The Myth of Meritocracy?

/
The Myth of Meritocracy?

Dr. Corrine Moss-Racusin is the lead author on the landmark paper describing a study documenting gender bias among male and female science faculty at research institutions. She has been visiting a number of institutions to discuss her findings, including a standing-room crowd at Stanford’s Clark Auditorium on Wednesday, January 15. What did her research find, and will her recommendations for how to fix gender bias be effective? Meryl Natchez, an education and training professional with almost 30 years experience in the corporate sector, the Hass Business School, UC Berkeley Extension and Cal State Sacramento, discusses the presentation and her impressions. 

Read More

Three books that make Neuroscience Cool(er)

/
Three books that make Neuroscience Cool(er)

I wanted to tell you a little bit about some of my favorite neuroscience books. Books that did a good job of distilling the “wow” factor that drives people like your intrepid neuroblog contributors to think and talk about the brain. I’ve chosen these books for three reasons: they’re accessible to newcomers who don’t know much about neuroscience, they’re well-written enough to be enjoyable reads regardless of your neuro expertise (or lack thereof), and the science in them is largely accurate and based on a body of rigorous scientific literature.

These three books are: The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, by Oliver Sacks; Moonwalking With Einstein, by Joshua Foer; This Is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin

Read More

What research won The Big Bang Theory's Amy Farrah Fowler the cover of Neuron?

/
What research won The Big Bang Theory's Amy Farrah Fowler the cover of Neuron?

Science featured in most TV shows is so ludicrously inaccurate that fact-checking it is no fun. It’s best to either avoid watching or to suspend disbelief. However, The Big Bang Theory is a pleasant exception. ... I thought that it would be fun to translate what the show’s neurobiologist Amy Farrah Fowler says about her research into plain English.

Read More

Ask a Neuroscientist: Why is thinking hard so hard?

/
Ask a Neuroscientist: Why is thinking hard so hard?

Jason asks: What makes certain mental tasks be perceived as more demanding than others?

For physical tasks, it is pretty ease to see how, say, lifting a 10 lbs barbell would be perceived as easier than lifting one that’s 20 lbs. But why is watching a 1 hour video on, say, physics perceived as more demanding than watching an hour of “Desperate Housewives”?

This is a great question, Jason. Why is it that we feel mentally exhausted after studying for a test or preparing for a meeting, but we read books or watch movies to relax? All of these activities require your brain, after all! And why is it harder to resist eating a cookie when you've been doing brain work for hours?  

As brain users, we generally feel as if there is some substance called mental effort, which we all have in limited quantities. We have to budget it carefully because some mental tasks require more of it than others, and if we run out we simply have to wait for it to replenish itself before we can use it again. 

Read More

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

/
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.

Read More

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

/
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.

Read More

How to be absolutely fascinating at your New Years Party

/
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

Read More

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

/
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.

Read More

An Obviously Dangerous Idea

/
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.

Read More

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

/
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.

Read More