In the latest issue of Scientific American, I have a feature on the biology of intelligence. (Read it online at sciam.com or carlzimmer.com) I’ve been fascinated by the subject for a long time, and I decided recently that the time was right to put together an article.
What’s the news? That there is no news.
Allow me to explain…
The October issue of Discover is just out, and it has my second brain column (following up on my first, on the perception of time). This time around, I take a look at our unconscious, considering just how powerful it can be. But don’t get too disturbed by that inner zombie. Our conscious minds are not just helpless moviegoers in the theater of the brain. They have work to do as well. Check it out.
Earlier this year I wrote in the New York Times about the remarkable minds of hyenas. The evolution of their brains appears to have followed the same pattern ours have: an increasingly social life drives the expansion of some parts of their brains. This research is the work of Kay Holekamp, a zoologist at Michigan State University who has spent many years observing hyenas in East Africa. And now, continuing a trend that should strike fear into the heart of any science writer, another of my subjects has started a blog of her own. Notes from Kenya chronicles the adventures of Holekamp and her colleagues in their new field season watching spotted hyenas. (The picture above is from a recent spat they had with a lion.) Check it out.
Writing about the brain is one of the Black-Diamond challenges of science writing. We all think we know what’s going in our heads, and yet the cells and neurotransmitters and signal patterns don’t fit comfortably into our everyday metaphors. Linguist Mark Liberman at Language Log regularly writes devastating posts about how lousy a job journalists sometimes do writing about neuroscience news–especially when the research touches on our pat assumptions and stereotypes. (”See, women really do think differently…” etc.)
I’ve written a lot about the brain in the past (including a book about the dawn of neurology), but now I’m setting out to write a column every month for Discover about our gray matter. The first one is now online: it’s about how we perceive time. The first thing I had to do was throw out the metaphor of the clock, because it just doesn’t do a good job of capturing our brains’ beautiful strategies for gauging the flow of now into yesterday.
As I write these pieces, I hope that readers will leave comments–neuroscientists if you’re out there, and everyone else. I hope to get things right; I expect to get things wrong; and I’m prepared to learn along the way.
[Image: Fabiola Medeiros, reprinted under a Creative Commons licence]
I’ve been pretty quiet on the blog while I’ve been off visiting grandparents in other states this past week. But in the meantime, Slate has published a piece I wrote for them on the beguiling mystery of octopus brains. I wonder if this guy would find it enlightening.
Update: A couple readers pointed out to me that I should have said octopuses jet water, not air. Sorry for the slip–it should be fixed shortly.
My newest “Dissection” column is up at Wired.com. This time around, I take a look at how our brains relay signals. They turn out to do a terrible job. What’s impressive is how they clean up their own mess. Check it out.
[Image via Vesalius Gallery]
(update 4.4.08 9:30 am: link fixed)
Hyenas are fascinating in many ways, such as the way female spotted hyenas are equipped with a penis of sorts (pdf). In tomorrow’s New York Times, I look at a new kind of fascination: hyena brains. Hyenas have a remarkably complex social life, and it appears to have altered the shape and size of their brains. The same social forces were at work in our own ancestors. Humans and hyenas, in other words, have been rolling on parallel evolutionary tracks.
For further details, check out the densely packed web site of Kay Holekamp, the biologist who has been investigating the social hyena brain. And don’t miss the slide show the Times has put together for my article.
When one of the founders of cognitive neuroscience is helping you plumb the mysteries of consciousness, the self, free will, and the two minds that coexist in our skulls, it helps every now and then to touch your nose. To understand why touching your nose is such a profound experience, check out my talk today on bloggingheads with Mike Gazzaniga.
(And if you want to see what Mike was like as a young post-doc 50 years ago, check out this video from the early1960s about his split brain research. It’s also evidence of how much science documentaries have changed…)
Last year I wrote about the emerald cockroach wasp, Ampulex compressa, which injects venom into cockroaches to turn them into zombie hosts for their parasitic offspring. (More posts on Ampulex here.) The scientists I wrote about have been trying to figure out what exactly the venom does to the nervous system of their victims, and they’ve discovered that it interferes with a neurotransmitter called octopamine. New Scientist has an update. And they also have a link to a YouTube video that offers more than you may want to see of this awesome parasitic manipulation.
The article I wrote for Scientific American in 2005 on the self has been anthologized in a new book: The Best of the Brain from Scientific American: Mind, Matter, and Tomorrows’ Brain. Check out the book’s line-up, which Oliver Sacks calls, “an irresistible guide to this new territory.”
Larry Moran passes on the rules of the game: go to the Wellcome Library’s new image bank and find your favorite scientific image. Here’s my pick: the first good picture of the brain, drawn by Christopher Wren in 1664 for Thomas Willis, the first neurologist. (More on Willis and Wren here.)
[Credit: Wellcome Institute, Creative Commons License.]
Reports are coming out this morning on a new study on one of the Loom’s favorite organisms: Toxoplasma gondii, the single-celled parasite that lives in roughly half of all people on Earth and has the ability to alter the behavior of its host. I reported on the research last June in the New York Times, when the Stanford researchers reported their results at a scientific conference. It’s nice to finally get the results on paper, though.
The study is a fine example of an underappreciated part of science: replication. In 2000 British researchers carried out a study in which they put healthy and Toxoplasma infected rats in an outdoor enclosure and watched them nose around. They added odors to some of the corners of the enclosure; sometimes the odor of rats, sometimes of rabbits, sometimes of cat urine. They found that healthy rats were deeply affected by the scent of a cat, becoming less curious. Parasite-infested rats showed no fear. They proposed that the shift in behavior was an adaptation of the parasite for getting into its final host–cats. (I included a description of this study in my book Parasite Rex.)
It was a remarkable result, but even remarkable results may not be so significant as they seem at first. They need to be replicated by other researchers. That’s what the Stanford team has now done. They set up an enclosure, set both rats and mice loose in it, and observed a significant difference between infected and parasite-free hosts. The animals were actually attracted to the smell of cats. The Stanford team went beyond mere replication, however. They took a closer look at how the parasites manipulate their hosts.
Carl Zimmer writes about science regularly for the New York Times and magazines such as Discover, where he is a contributing editor and columnist.
He is the author of seven books, the most recent of which is The Tangled Bank: An Introduction To Evolution. His website is carlzimmer.com and his address is [ blog at carlzimmer dot com ].
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