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.

Rapping about Evolution

It's hard to find good music about science. I imagine a distinct lack of successful songwriters interested in creating music discussing high level scientific ideas. When someone does attempt a composition, the science is usually a shallow shadow of a lecture half remembered from high school biology class. Either that, or the composition and lyricism of the song leaves listeners with memories of camp songs in elementary school ("Bats eat bugs, they don't eat people!"), and so will never make it to any playlist in your ipod*. Baba Brinkman is a glorious exception. Mr. Brinkman, who hails from Vancouver, is a hip-hop/rap artist (a self-described "rap troubadour"), who has composed some truly amazing songs about evolution. Mr. Brinkman's music excels on two fronts. His songs are well written, and would not sound out of place in a hip-hop playlist. Which is to say that these are no campfire songs. And his songs' science has been peer-reviewed by Mark Pallen, an evolutionary biologist and rap enthusiast at the University of Birmingham, so they are scientifically accurate.

Mr. Brinkman's website, Babasword, provides the following description of Mr. Brinkman's collection of evolutionary-themed music, which he performs during a show entitled The Rap Guide to Evolution.

“The Rap Guide to Evolution” explores the history and current understanding of Darwin’s theory, combining remixes of popular rap songs with storytelling rap/poems that cover Natural Selection, Artificial Selection, Sexual Selection, Group Selection, Unity of Common Descent, and Evolutionary Psychology. Dr. Pallen has vetted the entire script for scientific and historical accuracy, making it a powerful teaching tool as well as a laugh-out-loud entertainment experience. The show also engages directly with challenging questions about cultural evolution, asking the audience to imagine themselves as the environment and the performer as an organism undergoing a form of live adaptation.

Mr. Brinkman's show was recently reviewed by Olivia Judson over at the NYTimes, who describes The Rap Guide to Evolution as "a set of mini-lectures disguised as rap songs", containing lyrics that "are, for the most part, witty, sophisticated and scientifically accurate; and they lack the earnest defensiveness that sometimes haunts lectures on evolution."

Some examples, which along with Mr. Brinkman's other songs can be listened to online at CBC Radio:

A song entitled Natural Selection includes the following lyrics, set against a pulsing beat.

It's survival of the fittest but fitness is a tricky thing

It changes from place to place, from winter to spring

But the real question in this social scientific simile is heredity,

Whether we inherit our techniques from our predecessors, or invent them separately

But then we’re talking memes, and that’s a different thing,

Richard Dawkins can I get a proper definition please.

Later in the song,

See everybody’s always talking about “Do you believe in evolution” “Do you believe in creation”

No body believes in evolution.

You either understand evolution, or you don’t.

There’s nothing to believe.

Something to perceieve, feel, experience.

Do you believe in gravity?

Come on.

You can see it with your own eyes.

You just got to look.

And in another song, this one called DNA, Mr. Brinkman sings:

Yeah, this goes out to Watson and Crick.

Who discovered the twist.

Human genome project

And those who speed up the process

Like digital PCR

record a gene faster than a VCR

This is the future so you’d better get used to it.

This is what we are.

And in one of my favorite songs, Performance Feedback Revision, Mr. Brinkman describes how his songs are created, further expanding his lyrical description to describe the concept of descent-with-modification.

And sometimes people ask me: How does your show get written.

Like this: Performance. Feedback. Revision

…

And how do human’s beings ever learn to do anything

Like this: Performance. Feedback. Revision

And evolution is really just kind of an algorithm that goes

Like this: Performance. Feedback. Revision

So the genetic code of every living thing was written

Like this: Performance. Feedback. Revision

So the genes are like a text with a thousand pages

And revisions occur in the random changes that come from mutations.

And when they see the light, well that’s the performance, that’s the phenotype.

After spending some quality time listening to Mr. Brinkman's songs while analyzing patch-clamp recordings this Friday, I am, as Olivia Judson predicted "amused by the in-jokes and amazed by the erudition". Furthermore, I am astounded by the quality of the music, which will soon be making its debut in my iTunes playlist, because the best part about Mr. Brinkman's songs is that they are available for purchase, from both Amazon and the iTunes store.

*Or another other MP3 player.

[This post has been brought to you in honor of the Stanford Graduate Formal, from which I am recovering this morning, and which featured prodigious amounts of hip-hop/rap music, none of which mentioned descent-with-modification.]