HXCORTEX

Just a couple of neuroscientists who were up to no good, and started making trouble in the neighborhood.

[laboratoryequipment-blog]

World’s First: Skull-scalp Transplant Performed in Texas 

Opening a new frontier in transplant surgery, Texas doctors have done the world’s first partial skull and scalp transplant to help a man who suffered a large head wound from cancer treatment. Doctors from Houston Methodist Hospital and MD Anderson Cancer Center did the operation two weeks ago.

The recipient — Jim Boysen, a 55-year-old software developer from Austin, Texas — left the hospital yesterday with a new kidney and pancreas along with the scalp and skull grafts. He said he was stunned at how well doctors matched him to a donor with similar skin and hair coloring.

Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news/2015/06/worlds-first-skull-scalp-transplant-performed-texas

[hxcortex]

The real headline here (pun intended) should be that the guy already reports having feeling in the transplanted scalp just two weeks after surgery. Is this for real or is it just a case of "phantom scalp" syndrome?

Any developmental neurobiologists want to weigh in on the plausibility of re-innervation over such a short time?

[hxcortex]

Beware Pop Psychologists Bearing Neuroscience

A distressing new study by researchers at Villanova and U. of Oregon suggests that tacking a bunch of neuroscience facts onto explanations of human psychological phenomena makes those explanations more appealing – even howhen the explanations themselves were deliberately written to be circular.

The authors presented college students with brief explanations of findings from the psychological literature, half of which were genuine, and half of which were intentionally circular.

The authors found that appending a sentence or two about fMRI results increased the perceived quality of the explanation, regardless of whether explanation was intrinsically circular. These findings aren’t quite as depressing as they’ve been made out to be in some places; The Daily Mail for example, made it sound like a circular explanation plus some neuroscience was judged to be better than a non-circular explanation without any neuroscience, which was not true; while a circular explanation plus neuroscience was significantly better than a circular explanation without neuroscience, the former was not significantly different from a non-circular explanation without neuroscience.

All the same, if an explanation is truly circular, no amount of neuroscience padding should enhance it at all; you can’t polish a turd.

The truth is, we’re not really close to having evidence of how activity across large regions of the human brain might cause the kinds of phenomena described by human psychology. That’s not to say we can’t learn anything from fMRI data. We can correlate the performance of certain tasks with certain patterns of activity. But fMRI data alone can't tell us much about the causal relationships between brain states and behavior. So the next time you hear somebody trying to use an fMRI result to mansplain something they read on the pickup artist forums, have a good hard listen; no scan of the brain should be a substitute for valid reasoning.

[hxcortex]

My unofficial Gender Studies minor from Mount Holyoke College granted me the ability to spout facts about “the leaky pipeline”, the loss of female scientists along the academic career trajectory, in my sleep. I’d heard about friends’ experiences at other institutions where they were one of the few women in an upper level science or math class, but I’d never had that experience, simply because there were only women in my upper level classes. My choice to pursue a PhD was not a strange choice upon graduation; the number of women in my graduating class that went on to pursue a doctorate exemplified the statistic that women educated at all women’s institutions are twice as likely to pursue a graduate degree in the sciences than their co-educational counterparts (Mount Holyoke having single handedly graduated the greatest number of women who have gone on to pursue Chemistry PhDs of any American institution)1 . I can wax poetic about the empowering bubble that all-women’s education provides, but that would neglect the reality. The world is not a Seven Sister’s school, and despite my effusive cultlike pride for my Alma Mater, my chosen career path will not occur in a single-sex environment. The statistics that support single-sex education only highlight a problem endemic to the world of academic research and the gendered society that lends itself to it.

Let’s start out with some ‘Statistics’, accentuated with a capitol ‘S-‘ to emphasize some of their daunting odds. At the undergraduate level, the numbers for women in the life sciences look quite promising. The 58.2% of female undergraduates who earned a BA in the life sciences in 2014 is reflected by the 52.4% of them that make up current life sciences PhD track graduate students. This Statistic is emphasized with a capitol ‘S’ for ‘Sad’, considering that women make up an approximate 24% of life-sciences full time faculty employed at research institutions across the country. When you look at under represented minorities, the numbers are even more daunting. A dismal 18% of minority women pursue a BA in the life sciences, a number that drops to 7.3% for those pursuing a PhD. Of the 24% of women that actually make it to a full time position, the wage gap is still apparent. In a society of intellectual logicians one would hope that the meritorious nature of scientific research might bleed into the pay scale, but female faculty on average still make less than their male counterparts. Minority women in full time faculty positions make on average $10,000 less than their white male counterpart. These statistics emphasize the following: 1. “The leaky pipeline” of science education exists; and 2. despite being perceived as the female friendly science, women must still be courted to the life sciences. Altogether, the attrition rate of women between their obtainment of a PhD and a faculty position is a loss of intellectual capitol on an astronomical scale2 .

The “leaky pipeline” is attributable to many factors, but it is still notable that the overall leading cause of women leaving the academic career pathway is family responsibility2 . Although this can be said for any career, as paid maternity and paternity leave is not standardized in the United States, there is the possibility of curtailing this loss with the addition of a new type of academic. Paid family leave would keep positions open and viable in an intensely competitive field, and if offered to both men and women would take the onus of child rearing off females. The addition of the research-scientist or staffscientist position may help to curtail loss of women who are afraid that the demands of a faculty position would not coincide with their family planning. Having friends that have chosen not to pursue a PhD for this reason, the addition of a research scientist working under another’s RO1 would allow for intellectual independence and the retainment of highly trained female scientists in the field3 .

The numbers for women in life sciences have improved throughout the decades, but they’ve stagnated. After peaking in 2005, the number of women pursing BAs in the life sciences has plateaued, with only minimal growth in those pursuing PhDs and obtaining faculty positions2 . The loss exists in the graduate student to post-doc transition, but for minority women, it is also the courtship to science in the first place that must still be encouraged. Considering the dismal 16% of American high school seniors proficient in math and science and interested in following it in college, this is a systemic problem that is not specific to women, but the solution must also be tailored to emphasize female education3 . To date, the STEM program might be our best bet in getting everyone interested in science. With female scientists of all races leading by example, mentorship may be able to curb the loss of intellectual capitol and encourage students of all genders and ethnicities to pursue research.

Strikingly, the growing number of women pursuing the life sciences does not have a directly equivalent ratio in the harder sciences. Although this disparity can be theorized to be attributable to the same difficulties as described above, the concept of “hard” and “soft” science are inherently gendered, the spectrum of life science research sitting in a happy (and largely contended) intermediate between the two. Describing something as a “soft science” is inherently gendered on the level of language. To describe something as soft in inherently evocative of femininity, therefore weakness, and in this case, scientific rigor4,5. This intellectual rivalry between ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sciences may be one of the things driving women away from pursuing careers in ‘hard scientific research’, but also driving women towards the intermediate biological sciences. Perhaps it is just time that we refer to science as science, and respect the varying investigations conducted by different disciplines as unique.

The increased inclusion of women in the life sciences is not to say that female biologists are not met with sexism. Just this past April a female scientist was met with a single rebuttal by a male reviewer, that the objectivity of her study would be best served by the addition of a male author6 . Having never encountered this level of sexism in my short career, this incident seems laughable, but its true gravity is beyond reproach. If women are not viewed as intellectually capable as their male equivalents, then true equality cannot be realized in any discipline. This equality in the sciences can only be realized if it is realized in society as a whole; the egalitarianism of the discipline can only progress as those entering into it hold higher standards than those that have come before.

My college education gave me the ability to apply feminist critique and spout statistics, but stepping out into the ‘real world’ of co-educational scientific research after college helped me to visualize these disparities in a real way. Let me start by saying that I never felt anything but encouraged by the entirely male force of post-docs working in my previous lab. Their guidance helped to shape me into a curious graduate school bound young scientist. Upon applying to graduate school, their perception of me became relatively clear. They recognized my capacity to continue to do good work, but struggled with their contextualization of me amongst my peers. A post-doc described my love of astrocytes akin to “the enthusiasm most women have for shoes or babies”. I doubt this made it into the final letter of recommendation, but upon my acceptance to Columbia University, my former PI encouraged me to “think carefully and consider my options” before choosing the institution that he perceived to be an all-boys club. I was gleeful to show him my class roster that suggested that in a class of 10 women and 4 men Columbia appeared to be the closest to an all-women’s graduate education that I was likely to get.

I’m encouraged by the strides that my discipline has made, and I remain optimistic when I know how aware my classmates and current professors are of these issues. I refuse to be daunted by the statistics I’m faced with, but hope that at some point we might experience genderless science in an egalitarian way in which men and women participate in the discipline at equal levels.

1. "Mount Holyoke Science Facts and Figures." Mount Holyoke College. 18 Apr. 2012. Web. 19 May 2015. 2. "Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering." Nsf.gov. National Science Foundation. Web. 19 May 2015. 3. "Science, Technology, Engineering and Math: Education for Global Leadership." Science, Technology, Engineering and Math: Education for Global Leadership. Web. 19 May 2015. 4. Londa Schiebinger, Osiris, 2nd Seried, Vol. 12. Women, Gender, and Science: New Directions (1997), pp. 201. 5. Marjosola, Iiris. Gender, Identity, and the Culture of Organizations. London: Routledge, 2002. Print. 6. Feltman, Rachel. "Sexism in Science: Peer Editor Tells Female Researchers Their Study Needs a Male Author." Washington Post. The Washington Post, 30 Apr. 2015. Web. 19 May 2015 -Catherine Braine

[hxcortex]

[hxcortex]

America Can’t COMPETE

Last week, the America COMPETES(Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education, and Science) Reauthorization Act of 2015 (H.R. 1806) passed in the House of Representatives after 2 years of disagreement between Republican lawmakers and scientists (without a single democrat voting in favor of the bill).  This bill is a version of a bill that was initially passed in 2007, and again in 2010, and outlines how agencies like the National Science Foundation (NSF) and NASA chose to fund certain projects, with the intention of making the United States more competitive in science and engineering.

The latest version of the bill places some alarming restrictions on the National Science Foundation, which is the only national agency dedicated to the pursuit of “pure science”, meaning it funds projects not covered by agencies like the National Institute of Health, which funds health science related research. The America COMPETES Act cuts the overall NSF budget by 31 million dollars, but more alarmingly, places a number of restrictions on how that money can be allocated.  Under the provisions of this bill, research funded by the NSF must be “in the best national interest.” But who is deciding what is in the best national interest?

The bill was sponsored by Representative Lamar Smith  (R-Texas), who commented, “What our bill does is reduce funds for low priorities like a survey of Norwegian tourism and teaching TV meteorologists about climate change.”

Because climate change shouldn’t be a national priority.

This bill reduces the scope of scientific disciplines that fall under the umbrella of the NSF, forcing the agency to allocate more funding to fields such as biology and engineering.  Funding for social, behavioral, and economic research is cut by 58%.  The past 51 Nobel prizes awarded to Americans came exclusively from the aforementioned fields. How is cutting funding to fields where the United States has proved to be competitive in the past going to make us more competitive in the future?  Funding to geosciences, which covers research on Polar Regions, natural disasters, and climate change has been cut by 12%, and there are additional provisions that cut funding from Department of Energy projects concerning climate change.

The America COMPETES Act takes agency away from the peer-review system for grants, in which grants are dispensed based on the consensus of a panel of scientists within a field on the value of the work proposed, and puts it in the hands of politicians.  Politicians who have political agendas, and little to no scientific training.  The political biases are already blatantly obvious; the two largest cuts have been to research concerning climate change.  This is incredibly dangerous; it sets the precedent that Congress can stifle innovation because potential results could hurt them politically or financially.  Considering there are only 2 scientists in all of Congress (a Congress who has been called the most anti-science in history), this certainly isn’t the road to making the United States competitive in the realm of scientific research.

-Macayla Donegan

[hxcortex]

This is Bojangles.  He is the best thing to have ever graced this earth.  If you’ve ever spent more than 5 minutes with me, I’ve probably made you look at a picture of him and tell you about my completely ridiculous plan to bring him to live with me in New York City (He’s a 100 pound Labrador, I live in grad student housing in Manhattan, and also have a grad student schedule).   Sorry friends, but I love him more than you.

Even I can admit that the love I feel for this thing that isn’t even the same species as me is rationally a little excessive.  If we’re talking purely in terms of increasing my evolutionary fitness, which is why we normally form bonds like this, he’s a detriment, as he uses time and resources I could be dedicating to myself or to people I share DNA with.

A recent study published in Science suggests that the deep, and almost disturbing, love I feel for Mr. Bojangles may have a scientific explanation.  A whole lot of our brains are dedicated to being social communication, and a lot of the way we communicate is relatively unique to humans.  “Mutual gaze” is one of these forms of social communication.  This is one of the first ways we ever communicate; mutual gaze is essential for mother-infant bonding, and maternal oxytocin (which is often wrongly called the “love” molecule) is associated with this infant-mother gaze.

Oxytocin plays a role in social bonding in a variety of contexts, and is thought to be important for the formation of social attachments as well as recognition of faces, but this has only been observed within species until this point.  This study demonstrates that maintained mutual gaze with dogs, but not hand raised wolves, increases oxytocin levels in both humans and dogs.  Further, when oxytocin was administered to dogs, an increase was seen in the oxytocin levels of their owners.  This indicates that maintained mutual gaze with dogs activates a positive feedback loop, increasing oxytocin and facilitating bonding much in the way that a mother’s gaze with her infant does.

This study is a step in explaining the evolutionary underpinnings of the dogs’ integration into our society, as well as providing further scientific explanation for the success of therapy dogs for disorders, such as post-traumatic stress disorder, where dogs have been show to provide great relief during stressful situations. And maybe a step in explaining why I’m so crazy about Mr. Bo.

[hxcortex]

A drunk historian of science once told me he gets really pissed off every time he sees a headline about neuroscience. He’s had a lot to be pissed off about recently. Between the announcement of both the Brain Activity Map Project in the US and the  Human Brain Project in Europe within the last two years, governments around the world have signaled that understanding the brain is now a societal priority. It also sucks for him that last year’s Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine went to a trio of neuroscientists who pioneered the study of how space is represented in the mammalian brain. 

His gripe was that for all the headlines trumpeting our progress in “understanding the brain,” it’s almost impossible to tell just how far along we are in the history of the field (which naturally chagrined him as a historian of science of all things). Yes, he said, the latest study might announce that rats’ performance on this or that memory task depends on some protein or another – but just as importantly, how much do we not know? And how close are we to closing the gap?

He’d be very disappointed, then, to learn that the truth is this: nobody really knows – not even the researchers themselves. And part of the reason for that is that we don’t even agree on how much there is to know.

To get a sense of the possible scales that a mature body of scientific knowledge might take on, consider two different types of science for comparison: physics and zoology.

On the one hand, physics is quintessentially concise. It describes just a handful of laws that apply to any physical system, like how the Standard Model tries to boil the whole universe down to just four fundamental forces and 61 particle types. It’s a reductionist project.

On the other hand, zoology is quintessentially sprawling. It describes a riotous taxonomy of particulars with unique, often surprising properties that make generalization dicey, like how mammals give birth to live young – except when they lay eggs – or how birds fly – except when they don’t. It defies reduction.

So how reductionist (or not) will neuroscience turn out to be? Will the field culminate in a single neural “theory of everything” that can precisely predict the activity of any arbitrary part of any arbitrary nervous system, or will the field be one of constant exploration and discovery of new, unexpected phenomena?

The interesting thing about neuroscience at the present moment is that it’s driven simultaneously by impulses both towards and away from reduction. For example, on the side driving towards reduction is the (now century-old) observation that much of the mammalian cortex – the outermost “bark” of the brain – consists of the same pattern of local connections repeated over and over again. The extreme conclusion of this way of thinking is that you just need to understand what one of these repeated units does (and how they interact with each other), then you’ll understand the entire brain well enough to simulate it on a computer.

By contrast, driving away from reduction is a steady current of work showing that there exists a profusion of unique cell types expressing thousands of different combinations of ion channels, neurotransmitter receptors and cell adhesion molecules. By some counts, there exist between five to ten thousand types of neurons, many of them outside the cortex – and that’s not even counting the enigmatic and more numerous glial cells, which, despite not being neurons per se, appear to have some role in neurotransmission. The extreme conclusion of this way of thinking is that each of these cell types really performs a unique function, and that any attempt to generalize from one part of the nervous system to another (or between the nervous systems of different organisms) will be hampered by the unique idiosyncrasies of the cell types involved.

Of course, just about every neuroscientist recognizes that the truth lies somewhere between these two extremes. We all try to do some reduction by choosing a small, specific system to study in the hopes that it can teach us something about how the nervous system works at large. But any “laws” we formulate are likely to be riddled with important exceptions and qualifications that can only be discovered by meticulous study of each system in its own right: neurons that fire in quick succession will be more likely fire together in the future, except when they become less likely to fire together; the mammalian cortex consists of six anatomical layers, except when it consists of three; the neurotransmitter GABA causes neurons to reduce their activity, except when it causes them to increase their activity; etc.  

Neuroscience therefore affords both the satisfaction of simplifying explanations and the thrill of new discovery. Its history is not yet written because we can’t say how these impulses will balance out, and that’s what makes it so exciting.

[hxcortex]

Who is responsible for communicating good science? (Spoiler alert: everyone)

As a person who identifies as a science and an artist, I spend a lot of time thinking about the intersection of the two, and even more time thinking about the huge gap between science and the rest of the world.  I witnessed a moment where this disconnect between scientists and the public was utterly apparent this past fall at the Imagine Science Film Festival in New York City.  Several short films were shown, many of which were artistic representations of psychological and neurological disorders.  A short titled Amygdala portrayed the filmmaker’s experience with post traumatic stress disorder.  She referred to the brain circuitry that underlies PTSD, but she incorrectly stated that the hippocampus, played by her husband, inhibits the amygdala, played by the filmmaker, and that is what cures her. At this moment I felt myself (and I presume every other neuroscientist in the room) tense up; this woman’s incorrect artistic representation of neuropathology evoked this  visceral anger in me, which I still feel conflicted about as I write this piece.  Should we be holding our artists to a standard where they have to be scientifically accurate?   Before this moment I think I would have said no.  But what if someone who isn’t  getting a PhD in neuroscience saw this, and then believed that what the filmmaker portrayed was true?  This scenario might not seem like such a big deal, but these things can have a snow ball effect that lead to large groups of people believing information that is not scientifically sound.  Which can lead to people believing that vaccines give people autism and the resurgence of deadly diseases we eradicated decades a go.

There was a panel with the filmmakers after the screening, and a scientist in the audience asked the filmmaker about this issue.  She frankly seemed unaware that she had portrayed wrong information, and baffled that the scientists in the audience were so upset about it.  This whole kerfuffle could have been avoided if there was better communication between scientists and the science adjacent.  This is largely an education issue on both fronts; scientific literacy among the general public is lacking, and scientists rarely have any formal training for communicating their ideas to people without strong science backgrounds.  This isn’t just an issue where we need to hold our artists to a higher standard when it comes to portraying science, we need to hold our scientists and science writers to a higher standard  when it comes to making sure that science is accessible and correct, not sensationalized and over simplified.

[hxcortex]

Ok, first things first: the dress is blue and black. It just is. You can consult the orignal poster’s blog for other photos of the dress in less ambiguous lighting conditions to prove this to yourself:

To drive the point home, try covering up the sides of the original photo and comparing the sleeves to the Tumblr blue of the dash - they’re nearly (but not exactly) the same!

That being said, why is it so bloody difficult to tell?? A lot of it has to do with the context of the original photo (which couldn’t have been more perfectly composed to sow havoc if the OP had tried). Notice the brightness of the right hand side of the photo; it looks like there’s a really bright light source behind the dress, leading one to believe that the side of the dress facing the viewer must be cast in shadow. Moreover, observe how yellow the light is. Now, if you've ever looked at a bright yellow object then immediately looked at a white wall, you probably noticed a blue afterimage - similarly, in contrast to a yellow light source, shadows on a white wall will appear bluish.

This means that your visual system tacitly expects the dress to appear darker and bluer than it would under more direct lighting; thus, even though the hue of the pixels in the photo may be closer to Tumblr blue than to lily white, your brain is subtracting out the anticipated effect of the shadow and inferring that that the dress must be actually white.

We were tricked, though, because in this case, it turns out (perhaps improbably) that side of the dress facing us is actually not in shadow; there’s practically as much light coming from both sides! Armed with this knowledge, take a look at the original photo again: you may find that you can barely see the dress and white and gold even if you try!

But the point stands that your visual system is doing something really remarkable: it’s taking information about the overall lighting conditions of the scene, using that information to predict how different colors would be affected by light and shadow, etc., then using those predictions to infer how a surface in the image would appear in different (i.e., more direct or “normal”) lighting conditions. Moreover, it’s doing all of this automatically, completely outside of your conscious awareness.

The reason this might feel so automatic is that it happens so quickly and so early in visual processing. There’s a long literature on how your brain might start calculating these contextual effects as soon as the information arrives from your eyes at the visual area of your cerebral cortex. In one study from 2010 by Fraser W. Smith and Lars Muckli at the University of Glasgow, for example, it was found that activity in the brain region that receives information directly from one part of your field of vision could be indirectly influenced by what’s going on in other parts of your field of vision. To demonstrate this, they showed a white box in one corner of an image (see figure below), then analyzed the activity of the brain region receiving direct information from that corner of visual space, while changing the image around the white box.

The activity of the brain region receiving direct information from that corner of visual space actually changed with the surrounding image, despite the fact that the white box itself never changed. In fact, the pattern of the activity changes were so specific depending on the surrounding image that the researchers to actually use it to decode what the surrounding image was at any given time!

Other research by Michael Paradiso and others at Brown University has specifically suggested that neurons encoding the brightness of an object around its edges tend to activate first, which then influences the activity of neurons that encode the visual features of the center of the object, possibly representing a kind of “filling-in” process by which the neural network infers that the brightness of the center of an object must be correlated with the brightness around its edges - although note that this is in a way the opposite of what’s happening in our dress example, where we’re assuming that the effects of brightness at the center of the image must be different from the brightness at the edge of the image. It all just goes to show that the visual system is set up to perform all kinds of sophisticated operations for different circumstances indeed.

So the moral of the story is: if you were fooled into thinking the dress was gold and white, don’t feel bad - all it means is that your visual system was in this case just a little bit too clever for its own good.