Here’s a neurobiologist’s tale of trying to keep professional distance w/ his monkey study subject, Santiago.
He gets into how he taught Santiago to play a video game and eventually found himself in a battle of wills.
(via Radio Lab)
It feels like it’s taken forever, but the 5th season of WNYC’s Radio Lab is starting this weekend.
Their fist episode is gonna be on choice:
On a journey around the country to understand how emotion and logic interact to guide us through our options, we ponder how we get through the million choices and decisions we make every day. Forget free will, some important decisions could come down to a steaming cup of coffee.
Not sure if WAMU is carrying it, but I know for previous seasons, they eventually put MP3s for download on their web site.
Robert Krulwich (of NPR/Radio Lab) has an interesting story up about the two sets of bacteria that we have inside of us – one passed down from parents, the other a byproduct of our environment:
In studies on mice, their bacteria seems to affect weight gain…
Biologist Jeffrey Gordon of Washington University in St. Louis became quite well known a few years ago for a group of very skinny mice in his lab. The mice were skinny because they had no bacteria in their intestines. Gordon had kept them completely bacteria-free. If a bacteria-free mouse eats, food passes right through the intestine, significantly undigested.So without bacteria, the mouse can eat and eat and eat and never gain weight. But when Gordon exposed the mice to “this big, bad, dirty world,” as Gibson calls it, the mice suddenly turned their food into more calories and gained weight. So bacteria matter. Apparently, they can digest food far more efficiently.
So controlling these bacteria may allow doctors to prevent disease (it seems to be working in mice):
University of Chicago immunologist Alexander Chervonsky, with collaborators from Yale University, recently reported that doses of the right stomach bacteria can stop the development of type 1 diabetes in lab mice. “By changing who is living in our guts, we can prevent type 1 diabetes,” he told The Wall Street Journal.The bottom line: We now have two sets of genes to think about — the ones we got from our parents and the ones of organisms living inside us. Our parents’ genes we can’t change, but the other set? Now that is one of the newest and most exciting fields in cell biology.
I could see this becoming a whole new angle on weight loss…”what kind of bacteria do you have?”
(hat tip Catherine)
Watching Jill Bolte Taylor’s TED talk “My stroke of insight” made me think of Radio Lab’s episode “Who am I?“
This episode included an interview with Julian Keenan, a neurologist that studies self recognition.
Keenan discussed a study involving morph software and a drug that anaesthetises the brain.
He’d photograph his subjects and combine their images with images of famous people using the morph software. Then he’d inject the drug, sodium amatol, into their brain hemispheres and have them look at the images with half their brains turned off.
In Keenan’s own words:
The results were quite interesting: when the right hemisphere was driving the brain and the left hemisphere was anaesthetised, the patients saw their own face out of this morph, and that’s how normals react to these morphs. You generally see your own face in the morphs.However without the right hemisphere, the patients didn’t seem to recognise their own face in the morph, and they identified, they thought the face that we presented them was a famous person’s face.
That the right brain is so crucial in visual recognition and self awareness raises some fundamental questions about how we know who we are, and how informed our sense of self may be.
I wonder whether we can reach an imbalance in brain hemisphere activity not by injecting a chemical but by not actively using the right brain hemisphere on a consistent basis – by living in a society that is driven by left-brained activities.
Thinking about Western Society, America specifically, I could see how the trappings of our culture and economy cultivate extremely overactive left brains…and could lend to more dormant, under-utilized right brains.
All of this makes me wonder whether if we might house under-stimulated, atrophied right brains and/or overstimulated, hyper-developed left brains. And if we did, would leave us imbalanced – and give us a truncated sense of who we are as individuals and possibly even as a society?
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Below is a video from the folks at Science Central that dovetails nicely with the science behind visual recognition and Keenan’s research mentioned above.
I feel as though these studies could point to a deeper level of machinery animating how we frame the other and the amorphous nature of the self.
It sounds like right brain might hold some of the answers to these questions…
