My view from where I stand at the front of the set. From left to right: Ryan McDonald, Emily Bembeneck, Marlon Aguilar. Not pictured: Andy Poulos, me. Organizing, designing and filming “my” MOOC, Understanding the Brain, has been an amazing experience. I put my in quotations because the MOOC is definitely a team effort. Not only are others entirely responsible […]
Jeune pêcheur à la coquille by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Musée du Louvre, Paris (photo by me) Yesterday, we filmed the hearing and communication unit for my Coursera course on Understanding the Brain. The short version of this post is that as I was explaining the tensor tympani reflex, I realized that my explanation did not make sense. This is a beautiful […]
I read with dismay the latest news that chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) has been identified in a young man who played mostly amateur soccer. Patrick Grange played soccer throughout his childhood and in college and even in semi-pro leagues. He developed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) in his mid-20s and died at age 29. His brain was studied and the pathology reported is a grade 2 case (out of a 4-point scale) of CTE. Here I want to make two points. First, this news further deepens parents’ and young people’s dilemmas regarding sports. The most commonly played organized sport among youth in the world, even in the latecomer U.S., is soccer (or football in the parlance of the world outside of the U.S.). Much was made of Patrick Grange’s penchant for head-butting the ball. However, it is not clear at all that Mr Grange’s CTE was a result of his head-butting proclivities. His parents report that he suffered from at least 3 serious concussions. Regardless of which injuries were in the straw-pile that broke the camel’s back, I think that most parents recognize that soccer can be a dangerous sport. Weighing the positive physical and social benefits of team sports against the potential for future disability is a personal judgment call. The influence of future harm upon the final decision is greatly impacted by discounting as discussed in a previous post. The second point to be made here is the connection between […]
My cousin recently sent me a link to a report that the nutritional content of milk provided to male and female offspring differs. Very interesting and definitely a “cool” result but to paraphrase Janet Mock, we are born as babies. On the first day of life, it seems to me that the needs of a baby have little to do […]
I was talking about my previous post (http://wp.me/p4e7xm-1H) with a colleague. We were discussing how the cautions against regular mammograms probably do not hold for individuals with a family history of breast cancer. My colleague then pointed out that in fact women’s histories have been contaminated by the high number of women “successfully” treated for tumors that would likely have […]
The utility of mammograms in improving survival from breast cancer suffered another blow. From a rational point of view, the idea that women without any risk factors will benefit from regular mammograms is dead and buried, 6 feet under with the coffin nailed shut. And yet, many women feel a strong pull to get a mammogram. I think there are generally two reasons. First, we humans are spectacularly irrational, emotionally driven animals. I can not do any better than Chris Mooney did in a Mother Jones article in explaining this. So I strongly recommend that you check out Chris’ article: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/03/denial-science-chris-mooney. In brief, put an emotional viewpoint in the ring with a logical laying out of the facts, and the emotional viewpoint will score a knock-out in no time flat. Regardless of their content or source, facts and reason don’t stand a chance against emotionally held beliefs. The second reason that women still want mammograms despite a complete lack of evidence for their efficacy in improving survival is that most women have no way to make sense of mammograms’ lack of efficacy. This essentially puts emotion in an uncontested fight. There is no logical framework within which to understand the evidence regarding mammograms. So here is a framework. Cancer cells have a natural history. They are in a competition with other cells for the body’s resources. Some cancer cells are successful and consequently wreak havoc. But many other cancer cells […]
Discounting is a powerful effect and a constant in our lives. Let’s say that I tell you that I’ll give you $20 if you jump up and down 10 times. I am guessing that you’ll be jumping forthwith. Now consider your response if I tell you that I’ll give you $20 next year if you jump up and down 10 […]
As I carried my cup of tea from the kitchen to the living room this morning, I once again thought about the wonders of the vestibular system, wonders which I feared may have been lost in the length and detail of my previous post. So here goes, a quick and bottom-line account. If I could keep my hand as steady as I can keep my gaze I could run with that cup of tea and not spill a drop. There is only one part of the body that gets the royal treatment. Lots of brain power is devoted to fixing (in the sense of keeping steady) gaze in space. We care very much about our hands and mouth but we can’t keep them steady. The one steady point that we have is gaze. Pretty cool, don’t you think? A steady gaze is such a given in everyday life that we will always notice and be extremely bothered when something goes wrong with our vestibuloocular reflex or VOR (a brainstem reflex that moves our eyes to oppose head movements; see last post). Without an operational VOR, the world does not stay steady, we become nauseated and as you may imagine, unhappy enough to seek medical help. And to return to the topic of blue-footed boobies, here is a picture of a particularly fetching one:
I was out on a small boat going to the Marietta Islands to fulfill a long-time dream of seeing blue-footed boobies (fun to say, don’t you think?) and was trying to take some pictures. Check out how that turned out: The pictures are not steady because my hands moved as the boat rolled, pitched, and rotated on the choppy ocean. […]
Can you read this? The first lines are the hardest. So if you have trouble, scroll down a bit. Once you have the hang of it, you probably will have no problem reading it from the start. This is a great example of perception as interpretation. We are not cameras and tape recorders. In the case of vision, we use […]
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The brain is sooooo cool! 