Neuroscience

Although the jury had the case, the Judge Rotenberg Center settled with Andre McCollins' mother yesterday. Fox 25 News in Boston has covered this case diligently, and its article about the settlement writes, "But the attorney representing the Judge Rotenberg Center is not owning up to any mistakes."The Judge Rotenberg Center has a long history of defending its actions, wrapping their use of skin shocks and restraints in sunny graphics and opulent reward centers that make Liberace's home look like understated elegance.But what now? Andre McCollins now has an undisclosed amount of money to…

We know that voting changes your brain a little - just reading that sentence changed your brain a little, so actions and behaviors certainly change us.  But does voting change your descendants? Epigenetics is really a nascent field and that means there is a lot of interpretation. That also means people can try to make the case that politics is genetic. Which means partisan spinmeisters, within science and outside it, will find new avenues for the confirmation bias of their faithful. Chris Mooney, author of The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science - and Reality, has…

Researchers have gotten some clues to primitive consciousness - thanks to anesthesia. People are often groggy when waking from anesthesia, and sometimes struggle. A group of  scientists believe they now know why this may occur: primitive consciousness emerges first.  Using brain imaging techniques in healthy volunteers, a team of scientists have now imaged the process of returning consciousness after general anesthesia. The emergence of consciousness was found to be associated with activations of deep, primitive brain structures rather than the evolutionary younger neocortex. They…

Previous posts, examined possible plant cognitive functions with the Dodder’s parasitism and the complex ability plants have to communicate with other plants and fungi. More impressive are the elaborate abilities of plants to defend themselves. Traps and signals When an animal predator eats the leaves of a plant, some affected plants release chemicals within just five minutes to either repel the predator or trap them. Plants are able to rapidly activate a vast array of genetic and chemical signals to create helpful defensive chemicals, including terpenes, alkaloids, and phenols. …

Previous posts, examined possible plant cognitive functions with the Dodder’s parasitism and the complex ability plants have to communicate with other plants and fungi. More impressive are the elaborate abilities of plants to defend themselves. Traps and signals When an animal predator eats the leaves of a plant, some affected plants release chemicals within just five minutes to either repel the predator or trap them. Plants are able to rapidly activate a vast array of genetic and chemical signals to create helpful defensive chemicals, including terpenes, alkaloids, and phenols. …

In a now-famous experiment, people are told to carefully look for and count certain details of a performance.  During the performance, a man in a gorilla suit walks across the stage, bows, and walks off.  Almost no one sees it.  Why?  Because it wasn’t one of the details they were told to look for and they didn’t expect it. In a recent edition of Science a perspective notes the unusual findings that conscious awareness of sensory objects depends more on signals coming from the cortex down to the sensory pathways than the expected route of coming up through the senses…

Plants, while not generally thought of as being intelligent, do exhibit problem solving, planning, communication, and defensive behavior.  Plants actively search for nutrients and for sunlight. They move their leaves and stems in response to light and can change in which direction they grow in response to different available nutrients.  They can move toward prey and away from competition.  Multiple Senses Plants can sense touch, hearing, smell, and electromagnetic waves.  Plants such as the Mimosa close their leaves upon touch. Some plants respond to noises with changes…

Most of the time, we do not think of plants as having the ability to plan, move, and attack. Certain behaviors of plants have been known for many years, such as the ability to turn to face sunlight, to open and close leaves each day and night, and to catch insects. It is only recently that the behavior of plants has moved into the center of biological research, with some striking findings that raise further questions about what plants know and what they are able to do. We are beginning to see complex communication between plants, and elaborate defenses against invaders. A Plant Predator The…

For many years, it was thought that new brain cells could not develop in adulthood and that the connections between nerves were fairly static after childhood.  This was primarily because it wasn’t possible to see the microscopic details of changes that occurred inside and between neurons.  Also, since many brain-injured patients did not fully recover, the idea of an adult brain that could grow new cells or develop new neuronal pathways was not seriously considered. The Brain Is Not Static However, researchers from the 1960’s to the 1990’s began to see evidence of radical changes in…

The brain receives a variety of sensory information, then synthesizes and analyzes the data by sending it into various centers and loops.  It then determines a course of action and communicates with others. The microbe seems to do much of this without neurons and a brain.  Individual microbes solve complex problems, such as locating food, evading predators, and communicating for complex group activity.   Microbes carry out these functions using at least six capacities that we have traditionally attributed only to brains: Microbes have specialized parts of their cell membrane…