Dragonfly sporting antenna-laden backpack

Dragonflies are straight “A”  hunters, capturing fruit flies in mid-air about 95 percent of the time, a grade that puts  a head-of-the-class predator like a lion to shame.

The insect’s efficiency—combined with hackable biology (less moving parts—i.e., neurons) compared to any mammal big or small—makes  the dragonfly an alluring organism to study the neural underpinnings of a basic but still complex behavior like prey capture.

Intrigued by the dragonfly, biologist Anthony Leonardo and colleagues from Intan Technologies and Duke University set about creating the instrumentation that will enable the researchers to monitor the activity of a group of neurons in the species Libellula lydia that appear to be essential for guiding the hunt. This summer, Leonardo’s group at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Farm Research campus in Virginia wants to demonstrate what happens in the dragonfly’s nervous system during the course of carrying out a complex  behavior—zooming in for the kill—over the second or so that it unfolds. “The dragonfly catches moving flies in the air,” Leonardo says. “In the process of doing that, it has to think of a moving fly or mosquito and think about where it’s going, where it is now, where it’s going to be in the future how its own body works and that kind of  goal is constantly changing.”

Carrying out these experiments requires both tracking the dragonfly and devising the necessary instrumentation to monitor the 16 neurons hypothesized to steer the insect’s movements as it closes in on a Drosophila. The team was able to successfully outfit dragonflies with a set of small reflective balls on the head and wings to track them as they move through an insect version of the Roman Coliseum where they feast away on fruit flies.

The hard part is yet to come during coming months when the insects will be equipped with backpacks that can record signals from brain cells when going after a fly and then transmit them by a radio signal to a computer for analysis. A dragonfly weighs 400 milligrams, less than half the weight of a paper clip, so building a backpack that would not pin the insect to the ground or radically change its behavior is a major challenge.

The smallest practical battery for the telemetry in the backpack would have totaled about a third the weight of the dragonfly, and might have dampened the insect’s ardor for the hunt. So Leonardo and team designed a 40-milligran backpack that is powered by energy from  radio waves. By doing so, they can record from the insect’s steering neurons that guide it during prey capture—the garb should enable monitoring other  groups of neurons as well. The backpack has tiny wires, miniature sensors, that connect to the ventral nerve cord, the dragonfly equivalent of a spinal cord. The backpack should be able to transmit 5 megabits per second of information about what the insect’s neurons are doing as it descends upon its lunch.

If these tests go as planned, the work will provide new insights into how circuits operate during dynamic neural processes that take in sensory information and process it to make decisions about future actions. “Our hope is that what we learn about the dragonfly will be broadly applicable to how neurons solve problems in general,  Leonardo says. “This is a broad class of computation problems that nervous systems have to solve—and in some what they’ve evolved to solve.”

DFlies at Work: Dinner Is Served

Wikileaks' Julian Assange

The legacy of Wikileaks—the outing of secret government information—is all the vogue.

It won’t stop with PRISM and the government contractor who fed The Guardian and The Washington Post the skinny on the U.S. surveillance program.

The question is what comes next—and the only given is that there most certainly will be a “next.” This is a sky(net)’s-the limit-proposition for the intelligent handicapper. It’s not just leaky insiders vs. government, but bureaucrat against bureaucrat: China vs. the U.S., Russia vs. Georgia, Israel vs. the CIA (no more need for Jonathan Pollards). The possibilities are endless. Hackers without borders.

Help us along here.

If you were endowed with cyber omniscience where would this all go? What could happen or who was behind the major imbroglios? Will the supposedly anonymous Tor be exposed as a target of government snoops?  Who were the masterminds behind Stuxnet? Is the Syrian government responsible for the regular Internet blackouts there? Was it a network of hackers, or Russian government agencies, that shut down sites on Georgia’s Internet during a conflict between the two nations in 2008?

Help us add to the list and let us know what you think about the morality of all this. Should the ever more available tools of  much-vaunted Big Data, letting us burrow into the deepest recesses of the blackest of black databases, be given free rein? Is nothing left that is secret? Let us know.

Image Source: Adam Feuer

Cultures of Scopulariopsis, bacteria used in ripening cheeses with self-formed rinds

Trillions of microbes, a galaxy’s worth of prokaryotes, inhabit the human GI tract.

Figuring out what the microbiome does, as this Brobdingnagian collection of critters is known, remains a grand challenge of biology.

As always, scientists try to make a difficult problem tractable by conducting studies in a simpler version of the organism or environment they wish to observe: a mouse, rat, fruit fly or roundworm as stand-ins for humans. In the case of the microbiome, some of those model systems come from down the street at the local cheese store.

Last week microbiologist Rachel Dutton described to a gathering at the World Science Festival how her laboratory at the FAS Center for Systems Biology at Harvard works with bacteria and fungi that inhabit the rinds of cheeses to better understand the communal behavior of microbes. Next time you view  handmade cheeses on display, look at the rinds and think about the pitched battles and the calculated alliances that have taken place on those crusty biofilm coatings.  “We’re learning that there’s all kinds of interactions in communities on cheese,” Dutton says.

The colloquy took place not in a college auditorium but at Murray’s Cheese, a Greenwich Village institution that has its own aging caves in the basement, one of which is known as the stink tank. Suited up with booties, hairnets and white coats, the group talked to Brian Ralph, Murray’s cave master, about cheese mites.

“Right now you’re not selling anything with mites?” one woman asked.

Ralph had explained that that’s what you get when you pay good money for some cheeses: mites eat  microbes on the aging rinds. They can leave tiny pockmarks and help with the  ripening, or affinage, perhaps lending the product dusty and bitter notes.

It’s hard but well-compensated labor. A mite-worked Mimolette from Murray’s will run you $35 a pound. Pair it with an antiseptic strong ale or Scotch, if you’re queasy. But you should get over it. The fear of these little beings seems misplaced as they’ve already taken up residence big time in your duodenum.

So get onboard with the microbiologists—and bien sûr the cheese connoisseurs—and show a little love. The alliance between the culture of fondue and the one that enables the gene sequencing of Scopulariopsis (a relative of what might be on your toenails)—may translate into a deeper understanding of gut microbes involved in human health.

Image Source: FAS Center for Systems Biology, Harvard University

The FDA just issued a solicitation document, a request for quotation, seeking a contractor to comb drug makers’ expenditures, everything from phone calls to educational promotional materials, that would ferret out instances when companies have been peddling drugs for uses that have not received regulatory approval. The  contractor that wins approval would furnish this information in real-time to the FDA’s Office of Criminal Investigations. There’s a latent demand for these services, as the FDA, even without the ability to marshal the desired level of analysis, has discovered some whoppers in recent years: GlaxoSmithKline had to pay $3 billion for pushing drugs off-label: the antidepressant Wellbutrin for weight loss and sexual dysfunction is one example.

This is where Big Data gets interesting.

See Fierce Biotech and Regulatory Focus for more.

Even so, Alan Alda moderated a panel of experts whose members spend a lot of time on the issue of scanners and criminal intent. Watch this session from the World Science Festival that took place on the afternoon of June 1.

On the panel were Nita A. Farahany, a scholar from Duke Law School who studies the legal and social implications of the biosciences, Kent Kiehl, who has amassed the largest database containing brain scans of  prisoners, Jed S. Rakoff, a federal judge, and Anthony D. Wagner, a Stanford University memory researcher.

The World Science Festival assembled a panel of luminaries who will attempt to make sense of this sprawling theme in the allotted 90 minutes. They included Mélanie Boly, a researcher and physician who has performed studies on minimally conscious patients; Christof Koch, a leading researcher on the neural basis of consciousness; Colin McGinn, known for his work on the philosophy of mind, and Nicholas Schiff, a physician-scientist who specializes in disorders of consciousness.

Click below here to see these leading lights gathered at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts on May 30 to take on whether Homo sapiens is  the only conscious species, the question of whether consciousness transcends the physical boundaries of the brain, and an exploration of the biochemical processes that underlie the life of the mind. The session, entitled “The Whispering Mind: The Enduring Conundrum of Consciousness,” is moderated by ABC Nightline co-anchor Terry Moran.  (Image Source: World Science Festival)

George Whitesides

The Obama administration’s Big Brain project—$100 million for a map of some sort of what lies beneath the skull—has captured the attention of the entire field of neuroscience. The magnitude of the cash infusion can’t help but draw notice, eliciting both huzzahs mixed with gripes that the whole effort might sap support for other perhaps equally worthy neuro-related endeavors.

The Brain Activity Map Project—or the Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative—is intended to give researchers tools to elicit the real-time functioning of neural circuits, providing a better picture of what happens in the brain when immersed in thought or when brain cells are beset by a degenerative condition like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. Current technologies are either too slow or lack the resolution to achieve these goals.

One strength of the organizers—perhaps a portent of good things to come—is that they don’t seem to mind opening themselves to public critiques. At a planning meeting earlier this month, George Whitesides, the eminent Harvard chemist and veteran of big government ventures in support of nanotechnology, weighed in on how the project appeared to an informed outsider. Edited excerpting of some of his comments follows. This posting is a bit long, but Whitesides is eloquent and it’s worth reading what he has to say because his views apply to any large-scale sci-tech foray.

Whitesides began his talk after listening to a steady cavalcade of big-name neuroscientists furnish their personal wish lists for the program: ultrasound to induce focal lesions, more fruit fly studies to find computational nervous system primitives, more studies on zebra fish, studies on wholly new types of model organisms, avoiding too much emphasis on practical applications and so on.

“Listening to you this morning has been intensely interesting for me,” Whitesides began. “It has very much the flavor of a thousand flowers blooming. That is to say a problem which we all agree is intensely important: what is the brain how does it think, what is mind. It fits right there with issues such as what is life and where does life come from. It fits with the great problems of the next century.”

“The question of whether people outside understand what is going on and where it leads is more complicated,” he continued. “I’ll just make a point to set a starting point. When I first heard about…the brain map I checked with a bunch of people who are good scientists and neurobiologists and everybody’s opposed, almost universally…There’s very deep skepticism that this approach, physical mapping at that scale, is going to work and lead to something.”

To promote the program, Whitesides emphasized the critical need to get non-neuroscientists to understand the problem being addressed—and to think carefully about something as simple as what the project should be called. Would the name “brain map” convey anything intelligible to someone not conversant with technical papers that bear titles like “Climbing Fiber Input Shapes Reciprocity of Purkinje Cell Firing”?

Whitesides suggested reverting to first principles in trying to describe to the world at large the importance of spending $100 million to gain better insight into the minutiae of neural circuitry. He recommended a cross-disciplinary collaboration by drawing upon knowledge, not from geneticists or bioengineers, but by borrowing across the divide of C.P. Snow’s Two Cultures: In other words, bringing in the English teachers. Going as basic as it gets, Whitesides told a room packed with full professors from elite universities that they should craft the story of the Big Brain project with the structural elements of a murder mystery.

“You have to have a puzzle or problem: Who killed lady of house? Was it the butler or somebody else? There has to be a puzzle or conflict or problem you want to resolve. The second element, a journey or trek, how you get there. You’ve spent much time talking here about that: what technical methods to get data or to formulate experiments.

“The third component: There has to be a surprise. If you don’t have a surprise nobody’s interested. You have to catch the attention of people. To say [you want to come up with] a theory of mind is too far off. You want something shorter term that people can get a grip on. Finally, you need a resolution. The cat killed the lady of house, not the butler…But you need a resolution. Often in science you call it an application.

“If you don’t have those components, you don’t have much to work with when talking to people who are not neuroscientists. Everybody’s fascinated by the particular tack they take to a particular piece of research. Outside it’s a different story. People want to know what you’re all doing and it has to be simple enough for people to understand that. It’s very difficult to do.

“It’s very, very difficult to do and one of the issues here is to start hammering out that story. In genomics, it was: ‘we’re going to understand genomics, and based on the genome we’re going to understand cancer, and based on that understanding we’re going to cure cancer; and based on that your mother is going to live for a longer period of time.’

“Now it’s turned out to be more complicated than that as everything is in biology is. But here you’ve got an even more complicated problem. So how do you simplify this very complicated problem with top and bottom-level stories in such a fashion that I as an outsider can understand what the field is going to be doing, what it’s deliverables are going to be? …

“Now in that context there are just a couple of things to remember. One of them is the question of ‘Why now?’ This problem has been around for a long time. And this is hardly the first group that’s thought about the nature of the brain. So why is now the time where we expect something astonishing to happen? With genomics, it happened because the technology of sequencing became so good that virtually anyone could generate floods of data and then begin to think about what could be done with that. What’s the corresponding thing here? I don’t know the answer to that.

“The second issue which is in the same general issue of ‘why now’ is ‘Who cares?’” Obviously you care because you care about problems. But outside of this room with people who are not neuroscientists, what do they care about? What is the problem that you say you’re going to solve that they care about and I don’t think there are any shortage of these problems, all the way from alleviating tremor in Parkinson’s to beginning to think about depression, which is one of the great problems in public health.”

Whitesides then went on to talk about other considerations for structuring the project so that it retains some relevance beyond the neuroscience community. “I think that it’s really important to have deliverables and outcomes.” he said. “They don’t have to be the things that have the characteristic that they have to be the ultimate goal, but you need milestones along the way so you can go to the outside world and say we have done this. It’s not a compelling case to say that we’re here and in 100 years we’ll have a theory of mind and there’s nothing to show you in between because it’s all too complicated to understand. So what are they going to be and what do they look like?

“Second there’s a question of reductionism vs. higher-level stuff. If you think that a theory of mind is going to come by understanding the function of individual synapses and then building up from there, that tends not to work too well with really complicated systems. It works well with engineered systems like transistors or integrated circuits or devices or the Internet or Facebook. Those systems are engineered systems. Picking really complicated systems apart is hard to do. So what often one does is go from the end and look at higher-level behaviors in terms of black boxes and if you have good working models, you can pick those black boxes apart.

“Just to give you an example of how the fully reductionist approach can run into difficulties, again we can go to genomics. If you talk now to the people in the pharmaceutical industry, what they will say is they’re moving massively away from target-based medicine to phenotypic assays. That is to say, if you want to find out whether a mouse gets better, you give a mouse stuff and see what happens, you don’t ask too many detailed questions. The detailed questions haven’t worked out very well. Here I don’t have a sense where the dividing line is between things that are best done at high-level and things that are best done by going reductionist. But there’s probably a place for everything.”

“Zebra fish are a nice transparent model, but they’re probably not going to tell us very much about depression. People are probably more interested in depression than they are in zebra fish outside the room. That’s an interesting question.

“The third point is about balance and inclusion. We are at the tail end of a pretty successful program in the United States on nanoscience or nanotechnology. And the question of why was this successful is complicated. But one of the reasons is that when this program emerged, it was phrased in such a way that virtually every area of science saw there was something in it for them; that is, the chemists, the biologists, the physicists, the device guys; everybody saw that there was some value in nanoscience for them.

“And there was a supporting enormously important technology which is the technology of integrated circuits. And what’s happened over the course of time is what the engineers at Intel have done which is almost beyond belief in terms of its sophistication. Two generations or maybe one generation from now, microprocessors will have minimum feature sizes that are on the order of maybe 8 nanometers. I still can’t believe this and that’s using 190 nanometer light.

So they provided an enormous practical push for this area and then everybody had something interesting to do at the nanoscale. The question is how to does one open this community in such a fashion that everyone thinks there’s something interesting and important…[For the brain project], it has to include engineering, it has to include clinical medicine it has to include the molecular it has to include cells and animals. The whole story has to be there somehow but making the story inclusive will make a much stronger case for building a strong community.

The last point I’ll make is inclusion of industry…Let me tell you another short story which comes from a component of genomics that was Illumina, the sequencer that has been as important as many other things in genomics. The inventor of the technology at the very beginning was David Walt of Tufts…I was at a seminar with David in which one of the people in the audience at the end asked the following question: [which was] ‘how do you handle the conflict of interest problem in an academic lab. when you’re working on this and a company is working on the same thing’ and he [Walt] said ‘there’s never a problem and the reason there’s never a problem is that once industry takes up an idea; and good engineers, mature engineers, begin to work on it, an academic laboratory can never compete.’

“Now the relevance to this [the brain project] if you think about what Illumina and other sequencers made possible in genomics you can ask the question: are there corresponding things in this area where really good, skilled industrial engineers can make a capability available to the community in a way that makes it possible to collect all the data, all the structure, function, the measurements that you want to collect because it’s going to be vastly, vastly easier if it’s done as a centralized function, with real people paying real dollars to get it done really, really well.

“And it may be premature to do it at this point. I don’t know the answer to that but it’s something for you to think about. And I think the earlier you get people who are professional engineers and, on the other end, clinicians actively involved in the work that you’re doing; the more likely you are to find components that you can use and motivations for using them that will help keep the field strong.

“So it’s a fantastic area, unbelievably complicated. Outside it looks less straightforward than it looks to you inside and inside it looks pretty chaotic, so you can imagine what it looks like from outside.”

Hyundai ad depicts an abortive suicide

On May 3, the  Centers for Disease Control and Prevention published a report showing that suicide among middle-aged Americans has risen substantially. Perverse coincidence perhaps, but that document arrived about a week after Hyundai Europe pulled an ad that sparked sustained outrage because it shows a guy trying to commit suicide with fumes from his SUV, only to find his efforts stymied because his fuel-cell-powered vehicle emits only water vapor, not carbon monoxide.

The CDC statistics have nothing to do with the ad except that both furnish a reminder of the persistence of a particular public health problem that will never go away. The ad, perhaps a candidate for one of the worst advertisements of all time (that thought has crossed more than just my mind), ignores entirely the research literature suggesting that dwelling on this dark theme publicly in the wrong way can prompt others to try the same.

Samaritans, a British suicide-prevention group mentioned in a posting on the ad by prominent physician-blogger Ben Goldacre, cites over 60 studies demonstrating that media reporting on suicide can lead to copycat behavior. The phenomenon even has a name—“The Werther Effect” after Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther.” There is a legitimate debate as to what extent news media should withhold information about suicides to avoid repeat incidents. But Hyundai is not The Washington Post. The company pushes product and is unconcered with the public’s right to know.

An obvious question lingers from all of this: what was Innocean, Hyundai’s in-house agency, thinking? True, Madison Avenue is paid handsomely to push limits. Famed executive Jerry Della Femina called his autobiography “From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor,” a reference to a whimsical and immediately discarded idea he came up with for a Panasonic campaign.

So why did “The Pipe Job,” as the Hyundai ad is called, ever get into circulation?  Of course, lack of taste is not confined to Hyundai: PepsiCo recently dropped an ad for Mountain Dew that featured a police lineup with an injured white woman inspecting five African-American men and a goat. The particulars of the Hyundai ad are especially disturbing, though. The  protagonist tapes a hose from the exhaust pipe to the interior of the vehicle and waits grim-faced behind the wheel as vapors enter.

The camera then cuts to the outside of the man’s modest British home, where you see the light in the garage door window switching on before the man exits and captioning declares: “The new ix35 with 100% water emissions.” The Hyundai logo then floats mid-screen. Targeted to a British audience, the ad was posted on YouTube briefly until the uproar ensued. In response, the company issued the requisite “We apologize unreservedly.” and tried to scrub any trace of the offending material from the Web.

A simple apology here doesn’t really cut it. This ad is one for the history books. It should be embossed in the global advertising industry’s institutional memory so that no one ever attempts something this stupid again.

Image Source: YouTube screen shot

Summaries of a survey on scientific fraud in medical faculties in the Flanders region of Belgium

I went to a panel discussion at the New York Academy of Sciences on the evening of April 30th that addressed the topic of various forms of scientific malfeasance, ranging from plagiarism to outright manipulation of data. A gripping and deeply unsettling topic, as it relates directly to the research studies that I pore over every day at my desk. After the session moderated by Scientific American Editor in Chief Mariette DiChristina ended, I thought that would be my fill of data finagling for at least maybe a week.

The next morning, though, there was a breakfast gathering of editors and other representatives from foreign editions of Scientific American. I asked a bunch of the editors there about coverage that might be of interest to us here stateside.  Koen De Buck, commercial director of EOS, the group of Antwerp-based science magazines that publish the Dutch edition of Scientific American, mentioned a study by online news coordinator Reinout Verbeke on surprise, surprise—fraud of all things.

Verbeke, in collaboration with Dutch psychiatrist Joeri Tijdink, decided to explore the prevalence of fraudulent research practices in the Flanders region of Belgium, as shocks from the 2011 scandal involving Dutch social psychologist Diederik Stapel continued to reverberate. (See the New York Times Magazine feature on Stapel that appeared on April 28.)

Verbeke and Tijdink cast a wide net, with support they received from the Pascal Decroos Fund for Investigative Journalism.  They contacted  researchers from the medical science faculties of every university in  Flanders, sending out more than 2,500 questionnaires and receiving 315 fully completed anonymous responses in return.

The answers startled. Four of the researchers who responded, or 1.3 percent, acknowledged that they had fabricated data at least once during the past three years, misdeeds that may still be unpunished. What’s more, 23, or 7.3 percent, of those who sent back  questionnaires had engaged in the quaint term “massaging”—in which data or results were removed to make their work true up with original hypotheses. The roughly 8 percent of fraudulent practices found at the universities in Flanders compared with an average of 2 percent of smelly stuff going on that turned up in a 2009 meta-analysis in PLoS ONE of studies from around the world.

EOS published the survey (English PDF) in its April issue and Tijdink and Verbeke are now preparing to submit an article to a scientific journal.  “When you get four people fabricating data that’s a lot,” Verbeke said in an interview, adding: “People were very willing to cooperate with this  survey and admit that there is a problem. They had been unable to speak up and suddenly there was a chance to communicate about science fraud. That can explain the higher figures in my survey [compared to the PLoS ONE meta-analysis]… I’m happy now that there is a debate in Flanders and universities are taking action. They  want to install courses in research integrity. They want researchers here to publish their raw data.”

Respondents said the publish or die imperative was one of the main reasons for the infractions. The survey found that two thirds of the professors polled ran into excessive pressure to get their work into journals and  nearly 70 percent of all of those surveyed had added the name of one author who had not participated in a study.

Ivan Oransky, a founder of Retraction Watch, and a former editor at Scientific American, as well as one of the panelists at the NYAS event, was quoted in the article as saying that these figures don’t surprise when it comes to medical research. “Cooperating with the pharmaceutical industry gains researchers financial rewards. That could pressurize scientists to cut corners,” he remarked.

It’s studies like this one that have prompted a new look at the way that science is carried out.  The Nature journals have just published editorials calling for more transparent research. (Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.) And the Third World Conference on Research Integrity is scheduled to be held in Montreal from May 5 to 8.

EOS ended its article by calling for a rethink of the scientific enterprise. “Has publication pressure and the demand of specialist journals for positive and spectacular results become so high that it jeopardizes the scientific value of many studies? This survey can be a starting point to open the debate, and where possible, improve or thoroughly revise the scientific system.”

Image Sources: from an English-language version of “Science Fraud: The Hard Figures” published in EOS‘s April issue.

Google Glass

ScientificAmerican.com just ran an article on smartglasses. Not just the famous Google Glass, but a whole crop of smartglasses that are supposedly going to change everything: Big things afoot for the face in Tech Land.

I dunno, this technology just doesn’t make sense to me. I could be wrong, along the lines of DEC chief executive Ken Olsen’s infamous quote that there was no reason for anyone to have a personal computer at home. I concede that there could be a few neat uses for these gizmos, perhaps in a surgical suite, on the factory floor or to guide a disoriented Alzheimer’s patient on the walk home.

Beyond special needs, I just don’t get it. I wear glasses and most people at work don’t anymore. And the millions or billions that have been spent on surgery to get rid of eyewear for good suggest that a computer fashioned as a glasses-like device, no matter how small, is a non-starter.  Sit at a window table in any restaurant when the light is just right and watch the women (and men) check themselves out in the plate glass. Donning headwear with a little chip attached is not what people are hankering for.

I’m no Luddite, but it seems that technology works best when it integrates without any visible seams into an existing social and commercial ecosystem. The smartphone is a good example, letting you run your life from something that fits in your pocket. My guess is that’s as far as people really want to go when internalizing microchips. There’s no deterministic geek dialectic that mandates a sequential staging from mainframe to mini, followed by the desktop, then a handheld device and later Google Glass and ultimately perhaps a neural implant.

People want a computer as a companion or an assistant. They don’t necessarily want one in their face. R2-D2 is cute. The person in the next seat on the bus talking into a pair of smartglasses or blinking his right eye furiously into a lens sensor to transmit a Morse-code-like text message just plain isn’t.

Source: Antonio Zugaldia/Wikimedia Commons

Retailer in Katete, Zambia with anti-diarrhea kits slotted among bottles

Women in rural areas of the developing world often have to walk all day to get to a health clinic to retrieve the oral rehydration packets needed to treat their children’s diarrhea, a leading killer for those under the age of five.

When they arrive, however, the medicine is often gone. The solution lies in getting the packets closer to outlying villages, a logistical challenge in distributing a world renowned soft drink.  “You will find Coca-Cola in any village at any time in the course of the year, but you’ll not find medicines. What’s the difference? There’s  something to be learned there,” says Zambian Minister of Health Joseph Kasonde.

Claire Ward’s indie documentary —The Cola Road—follows that learning curve as an innovative nonprofit piggybacks on the Coca-Cola distribution network in Zambia to distribute oral rehyrdration packets.  A former editor at Maclean’s, Ward made the film for her master’s project in journalism at New York University, funding it largely through crowdsourced financing.

The film highlights the work of Simon and Jane Berry, who head ColaLife, as they probe whether a plastic kit containing zinc and the salts used to combat dehydration in stricken babies and toddlers would win acceptance by the country’s Coca-Cola bottler, South African Breweries, as well as wholesalers, small rural shopkeepers and critically the parents of sick children living in far-flung provinces.

The kit, sold for a dollar (5000 kwacha),  fits snugly into the neck of the Coke bottles slotted into the familiar vermillion, hard-plastic crates and delivered by donkey, oxcart, bicycle as well as the familiar trucks and buses. (“Think Outside the Box and Inside the Crate,” as the film’s promo poster entreats.)

Tiny village shops, always stocked with Coke, have now started to receive oral rehydration Kit Yamoyos (kits of life)—and, no, Coke itself is not a particularly good rehydration fluid, despite the lore. Thousands of the kits have been sold already in Zambian rural districts and the Ministry of Health, the film points out, now has plans to use the same supplier network to distribute other types of medicine. The income for the shopkeepers provides an incentive to keep the kits on the shelves.

Simon Berry has contemplated using the Coke supplier network to distribute medicines for more than 20 years and now the  idea is catching on.  Segway developer and serial inventor Dean Kamen remarks in the April 29 issue of Fortune that he convinced Coca-Cola to become his partner in distributing Slingshot, a still that uses minimal energy to clean water. It could become an ideal complement to a Kit Yamoyo that requires a clean water supply to bring a sick baby back to health.

Here’s a trailer for the film and a video that contains some footage from the documentary:

Image Sources: Simon Berry/ColaLife; pi Global (video)

Barack Obama on Twitter

The Dow Jones Industrial Average and Twitter, both cultural mainstays that suffer at times from  acute alphanumeric ADHD, collided at ultra-high velocity on April 23 to induce an institutional chain reaction. The half life of the “flash crash” stretched a couple of minutes—and then the market came roaring back.

But fewer than 140 characters sufficed to send the ticker spiraling down a poetic 145 points, with losses reaching $200 billion at one point. Symmetries in the natural world are so mind numbingly gorgeous, eh?

According to the Wall Street Journal, algorithms in institutional computers that scan news feeds took at face value a hacker-placed tweet on the AP’s Twitter feed. The bogus report of an explosion at the White House triggered automatic sell orders. Let’s hope our ICBMs don’t use the same software.

This all came less than a week after social media’s wisdom of crowds had tagged as suspicious more than one person who had not left a pressure cooker bomb in a backpack near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Among social media titans, Twitter is a great place to retrieve news pointers, join a 24-hour party (as my colleague Ferris Jabr likes to emphasize) and retrieve the minutest musings of friends and family. But it has always served equally as a hyper-kinetic wire service for rumor.

That seems obvious but we—and I mean even we at Scientific American–need to sometimes revisit the initial ardor that suffuses the reporting on a new medium. We reported in 2010 that Chileans after an earthquake had started using Twitter to sort truth from fact, maybe no longer such a good idea as the micro-blogging site continues to attract anyone and everyone, including apparently hackers from the Syrian Electronic Army who broke into the AP.

Press reports suggested the possibility of two-step verification for Twitter as one solution to tighten up security. But requiring the input of a code sent to a cell phone before being able to log on and tweet what’s for dinner seems kind of a non-starter. Could this be the ultimate use for the much-vaunted Google Glass, allowing retinal security scans before logging on to an account?

Probably not. The upshot should be that it’s always going to be tough to sort the wisdom from the noise in 140 characters when looking for a bombing suspect or placing a million-dollar sell order.

Source: White House

Can't Keep 'Em Down: New Year's in Times Square

Will the masses at NFL events do “the wave” only in the watchful sights of a police sharpshooter’s high-powered rifle? Is tailgating before the game all but nostalgic history? Will major marathons be relegated to a dull repetition of 105 or so loops around a stadium track?

These are some of the questions that immediately spring to mind as frissons of anxiety pulsate through the constant stream of media reports in the aftermath of the Boston tragedy.

The answer to the query of whether voluntary attendance at large public events will drop permanently can probably be found by clicking on this link.

Even post September 11th, Times Square is as much a gathering point for tourists—and locals—as it has ever been in the many decades it has served as the navel of New York, the city’s focal center—and not just on New Year’s Eve, when the police scrutinize crowds with a vigilance that may become a model for the type of security required at future marathons or other large gatherings.

True, attendance may drop a bit at public events because of the irritating TSA-like measures that could be instituted just to be allowed to stand in the cold and crane your neck over 20 people blocking a view of the finish line. But crowds will keep coming.

The legacy of September 11th, as witnessed by the tourists that descend daily upon Times Square, prove the point—the attacks served as a kind of mass immunization for the eventuality of shoe bombers and marathon killings. The threat of persistent trauma after these events always lingers, but, except for those who experience a tragedy firsthand, that threat is exaggerated—at least that’s what a body of reputable research shows.

George Bonanno, a Columbia psychology professor who studied resilience among New Yorkers after September 11th, found that only six percent of the nearly 2,800 surveyed in a random sample experienced post traumatic stress after the 2001 tragedy. “There’s a big spike in trauma symptoms right after and then they’re gone,” he says. Bonanno, in fact, said that those living close to the attack may have recovered as well or better than those in other parts of the country who just watched what happened on television. “Living with a situation on a daily basis, there’s little choice but to put things out of your mind,” Bonanno says.

Lasting effects en masse do happen. But when they do,  they often affect a beleaguered sub-group, victims of a prejudice that occurs relentlessly over generations. When I Googled “collective trauma” Tuesday afternoon, nothing came up for Boston Marathon. But there was a headline from Der Spiegel. Hüseyin Avni Karslioglu, the Turkish ambassador to Germany, lamented xenophobic killings and arson incidents against Turks, which led to what he characterized as a “collective trauma” that had undermined Turks’ basic sense of safety in that country. The closest analogy to the American experience might be, not the threat of terrorist attacks, but the seemingly endless tide of mass shootings, often occurring outside major urban centers.

After the marathon tragedy, normalcy will return, except in the unlikely scenario that explosives in public places become commonplace. The  bombs in Boston do not mark the beginning of our own Battle of Algiers. The tailgating will continue.

Image Source: Rob Boudon/Wikimedia Commons

But it appears that all of us may be  capable of these sensations, even if arms and legs remain intact. If we can conjure a phantom limb just like that, it raises all kinds of enticing questions for philosophers as well as scientists about what exactly constitutes our perception of the physical self. Karolinska Institute researchers report online in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience that they can induce a sensation of a phantom hand in just a short time. Watch this simple experiment here:

Mautz, B. S., Wong, B. B. M., Peters, R. A. & Jennions, M. D. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA (2013), modified by Angela Cesaro

I recently saw The Social Network. It’s been out for years, but I usually wait until I can watch them in my living room for free.

The take-home from that movie was that Facebook survived—it was the cool one—whereas other social media sites faltered because they didn’t “get it.” I know. It was just a movie, but that idea seems plausible to me.

Plausible, that is, for the era depicted a decade or so ago. That was then. How about now?

Judging from something that happened this week on Scientific American‘s Facebook page, things have changed. The current goings-on at the premier social media site bring to mind another movie, another (much-better) film than The Social Network, that I actually paid to see, and which was very much worth the price of admission. I have in mind the Academy Award-winning The Lives of Others whose plot centered around the workings of the uber-paranoid East German Stasi.

What does a pasty-faced East German bureaucrat listening to the phone conversations of others have to do with the ne plus ultra of the digital world? A lot, in fact.

So what happened this week? Big thumbs down: a committee of Facebook reviewers—should be rephrased “functionaries—decided  to censor a story published on ScientificAmerican.com that we reposted to our Facebook page. Am I getting overexercised here? No, “censor” is the right word in this instance.

Okay, what story was that? Nature News reported on a scientific study published this week in the august journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group and we posted their story on our site and then later on our Facebook page). The story was widely tracked, not just by us, but by dozens of media outlets because the study was a scientific take on one of those perennial topics that is the stuff of collective fascination, whether you own up to it or not. So what topic was that? Okay, let’s coyly spell it out here: does size matter?

The study used a digital representation of naked men, depicted both in the research report and republished by Scientific American and elsewhere online, that showed  men  of differing heights with different penis sizes. A group of women subjects were quizzed about the relative attractiveness of these male simulacra. The hypothesis, of course, was that male proportions might matter just a bit in female choosiness, providing some explanation for the evolution of penis size as a sexual trait, a convoluted way of asking: does size really matter?

The answer to that question, hold onto your seats: It depends. Typical science study, right? One might even ask is this this a question worth studying? Was it even a good study?

But that’s not what this post is about and it doesn’t really matter here.

Am I the next to go Mark? (Facebook allows this image but not the less hunky, more clinical images above.)

What this post is about is the fact that after the story went to Scientific American’s Facebook page, it was censored. The “committee of reviewers” deleted the post because the social media giant has a “strict policy against the sharing of pornographic content and any explicitly sexual content where a minor is involved.”  Huh? That comes as somewhat of a surprise, appearing as it did in the same issue of Proceedings (Impact factor 9.681) that also included articles with titles such as “Organization of lamprey variable lymphocyte receptor C locus and repertoire development” and “Biased assimilation, homophily and the dynamics of polarization.” This is science, not porn (it’s fairly clear that no one was harmed or exploited in the conduct of this study), and the study of sexuality, social psychology and evolution are essential, albeit still titillating, topics to the generation of knowledge about humankind.

Pornography? A committee of reivewers? My mind immediately jumps to the scenes from The Lives of Others in which a Stasi agents listen intently through their headphones to the calls of their fellow citizens—except the bland-faced monitors have been fast-forwarded to a cavernous roomful of hipper-than-thou, college-educated “reviewers” in Silicon Valley staring into their Macs.

This also brings to mind yet another image in which I return to that time when my elementary school librarian went through each new issue of National Geographic to make sure that no bare-breasted African tribal women made it to the shelves for the perusal of the boys in my third-grade class.

So back to the original question. Yes, size does matter. As far as male paraphernalia, who knows? But as far as avant-garde, digital media, it really does matter a lot. There is such a thing as being just too big. When organizations grow large, whether they be recently IPO-ed U.S. corporations or Soviet-bloc bureaucracies, they tend to lose their way.

And, yes, Facebook, you should respond to this post—with an apology.

Image Source: Mautz, B. S., Wong, B. B. M., Peters, R. A. & Jennions, M. D. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA (2013); Michaelangelo’s David: Wikimedia Commons

Transparent ("CLARITY-fied") mouse brain

Karl Deisseroth is a pioneer in optogenetics, the technology that has taken neuroscience by storm by enabling the use of optical and genetic methods to precisely control the switching on and off of individual neurons and brain circuits.

Deisseroth and his team at Stanford have now come up with an entirely new method to explore the brain that  U.S. National Institute of Mental Health director Thomas Insel told Nature represents “probably one of the most important advances for doing neuroanatomy in decades.”

As its name suggests, it is a means of making the post-mortem brain of a mouse or human transparent, a boon to researchers who wish to literally get a clearer picture of the mess of wiring in neural tissue without having to digitally stack images of tiny brain slices in a computer. The paper in our sister publication Nature went live on April 10 so  Scientific American decided to talk with Deisseroth about the advance.

What is CLARITY?

Clarity is the process of exchanging natural tissue components for components from outside the body to achieve new visibility, access, or function. For example, the CLARITY method described in the Nature paper involves exchanging native lipids for an artificial hydrogel, that provides transparency, firmness, and the ability to label tissues.

How do you get it to work?

We first build in-place, and from within the tissue, a new firm hydrogel infrastructure that retains proteins and nucleic acids but excludes lipids, which can then be vigorously removed with ionic detergents and electrophoresis

What will be the benefit for brain and other researchers?

This enables researchers to study complex biological systems with high resolution without taking them apart. This not only saves a great deal of time and effort but serves useful scientific purposes as well, by allowing assessment of joint relationships among the different elements within a complex system– for example, brainwide connection patterns coupled with panels of molecular labels.

How does it fit with your other work on techniques to understand neural circuits (optogenetics)?

It’s independent from our optogenetics technology, but the two could work together. For example, one could clarify a brain from an animal in which optogenetic control had been delivered (over neurons expressing an opsin fused to a fluorescent protein as we usually have it configured) and which had resulted in a known behavioral change (a mouse that stops feeding after receiving an electrical shock, for instance).  One could thereby map the local and global connectivity of those same neurons in the same animal known to cause behavioral change to a known extent.

Do you think you’ll ever be able to do something like this in a live animal?

The CLARITY method described in the Nature paper is not compatible with life since the lipids are essential for life, but other CLARITY approaches could be.

Image Source: Kwanghu Chung and Karl Deisseroth, Howard Hughes Medical Institute/Stanford University

Except the house of neuroscience, which attracts tens of thousands of attendees each year to the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, may be built on a foundation of clay. Those are the implications of an analysis published online April 10 in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, which questions the reliability of much of the research in the field.

The study—led by researchers at the University of Bristol—looked at 48 neuroscience meta-analyses (studies of studies) from 2011 and found that their statistical power reaches only 21 percent, meaning that there is only about a one in five chance that any effect being investigated by the researchers—whether a compound acts as an anti-depressant in rat brains, for instance—will be discovered. Anything that does turn up, moreover, is more likely to be false. The low power stems from the small size of the studies and minuscule effects.

John Ioannidis of Stanford University School of Medicine, says the statistical power of neuroscience studies is actually lower than that found in other areas of biology, which also suffer from the same phenomenon—he cited studies on cancer and cardiology that are powered at 34 percent.  “Neuroscience has tremendous potential and it is a very exciting field,” Ioannidis says. “However, if it continues to operate with very small studies, its results may not be as credible as one would wish. A combination of small studies with the high popularity of a highly-funded, bandwagon-topic is a high-risk combination and may lead to a lot of irreproducible results and spurious claims for discoveries that are out of proportion.”

Update: Moses Chao, a former president of the Society for Neuroscience and a professor of cell biology at New York University Medical School, got back to me with a comment after I posted the blog, which is excerpted here:

“I agree that many published papers in neuroscience  are based upon small effects or changes.  One issue is that many studies have not been blinded.  There have been numerous reports in my field which have not been reproduced, some dealing with small molecule receptor agonists.  This has set back progress.  The lack of reproducibility is one of the reasons that pharmaceutical companies have reduced their effort in neuroscience research. But irreproducibility also applies to other fields, such as cancer…

“I recently wrote an obituary on Rita Levi-Montalcini, who disdained  statistical analysis and only wanted to see results with a big effect!”

Professor Gilbert

I was watching one of the March Madness games recently with my son Benjamin. He is the only one in the world I can do this with because I can ask him what the difference is between the shot clock in the NBA and the one in the NCAA without being asked to immediately produce a green card.

During a commercial break, a familiar face popped onto the screen. The bald head, the gray goatee. What da hey, it was  Daniel Gilbert, Harvard psychology professor, host of the PBS special This Emotional Life,  author of the bestselling Stumbling on Happiness and purveyor of memorable aphorisms derived from social-psychology research: money does matter but only up to a point and marriages without children are happier.

In the game commercial, Gilbert was talking to millions of people about the need to better plan for retirement, people whose main foray into the investment world had to date been a contribution to the office betting pool on the game we were watching. The Prudential commercial was built around a faux social-science experiment in which a crowd of Austin, Tex. residents was recruited to put large stickers on a 1100-square foot wall in answer to the question: Who is the oldest person you know? Stickers on the wall bunched near the mark for  the tenth decade, demonstrating the wide gap on the wall between the oldest old and the line marking the traditional retirement age of 65. The implication, of course, was that you better start thinking about more than March Madness winnings if you were going to make it to 102.

Wow, neuroscience has really hit the big time. First, the Obama administration agreed in early April to spend $100 million to construct a brain map, making brain research  a centerpiece of a second-term effort to create a  legacy in the science arena. No Super Colliders or pitched battles against lymphoma, just brains all the way down. Now  Gilbert has given the profession unprecedented visibility by elevating social psychology and behavioral economics/finance to the level of the GEICO cave men and the Aflac duck. The “nudge” philosophy of behavioral economics—or the “shove” entreaties of Michael Bloomberg—(here’s why you “should” grow that nest egg or “must” forego that Dr. Pepper) has now officially entered the deepest reaches of the popular psyche .

Is this just the beginning? Will Walter Mischel of “the Stanford Marshmallow Experiment (think delayed gratification) act as spokesman for Weight Watchers? Will Michael Jordan describe the subtleties of the Morgenstern-Von Neumann utility theorem in examining the relative merits of boxers vs. briefs when pitching Hanes? Maybe not, but the Century (Millenium?) of the Brain is no doubt upon us. The future consists of axons and synapses. Benjamin, in medical school, is trying to decide on a specialty. This is terrible but I can’t resist: One word, neurology, Benjamin. 

Source: Jon Chase/Harvard University

Tuesday’s announcement made supposition real with $100 million in funding—to be complemented by tens of millions more kicked in by non-government sources.  Obama on Monday talked about gaining deeper knowledge of those tissue-based central processing units as a next “grand challenge” of science, the same one, really, that had been there when George H.W. Bush declared “The Decade of the Brain” in 1990, and identical to what will be encountered by presidents 45, 54, 55, 61, pick a number.

Big Neuroscience as it takes form in BRAIN—the Brain Research through Advancing Neurotechnologies—will be dedicated to tracing the workings of live neural circuits, a task currently hindered by instrumentation that can only look at small collections of brain cells or, at the opposite pole, scan large swathes of neural anatomy (slowly very slowly). The new tracking techniques would  capture, say, real-time traffic flows of neural signals between  the prefrontal cortex and the basal ganglia, a record of activity and interactivity of millions and sometimes billions of neurons. Understanding end-to-end circuit malfunctions may provide critical insights in unraveling some of the most debilitating non-infectious diseases that aren’t cancer: that means, Alzheimer’s, epilepsy and traumatic brain injury, to name but a few.

My lovable but sometimes cantankerous friend and blogmate John Horgan has cast a jaundiced eye on this endeavor (just this one)? I fully get John’s take when he goes after particle physics—which has all the hallmarks of a science ready to pack up its tents after the Higgs grand finale. But BRAIN is different. It’s one of the most clever—and most cleverly (and justifiably) hyped—ways to promote a major undertaking in basic biological research. Despite the elaborate P.R. cloak, it is probably deserving of support by scientist and non-scientist alike. “Probably” only because many of the devilish details are still to come.

Why so great? The project is big science, but not too-big—or delusional.  It  is not a technophile’s wish to achieve eternal life by promising to transfer a volunteer’s brain into a computer, as some futurists like Google director of engineering Ray Kurzweil desire. It is not trying to insert a full digital model of the human brain into a computer, the target of  The Human Brain Project. It envisages, rather, a Buddhist-like Middle Way in which tools can be built to map the large-scale ebb and flow of electrical and chemical signals traversing that three-pound, fissured lump underneath the skull—and it wants to do the same in the nervous systems of lesser organisms, knowledge that might furnish insight into human neuroanatomy.

The project organizers made the brilliant move of tapping Cornelia Bargmann, a Rockefeller University researcher, to head a working group that will define scientific goals. Bargmann is a great choice because she has voiced skepticism about mega-research projects and  understands the need to avoid having BRAIN become a money sink that drains funding from the rest of the field. A great quote from the great choice: “Creative science is bottom-up, not top-down,” Bargmann told Nature. “Are we talking about central planning inside the Beltway?” Empowering critics is adopted all too little as a strategy for managing big projects—apostasy of apostasies: big government may have some lessons for the private sector in this regard.

Okay, but here’s the hype part: this project is neither a Moon Shot nor a Human Genome Project. There will be no lunar one small step or a genomic three-billion nucleotides within the next four years. A pulsing, thalamo-cortical circuit from a mouse by 2016, if that’s even possible, may not result immediately in breakthroughs for Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s. The best that might be achieved may be one nano step for wormkind. As Christof Koch noted in a fascinating review in Science of Ray Kurzweil’s new book: “And even the lowly roundworm Caenorhabditis elegans, a creature no bigger than the letter l and with exactly 302 nerve cells, is for now beyond the ability of computational neuroscience to comprehend.”

Not everyone agrees with my pessimistic assessment. John Donoghue, a neuroscientist from Brown University involved in planning the BRAIN initiative, thinks that it’s conceivable that the type of circuit tracing work envisaged in this project might have a near-term payoff, perhaps in existing efforts to use electrical stimulation to enhance cognition in Alzheimer’s patients. “If we can accelerate that it would be a fantastic thing and have huge public health implications,” he says.

It doesn’t matter whether Donoghue is right—or I am. This project is a valuable undertaking, a splurge, though not an obscene one, on basic research in neuroscience. Even if it utterly fails in mapping real-time neural circuits in the human cerebral cortex, the various tools that emerge from nanotechnology and the like will be worth the price of admission. So it may not nail Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s. But hype has been used before to sell science to the public. Really?

So what? Just go for it.

Image Source: Harvard University

Note: This article was updated.

Electrical impulses travel up a neuron to branching dendrites, providing a neural tune-up.

A little shuteye refreshes.

Right, but what does that really mean?

Not talking here about leaping out of bed ready for a five-mile run upon awakening, but rather about what’s happening at the level of individual brain cells deep inside your head.

A new study by R. Douglas Fields, a pioneer in researching out-of-the-mainstream  brain areas and neural activity, holds one promising suggestion. Fields’s team at the National Institutes of Child Health and Development in Bethesda, Maryland, built on an earlier observation that during sleep (or even when just chilling out), neural signals travel the “wrong way” in cells of a critical region of the hippocampus, the brain structure involved with forming some types of new memories. The new study by Fields demonstrates, in a lab dish, that this reverse trafficking functions as a form of “editing,” a physical paring back of inessential parts of a brain cell to ensure that you don’t forget what you learned the previous day.

Specifically, electrical signals in the CA1 area of the hippocampus reverse direction like the opposite flow of cars during the evening rush hour. The spiking electrical pulses move up instead of down the long extensions of nerve cells known as  axons. The train of spikes pass through the cell body where the nucleus resides before reaching the ends of thousands of tiny branching tendrils called dendrites.

Upon arrival, the signals act as dimmer switches that cause neurons to fire less strongly when they receive chemical signals from other neurons across the small gaps known as synapses—in neurospeak, the synaptic strength diminishes.  “That allows you to learn the next day because you haven’t saturated your synapses,” Fields says. During this synaptic tuneup, some of the synapses disappear as part of a process that helps integrate the sights and sounds of the past day into memory, a process that involves blotting out irrelevant detail and “refreshing” synapses to better absorb the sensory onslaught of the coming day.

In the experiment, Olena Bukalo, the first author on the paper that appeared in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, working with the rest of a team in Fields’s lab, provided reverse stimulation to a slice of hippocampal tissue. When the researchers then turned around and sent electrical signals in the opposite direction, from dendrites to axons, the tuned-up neurons produced stronger signals. The re-stimulation (similar to spacing out studying for a test) was essential for strengthening connections. Without reminder zaps, firing did not improve.

“What has been discovered is  a remarkable new mechanism of plasticity at the global cell level,” says Giulio Tononi, of the University of Wisconsin. “While it has been characterized in vitro, it is quite possible that it represents a fundamental way of resetting synaptic strength also in vivo.” Tononi researches the weakening and “resetting” of synapses during sleep and an article on his work will appear in Scientific American during coming months.

Reverse transmission up the axon, known as antidromic firing, occurs as part of a larger set of events in the hippocampus in which experiences of the previous day replay like a sportscaster’s video tape. Ultimately, understanding these night moves—and the benefits  of weakening synapses—may help address PTSD, OCD and other disorders in which a  mind, unable to detach, replays an endless tape loop that is incapable of refreshing and wiping the slate clean.

Source: National Institutes of Health

Daphne Bavelier of the University of Rochester and Richard J. Davidson of the University of Wisconsin put forward a plan calling for neuroscientists and game designers to work together to determine what aspects of play can  improve cognitive performance—and for enabling  game designers from academia to get their products to market, a process they compare to transferring drugs from the lab to patients.

The promise of video games for enhancing a range of cognitive skills was highlighted as well in the January/February issue of Scientific American Mind in an article that points out that games like Call of Duty can improve visual ability, attention, spatial reasoning and decision making. The article mentions the work of Bavelier, an advisor to a game company, and others who are trying to realize the vision of  neural enhancement either through action play or explicitly labeled brain training.

By coincidence, the same issue of Mind references one of the biggest snags in bringing forth gaming as pedagogy.  In the letters section of that issue, three researchers—David Hambrick, Frederick Oswald and Thomas Redick—cite the absence of any convincing evidence for efforts to improve intelligence through mental exercises —the basis for much of  the lucrative brain-game industry. Their letter was a response to an earlier Mind article that showed that an “n-back test,” incorporated into some games, can improve working memory, a measure related to intelligence. (See their letter online under the sub-heading Fixing Intelligence.)

What’s the answer?  I can only waffle here. One of my editors always entreats staffers to try to bring out a clear argument in any story that we write or edit. The brain-video game arena is one reporting area in which I have always utterly failed to meet that objective. The article by Bavelier and Davidson indicates why it is difficult to disentangle studies on games for brain enhancement. In sum, this  type of research is tough to do. “Placebo controls are not possible,” the authors write, “so optimal designs probably involve having several comparison groups, including an active gameplaying comparison [group] and perhaps other, more typical interventions, such as drug therapy.”

To continue this on-the-one-hand/other-hand thread that drives my editor crazy: something along these lines certainly seems possible. One of the underlying themes in brain research in recent decades is the accumulation of evidence for neuroplasticity, the brain’s apparent ability to remold  like clay in response to changing inputs from the outside world: the brain of a blind person expropriating the visual cortex to process sensations of touch.  One long-time pioneer in neuroplasticity research, Michael Merzenich, became involved with developing brain-training software—and researchers in the laboratory of Nina Kraus at  Northwestern University reported in February that using one of the brain training exercises developed by Merzenich’s company, Posit Science, enabled older adults to hear better by letting them process sounds more quickly.

It’s studies like this that may have  prompted the White House Office of Science and Technology and the National Science Foundation to organize a get-together last year of gaming companies and neuroscientists—and the second annual Entertainment Software and Cognitive Neurotherapeutics Society conference is being held from March 15 to 17th at the University of Southern California.

The  biggest challenge in all of these endeavors will be to determine whether a higher score on Call of Duty translates into a larger tally on tests of mental processing time (how fast you jam on the brakes when a kid runs in front of your car to retrieve a ball) or working memory (keeping a new phone number in your head long enough to dial). As the letter writers to Mind imply, not much evidence exists so far that a video war fantasy or a psychological test, slightly re-purposed into the form of a commercial brain game, will get you into Mensa if you didn’t have the essentials from the outset.

Call of Duty may improve memory, attention, reflexes and whatnot for  Sergeant John “Soap” MacTavish, a game character, but that’s wholly separate from whether the actual game player also displays augmented function for those attributes when venturing beyond a desktop virtual world. Daniel T. Willingham, a professor of psychology from the University of Virgina, sums up the main critique of cognitive calisthenics: “What we really want to do is target a cognitive process [say, attention or memory] and then design a game that packages practice of that process into a gaming experience. That effort has been ongoing for 20 years or so in the education world and game designers have found it much more difficult than anyone thought it would be.”

Judging whether anything has actually changed within the neural circuitry of a game player’s prefrontal cortex is an exceedingly difficult task. A player may actually improve when tested on a measure like working memory—in principle, demonstrating that interacting with battlefield graphics translates into an improvement in mental ability. But that may not suffice. Willingham again:

There has been enormous controversy over transfer in working-memory training. At least in some tests, researchers show transfer [from the game to] working memory measures. What they don’t show is beneficial effects of working memory training to cognitive processes that have working memory as a constituent—reasoning, for example. So working memory is highly correlated with reasoning ability and then you boost working memory…but reasoning doesn’t get any better. Why? That’s still under debate…it’s not obvious that if we can boost mental rotation [a skill mentioned by Bavelier and Davidson in their article], we will make people into better dentists or  scientists.

This hurdle will likely leave both psychologists and software developers executives undeterred, if only because of the hypnotic allure of gaming: Call of Duty: Black Ops was played the equivalent of  68,000 years in the month after its release. Michael Posner, a professor of psychology from the University of Oregon, believes that the issue of transfer effects will ultimately be addressable: “We do have principles for predicting transfer based on common elements among tasks, common mental operation in performing them, or common anatomy of the brain networks that support them. Many of the findings are disputed, but I think in the end it will be possible to know the limits of generalization of different forms of learning.”

More (and better designed) research will be needed before that goal is achieved. Walter Boot, who researches complex skill training at Florida State University, says that most of the studies on games arrive freighted with methodological flaws—they include overly simplistic lab tasks, inadequate control groups and a failure to measure whether a game skill translated to the world beyond the confines of a game. “The potential of games to improve cognition is exciting and in the end may be a fruitful approach,” Boot says, “but it will be important for consumers of these games to be given realistic expectations regarding their effect. Much more research is necessary before this can happen.”

For the moment, a video or brain game that enhances neuroplasticity or IQ may not be where a parent or student should look to learn how to learn better. Willingham and colleagues published a lengthy review in Psychological Science in the Public Interest this year that shows that the student that tests herself on recently learned material and goes over coursework at set intervals, rather than cramming, has the best chance of success. Whether or not they make the brain more plastic, these tried-and-true methods, affirmed by a body of psychological research, may be as good as it gets.

Image Source: Activision, Treyarch, Wikimedia Commons (public source)

What's up rat?

Miguel Nicolelis is a brilliant neuroscientist (and showman) who is constantly trying to explore how far technology that uses brain signals to control machines can be pushed. In his 2012 book Beyond Boundaries, he speculated about an experiment in which two rat brains would exchange information—telepathic tweets, if you will.

He wrote in one chapter: “In this arrangement, could the two brains eventually reach a consensus, let’s say, about the identity of a complex object explored only partially by each rat? Would the rats literally share their minds to build vicarious sensations, through a sort of touchless, Vulcan mind-melding ritual, in order to overcome the limits of their individual brains?

Nicolelis just took one small step toward a brain net. He reported in the Feb. 28th Scientific Reports (part of the Nature Publishing, as is Scientific American) that his research team at Duke University Medical Center had achieved a back-and-forth exchange between two rodent brains. Not exactly a Vulcan mind meld, but the experiment demonstrates that the technology of brain-machine interfaces—which relays a signal from the cerebral cortex to a prosthetic—might be extended to a transfer of signals from cortex to cortex.

Would this enable a true meeting of minds—and would that be better than a chat over a latte at Starbucks? Nicolelis has speculated that these interfaces could eventually lead to networks of interconnected cocos that would lend new meaning to the idea of a brainstorming.

Still a ways to go until brain nets. But here’s what happened: both animals were trained to press one or the other levers when an LED turned on in exchange for a drink of water. Microelectrodes were then placed in each of the animals’ cortices and when one rat pressed the correct lever, a sample of cortical activity was wired to the second in a second chamber where the “it’s-time-to-drink” LED was absent.  The rat on the receiving end, nonetheless,  proceeded to press the correct lever that had been messaged over the brain link. It did so an average of 64 percent of the time, compared to chance (50 percent) and an accurate hit rate of 96 percent for the rat sending the signal after witnessing the LED illuminate. A similar experiment was attempted in which one rat communicated the presence of a narrow or wide opening to the other. One of the experiments was performed with an over-the-Internet link from Natal, Brazil to Duke in Raleigh.

The intensely competitive brain-machine interface community is chary with compliments.  And Andrew Schwartz, another luminary in the field, was less than wowed. He told Ed Yong for Nature News: “Although this may sound like ‘mental telemetry’, it was a very simple demonstration of binary detection and binary decision-making. To be of real interest, some sort of continuous spectrum of values should be decoded, transmitted and received.”

One source suggested by Nicolelis to reporters  was more generous. Marshall Shuler, a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, registered high praise: “This work further advances a large body of inquiry conducted by the Nicolelis lab over many years, –specifically by closing the “control loop” for brain actuated  technology–  in pursuit of Miguel’s passionately held dream to devise smart, brain/machine interfaces that will redress serious health problems, as well as potentially to augment our native capabilities.”

In recent weeks, Nicolelis also reported on a rat fitted rat with a sensor that allowed the animal to detect invisible infrared light and he has plans for a brain-controlled robotic exoskeleton that a handicapped child would demonstrate either in the 2014 World Cup or the 2016 Olympics, both in his home country of Brazil.  So what’s the frequency, Miguel? Stay tuned for more BrainNet.

Image Source: Katie Zhuang, Nicolelis Lab, Duke University

Christof Koch

Christof Koch, a columnist for Scientific American MIND, a professor at the California Institute of Technology and the chief scientific officer for the Allen Institute for Brain Science, has the best characterization that I’ve ever seen of futurist Ray Kurzweil’s speculations about the imminent merger of mind with machine and the domination of cyborgs.

This is the kind of thing that should normally be confined to Tweetland, but Koch’s prose, from his review of  Kurzweil’s new book “How to Create a Mind” for the Feb. 15 Science, simply bursts out of the alphanumeric constraints of 140 characters.

Koch begins respectfully, noting that Kurzweil developed and commercialized optical character recognition, advanced music synthesizers  and speech recognition. But then the review gets to the book’s description of neuroscience. Here goes:

According to Kurzweil, the new brain is clever, learns flexibly and controls the primitive impulses of the old brain related to food, sex and aggression. His understanding of neuroanatomy is about as sophisticated as U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s understanding of international politics when he articulated his belief of a division of Europe into an Old and a New one during the run-up to the second Gulf War in 2003.

The richness continues:

Kurzweil’s knowledge of neuroscience is simply inadequate to the task…He mistakes the striatum for cortex and apical dendrites for axons, belies the cognitive contributions of the basal ganglia…

The exponential increase in both computing power and data about the brain—the enabler for the putative mind-machine meld postulated by Kurzweil—is an accurate characterization that belies a deep-seated misunderstanding of where neuroscience stands in its goal of eliciting a fundamental understanding of brain functioning. nbsp;

Indeed, the torrent of data begets the illusion of progress. While the data about the brain accumulate exponentially, our understanding increases sublinearly. Basic questions about cortical circuitry posed by future Nobel laureates David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel in a celebrated publication in 1962 remain unanswered 50 years later. Functional human brain imaging has yet to affect standard medical practice (the upcoming fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders does not even mention any functional magnetic resonance imaging diagnostic criteria).

And to end:

Brains are not assembled out of billions of identical LEGO blocks but out of hundreds of distinct nerve cell types. Each cell type has its own idiosyncratic morphology, signaling and active genes. And they are interconnected with elaborate wiring rules we only discern darkly. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, neuroscience is (perhaps) at the end of the beginning of the quest to understand our brain and mind.

A hundred forty letters and numbers are sometimes just not enough.

Image Source: Romanpoet

The Human Brain Project intends to create a computer simulation at scales ranging from the nano to the macro.

The era of Big Neuroscience has arrived.

In late January, The Human Brain Project—an attempt to create a computer simulation of the brain at every scale from the nano nano to the macro biotic—announced that it had successfully arranged a billion Euro funding package for a 10-year run.

And then on Feb. 18, an article in The New York Times took the wraps off a plan to spend perhaps billions of dollars for an effort to record large collections of brain cells and figure out what exactly they are doing.

Is this the Large Hadron Collider vs. the Superconducting Supercollider redux?

Not yet. The billions for the Brain Activity Map, the U.S. project, are still a wish that has yet to be granted.

But, despite as-always hazy government finances, brain researchers are thinking large as they never have before, and invoking the attendant rhetoric of  moon shots, next-generation Human Genome Projects and the need for humankind to muster the requisite visionary zeal to tackle one of science’s “last frontiers.” Oy, spare me that last part.

The challenges these projects have set for themselves, though, illustrate the challenge of  going from today’s crude profiles of  a biological machine of incomprehensible complexity to an accurate rendering of the goings-on of some 100 billion neurons woven together by a pulsating tapestry of 100 trillion electrical interconnections.

Henry Markram of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne described the goals for the Human Brain Project in Scientific American in June, saying that the project would become the “most powerful flight simulator ever built. Rather than simulating “thermal runaway” in a Boeing 787, it is intended to  furnish a big-screen blowup of every cell and connection inside the human skull.

The Human Brain Project continues to receive brickbats from a number of quarters. The researchers  plan to take the most current knowledge of brain anatomy and function to create an elaborate computer simulation. The  pitfall has to do with the simple fact that what we know at the molecular, cellular, circuit levels and up is often inadequate or just plain wrong. Layering faulty assumption upon faulty assumption can produce an elaborate  software fantasy world. But, as Markram hastens to emphasize, software can always be revised for a next release to fold in the latest from experiments in cells, fruit flies, roundworms, mice, monkeys and people.  The hurdles are still enormous. When we ran this article last year, it was accompanied by a Web-based excerpt from  a section of a chapter of Connectome, a book by neuroscientist Sebastian Seung, that described the difficulties involved in reducing the brain to a piece of software.  What happens, for instance, if a neurotransmitter like dopamine escapes from the immediate connection point, a synapse, and interacts with a synapse at some distance. How does this magisterial brain model take into account this possibility?

The Brain Activity Map, in its still nascent conception, has plans for something less ambitious than a brain in a box. It intends, from what can be gleaned, to provide a record of everything that happens along particular neural circuits. It would function not  just as a static model of the connections between, say,  the frontal lobe of the brain to  the emotion-processing amygdala. Rather it would be a dynamic rendition of what goes on along that pathway, a record of even the most minute voltage fluctuations along the intricate links of this circuit.

“People refer to connectomics both when talking about gross features of brain wiring and when referring to the approximate 100 trillion synaptic connections of the brain.  Both of these are morphological in nature,” says Michael Roukes, an experimental physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and one of the project’s organizers. “By contrast, what we are talking about with this Brain Activity Map project is functional connectomics… how the  brain’s “bits” of information are encoded, routed in its hardware (should I say “software” or wetware?), and ultimately how circuits are constructed and the brain actually computes.  Functional connectomics is about the dynamical organization of brain circuitry.”

John Donoghue of Brown University, a researcher in brain-machine interfaces, and one of the scientists involved in planning the Brain Activity Map, noted that probes exist today to capture what happens at the cellular and molecular level and that brain imaging machines can take in what happens over gross areas of neural anatomy. Missing, however, is the technology to monitor in real time what happens when hundreds to millions of neurons coordinate their firing patterns, a circuit-level view of brain activity from which aspects of conscious function emerge—seeing a dog, hearing a song, feeling happy or sad. “We don’t have the tools to study large numbers of neurons at high temporal resolution over large areas of the brain,” Donoghue says. “We need tools to do that. Once we have the tools, we can do the experiments and that can drive theory about what goes wrong in schizophrenia or depression.”

Even if the Brain Activity Map doesn’t meet its most ambitious goals, it might still be deemed a success because it could produce  tools that could sense and stimulate individual neurons at the scale of nanometers—one speculative proposal would even use an artificial DNA sensor that would detect electrical activity in a brain circuit—a sort of DNA ticker tape

The tangled complexity of the brain’s wiring may make any Big Neuroscience effort a bigger hurdle to overcome than decoding the sequence of nucleotides, the A, C, G, Ts that make up the human genome. A documentary released recently—The Singularity—explores the idea that computing and other technology is advancing so rapidly—that machines will soon be smarter than humans and humans will be achieve immortality by making a copy of their neural circuits and transferring them to a robot or computer. The documentary interviews a number of prominent neuroscientists about the prospects for The Singularity becoming a reality. In it, neuroscientist Christof Koch mentions that the  wiring diagram of the nervous systems of the roundworm, Caenorhabditis elegans, has been known for decades and neuroscientists are still attempting to unravel its basic functioning.

Michael Gazzaniga, another prominent brain researcher, endorsed the idea of proceeding with the Brain Activity Map as long as other critical brain research does not suffer. But he added that a realistic perspective is required on how long it will take to achieve the ambitious goals that were widely discussed in the popular press in recent days. “I say go with a new approach while keeping the best of the old,” he says. “It will take dozens of years to figure this all out.”

Illustration: Emily Cooper.

Note: This article was updated with additional reporting.

Some users have "unliked" Facebook

To write this post, I just copied a title from an academic journal and hit <CTRL> V in the headline field of WordPress.

I wouldn’t usually do a cut and paste, but this title brought a big smile and, after all, isn’t consummate fascination the sine qua non of search engine optimization?

The headline above also happened to top an article by Laura Portwood-Stacer, a visiting professor at NYU’s Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development, an article published online in the journal New Media and Society.

The study kept me amused throughout because of my familiarity with the “WooHoo!!!” “Awesome!!!” vernacular of Facebook and the contrast of OMG speak with the dense lexicon of media studies. The research by Portwood-Stacer focuses on those who make a conscious choice  to avoid the social media site.

These are “Facebook abstainers,” people who engage in a “performative mode of resistance, which must be understood within the context of a neoliberal consumer culture, in which subjects are empowered to act through consumption choices—or in this case non-consumption choices—and through the public display of those choices.” In other words, is dropping your Facebook account an act of political defiance?

According to Portwood-Stacer, those who commit “Facebook suicide” or frequent the @NotOnFacebook Twitter account, or post to the hashtag #facebooksucks (Facebook no, Twitter si?) or flee to the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine may be embracing a form of reverse snobbery: “taste and distinction are invoked by refusers through their conspicuous display of non-consumption.” Call it reverse Veblenism or maybe just imagine retro hipsters from Williamsburg casting off the psychological bondage of keeping up with social media commitments.

For the study, Portwood-Stacer went to anti-Facebook websites, read 100 popular press articles on the topic, along with reader comments, and contacted 20 Facebook conscientious objectors.

One refuser named Bruce and his male family members “felt that masculine norms of rugged independence and seriousness—in contrast to the implicit femininity of playfulness and dependence—were bound up in the men’s vocal disidentification with social networking activities.”

Other rejectionists  distanced themselves from the “artificiality” and “narcissism” of it all. “Again, the parallel to other discourses of media rejection is clear—mediums such as the telephone and the television have been accused of similar deficiencies, often with gendered and other connotations inflected by structural social hierarchies. The discourse of authenticity is invoked to distinguish ‘real life,” which is worthwhile, from media consumption, which is not.”

Facebook refusal can also be interpreted in a Marxist-Marcusian framework. “As a media platform, Facebook may be the epitomic site for the creation and discipline of the neoliberal consumer-producer-citzen: through participation in Facebook’s network, individuals are addressed as consumers of commodities; enlisted as panoptic surveillers of their friends, family and even distant acquaintances.”

Facebook refusal quickly bumps up against “the hegemony of the status quo, which by nature works to delegitmate ideological critique and quash burgeoning counter-hegemonic movements.” Portwood-Stacer gives the example of  Billy, a Facebook Luddite who listens to vinyl records and perceives himself to be  an “old man” for reading a print newspaper.

In the end, Portwood-Stacer comes to the conclusion that Facebook refusal is a “limited tactic of political engagement where media platforms are concerned.”

“…as this study demonstrates, the discursive context within which personal refusal is situated matters greatly for how the practice of refusal is interpreted, whether it is awarded legitimacy and whether it will win the support of observers. The discursive context will necessarily be constrained by the ideological forces that shape mainstream conversations about consumption.”

The discursive context may be constrained as well by the $25 that it costs to buy a PDF of the full text of the article in New Media and Society.

Image Source: Enoc vt