indeed, rudimentary pleasure pathways appear quite early in evolutionary history.  Even the roundworm C. elegans, which is a millimeter long and has only 302 neurons in its entire body has some basic pleasure…

Julia at the Med

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'll have the Primordial Soup

"Cooks were not supposed to be political.  Cooks were the mitochondria of humanity; they had their own separate DNA, they floated in a cell and powered it but were not really of it."

--Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections

Orgasmatron?

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…

A Perfectly Nice Monogamous Relationship With This Ravioli

I was in L.A. last week and was lucky to have dinner with my old hometown pal Attila Giri.  She writes a witty and spirited account of our meal and conversation that's way more interesting than anything I could scribble.

Ancient Synaptic History

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…

Every Dog Will Have His Day

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Not Photoshopped!  This is the real current issue of the esteemed scientific journal Nature.  Layout artists have all the fun.

via Blog Around The Clock

Okavango Delta, August 2008

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Aw c'mon honey--  it's ragweed season!

From the journal Medical Hypotheses, comes the ground breaking new article: "Ejaculation as a potential treatment of nasal congestion in mature males" by Sina Zarrintan of Tabriz Medical University, Iran.

"As it is seen, ejaculation can be used as a potential treatment of nasal congestion because its emission phase provides a sympathetic stimulation and subsequent vasoconstriction and nasal decongestion. Also, the refractory period serves as a sympathetic reservoir and maintains the decongestive state for a considerable while. This method does not wish to have the adverse effects of…

The discovery of brain pleasure circuits

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…

Thoughts on medial forebrain dopaminergic reward circuits 

"For the bow cannot stand always bent, nor can human nature or human frailty subsist without some lawful recreation."

- Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

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"Pleasure never comes sincere to man; but lent by heaven upon hard usury."

- John Dryden (Edippus, Act  1, Scene 1)

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