Inception: A Neuroscientist’s Review

Some background: I recently went to see Christopher Nolan's film Inception with a large group of friends. As the only neuroscientist in the group, I was, of course, asked my opinion of the films scientific plausibility. Asking for some time to formulate a thought out response, I realized that a short review would make for a perfect blog post. Four days and six pages of typing later, I'm posting some of my thoughts. [Authors note. A few official caveats: first, the post below contains some spoilers, and so would most likely be enjoyed most by someone who has already seen the film. Secondly, I am not a sleep researcher, and so am in no way an expert on the complex biological processes occurring during sleep. Lastly, much of my knowledge of the biology of sleep is gained from the excellent textbook Fundamental Neuroscience 3rd ed. Edited by Squire et al. 2008.]

I really enjoyed Inception. I think it’s a challenging film that assumes, even demands, an audience comprised of intelligent individuals. While the film did contain the pyrotechnics we expect from a filmmaker with Christopher Nolan’s CV, the action was gratifyingly overshadowed by the prevalent psychological themes. From my theatre seat, the themes of Inception were that an individual’s dreams are both an infinite battlefield and a powerful weapon, and that our conscious perception of reality is a mercurially fragile construct. Given this, the plot could hardly have avoided making basic assumptions about the nature of dreams and consciousness. Furthermore, given the specific story, I fully expected to be presented with various fictional technologies that would allow Nolan’s character to enact their mental shenanigans; for the record, I was not disappointed. In the past, I have found that the best way to watch films whose plots stray into the realm of neuroscience is to firmly suspect disbelief; this saves me a lot of mental pain when I compare the reality of our knowledge/technology with the principles (both theoretical and practical) that are presented to the audience within the confines of a fictional film.

Nevertheless, in the case of Inception, I am more than willing to provide a brief analysis of the various principles feature within the film. As with most complex storylines, the plausibility of these various bits vary between complete flights of fancy to moderately based on current knowledge. Inception is a long film – to exhaustively deconstruct the biological plausibility behind ever scene would require a considerable effort. I will therefore discuss only the most prominent examples of neuroscience-themed plot points within the film, also spending some time discussing what neuroscience knows about sleep and dreams. I would caution those who have not yet seen the film to avoid reading further, as there will invariably be spoilers below the break.

As I commented before, Inception was a long film containing many concepts loosely related to the neuroscience of dreaming. I will not attempt to cover all the concepts touched upon in the film – however I hope to highlight a few of the more interesting ones. Of course, the most glaring example of pseudo-neuroscience is the concept of shared dream states, upon which the entire film is based. Our introduction to this guiding principal occurs at the very beginning of the film, and although the script spends some energy explaining other aspects of the dream state (e.g. the role of the Architect in creating the dream landscape), at no time is the underlying principle questioned or discussed, that individuals can share dreams without the aid of any external technology. Examining this assumption is a blog post in and of itself, one likely to be a rather lengthy discussion of the nature of dreaming and consciousness. As I gear up to tackling these subjects (which will most likely appear in a later post), I will first set them aside to examine a few of the other neuroscience-related plot details contained within Inception. First, I’ll briefly discuss the sleep cycle, comparing what research has demonstrated with Inceptions version. Next I’ll talk about which brain areas are active during dreaming, and whether the remarkable levels of cognition displayed by Inceptions dreaming characters are possible given what we know about the sleeping brain. Lastly, I’ll talk about the technology (or lack thereof) used to facilitate Inceptions dream states.

The Sleep Cycle:

The advent of neuroimaging techniques such as functional MRI allowed neuroscientists to view brain activity during classic states, including sleep. We therefore have a pretty good understanding of what brain regions are active during sleep. Classic studies of brain activity during sleep identified multiple stages of sleep (non-REM, which is divided into the sub-stages of N1, N2 and slow-wave sleep, and REM) each possessing a characteristic profile of brain activity. The sleep seen during Inception is remarkably homogenous. Research has shown us that, generally, dreams only occur during REM sleep (although night terrors do occur during non-REM sleep). Furthermore, the progression through the various sleep stages during a sleep cycle (generally described as N1 to N2 to slow-wave to N2 to REM) is highly periodic, with the cycle lasting for 90-100 minutes. Any individual sleep cycle (a sleep will experience multiple cycles during a nights worth of sleep), will be 20-25% REM sleep, with the remaining time taken up by non-REM sleep (Squire et al, 2008). The ratio between REM and non-REM sleep evolves over the course of the night, with earlier sleep cycles dominated by non-REM sleep, with REM sleep (and therefore dreaming) brief or nonexistent. This ratio reverses during the final cycles of the night. During the course of Inception, the immediate entrance into a dream state by the actors is somewhat implausible – we might expect real sleepers to go through multiple sleep cycles before experiencing a dream, or at least hang around in non REM sleep before entering REM sleep (with a possible exception discussed below).

The Sleeping Brain:

The transition between wakefulness and sleep is characterized by widespread deactivation of the brain, in particular the forebrain and brain stem. Brain activity further decreases as sleep transitions from non-REM sleep stage N1 to non-REM sleep stage N2 and then on to slow-wave sleep. During REM sleep, when dreaming occurs, selective brain regions show reactivation to levels equivalent or above waking levels; these regions include areas in the brain stem, diencephalic, subcortical limbic, cortico-limbic, and selected cortical association areas. Additionally, REM sleep is characterized by active suppression of motor activity and presynaptic inhibition of sensory signals (Squire et al 2008).

These patterns of activity (or lack thereof) have been directly associated with the features of dreams that distinguish the dream perceptual experience from wakefulness. The phenomenology of the dream-state was poetically described: “Perception, instead of being shaped by external forms, becomes hallucinatory. Cognition is similarly deranged. Instead of being oriented, the dreaming mind looses track of time place and person. Instead of thinking actively and critically, the dreaming mind indulges in non-sequiturs, ad-hoc explanations, and other illogical whims. Memory, during dreams, is fragmented in its disconnection from current events and globally deficient in recalling them. Emotion, instead of being restrained and focuses in response to percepts and thoughts, comes to dominate and organize dreaming consciousness often in strikingly salient ways.” (Squire et al. 2008)  Activation of the limbic brain is thought to underlie the strong emotional salience of dreams, whereas continued deactivation of prefrontal regions results in the illogical nature of dreams, as well as the deficits in cognition and memory. Selective activation of multimodal association cortices may underlie the hyper-associative quality of dreaming. Active motor suppression prevents the acting out of dreams, and presynaptic inhibition of sensory signals prevents the processing of external sensory signals.

We can compare some of the specific details of Inceptions dream states with the neuroscience based principles of dreaming suggested from the observed patterns of brain activity during dreaming. A prime example is the comment by DiCaprio’s character regarding time flow and logic within the dream. [Spoiler warning]. In the scene where DiCaprio introduces Ellen Page’s character to the dream state, he demonstrates (at the Parisian café) the non-linearity of dream, specifically how the flow of time within a dream is often interrupted by unpredictable jumps. However, despite this verbal acknowledgement, action within the dream states proceeds with remarkable logic with the dreamers displaying a level of cognition, orientation, and memory that neuroscience would not predict given the wide ranging inactivation of prefrontal brain regions during REM sleep.

Another instance of partial plausibility is the focus on the emotional content of dreams. [Spoiler warning]. A major plot point concerns DiCaprio’s subconsciousness infiltrating the content of his dreams with his emotions regarding the death of his wife. During REM sleep, limbic structures such as the amygdale show high levels of activation, and dream content is generally highly emotionally valiant. However, given the deactivation of memory regions, dreams would be unlikely to feature the highly detailed memories and focused emotional construct so specifically produced by DiCaprio’s subconciousness. More plausible would have been an overarching emotional valiance, and the appearance of constructs associated with the emotional content; if the specific emotional event (the wife’s death) were to be replayed in the dream state, we would expect that memory to be fragmented. Furthermore, neuroscience would predict that while dreaming, DiCaprio’s character would exhibit global deficits in recalling the specific memories underlying his emotions, rather than the highly specific recall he displays in the scene where Page’s character enters his dreams.

A point I wanted to briefly mention is the idea of transitioning out of sleep. Given the length of this post, I’m going to address sleep-to-wake transitions in a later post, but I did want to lay some groundwork. Inception is highly concerned with the sleep-to-wake transition. Indeed, the woken sleepers ability to recognize this transition is at the heart of the emotional arc of DiCaprio’s character. Research has shown us that, contrary to the elaborate efforts displayed during the film, a person is easily awakened from REM sleep by meaningful stimuli (such as their name), although they will not react to other external noises. Again, in a later post, I plan to discuss what we know about the biology behind the sleep-to-wake transition, whether Nolan really needed to dump DiCaprio in a bathtub of cold water, and the potential existence of sleep disorders similar to that afflicting DiCaprio’s wife.

Returning now to a point made above, that Inception’s instant entrance into a dreaming state ignores neurosciences evidence that the progression from wakefulness to REM sleep and dreaming involves a series of transitions through a variety of brain states. It is worth noting, that studies of lucid dreaming report the occurrence of direct transitions between sleep and dreaming states. The idea of lucid dreaming appears to be a guiding principle behind the dream states of Inception. A lucid dream is defined as a dream in which the sleeper is aware that he/she is dreaming. Unfortunately, studies of lucid dreaming do not have a strong presence in reputable scientific journals (although in the a graduate of Stanford University, Dr. Stephen LaBerge made initial steps in the late ‘70s to bring lucid dreaming into the realm of peer-review psychophysiology – a note that Dr. LaBerge has since founded a company, the Lucidity Institute, dedicated to teaching the art of lucid dreaming). A PubMed search for “lucid dreaming” returns only 40 results, with the 3 most recent articles published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry (Been and Garg, 2010, a case study where PTSD nightmares were treated with psychoeducation on lucid dreaming), Conscious Cognition (Soffer-Dudek and Shahar, 2009, a longitudinal study of co-occurrence of sleep-related experience and life events in young adults), and Sleep (Voss et al. 2009, the only published study locatable on PubMed in which brain activity was measured (by EEG) during lucid dreaming). In this last study, researchers made 19-channel EEG recordings from sleeping participants, observing an increase in the power of various frequency bands (especially in the 40-Hz frequency band) and greater synchrony between activity from different electrodes, when comparing activity during lucid dreaming to activity during REM sleep. From their results, the authors conclude that brain activity during lucid dreaming share similarities to activity observed during waking, and speculate that lucid dreaming involves activation of prefrontal regions, an area that is normally inactive during REM-sleep. Unfortunately, direct testing of their hypothesis that lucid dreaming involved reactivation of prefrontal regions was not possible given their use of EEG (which does not allow a fine degree of signal localization). I was unable to find evidence of published fMRI studies of brain activity during lucid dreaming; it is highly likely that such studies have not been undertaken, leaving neuroscience with little to say on the subject of the underlying mechanisms of lucid dreams and whether Inceptions dream states are a) meant to be examples of lucid dreams and b) if so, whether such states are biologically plausible.

Inception’s Technology:

A third comment is regarding the technology being used. The transition between wakefulness and unconsciousness is a complex biochemical process, which involves the coordinated activity of multiple brain regions and neural chemicals.  To date, all the interactions are not fully understood; however there is a large body of research describing both intrinsic neurochemicals playing a role in sleep, as well as medically relevant compounds capable of promoting the brain to enter an unconscious state.

The neural mechanisms responsible for transitions between wakefulness and the various sleep stages are of decided interest to several research laboratories, and there is a growing body of work describing the various brain regions and chemicals responsible. I won’t go into specifics here, but will mention that there are multiple, complex interactions underlying the sleep cycle. In the context of the film, which for the most part avoids discussing the heterogeneity of sleep itself (see above), I will mention that finding that certain chemicals can promote different sleep stages – critical for the potential plausibility of Inception is the finding that organophosphate insecticides directly activate the neural circuits responsible for dreaming, and have therefore been reported to induce vivid dreams and dream-like hallucinations during wakefulness.

Within the film, the importance of heavy sedation for the establishment of rich dream states is an important plot point. The script is understandably cautious about naming specific chemicals, as the biological mechanisms of most commonly used sedatives are complex. Furthermore, most of the chemicals used in medical procedures do no result in the enhancement of dream-like states. However, classes of drugs called dissociatives have been reported to induce cognitive states similar those that desired in the film. Distinct from psychedelics (where users experience cognitive alterations while fully alert), most dissociatives act as sedatives, additionally producing vivid dream-like states, potentially by reducing signaling between conscious perception and other brain regions. However, there is relatively little scientific research on the effects of these chemicals on human brains, seeing as how many dissociative compounds enjoy a dubious legal status. Nevertheless, we might imagine that the sedative drug displayed during Inception could act as an inducer of such a dream-like state. Alternatively, these fictional chemicals could act to promote the transition from wakefulness to REM sleep, with a further action to prevent the natural procession of sleep-states, effectively holding the sleeper in REM sleep.

The Purpose of Dreams:

One of the guiding questions I was asked immediately after the film was “why do we dream?” It’s a good question. Although neuroimaging has provided a solid glimpse into which brain areas function during sleep and dreaming, a major unresolved question is the exact function of sleep and dreaming. Many studies have sought to answer this question, and have shown that sleep is required for the maintenance of metabolic caloric balance, thermal equilibrium, immune competence, and consolidation of recently formed memories. This last function has been extensively studied, with research showing that different stages of sleep are critical for the consolidation of different forms of memory: REM sleep for procedural memories, slow wave sleep for explicit/declarative memory, both REM and slow wave for emotional memories. As for dreaming, a study tracking REM sleep dream content has been shown to predict the occurrence of clinical depression following martial divorce/separation (Cartwright et al, 1998), which may suggest that dreaming serves to modulate emotional states during waking. Additionally, dreaming is thought to play a critical role in strengthening associative memory networks, with evidence coming from studies showing that people woken from REM sleep show preferential activation of more distantly related associations than seen during waking or after non-REM sleep (Stickgold et al, 1999). But despite several lines of sleep research, neuroscience still lacks an overarching explanation of why we sleep and dream.

Here ends this review – as promised multiple times above, I hope to conclude with a second part discussing the transition between sleep and wakefulness and the concept of shared dreams.

Get Parasite... Love Cats... Win World Cup?

Although the World Cup has concluded, those of you who haven't done so should read the amazing article in Slate by Stanford Neuroscience's own Patrick House. For those of you who live/work around Palo Alto, CA, Patrick is the tall gentleman with the massive head of curly hair who you will have noticed, perhaps out of the corner of your eye, sitting at Cafe Del Doge, or browsing at Feldman's Books. When he isn't cultivating his man-about-town image, Patrick studies Toxoplasma gondii in the lab of Robert Sapolsky.

Toxoplasma gondii is a single-celled parasite whose reproduction is dependent upon being located within the stomach of a cat. In order to get to this critical breeding ground, Toxo has developed an unusual strategy: excreted from the cats stomach in feces, Toxo is ingested by cat feces-munching rodents. Toxo then travels directly to the rodents' brains, where it alters brain function, making infected animals attracted to cat urine. Infected rodents seek out this newly attractive odor, whereupon a recently relieved cat eats them, returning the Toxo to the cat's stomach, where it can reproduce.

There has been recent discussions of how Toxo infection in humans might be influencing human behavior (see a recent Economist article, as well as research articles from the journals NeuroImmunoModulation and Folia Parasitologica). In his Slate article, Patrick takes a serious look at correlations between country-wide rates of Toxo infection, and success in the World Cup.

Landon Donovan Needs a Cat: Could a brain parasite found in cats help soccer teams win at the World Cup? by Patrick House for Slate

Presenting Research, Humorously

The powerpoint-driven Scientific Seminar is a mainstay of academia in general, and graduate education specifically. Variations in scientific content aside, these talks share a remarkable consistency of format and tone. At this years Neuroscience Program student retreat, we (now former) first-year graduate students riffed on the ubiquitous nature of neuroscience seminars; the common use of overly artistic representations of the brain, the buzzword filled introductory slides, and the obligatory neuronal stains by Ramon y Cajal (complete with tribute photograph of that most esteemed scientist). To continue the celebration of the Scientific Seminar, a demonstration from a recent AAAS session, that makes the entirely humorous observation that those who present science often employ remarkably stereotyped verbal patterns. So stereotyped that you can almost follow the gist of the talk even if you couldn't understand the content of the presentation. Or if there was, in fact, no content at all...

(And for those of you wanting a closer look at some of those figures/formulae)

A recent meta-analysis of global psychology literature by Henrich et al. asks the important, obvious, and rather disturbing question, How reasonable is the assumption made by many psychological studies that we can understand human nature based on experimental data derived largely from undergraduate research volunteers, nearly all from "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic (W.E.I.R.D.) societies"? The Weirdest People in the World?

The authors look through the psychological literature and find that this dominant group of psychology subjects is a consistent outlier when compared with much of the rest of the human race, and essentially question the generality of vast swaths of the field of experimental psychology.

So it's an interesting & controversial read (and from the title you can tell already the authors intend to amuse as well as edify), and as a former fMRI research tech responsible for subject recruitment, I can tell you that while we screened subjects to prevent obvious outliers (on meds, history of mental illness), there is no screening against run-of-the mill head cases. If there were, we would have had much smaller 'n's. Furthermore, Henrich et al would argue that from the perspective of most of the human race, even the most average western undergrad is a head-case.

(ps. thanks to Steve for the tip)

Your Courageous Brain

How does the brain encode courage? This is the question that Israeli researchers, headed by Uri Nili from the Weizmann Institutide of Science, seek to answer. Their research, published in Neuron under the title Fear Thou Not: Activity of Frontal and Temporal Circuits in Moments of Real Life Courage, identifies specific brain regions whose activity correlates with the behavioral expression of courage. Defining courage as the "performance of voluntary action opposed to that promoted by ongoing fear", Nili and colleagues used functional MRI to look at brain activity during a behavioral task requiring the expression of courage.

Participants were placed in an fMRI machine, and a live corn snake was place on a trolley that extended from the end of the exam room to next to the subjects head within the scanner. The trolley could be moved either towards or away from participants heads in a step-wise manner. Participants (both those who feared snakes and those who were used to handling snakes) were given control of the location of the trolley, and repeatedly asked to choose whether to advance or retreat the snake, the overall goal being to bring the snake as close to their heads as possible.

The researchers imaged the brains of the participants as they made their choices, and identified differences between brain activity when the subjects overcame their fear (moved the snake closer), and when they succumbed to it (moved the snake away). Specifically, two brain regions were found to show activity correlating with overcoming fear, the subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) and the right temporal pole (rTP).

Of particular interest was the activity of the sgACC, which showed positive correlation with choosing to bring the snake closer. In trials when fear was overcome, sgACC activity increased during the delay period between presentation of the snakes location and the cue to make the choice, with activity remaining elevated until the button to advance the snake was pressed. In trials where subjects succumbed to their fear, the sgACC activity declined rapidly after the snakes location was presented. The sgACC therefore appears to display on-line activation correlating with the decision to overcome or succumb to fear. Furthermore, greater sgACC activity occurred in trials where greater levels of fear were overcome. From these correlations, as well as other data described in the study, the researchers concluded that activity in the sgACC reflects the effort necessary to overcome fear.

Of note to fear conditioning aficionados, the sgACC is encompassed by the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, a region previously implicated in retrieval of inhibitory associations in studies of fear conditioning, although as the authors note, previous studies of vmPRC found no on-line role for the region during acquisition of extinction of fear conditioning, a finding potentially at odds with the on-line role for sgACC described in this study.

Nevertheless, given previous knowledge regarding the connectivity of the sgACC, as well as the activity of multiple other brain regions during the snake-movement task, Nili et al propose a model of courage whereby the sgACC inhibits the amygdala, reducing autonomic arousal and promoting subjects to choose action at odds with that prompted by their fear of snakes. The authors round out their paper by suggesting that manipulating sgACC activity may be a potential intervention for disorders involving an inability to overcome fear, and by pointing out place of their research in a field seeking to understand how the brain shirts between internal representations to select a context-specific behavioral outcome.

For a more thorough description of the paper, watch the video abstract, available courtesy of Neuron, which features the researchers discussing their research. Additionally, the paper is available online: doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2010.06.009

Newsome shares Champalimaud Vision Award

Another Stanford Neurobiology professor has won a prestigious prize for their research: Bill Newsome has been awarded this year's Champalimaud Vision Award. The prize, worth $1.3 million, is given in odd-numbered years to honor accomplishments in preventing blindness, and even-numbered years for outstanding scientific research in the field of vision. This year's prize is shared between Newsome and Dr. Anthony Movshon (NYU) for their work characterizing areas of the brain involved in making perceptual judgments about direction. Bill Newsome, well known among neuroscience students and med students for his enthusiastic depictions of intracranial self-stimulation in rats, studies neuronal processes relating to visual perception and visually guided behavior. To this end, his lab studies rhesus monkeys trained to perform visual discrimination tasks, using neurophysiological recordings to measure the activity of cortical neurons during task performance. Of particular interest are neurons in the visual cortex (particularly the middle temporal visual area, MT) that respond optimally to visual stimuli moving in a particular direction - these neurons are believed to underlie our ability to perceive and judge motion direction. In addition, the Newsome uses perceptual discrimination tasks to investigate the neural basis of the decision process, studying two brain areas, the intraparietal region of the parietal lob (LIP) and the superior colliculus, both of which contain neurons whose activity predicts an animals decisions. For a detailed description of the ongoing research in the Newsome lab, see Newsome's HHMI Research Abstract, or visit his lab's website.*

Stanford Report interviewed Newsome, who reportedly learned of his award June 2nd, after turning his cell phone back on after lab meeting. "There was a message from my wife telling me an ophthalmologist in Portugal had called and told her he was absolutely sure I would really, really want to call him back.” (The opthalmologist in question was Dr. Alfred Summer dean of the School of Hygiene and Public Health, and professor of Opthalmology, Epidemiology, and International Health at Johns Hopkins University, and a member of the Champalimaud jury.)

Congratulations to Bill for a well deserved recognition of his amazing contributions to neuroscience.

*Also of note this spring for the Newsome lab was the successful thesis defense of Dr. Rachel Kalmar, whose thesis research delved into the neural dynamics of movement preparation.

Dance Your Ph.D Contest Accepting Entries

It's summertime, which means the call has gone out for submissions to the annual "Dance Your Ph.D." Contest. Eagle-eyed readers of Science may have noticed an oddly titled article in this weeks edition: Calling All Dancing Scientists (Bohannon J. Science (2010) 328(5983):1226). Not a treatise on scientists with lucrative alternative careers as breakdancers, this article was rather a call for submissions to the 2010 "Dance Your Ph.D" Contest.

This contest promotes the use of the human body in motion as a medium for communicating science, asking graduate students to compose interpretive dances that capture the spirit (and content) of their Ph.D research.

Researchers may submit their dances in categories defined by scientific field: Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Social Sciences. Finalists will be chosen by an independent panel of judges, and screened at the Imagine Science Film Festival (NYC, Oct 15-24), when winners will be chosen. Winners of each category will be awarded a $500 cash prize; winning dances in each category will compete for the title of Best Ph.D Dance of All (and an additional $500).

To enter the contest, you need to:

1) Choreograph and film an interpretive dance depicting your Ph.D research

2) Post the video on Vimeo.com

3) Follow the directions for entering the contest at www.gonzolabs.org/dance

The submission deadline is September 1st.

Contestants and winners from 2009 can be viewed by searching Youtube.

Of special interest to Stanford students will be recent grad Jennifer Shieh's entry, entitled Adhesion and Endocytosis in Neuronal Migration.

Tom Südhof, 2 others win Kavli Prize in Neuroscience

Today the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced the winners of the Kavli Prize, a 1 million dollar award given out every other year. All told, 3 prizes are awarded, one each for astrophysics, nanoscience, and neuroscience (for a total of $3 million dollars). An official description of the Kavli Prizes states that they "were set up to recognise outstanding scientific research, honour highly creative scientists, promote public understanding of scientists and their work and to encourage international scientific coop eration." The Kavli Prize in Neuroscience is specifically geared towards awarding "outstanding achievement in advancing our knowledge and understanding of the brain and nervous system, including molecular neuroscience, cellular neuroscience, systems neuroscience, neurogenetics, developmental neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, computational neuroscience, and related facets of the brain and nervous system."

The Kavli Prize in Neuroscience was awarded to Stanford's Tom Südhof, as well as Richard H. Scheller (Genentech) and James E. Rothman (Yale) for their combined work on neurotransmission, in particular the molecular mechanisms of vesicle release.

The nanoscience prize will be shared by Donald M. Eigler (IBM's Almaden Research Center) and Nadrian C. Seeman (NYU). The astrophysics prize goes to Jerry Nelson (UC Santa Cruz), J. Roger P. Angel (U. Arizona) and Raymond N. Wilson (formerly of European Southern Observatory, Germany).

NY Times coverage of the announcement, as well as brief overviews of the awardees research.

The Kavli Prize Website.

DarWIN, not DarLOSE

Back in the early days of this blog, I wrote about an upcoming (at the time) movie about the writing and publication of Origin of the Species, by Charles Darwin. That movie, called Creation (discussed back in January), has since aired in theaters. This blog post is not about that movie.

It's about a fake movie, or more accurately a trailer for a fake movie, that presents a reinterpretation of the voyage of the Beagle and Darwin's struggle to publish his theories in the same vein as the recent re-imagining of Sherlock Holmes. Fans of both that film and of Darwin, will probably appreciate the trailer, which includes scenes where Darwin narrates a fight scene a la Robert Downey Jr. ("First use handkerchief to distract.... second, force feed Dodo egg.")

The best exchange prize is currently being vied for between two gems:

"How can a monkey turn into a man?" "The same way a hand can turn into a fist."

"My name is DarWIN, not DarLOSE!"

DARWIN at FunnyorDie.com [Warning, some lines regarding "natural selection" and the "rise of man" are probably not meant for the ears of children.]

[Also, thanks to @AdamRutherford and @ScienceHsu for the tweet and re-tweet, respectively.]

Snakes. On a Plane. In Free-fall.

At this point in my blogging career, my love of wacky research has become increasingly well documented (see previous posts The Best of Pubmed Part 1 and Part 2). So I'm sure no one will be surprised to learn of my excitement when I learned about the following study via the lovely bloggers over at ScienceBlogs. The research in question was published in April 2005 in the journal Zoology under the title of "The Behavioral Responses of Amphibians and Reptiles to Microgravity on Parabolic Flights". Translation: Snakes. On a plane. In freefall.

In honor of the course in the Neurobiology of Behavior that so many Neuroscience students are currently working hard to survive, below is a synopsis of this most epic paper. I highly encourage rampant discussion in the comments section regarding the scientific merit of this paper, as well as proposed projects to expand upon its findings.

Note: It turns out there is a rich literature regarding the behavioral consequences of exposure to altered gravity. My favorite segment of this literature? The one concerned with the "Gravitational Neurobiology of Fish".

1) What was the main question asked in the paper?

How do various reptiles and amphibians react when abruptly exposed to microgravity? Specifically, what behavioral patterns can be observed, and how do these patterns compare to behavior observed in normal gravity? Really, the question is how various species perceive "weightlessness".

2) What (novel) techniques were used?

Researchers collected 53 animals from 23 species of amphibians and reptiles. They were loaded onto a large plane (a Falcon 20), and taken on a parabolic flight. Researchers filmed the behavior of the animals, presumably which simultaneously quoting prolifically from Samuel L. Jackson.

3) What results were reported?

Depending on the animal, the researchers report different behavioral responses to sudden weightlessness. Some animals didn't move much, others attempted to righten themselves, producing large whole-body motions as if they were trying to grab at something to stabilize themselves. Still other animals displayed a behavior described in the paper as "a skydiving posture". As for the snakes, several species moved around until they'd knotted their tails around their bodies, at which point they settled down.

4) What conclusions did the authors draw from their results, and were these conclusions justified?

The researchers seemed most interested in the behavior exhibited by the snake species that knotted their tails around their bodies. To paraphrase the paper, the fact that these snakes became quiescent after successfully knotting themselves up suggests that the snakes brains gives higher priority to proprioceptive input from their body over the vestibular input. The authors suggest that the proprioceptive input was being interpreted by the snake as stable physical contact, and not as a self-embrace occurring during free-fall. Which is interesting, as it suggests a hierarchy for the interpretation of competing information from sensory modalities. However, being not an expert in the responses of animals to microgravity, I can't really comment on the validity of the results - but I highly encourage any experts in snake-chucking that we have in the audience to leave comments.

The best part of this paper is inevitably the figures, which include pictures and 10 fantastic videos of animals in the middle of their free-fall behavior, most notably the self-embracing snake (see video below).

Wassersug et al. The Behavioral Responses of Amphibians and Reptiles to Microgravity on Parabolic Flights. Zoology (Jena). 2005: 108(2): 107-20.

The hysterical original post on Science Blogs, by Jason G. Goldman, who makes all the required Indian Jones and Snakes on a Plane jokes.