Recommended items to pack a fresh brain:
1. Put the fresh brain (A)
2. In a ziploc bag (B)
3. Wait! Don’t just ziploc – double-ziploc (C)
Pack with ice and post!
Continue reading the shipping information for fresh brains at the New York Brain Bank website (also availale in PDF)
Thanks to Kat for this, from oztam.com
People ? often do not have a good sense of the limitations of sample-based research. Warren Cordell, chief statistical officer at Nielsen for many years, devised a wonderful visual explanation for [the United States] Congress, which went as follows. The picture (below) is comprised of several hundred thousand tiny dots (the population).
The three smaller pictures contain 250, 1,000 and 2,000 dots (the samples). They are ‘area probability’ samples of the original picture, because the dots are distributed in proportion to their distribution in the picture. If we think of homes [or persons, consumers] instead of dots, this is the sampling method used for most media research studies.
Now move back 30 inches or so. When the eye stops trying to read the dots, even the smallest sample provides a recognisable picture (you can use top-line data). But you would have trouble picking her out of a group of women based on the 250-dot sample (do not try reading demographic breaks). At 1,000 dots, if you squint to read the pattern of light and dark, you would recognise her in a group (now you can read major demographics). At 2,000 dots, you see her more clearly – but the real improvement is between 250 and 1,000 – an important point. In sampling, the ability to see greater detail is a ‘squared function’ – it takes four times as large a sample to see twice the detail. This is the strength and weakness of sample-based research. You get the general picture cheap, but precision costs a bundle.
Shamelessly stolen from the inside cover of Stanley Donwood‘s ‘Catacombs of Terror!’
I wanted to post this as a comment on onemonkey‘s post about cool german words but i couldn’t get it to work so…
Weltschmerz, literally “world-pain”
[OED] ‘A weary or pessimistic feeling about life; an apathetic or vaguely yearning attitude’
It would be prejudicial to the national interest and the conduct of the government’s foreign policy if the English courts were to express opinions on questions of international law concerning the use of force by the United Kingdom and other states which might differ from those expressed by the government and advanced by it in the conduct of international relations.
– Permanent Undersecretary of State Sir Michael Jay, July 1st
As James said, “Come again? Government accountability? Separation of judiciary and executive? Wishy-washy liberal nonsense…”
Or as Michael Jay might have said “The government does what it likes and we do what we’re told”
Will chips in
If there’s any hope for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there’s any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara
Phil Ochs, musician, 1940-76
When the Tao is lost, there is virtue.
When virtue is lost, there is morality.
When morality is lost, there is the law.
The law is the husk of true faith,
the beginning of chaos.– Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, 38
UpdateYour metabolic rate while watching TV may not be less than while unconscious, but in children it is less than other resting activities (less fidgiting):
Ref:
Effects of television on metabolic rate: potential implications for childhood obesity.
The young sea squirt swims the oceans. When it finds a comfortable rock to settle down on it attaches to it by the head and proceeds to digest its own brain – a brain which would be of no further use during an uneventful future of filter-feeding.
Sea Squirts, aka tunicates, also aka urochordata, are more than just a curio from marine biology. Sea squirts are more closely related to humans than any other invertebrate group – evolutionary biologists reckon that they resemble the ancient last common ancestors of all vertebrates.
The brains they have in the larval form are really just a rod of nerve cells, a notochord. But it’s this notochord, found in its most primitive form in the sea squirts, which defines the phylum to which all birds, fishes and mammals belong. We humans could, ultimately, be just a development on the larval form of these slimy plankton eaters.
Nicol suggested to me that this means there might be a genetic switch which could still be flipped in humans, and would give us a strong urge to press our heads to the nearest rock face, digest our brains and move no more.
I think maybe it’s already happened, except that the switch is memetic, not genetic. The rock is a sofa and the digestive juices responsible for atrophying our brains are the emissions from the TV.
An additional curious note about tunicates is that they use a rare metal, vanadium, to bind oxygen in their blood, rather than iron (like humans) or copper (like squid). What this means for the sofa/TV/brain digestion analogy I don’t know.
Something about Leunig at his best leaves me speechless. It’s the expression of that idea, but without leaving me any referrent I could pass on to anyone else. I’m left, dumb, pointing, mouthing “look! look! That’s it!”
Five years ago there was a Kronenberg 1664 advert with a fantastic french hip-hop track on it. I promised my girlfriend I’d find out what it was and get a copy.
Well, thanks to this site and my housemate‘s CD collection i’ve found it.
Apologies for the small delay, but, Naomi, if you still want the track I now have a copy and it’s Mc Solaar’s A La Claire Fontaine from his album Prose Combat.
Stumbled upon this spoofed vid of George Bush and Tony blair singing a duet of ‘Enduring Love’ to each other this morning.
It set me looking for more spoofed vids and i came across this vid of Dubya drunk at a wedding. Lots has been made of Dubya’s drug and alcohol problem, and all the sites I found hosting this video held it up in mockery and/or condemnation. But i have to say, loath him as I do, i found myself warming to him during the inpromptue interview he inadvertently gave at the wedding.
George, please drink more and bomb less.
The order in which different brain areas reach maturity must be crucial to how activity-guided development creates functional specialisation (there’s good stuff on this in Rethinking Innateness). Here’s a maturational timetable (via) for different brain areas:
Notice that it’s areas associated with audition that finish myelination first (in the womb), and the neocortex which finishes last (about 25 years later).
Ref:
Elman, J., Bates, E., Johnson, M., Karmiloff-Smith, A., Parisi, D., & Plunkett, K. (1996). Rethinking innateness: A connectionist perspective on development. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.
Like a dutiful embodied cognitivist i believe that what we’re doing affects how we think. Or, on a more mircoscale, that the task we’re engaged in affects the how we process the stimuli we’re sensing. Not just how we process the stimuli in the sense of the parameters of the processes used to deal with it, but that the actual processes themselves alter – and not always in ways we have personal insight into.
So, as part of my duties i was re-reading Goodale & Milner’s (1992) classic paper “Separate visual pathways for perception and action”. They discuss research that shows that motor systems aren’t fooled by various illusions – so that with things like the muller-lyer illusion, our fingers reaching to grab the object are not fooled in the same way as our eyes are fooled in providing us with information on size. They go on to say:
The functional modules supporting perceptual experience of the world may have evolved more recently than those controlling actions within it
But that’s just an aside. The question that jumps out at me is, if the type of response affects stimulus processing, what kind of response is conscious experience?
Ref
1. Goodale MA, Milner AD (1992). Separate visual pathways for perception and action. Trends in Neurosciences, 15(1), 20-25.
Artificial plants which are so real, you’ll be tempted to water them. They are virtually maintenance free – just give them the occasional dust down and they will last for ever. Your chosen display is carefully packed to reach you fully arranged and ready to site where you want to enhance your interior environment. Packed with full care instructions.
The increasing growth of call centres and open plan offices have made screens ever more popular. Greater numbers of people now work within single areas and this has naturally been accompanied with an increased need to control these environments. Optical distractions and disruptive noises can affect productivity, cause agitation and be detrimental to staff welfare. Desktop screens can divide working areas to give a sense of personal space while still enabling group interaction. Personal items such as photographs can also be pinned to screens to create an individualised and more inspiring work area.
Not fiction – emailed to me by my friend James from office catalogue he was using at work.
Be the change you wish to see in the world
– Gandhi
I’m off to Sheffield now, for Peace in the Park. Bye bye London, see you monday…
Like i said, the rat is more spinal cord than cortex, whereas the human is more cortical than spinal cord by a factor of nearly forty. Does anything else happen as we stagger up up the phylogenetic ladder? Well there’s a whole lot of crinkles added…
Rat:
Man:
Extending the war into Iraq would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Exceeding the U.N.’s mandate would have destroyed the precedent of international response to aggression we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land.
From “Why We Didn’t Remove Saddam” by George Bush [Sr.] and Brent Scowcroft, Time Magazine, 1998
Via IraqBodyCount.com. Let the record show: 10,000 civilian casualties so far.
Two bits of classic Kerouac, the first from the beginning of ‘On the Road’
the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace things, but burn like
fabulous roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
and
What is the feeling when you’re driving away from people, and they recede on the plain till you see their specks dispersing? -it’s the too
huge world vaulting us, and it’s good-bye. But we lean forward to the
next crazy venture beneath the skies.
Some thoughts from a speech by Neil Gaiman:
Ignore all advice.
In my experience, most interesting art gets made by people who don’t know the rules, and have no idea that certain things simply aren’t done: so they do them. Transgress. Break things. Have too much fun.
Another piece of advice:
I’ve learned over the years that everything is more or less the same amount of work, so you may as well set your sights high and try and do something really cool.
The unexpected consequences of a noisy environment
Xiaoqin Wang
Trends in Neurosciences
Volume 27, Issue 7 , July 2004, Pages 364-366
Laboratory of Auditory Neurophysiology, Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine
Abstract: A recent study found that the functional organization of auditory cortex was disrupted when rats were exposed to a moderate level of continuous noise during early development. However, this detrimental effect on auditory cortex could be remedied later by stimulating the noise-reared rats with structured sounds. These findings suggest that the endpoint of the ?critical period? could be extended well into adult life, which has significant implications for our understanding of cortical plasticity.
Thanks to Brain facts and figures
Nature discuss neuromarketing:
A more skeptic view of neuromarketing is that cognitive scientists, many of whom watched from the sidelines as their molecular colleagues got rich, are now jumping on the commercial bandwagon. According to this view, neuromarketing is little more than a new fad, exploited by scientists and marketing consultants to blind corporate clients with science
No one would do that, would they? Would they…?
It occurs to me that the post-modernist critics, with their obsession with text, are in fact profoundly modern. Treating words as objects, rather than events, analysing language as if it had some meaning in-itself, rather than as a dynamic relation to the world. Just like the literalists, the fundamentalists and their holy texts, the unreformed scientists and their static truths.
And before you say it, the more I hear the insistence that words are multiplicitious, the more i hear the binaries deconstructed, the more hollow it sounds. Such ardent disbelief in words feels too utterly entangled in the world of written words to escape – back to or onward to – the world of words as voiced actions.
Given what we know about the human brain, two facts stand out as astonishing: (1) We know very little about what distinguishes the human brain from that of other species; and (2) apparently, few neuroscientists regard fact 1 as much of a problem.
–Todd Preuss (2000). What’s human about the human brain? In The New Cognitive Neurosciences (M.S. Gazzaniga, Ed.), Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Via Jody Culham
I went to the Edward Hopper exhibition at the Tate Modern on saturday. The unquiet emptiness of his paintings reminded me of this poem by Leonard Cohen
What I am doing here
I do not know if the world has lied
I have lied
I do not know if the world has conspired against love
I have conspired against love
The atmosphere of torture is no comfort
I have tortured
Even without the mushroom cloud
still I would have hated
Listen
I would have done the same things
even if there were no death
I will not be held up like a drunkard
under the cold tap of facts
I refuse the universal alibiLike an empty telephone booth passed at night
and remembered
like mirrors in a movie palace lobby consulted
only on the way out
like a nymphomaniac who binds a thousand
into strange brotherhood
I wait
for each of you to confess.
