Even more brainy genes — finale

As a finale to the two previous posts about brain evolution, let me end by referring to this study by Mekel-Bobrov et al in Science. If you have followed blogs such as John Hawks, Gene expression or The Scientist you have probably heard about this story before.
The study “Ongoing Adaptive Evolution of ASPM, a Brain [...]

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Dennett-Ruse exchange leaked

Parts of a private email exchange between philosophers Dan Dennett and Michael Ruse have been published on ID doyen William Dembski’s blog. And apparently with the permission on Ruse! Several bloggers have commented on the issues raised by Dennett and Ruse*, but to me the real question is: Why on Earth is Ruse, an avowed [...]

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More on continuous brain growth in humans

While we are thinking about brain evolution, consider this study by Evans et al. in Science. They studied the gene Microencephalin (MCPH), which is known for its severe reduction in brain size coupled with mental retardation. Remarkably, despite this abnormality, there is an overall retention of normal brain structure and a lack of overt abnormalities [...]

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Brainy chromosome

The brain changes continually. Not only during development or ageing, but over generations, too. While the common popular notion is that the human brain of today is identical to that of the stone age man, recent studies of the genetics underlying brain development has shown that the human brain has changed significantly over a far [...]

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Unravelling the evolution of language?

There is now an online-only published paper in PNAS from the Max Planck Institute on the evolution of language. What is surprising is that the researchers have used functional MRI to infer the evolutionary lineage from their results. Basically, what Angela Friederici and her colleagues have done is to compare language processing that is “simple” [...]

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Neuroeconomics and neuromarketing news

Every week there seem to be new papers out on some neuroeconomics or neuromarketing related topic. Let me briefly mention three new papers I’ve stumbled over during the last few days.
[1] In the latest issue of Science a group of researchers at University of Amsterdam report two psychological studies testing how we reach a decision [...]

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Incidental findings in fMRI

Judy Illes, director of the Program in Neuroethics at the Stanford Center for Biomedical Ethics, has a new paper out in last Friday’s Science. Co-written with a large number of researchers, working with brain imaging techniques, the paper highlights the ethical issues raised by incidental findings in such studies. The basic problem is that, [...]

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Neuromarketing

For some years now the marketing industry has been intrigued by the possiblity of using brain science to get a handle on people’s secret desires. Using brain scanners, the hope is to perfect the marketing of products by learning which presentations trigger the brain’s “cool” or “must buy” buttons. The always great magazine Wired ran [...]

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Brainy politicians

Here’s a new field of scientific enquiry: Political Biology, or biopolitics. It sounds strange, doesn’t it? To me, it sounds most like politicians trying to influence how research should be conducted, which areas should be allowable and which should not.
But it’s actually the reverse: as this page attests, biopolitics is about how politics could and [...]

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Nalmafene for your ludomania

I have mentioned this as a headline at SCR. A new study demonstrates that Nalmefene, an experimental drug, has positive treatment effects on compulsive gambling. It works through making gambling become less thrilling and compelling. Maybe we can soon find a drug that makes statistics lectures more exciting, too?
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Multicenter investigation of the opioid antagonist nalmefene [...]

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