New Year’s Resolutions and the Neural Circuitry of Habitual Behavior

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New Year’s Resolutions and the Neural Circuitry of Habitual Behavior

As we leave 2013 behind and enter into a New Year, many of us make New Year’s resolutions. Most everyone has bad habits that they would like to break or new habits that they would like to start. Perhaps the resolutions center around diet, exercise, or work habits. Whatever your New Year’s resolution may be, sticking to it is hard work! During performance of a habit, the brain seems to be running on autopilot, executing an entire program of actions as if they were one action. Fortunately for those of us engaged in the fight against undesireable habits, a few intriguing studies from the Graybiel lab at M.I.T shed light on how to break out of such automatic brain states. In this post, I’ll be summarizing one of the studies (Smith et al. 2012), and discussing how I think about it in the context of my own and general human habitual behavior, and what implications this study has for enacting long-term behavior change.

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Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme: new insights into musical beat perception

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Feel the rhythm, feel the rhyme: new insights into musical beat perception

Music and rhythm are fundamental and essential components of human civilization. When we dance we anticipate beat placement to coordinate our hands, feet, arms, and legs, while also twirling our dance partners in sync with the music (or so we hope). Our need for music has also materialized in the clinical world. It has been shown that patients with Parkinson’s disease, who often exhibit difficulty initiating motor movements, can move more fluidly when listening to music. Unfortunately, despite our common interactions with music, extremely little is known regarding how our brains process it. Recent findings at Stanford should open the door to studying neural components of rhythm perception and their potential clinical implications.

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How to be absolutely fascinating at your New Years Party

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How to be absolutely fascinating at your New Years Party

Stanford University is closed until January 6th. Logistical translation: the heat in the Stanford School of Medicine is off until January 6th.

Practical translation: I’ve been occupying the spare bedroom of my parents’ house for over a week, and I’m running out of entertaining neuroscience facts to spout.

A critical situation, as my primary purpose as the token Doctoral Candidate is the spouting of random neuroscience facts. Or holding forth about my research.

MyresearchisgoingfinenoIdon’twanttotalkaboutit.

Does this sound at all familiar? Has your store of neuroscience tidbits been exhausted by the constant presence of relatives? Are you wondering how you will entertain folks on during the inevitable portion of the New Years Party when awkward pauses cry out for the utterance of a Neuroscience Fact™, newly learned in honor of the new year?

Never fear.

Here are 10 facts for you, in no particular order, carefully selected from Amazing Numbers in Biology, by Ranier Findt

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Schroedinger’s Utility Belt, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Randomness

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Schroedinger’s Utility Belt, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Randomness

Biology has an amazing capacity to adapt in very specific ways. From learning (and generating) entirely new facts, languages and skills, to making antibodies to take down an infection, human biology is profoundly capable of generating specific biological changes in response to stimuli that are completely novel. On an intuitive level, it’s easy to equate this with the way human behavior often solves a problem—you observe a new stimulus, analyze it, and come up with response. And that’s where intuition fails to grasp how simultaneously haphazard and immensely clever biology can be.

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An Obviously Dangerous Idea

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An Obviously Dangerous Idea

It’s not often that I get into heated debates with people on my iPod, but I found myself doing just that while listening to a recent episode of the Radiolab podcast called “Cut and Run”. Radiolab, for those who are unfamiliar, is a highly engaging and entertaining radio program about “science, philosophy, and the human experience.” For the most part, I think they do a really good job explaining the science behind a particular phenomenon in a way that is both accurate and entertaining, while handling the subject matter in a respectful manner. In this particular episode, however, they really missed the mark.

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Getting to Novice: What I’ve figured out so far about how to become a science writer

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Getting to Novice: What I’ve figured out so far about how to become a science writer

This blog’s sister organization, Neuwrite-West, is a science-writing working group at Stanford through which scientists can practice and learn together to become better public communicators of science. For the first year of the group’s existence, we have focused on writing for and critiquing one another, as a fun and safe way to improve our science communication skills. However, our ultimate goal has always been to share our perspective on scientific issues and enthusiasm for the process of discovery with the broader public, so this year we must turn our sights to more active engagement with the larger world of science journalism. As the group embarks on this effort, my colleagues asked me to offer up some advice for group members on how to get from the pleasant idea of science writing to the stage of actually sending your work out into the world for publication. A simple google search for all of the science writing that I’ve had published will reveal that I have scarcely set out on this path myself, but I have read and heard a great deal of excellent advice from professional science writers over the last year, and am happy to synthesize and summarize what I think I’ve learned below, along with some key resources that I’ve found useful along the way and gladly pass on to you.

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Making the right impression

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Making the right impression

Is direct-to-consumer advertising appropriate when it comes to health information?

My my, the FDA have been busy recently. Or, perhaps more accurately, they have been publicly busy recently. As the primary agency involved in the regulation and supervision of food and pharmaceutical safety standards, the US Food and Drug Administration may not be the most glamorous of government bodies (FDA, Miami anyone?) but it certainly has its work cut out in an age where technological advances in the generation of health data are outpacing changes in law and policy.

We’re entering a very interesting era of health informatics. We now have the technology to collect, for relatively little cost, terabytes of data on an individual related to their genetics, metabolism, gut flora, immune response, brain activity… the list goes on. The question is – how can we use these data to make meaningful choices about healthcare? And should individuals without medical training, be allowed access to information about their own health status that could be misinterpreted or misused? This is the current subject of debate in the somewhat bizarre altercation between the FDA and 23andme – a company set up to provide (limited) genetic information direct to consumer (DTC). 

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Ask a Neuroscientist: Why does the nervous system decussate?

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Ask a Neuroscientist: Why does the nervous system decussate?

Our latest question comes from Dr. Sowmiya Priyamvatha, who asks: I've learnt that tracts to and fro from the brain cross. Why should they cross? Is there any evolutionary significance for that? I know left side of the brain controls right and vice versa but why?

Your question is actually hotly debated among evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists. There are, in fact, multiple theories about why tracts cross in the human nervous system. My favorite theory, though, has to do with the evolution of the entire vertebrate lineage. It is called the “somatic twist” hypothesis[i], and it asserts that neural crossings (technically called “decussations”) are the byproduct of a much larger evolutionary change—the switch from having a ventral (belly-side) nerve cord to dorsal (back-side) nerve cord.

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NeuroTalk S2E9 Kathleen Cullen

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This week we speak with Kathleen Cullen about how our brains control our eyes and head, why astronauts get sick in space, and more! 

This week we speak with Kathleen Cullen about how our brains control our eyes and head, why astronauts get sick in space, and more! Dr. Cullen is a professor of physiology, and the director of the Systems Neuroscience and Aerospace Medical Research Unit at McGill University.

Dr. Cullen is a professor of physiology, and the director of the Systems Neuroscience and Aerospace Medical Research Unit at McGill University.

This episode can also be streamed or downloaded here: NeuroTalk S2E9 Kathleen Cullen