On Thursday, an excellent crowd turned out, despite the sharp cold weather, to hear me talk about Neanderthals. I managed to get a fairly good recording on my Iphone, and today I melded it with my slides on Imovie, to create a slideshow of the talk. I’ve embedded the Youtube and the Vimeo versions below. Take your pick.
Archive for the ‘Brains’ Category
Fifty Years of Animal Technology
Over at Psychology Today, I’m in a celebratory mood. It’s been fifty years since Jane Goodall discovered that animals have been making tools. And it’s been downhill ever since. Check it out.
The Once and Future Brain: My guest blog post at Psychology Today
Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be writing some posts over at Psychology Today in conjunction with the publication of Brain Cuttings. Here’s my first, on the hazards of trying to predict the future of the brain.
The traffic jam in your head (now with Slashdot goodness)
My new brain column for Discover is online, and it’s about one of the weirder failings of our mind: the way our thoughts can get stuck in a traffic jam. When we are required to do two things in quick succession–like answer a cell phone and hit the brakes–our brains freeze up for an instant. Researchers have known about this so-called psychological refractory period for decades, but they’re still trying to figure out how, and why, it happens. As I explain in my column, this inner weakness may actually reveal an inner strength. Check it out. (And thanks to Slashdot for the tsunami of link love.)
My new brain column: Tinnitus, from ears to consciousness
My new column for Discover is about tinnitus, the ringing in the ears that affects a third of all people at some point in their lives. While tinnitus may seem to like it’s in our ears, its source actually lies deep within our brains–possibly spread across the networks of neurons that make us consciously aware of our lives. The better scientists can appreciate its full reach, the better they may be able to treat it. Check it out.
[Update: Link fixed to take you to the first page of the column, not the second.]
Harnessing Your Marilyn Monroe Neurons
Deep in your brain there are probably several thousand neurons that will respond only to the sight of Lady Gaga. Several thousand others probably only crackle to the sight of Justin Bieber. It might be nice to reassign those neurons to loftier thoughts. For now, though, neurology can’t help you. What neurology can do for you (if you’re up for a little invasive brain surgery) is let you use those Gaga and Bieber neurons to control a computer.
In an unprecedented fusion of pop culture and neurosurgery, scientists at Caltech have invented a surreal brain-machine interface. The history leading up to this discovery goes back to the 1990s, when Itzhak Fried, a neurosurgeon at UCLA, began to collaborate with neuroscientists who wanted to probe the brain from the inside. Fried would sometimes have to perform surgery on people with epilepsy in order to reduce their seizures. First he would implant electrodes in the brains of his patients, so that he could unleash small bursts of current from them. When one of the electrodes triggered epilepsy-like firing from the neighboring neurons, he knew he had found the patch of brain that had to be removed. Sometimes Fried would also implant thin wires into the same regions of the brain that could detect the activity of the neurons in the neighborhood. He then closed up the heads of his patients, and they spent several days hanging out in the hospital with electrodes and wires trailing from their heads. The neuroscientists could show them various pictures or play them various sounds, and listen to the response from the neurons. In some cases, the wires were positioned right next to individual neurons, allowing the scientists to listen to them one by one.
Fried’s collaborators discovered that some of these individual neurons responded faithfully to certain kinds of sights. Some only responded to faces with sad expressions, others only to happy faces. Some only responded to houses. In 2005, however, Christof Koch of Caltech and his colleagues decided to get more fine-grained. They showed pictures of actors and actresses. They found individual neurons that responded almost exclusivey to Jennifer Aniston. Others only responded to Saddam Hussein, others to Pamela Anderson, and so on.
Later, the researchers found that people can develop these so-called “Jennifer Aniston neurons” for anyone they become familiar with in a matter of days. The neurons start out relatively weak, but get stronger with familiarity. The picture of a loved one will trigger a loved-one neuron to fire a lot more strongly than a neuron dedicated to an obscure D-list celebrity. Fortunately, these neurons are not limited to Hollywood celebrities. They seem to be the medium in which we encode any kind of concept. We probably can store ten to thirty thousand concepts in our brains, each of which is encoded in an estimated several thousand Jennifer Anniston neurons. (I talk more about the history of this research in Brain Cuttings, and in this column for Discover.)
In a flash of mad genius, Koch and his colleagues wondered if people could use biofeedback to control the strength of these neurons. They interviewed twelve patients, and in each case they identified four celebrities who triggered particularly strong responses from their individual neurons. Then they superimposed two of those celebrities–in one case, Josh Brolin and Marylyn Monroe–on a computer screen. The patients were told to try to shift the picture to one celebrity or the other. The computer was programmed to alter the balance of the images in response to the firing of the Brolin and Monroe neurons. As the Monroe neurons got stronger and the Brolin neurons weaker, for example, the screen would go all Monroe.
This movie shows what happened. On the early trials, the image of the screen sometimes veered back and forth between Brolin and Monroe, as if shifting between channels. But within a few trials, patients could get the hang of the game and push the screen to the correct image in a matter of seconds.
For now, this technology is profoundly limited. There’s no way to eavesdrop on individual neurons from the outside of the brain, so invasive brain surgery is mandatory. But this technology does have some big advantages over other brain-machine interfaces. Up till now, these devices have typically allowed people to control a cursor on a screen or a robotic limb. But this new system taps directly into the concepts of our minds. Someday it might be possible to choose among thousands of concepts to put up on a computer screen for all to see. Let’s just hope that if that marvelous day ever comes, we can think about things worth sharing.
Reference: Cerf et al, On-line, voluntary control of human temporal lobe neurons. Nature, October 28, 2010. doi:10.1038/nature09510
Portraits of the Mind: The Loom’s First Photoessay!
A few months ago a neuroscientist named Carl Schoonover sent me the galleys of a coffee table book made for my kind of coffee table. It’s a visual history of the brain, using images to tell the story of neuroscience from its earliest roots to today’s awesome brain scans and micrographs. The book, called Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century is just out. So rather than just blurb and run, I thought I’d share a peek into it with you.
Brain Cuttings goes podcast!
Chris Mooney, my fellow Discover blogger, hosts a podcast called Point of Inquiry, and I’m the guest on his new episode. On the occasion of the publication of Brain Cuttings, we talk about the thinking glue that holds our brains together, Francis Collins’s views on the evolution of morality, and the future of books. Check it out!
Brain Cuttings at Mind Hacks and Neurotribes
Thanks to two of my favorite brain bloggers for taking an interest in Brain Cuttings.
Vaughan Bell at Mind Hacks offers up a classic book review for something that is not quite a book:
Whether you are an enthusiast, a professional psychologist or neuroscientist, or a combination, you will probably learn much from the book due to its breadth of vision. Regardless of who you are you are sure to enjoy the engaging immersions in some of the most interesting ideas in contemporary science.
And over at Neurotribes, science writer Steve Silberman publishes a conversation he and I had the other day on what ebooks mean for our ilk, and our readers. This was not an interview, with pat questions that could have been programmed into a computer. This was instead a long talk, because the subject is something that interests us both. In fact, Silberman wrote a Wired article back in the last century–1998–about the first glimpse of ebooks. Check it out.
My essay in the Atlantic: On ebooks, writers, and the myth of solitude
Over at the Atlantic, I describe my experience creating an ebook. First lesson: I don’t want to be the author of a Microsoft Word file. Check it out.
My deep thanks to Alexis Madrigal, the technology editor at the Atlantic, for inviting me to contribute my thoughts.
My new book–ebook, that is: Brain Cuttings
I’d like to introduce you to my latest book. It’s called Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through The Mind. (Amazon / BN/ Mobipocket ) It’s my ninth book, but it’s my first dip into a new kind of publishing. And it was spurred on by you, dear reader.
Last year I put a survey on the Loom to find out about your reading habits—current and future. The 761 responses I got were surprising in a lot of ways, and they guided my thinking about what sort of new kinds of formats I could explore. I’ve been especially curious about how books can become blogified: in other words, writers can think up ideas for books, create them, and then quickly offer them up for sale at places like Amazon, regardless of whether they fit into the well-worn grooves of traditional publishing.
As a first foray, I decided to gather my favorite recent pieces on the brain. Some readers may have come across one or two of my published pieces over the past couple years, but I wanted to offer them a bunch of them—fifteen to be exact—in one place. Collections have always thrived on this convenience. If you’re a fan of Joseph Mitchell, for example, you could track down all of his pieces in individual issues of the New Yorker. Or you could just buy Up in the Old Hotel.
Ebooks are thriving on convenience too. You can read a lot of things for free online, but you need the patience to hunt for them amidst a lot of mediocre writing, pop-up ads, and text so poorly designed it burns out your visual cortex. Or you can tap the “buy” button on an e-reader and having a well-crafted book in seconds. The convenience sometimes borders on addiction. Finished The Thousand Autumns of Jacob Zoet? Well, David Mitchell’s previous book, Cloud Atlas awaits.
So I brought together fifteen of my favorite pieces. Fourteen of them are from Discover, and the final one is a long feature that I published in January in Playboy on the future of the brain—as seen through the funhouse prism that is a movement called the Singularity. I’ve edited them all, updating some of the science and giving them more of a unified feel of a book. Scott & Nix have given the book a lovely design and made sure it stays lovely in the various incarnations ebooks take these days.
I hope you’ll consider getting a copy, and passing on the word to anyone with a serious ebook addiction, or just a long flight to Phoenix to get through. Here’s the Kindle page, and Barnes and Noble’s. I’ve set up a page on my web site with more information. Other links are coming up in a fairly unpredictable way; I’ll update the book page as they arrive.
If you do get Brain Cuttings, please tell me what you think. This is still very much an experiment, and it’s not over. You can post a comment on this post or send me an email. (And if any bloggers, book reviewers, neuro-folk, or new media people would like a review copy, just get in touch.)
While working on Brain Cuttings, I’ve been thinking a lot about where science writing is headed, and I’ll be sharing some of my thoughts tonight at the Koshland Science Museum. Join us if you can (I think some seats are still left), or watch (and participate) through this livestream. I’ll also be thinking out loud in some future posts.
Let me leave you with some of the kind endorsements I’ve gotten for Brain Cuttings:
“Carl Zimmer takes us behind the scenes in our own heads. He has ferreted out all the most wondrous, bizarre stories and studies and served them up in this delicious, sizzling, easy-to-digest platter of neuro-goodness.” —Mary Roach, author of Packing for Mars and Stiff
“If you want to jump start your knowledge about how the brain does all those marvelous things for us like think, feel, and deal with others, read these essays. Zimmer has the rare capacity to get the science right and make it all feel like a glass of smooth bourbon.” —Michael Gazzaniga, Director for the SAGE Center for the Study of Mind at the University of California Santa Barbara, author of Human: The Science of What Makes Us Unique.
“These essays combine that rare blend of precision and wonder, hard-nosed reporting and nose for the poetically spooky. The brain should be very pleased to have Carl Zimmer as its scribe.” —Jad Abumrad, host and creator of Radiolab
“Carl Zimmer is one of the finest science writers around. In this fascinating tour of the brain, he explores the meaning of time, the genetic tug of war between parents, the science of anesthesia and a dozen other absorbing tales of the meaty computer inside our head.” —Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide and Proust Was a Neuroscientist
“Few writers are as clear and wide-ranging as Zimmer. In these fifteen day-trips into modern neuroscience, he clears away the fog of jargon to give us a clear view of the newly discovered land.”—David Eagleman, Baylor College of Medicine, author of Sum
Monkey self-recognition? Not so fast!
Last week I posted a story about an experiment suggesting monkeys can recognize themselves in the mirror. One of the experts I contacted was Peter G. Roma, who was the lead author of a 2007 paper that failed to find evidence for this kind of self-recognition. Roma responded today with an interesting response, which I’m posting here, and at the end of the original post...
Although the video samples are provocative, I cannot agree with the conclusion (and title) of the paper.
The lack of social behaviors towards the mirror is irrelevant because the monkeys all had an extensive history with mirrors prior to the study, so there was no reason to expect social responses after years of habituation to reflective surfaces. To anthropomorphize, they may still think the monkey in the mirror is another animal, but over the years they’ve learned that he’s harmless.
The examples of putative genital viewing were not convincing either. The authors repeatedly asserted that the monkeys used the mirrors to view areas they could not see directly, but monkeys can see their genitals unaided, and they play with them all the time with or without mirrors! Even the video samples show the monkeys looking at their genitals directly then viewing the same area(s) in the mirror. This is why scientists do the mark test!
In my view, the most compelling evidence was the first video of the monkey touching the head implant while holding the mirror. There is no doubt that the monkeys could not see the implant without a reflective surface, but the key here is whether or not this self-examination behavior occurred more frequently in the presence of the mirror vs. without. The authors report increased incidence of touching “unseen” areas in the presence of the mirror (figure 2C), but these data include touching the cranial implant and the genitals. I suspect these data are artificially inflated by what the authors perceive as mirror-guided genital examination, which even in the video examples did not appear to be anything more than typical stereotyped “acrobatic” behaviors often seen in individually-housed rhesus monkeys. The authors provide no data on the frequency of just cranial implant touching with vs. without mirrors, and no visual evidence except for the single incident from the video. Why wouldn’t they report the number of implant explorations independently of the genital viewing?
My primary concern is that all monkeys failed the mark test, and the strongest apparent evidence of mirror self-recognition (MSR) was only seen in two monkeys following cranial surgery–a manipulation with strong tactile cues that could elicit exploration regardless of the mirror’s presence. Their argument rests largely on the assertion that the cranial implant is a “super mark” that somehow awakened a latent ability in the monkeys to self-recognize, but it’s unclear why the implant would be more visually salient than a brightly contrasting color marking on the face. The more parsimonious conclusion is that the tactile sensation of the implant was enough to elicit exploration, but even then, the authors provide no evidence that implant exploration occurred more frequently in the presence of the mirror vs. without.
If the authors’ hypothesis is true that a cranial implant serves as a “super mark,” then their procedures warrant replication, which frankly they should have done before making such a bold assertion. Currently within the Order Primates, the overwhelming preponderance of evidence still limits MSR and the fundamental cognitive precursor to a “sense of self” to the apes.
