Writing scientific papers is rather like writing poetry in an ancient verse form. Everything you want to say has to be forced into predetermined sections: introduction, method, results, discussion. You must never say “I,” and the passive tense is preferred. Inevitably all the interesting things get left out.
The 11 Best Science Books of 2011
— by Maria Popova, via Brain Pickings
We ‘see’ through one eye at a time
A study indicates that humans gather visual information by shifting attention to one eye or the other, while the brain combines the incoming visual information so that the mind thinks it sees with both eyes at once.
“Maybe there are binocular neurons in the brain” — neurons that take in and collate information from both eyes — “that also know which eye that information is coming from and can feed back to that eye,” University of Minnesota researcher Peng Zhang said.
Neurons: Animated Cellular and Molecular Concepts
This is a really great illustrated (free!) online textbook of sorts that describes the basic neuron, from its anatomy to ion channels and neurotransmitter activity. The 8 chapters listed are:
- Anatomy of a Neuron
- Axonal Transport
- Ions and Ion Channels
- Resting Membrane Potential
- Action Potential
- Neurotransmitter Release
- Postsynaptic Mechanisms
- Removal of Neurotransmitter
Each section has illustrations and diagrams to help supplement your studies! Whether you want to start your foundation in neuroscience or give it a small refresher, definitely bookmark this resource.
Source: fuckyeahneuroscience
In the audio above, Hurricane Hunter Paul Flaherty talks about his recent flight through the center of Hurricane Irene. Irene was the 100th hurricane he’d flown through in his career.
Technically, Flaherty’s title is flight meteorologist, but hurricane hunter just sounds so much cooler.
Source: hereandnow.wbur.org
Natural brain state is primed to learn | New Scientist
STUDYING for an exam? Begin by thinking your way into a learning state.
Until now, neuroscientists have focused on identifying parts of the brain that are active during learning. “But no one has looked at the preparedness state,” says John Gabrieli at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “The idea is to identify before the event whether the brain is prepared to be a learner.”
Gabrieli and his colleagues used functional MRI scanning to monitor the naturally fluctuating brain activity of 20 volunteers and investigate whether the brain enters such a learning state. While in the scanner, each person was presented with 250 images, one at a time, and asked to memorise them. The volunteers were shown the images again 2 hours later - mixed in with 250 new ones - and asked to remember which they had seen before.
Looking through the results, the team was surprised to find that in the moments before individuals were shown images that they later remembered, they had low levels of activity in the parahippocampal place area - a region of the brain that is known to be highly active during learning. “Maybe the fact that this region was less active meant that the deck was cleared - that it was more open for a stimulus to provoke a response,” suggests Gabrieli.
To investigate further, the team attempted to boost subsequent participants’ memory test scores by presenting them with images only when they showed this pattern of brain activity. “There was around a 30 per cent improvement in the memory task,” Gabrieli says.
Original paper here.
This will be a fascinating line of research to follow. What conditions create that state of readiness in the first place? What conditions inhibit it? How could we identify this kind of readiness behaviorially? While it would be premature to draw conclusions about how this applies to classroom practice, it certainly does raise some interesting possibilities about what activities do (or do not) promote this state of readiness.
Source: fuckyeahneuroscience
Too often we assume that that the only way to explain complicated concepts in science is to use words. And then we take those words and we add more words, occasionally putting tiny, boring pictures next to them to break up the text into easily digestible chunks.
That’s not very exciting to most people, even me, a professional scientist.
That’s why this feature on the language of smell by Perrin Ireland is so much fun. Perrin is an illustrator who recently has been turning lectures into illustrated lessons. It’s a really fun change of pace from the “normal” way we learn science, and you should check out the whole lesson on smell. If only my textbooks had been like this …
(I am trying to get Perrin to set up a Tumblr, cross your fingers!)
Science … illustrated … I was loving it until I started reading it …
“The olfactory nerve is the only part of the brain that sits outside of the skull.” … I’m not certain that statement is entirely accurate.
Stanford bioengineer Kwabena Boahen called the retina “a piece of the brain that lies inside your eyeball.” http://youtu.be/nyLYQYHGbvI
Maybe Boahen was being figurative, or maybe there is some key difference in neuroanatomy between the cells of the retina and cells of the olfactory epithelium that qualifies one or the other to be described as part of the brain. Any neuroscience tumblrs know?
(via jtotheizzoe)
Source: scientificamerican.com
Why the GOP Hates the National Science Foundation
Republicans don’t like science and scientists because they are sources of data that are independent of GOP-approved propaganda mills like Fox News. Pesky scientists and academics are always popping up to dispute the Roger Ailes-approved buzz-quote of the day — on climate change, on health care, on the effects of poverty on the rapidly evaporating middle class, on the diversity of American families, and on the importance of funding basic research instead of commercially-driven ventures constrained by short-term considerations like ROI.
Today’s GOP has a visceral distrust of scientists for the same reason that it has a visceral distrust of the “lamestream media” (particularly deeply reported news organizations like The New York Times), teachers, organized labor, regulatory agencies, National Public Radio, and protest movements that are have not been astroturfed for Fox News’ cameras by Koch Industries: They’re not with the program, whatever this week’s program might be — more windfalls to Big Oil, justifying torture, or floating amendments to officially brand gay people as second-class citizens.
Science, you could say, has a built-in left-wing bias, because it does not appeal to simplistic notions of God, country, tribal supremacy, or any of the other lesser angels of our nature that the GOP finds handy for its get-out-the-angry-vote drives.
Given the power of our prior beliefs to skew how we respond to new information, one thing is becoming clear: If you want someone to accept new evidence, make sure to present it to them in a context that doesn’t trigger a defensive, emotional reaction.
Chris Mooney, The Science of Why We Don’t Believe Science, Mother Jones
Terrific research-based article with important implications for learning.
Source: Mother Jones
Half of Japan, including Tokyo, is actually on the North American tectonic plate.
Who knew?
