The Brain

For the past two weeks I have been vexed by an ad on the 151 CTA bus I take to work everyday. It features puzzle- a pie with eight pieces, each of which contain a number. Two of these numbers are missing, and it’s the viewer’s job to figure out what they’re supposed to be.

The reason this ad bothered me so much is because the answer was not written upside down on the bottom of the poster, as one might hope. Instead, you have to go to Marbles the Brain Store and ask an associate (which makes sense, from a marketing perspective). So, this past Friday night, I was very excited to happen upon a Marbles in the new wing of Old Orchard Mall in Skokie.

The bad news: I was not at all correct. The good news? (Read more…)

The ability to do math has long been thought of as a purely human trait – it comes with the whole higher-intelligence thing. But what if the ability to do math wasn’t as restricted to our makeup as we thought? Are we really as special as we think we are, or is our ego much larger than our reality?

Recent studies are turning up mathematical abilities in many different species of animals. Chickens, bees, and of course monkeys have all shown promise in being able to deal with simple mathematical operations, like differentiating between numbers, counting, and summing. The animals are performing math linguistically like we do – they are not physically counting out objects or identifying numbers. Rather, it is some sort of innate ability constituting rough math. (Read more…)

This week, the New York Times published a nice profile on Nobel Laureate Martin Chalfie at Columbia University. Chalfie shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry last year for his work on an amazing protein found in jellyfish called Green Fluorescent Protein, or GFP. The article is a great reminder of how very basic research on jellyfish and worms, of all things, yields invaluable scientific tools and knowledge.

GFP has the natural property of absorbing invisible ultraviolet light and producing green light – a discovery made in 1961 by Osamu Shimomura (who also shared the 2008 Nobel Award with Roger Tsien and Chalfie).

Chalfie’s “aha” moment, in 1989 at a department seminar, was a recognition that the light-producing properties of GFP could be harnessed as a sort of molecular flashlight. (Read more…)

While in my home state of Minnesota last week on vacation, I read a very troublesome editorial in the Minneapolis Star Tribune. On display at mall: Human indignity, written by columnist Katherine Kersten, takes to task Bodies… The Exhibition, a Body-Worlds-type exhibit that opened recently at the famed Mall of America.

For those unfamiliar with Body Worlds, this traveling anatomical exhibit of real human bodies has proven very popular and successful in demystifying our inner workings. It respectfully showcases the elegance of our anatomical structure, and provides visual lessons about the destructive outcomes of smoking and obesity. The smoker’s lung is not pretty.

Kersten’s opening salvo:

If you’re heading to the Mall of America this weekend, you’ll find something new to gawk at, along with the lacy lingerie at Victoria’s Secret and the sea horses at Underwater Adventures. It’s “Bodies … the Exhibition,” a show that features human cadavers.

Really? C’mon. Comparing an aquarium, a human physiology/health exhibit, and scantily-clad Victoria’s Secret models is the beginning of, well, a scantily-clad argument.

She goes on to use terms like “high-falutin’” when describing the exhibit’s educational goals.  She criticizes the choice of location for the exhibit, the Mall of America, as being too commercial (shouldn’t exhibits be held where the people are?). The issue of whether or not the exhibit bodies were procured according to accepted medical standard, raised midway through the article, is a very valid and important concern. Kerstens, however, quickly returns to the crux of her argument:

At “Bodies … the Exhibition,” we sense the danger of a line being crossed. The issues the show raises intersect with many of the important questions we face about the nature of humanity in our scientific age.

In short, she thinks the exhibit is in poor taste and that it markets death as entertainment. I don’t see it that way at all. (Read more…)

This past Friday, I listened to an interesting story on National Public Radio about the science of what some considered to be near-death experiences. It focused on the account of one woman, Pam Reynolds, who underwent surgery to remove a leaking aneurysm on her brain stem. Because of its size and location, her surgeon, Robert Spetzler of Barrow Neurological Institute in Arizona, chose to place her in “cardiac standstill” during the operation– after lowering her body temperature to 60 degrees, she would flat-line, allowing the doctors to drain the blood from her head and remove the aneursym. According to Spetzler, Reynolds was “as deeply comatose as you can be and still be alive.”

After being placed unconscious, Reynolds remembers hearing a noise and suddenly feeling like she “popped out of the top of her head.” After observing some of the details of her surroundings– the number of doctors, the instruments they were using, and a conversation about the arteries in her groin– she noticed a tunnel and a white light, which appeared around the time doctors lowered her body temperature. She then conversed with her dead uncle and grandmother, who later brought her back to her body. Upon re-entry, she heard “Hotel California” playing in the hospital waiting room.

Afterward, Reynolds assumed she had been hallucinating. After all, her eyelids were taped shut the whole time, and speakers had been placed in her ears that made noises as loud as a plane taking off (these allowed surgeons to monitor her brain stem activity).

However, in a discussion with Spetzler years later, she discovered that her hallucination matched his memory of the actual operation. Michael Sabom, a cardiologist who researches near-death experiences, later examined the details of Reynolds’ account against hospital records. Again, every detail down to the conversation about her arteries, matched.

So how is this possible, when Reynolds couldn’t hear or see? Can a person really be “conscious” outside of their physical body? (Read more…)

In the past two postings I’ve talked about my experience working with the Science Entertainment Exchange, which aims to improve the quality of science in movies and other forms of entertainment by connecting movie and TV people with scientists who have expertise in something related to their story lines. In my last posting, I addressed some creative ways in which scientists and engineers can be helpful in this endeavor. In this posting, I will address how the entertainment industry can further the agenda of scientists and engineers.

Ten years ago, while I was doing my PhD in neuroscience at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, the ABC TV news show “Primetime Live” decided to do an exposé on wasteful government funding of science. Their strategy was to ask the main funding agencies for a list of the titles of currently funded projects and pick the ones that sounded the most “out there.” Since my lab was studying prey capture in weakly-electric fish, the project I was working on got picked. Luckily, the executive producer was well informed about science and after trips to several of the labs, where he found that the selected projects had excellent justifications, they switched the tone of the show. It became about how seemingly strange and obscure basic science projects have led to revolutions in our understanding of everything from genetics to brain plasticity. (Read more…)

Welcome to my corner – or loose confederacy of evanescent electrons – of the Science in Society Blog. My primary charges are issues in brain science and engineering, my main areas of research. I’m an assistant professor in the Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University. Because two departments means only two Christmas parties, clearly not enough, I’m also adjunct in the Department of Neurobiology and Physiology.

My background is quite varied, with degrees in philosophy, computer science, and neuroscience, and on-the-job training in artificial intelligence and mechanical engineering. A highly abbreviated history is that I started out with the aim of making an artificially intelligent system with human-like capabilities, and I’ve settled for the more practical goal of making an artificially intelligent fish. This work is driven by more general questions about the ways in which the body is clever, and how that fits with more readily recognized forms of cleverness that are identified with the nervous system. The body evolved in close coordination with the nervous system over the past 635 million years, so it should be no surprise that there’s a lot going on in that interaction. The main approaches I use for working on these problems are biological investigations, computer simulations, and robotics.

I’m excited by this opportunity to blog about issues at the intersection of science and society, as I’ve long been interested in bringing research to the broader community. In the past I’ve done this through an interactive art installation project in LA and through working on projects between Northwestern University and the Shedd Aquarium.

Most recently, I was involved with the Science Entertainment Exchange (SEE). SEE is a new program sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences, with the goal of connecting entertainment industry folks (thus far, mostly movie types) with scientists. (Read more…)

This Scientific American article explores how magicians use the brain’s wiring to produce illusions.

For example, “change blindness” is the tendency of a viewer not to notice significant visual changes in a particular scene if they are masked by a temporary flicker, rapid movement, or other interruption (for a dramatic demonstration, watch this video). Because the pre- and post-change environments cannot be compared side by side, the changes are missed.

The article gives other neat examples, too, like the tendency of our visual system to follow movement, which can be covertly manipulated by the magician with head or hand movements.  Straight or curved hand motions affect our visual system in different ways, producing different levels of attention on the gesture.

Original Article

Click on the link below to view the winning entries for Nikon’s “Small World” photography contest. This contest is “…the leading forum for showcasing the beauty and complexity of life as seen through the light microscope.” Scientists from all over the world submit their entries for this prestigious award.

Give the Nikon site a look. Many of the pictures are quite stunning – true works of art!

Original Article

Inside of each of us is an innate ability to quickly decipher numerical differences between groups  – the number of people waiting in checkout line 1 vs. checkout line 2 – and use this information to our advantage (e.g. picking the shorter line). Researchers from Johns Hopkins University and the Kennedy Krieger Institute have discovered a link between this primal “approximate number” sense and the degree to which individuals are skilled at higher-level, abstract math skills.

In a study of 14 year-olds, the researchers found that the ability to quickly identify differences in the number of colored dots on a slide was positively correlated with the teenager’s ability on a range of standardized math tests – going all the way back to Kindergarten. In other words, if you can quickly decide if there are more yellow or blue dots on a slide, you are more likely to be strong in math.

The study, however, raises a number of important questions: does one’s approximate number sense change as you develop from an infant to young adult? Can it be improved with training (quantity of training or quality of training)? From a brain “wiring” perspective, how does the approximate number sense interact with the abstract, higher-level math sense? Does the correlation hold for a larger sample of teenagers, from different cultures and different parts of the globe? The answers to these questions may eventually shape how early math courses are taught.

Interested in testing your “approximate number” sense? The NYT article has a link to a version of the test.

Original Article