This review also appears on Download the Universe, a group blog reviewing the best (and worst, and just "meh") in science-related ebooks and apps.

When I go to science museums, I like to press the buttons. I'm convinced this is a special joy that you just do not grow out of. Hit the button. See something cool happen. Feel the little reward centers of your brain dance the watusi.

But, as a curmudgeonly grown-up, I also often feel like there is something missing from this experience. There have definitely been times when I've had my button-pushing fun and gotten a few yards away from the exhibit before I've had to stop and think, "Wait, did I just learn anything?"

Science museums are chaotic. They're loud. They're usually full of small children. Your brain is pulled in multiple directions by sights, sounds, and the knowledge that there are about 15 people behind you, all waiting for their turn to press the button, too. In fact, research has shown that adults often avoid science museums (and assume those places aren't "for them") precisely because of those factors. Sound Uncovered is an interactive ebook published by The Exploratorium, the granddaddy of modern science museums. Really more of an app, it's a series of 12 modules that allow you to play with auditory illusions and unfamiliar sounds as you learn about how the human brain interprets what it hears, and how those ear-brain interactions are used for everything from selling cars to making music.

It's part of a series that also includes Color Uncovered. The app is basically a portable Exploratorium. It would be very simple to convert everything in here (from games to text) into a meatspace exhibit. And that's a good thing. There are some big benefits to having access to your own, private museum.
A) You get to press the buttons as many times as you want.
B) You actually have the time and the headspace necessary to explore the text and learn the things the button-pressing is supposed to teach you.

For instance, one module features a psuedo vintage tape deck that allows you to record yourself speaking, and then play the recording both normally, and in reverse. You're particularly encouraged to try recording palindromes—words and phrases that are spelled the same backwards and forwards. You might think that palindromes would also sound the same backwards and forwards, but you'd be wrong. The phrase "too bad I hid a boot", for instance, sounds more like garbled Japanese when it's played backwards.

Having this all to yourself on an iPad means that you can spend a lot of time being silly (examples of recordings made by this reviewer include palindromes in different accents, "Hail Satan", and multiple swear words) while easily jumping back and forth between the interactive diversion and the explanations of how it works and how it fits into modern society. I can even imagine kids playing with the toy part of this for a while before finally stumbling upon the embedded text and having their games suddenly illuminated with meaning. That's pretty cool. In a museum setting, I've watched plenty of kids muck around with the button pressing and then run off before they ever have a chance to learn that phonemes are distinct units of sound or that backward speech doesn't just reverse the order of the phonemes, but reverses the phonemes themselves. Sound doesn't have palindromes.

The other benefit here is that Sound Uncovered eliminates the need for the role of Boring Adult — the person charged with the futile task of reading the explanatory text out loud to a gaggle of button-pressing children who really do not care about that right now. In doing so, it frees adults to actually have fun and learn something, too. If you don't have to be the education enforcer, and can trust that your kids will discover the explanations as they play with the app over time, then you're able to actually engage in play yourself —both with your kids and without them. The portable museum is a place for kids, and it's a place for adults, too.

That said, I think an adult on their own would probably burn through this pretty quickly. I got most of what I'm going to get out of it on a three-hour plane flight. But it's also free, so it's not like you're out a lot of money for a small amount of information. In general, I'd say Sound Uncovered is a good example of how the digital format can be used to improve science communication in ways that aren't easily possible in the real world.

Sound Uncovered and Color Uncovered

The Rotating Snake Illusion is a fun image that makes your brain perceive motion where no motion actually exists. Psychologists understand the factors that make an illusion like this work (and work better) — for instance, breaking up and staggering the colored lines that radiate from the center of the circle creates a much stronger sensation of movement. But they don't know exactly why it works yet, according to Japanese psychologists Akiyoshi Kitaoka and Hiroshi Ashida.

And that brings us to this kitten video.

YouTube user Rasmus posted a video that he thinks might show his cat being tricked by the same sense of motion that catches the eyes of humans who look at The Rotating Snake Illusion. On the other hand, this just might be a cute video of a kitten attacking a piece of paper — which is known to happen.

So here's the challenge: Try it on your cat. You can print it off here. Then, report back here and/or post video responses to YouTube. Let's gather some data!

This is not exactly the soundest experimental methodology ever, but it sure would be interesting to see what happens.

She wrote the post a week after the episode, and two weeks before having brain surgery to remove the tumor that caused it.

"At the time I was still having seizures every few days, and just the act of writing about the first seizure in such detail almost brought on another one," Jess explains. "I initially planned to keep this account private, but after two months, I’ve decided to share it, if only for the fact that it might be useful to others who have had or will have a similar experience."

It happened when she was in transit via plane from Yemen to Beirut.

My head resting against the window, I was swimming around somewhere between awake and asleep when I felt my mind fall through a trapdoor and into a vacuum. Suddenly, there was no ground for my mind to land on. No language. No concepts. Anxiously I grasped through the smothering black for an idea, a word, something I could articulate. Nothing. Just black.

Then I felt my eyes roll up in my head. On a slow, steady rhythm, they started jerking forcefully to the right. Language flooded back i’ve lost control! and jerk, jerk, jerk, further and faster my eyes pushed to the right. Breath quick and shallow now, eyes so far up and to the right they pushed painfully against their sockets. My head jerked too now, like it was being dragged by my eyes jerk, jerk, jerk, I tried to push out a sound, a grunt. Nothing but spittle.

In full seizure now, shaking uncontrollably, I could still see out of the very corners of my eyes. There was no-one sitting next to me, and the man two seats down was staring into his iPad.

Read more. Follow Jess on Twitter: @jessradio.]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/22/what-its-like-to-have-a-gran.html/feed 62 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/17/the-two-parts-of-pain.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/17/the-two-parts-of-pain.html#comments Thu, 17 Jan 2013 21:38:26 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=206417 crabs might be capable of feeling both. ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/17/the-two-parts-of-pain.html/feed 30 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/15/a-more-resilient-species.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/15/a-more-resilient-species.html#comments Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:07:17 +0000 Linda Stone http://boingboing.net/?p=205497

“A playful brain is a more adaptive brain,” writes ethologist Sergio Pellis in The Playful Brain: Venturing to the Limits of Neuroscience. In his studies, he found that play-deprived rats fared worse in stressful situations.

In our own world filled with challenges ranging from cyber-warfare to infrastructure failure, could self-directed play be the best way to prepare ourselves to face them?

In self-directed play, one structures and drives one’s own play. Self-directed play is experiential, voluntary, and guided by one’s curiosity. This is different from play that is guided by an adult or otherwise externally directed.

A MacArthur Fellow told me that, when he was a teenager, his single mother would drop him off at an industrial supply store on Saturdays while she ran errands. Using library books as his primary resource, he built a linear accelerator in the garage. It wasn’t until neighbors complained about scrambled television and radio signals in the hours just after school and after dinner that his “playful” invention was discovered.

Photo: Linda Stone. "This is the "office" of a 14 year old I know."

Play researchers’ findings indicate that self-directed play, for both children and adults, nourishes the human spirit and helps develop resilience, independence, and resourcefulness. Yet, our desire to be efficient and productive, and our tendency to over-schedule and over-program, has crowded out opportunities for self-directed play in our education system and in our lives at home.

According to Pellis, self-directed play supports us in better handling the complex and the unpredictable, both in social and in non-social situations.

Play scholar, Brian Sutton-Smith, wrote “The opposite of play is not work. The opposite of play is depression.” NIMH reports that one in ten adults are depressed, up over 400% in the last two decades, with far more suffering from anxiety and other mood-related disorders. When psychiatrist Stuart Brown conducted play histories of over 6,000 people from a variety of backgrounds, he noticed that childhood play histories often have a strong relationship to what people do in their adult lives.

A technology consultant I interviewed told me about his passion for stamp and coin collecting. When I probed about his interest in stamps and coins, he said he was fascinated that countries that spoke different languages and had different currencies had found ways to cooperate on services like mail delivery, and had figured out currency exchanges. As an adult, one of his areas of expertise is global internet policy.

One of Brown’s studies covered the life and death of Charles Whitmore, a college campus mass murderer, who, in 1966, on the University of Texas campus, killed 15 people and wounded another 31, after killing his wife and mother the previous evening.

Extensive interviews with those who knew Whitmore, revealed that a “lifelong lack of play” had been an important factor in his psychopathology. Whitmore was always pressured by his parents to “do something useful” -- the antithesis of self-directed play.

In the course of his research and through extensive interviewing, Brown found that many violent criminals shared this same lack of childhood play.

Play can be risky. During self-directed play, our imagination and curiosity guides us as we venture into the areas where we can fail and iterate. Consequently, we play when we feel safe and secure, and self-directed play tends to reinforce a feeling of safety and security.

Researcher Jaak Panksepp, suggests that depriving young animals of play can delay and disrupt brain maturation. Panksepp’s research found evidence that play increased gene expression of BDNF (brain-derived neurotrophic factor), a protein involved with brain maturation.

On the flip side, a life rich with self-directed play can nourish genius. I had an opportunity to interview a handful of Nobel Laureates on their childhood play patterns, every one of them reported many memorable hours of self-directed play. Many of these Nobel Laureates went on to say, “This is actually what I do in my lab today.”

I worry that our education system focuses on measures related to rote learning versus the type of student engagement enabled by self-directed play. I worry that in our desire to develop our potential through densely packed schedules and programmed activities, we are actually stifling our potential and suffocating imagination and curiosity.

Stuart Brown, author of The Neuroscience of Play, advocates, “Play is…more than just fun. Plenty of play in childhood makes for happy, smart adults – and keeping it up can make us smarter at any age.” It is through self-directed play that we discover who we are. Coaches and experts often admonish us,  "Find your passion!" Then they offer questionnaires and processes.  The truth is, the very best way to find our passions is to give ourselves the gift of time for self-directed play.

[Brain maze illustration: Shutterstock.com]]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/15/a-more-resilient-species.html/feed 10 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/10/fda-wants-ambien-doses-cut-for.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/10/fda-wants-ambien-doses-cut-for.html#comments Thu, 10 Jan 2013 19:46:35 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=205099 Food and Drug Administration today announced it will require the makers of popular sleeping pills like Ambien and Zolpimist to reduce the recommended dosage in half for women, "after laboratory studies showed that the medicines can leave patients drowsy in the morning and at risk for car accidents." Women eliminate the drugs from their bodies more slowly than men. (NYT)]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/10/fda-wants-ambien-doses-cut-for.html/feed 44 http://boingboing.net/2013/01/10/junior-seau-had-brain-disease.html http://boingboing.net/2013/01/10/junior-seau-had-brain-disease.html#comments Thu, 10 Jan 2013 19:43:50 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=205097 ABC News reports that a team of scientists who analyzed the brain tissue of the late NFL star Junior Seau after his 2012 suicide "have concluded the football player suffered a debilitating brain disease likely caused by two decades worth of hits to the head." ]]> http://boingboing.net/2013/01/10/junior-seau-had-brain-disease.html/feed 13 http://boingboing.net/2012/11/16/the-neuroscience-of-the-human.html http://boingboing.net/2012/11/16/the-neuroscience-of-the-human.html#comments Fri, 16 Nov 2012 16:10:39 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=194653

Using brain scans, scientists are trying to find how great freestyle rappers drop dope lines. Discovery News reports on a study conducted by researchers the voice, speech and language branch of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) at the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Here's the paper: "Neural Correlates of Lyrical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of Freestyle Rap." (via Clive Thompson; image photoshop mine from original study)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/11/16/the-neuroscience-of-the-human.html/feed 7 http://boingboing.net/2012/09/11/tapeworms-on-the-brain.html http://boingboing.net/2012/09/11/tapeworms-on-the-brain.html#comments Tue, 11 Sep 2012 13:30:01 +0000 Maggie Koerth-Baker http://boingboing.net/?p=180223

Here's a fun fact: Did you know that you can get tapeworms in your brain? You know that you can get a tapeworm from eating infected meat. But when people have tapeworms in their guts, they secrete tens of thousands of eggs a day. And those eggs can end up on food, or other things that people put into their mouths. For some reason—nobody is really sure why—tapeworm eggs that are ingested by humans never mature into adults. Instead, they remain in a larval stage and hang out in a host's bloodstream. Sometimes, they make it to the brain. And, apparently, this happens often enough that it has an actual medical name: Neurocysticercosis.

The good news is that these things are mostly harmless. They don't seem to hurt your brain at all while they're alive. The bad news: As soon as the larvae die, your body's immune system seems to suddenly realize they exist and it goes into overdrive—triggering seizures, loss of feeling in the body, and sometimes leading to death.

Scientific American blogs has the story of one woman in California who had this happen to her. To save her life, surgeons had to remove a calcified tapeworm larva from her brain.

Sara Alvarez was afraid.

It was December 20, 2010, in Sunnyvale, Calif., a town that lives up to its name. The West Coast winter, not as long or as harsh as seasons in the East, gave her the opportunity to take her youngest child out for an afternoon stroll.

In the fading light of dusk, Alvarez, too, began to fade. She lost the feeling in her right leg. Her right foot followed suit. She couldn’t lift or move her right hand. She was weak, and her body was numb.

The National Institutes of Health classifies neurocysticercosis as the leading cause of epilepsy worldwide, and the World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that tapeworms infect 50 million people globally. The CDC says an estimated 1,900 people are diagnosed with neurocysticercosis within the United States yearly.

Read the rest of the story at Scientific American blogs. (WARNING: Surgery images!)

While they were both in the psychology department of Stony Brook University, Bianca Acevedo and Arthur Aron scanned the brains of long-married couples who described themselves as still “madly in love.” Staring at a picture of a spouse lit up their reward centers as expected; the same happened with those newly in love (and also with cocaine users). But, in contrast to new sweethearts and cocaine addicts, long-married couples displayed calm in sites associated with fear and anxiety. Also, in the opiate-rich sites linked to pleasure and pain relief, and those affiliated with maternal love, the home fires glowed brightly.

The Brain on Love (NYT)]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/03/25/diane-ackerman-the-brain-on-l.html/feed 3 http://boingboing.net/2012/03/19/pianist-with-synesthesia-perfo.html http://boingboing.net/2012/03/19/pianist-with-synesthesia-perfo.html#comments Tue, 20 Mar 2012 00:30:32 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=150016

[Video Link] BB pal Joe Sabia points us to this incredible video by Evan Shinners, Julliard-trained pianist and "best Bach player around." In the video, Shinners shows the world the colors he sees when he plays: he has synesthesia. You can follow him on Twitter, and check him out live on one of his upcoming tour dates.]]> http://boingboing.net/2012/03/19/pianist-with-synesthesia-perfo.html/feed 29 http://boingboing.net/2012/01/09/wide-awake-during-brain-cancer.html http://boingboing.net/2012/01/09/wide-awake-during-brain-cancer.html#comments Mon, 09 Jan 2012 20:13:17 +0000 Xeni Jardin http://boingboing.net/?p=137942

This fascinating video from the Mayo Clinic explains how 28-year-old Mary Meixner went through "awake surgery" during which surgeons used an intra-operative MRI to target her brain tumor.

At the end of the operation, she slept. Then, she says, "I woke up and I was so excited, and I was like, yes! I'm not dead! I can talk! I can think! Because you never know, right?"

Transcript here (PDF).

(via @thespeachgal)

Eric Kostelich is one of the researchers who is trying to change that, by approaching the problem of brain cancer  from a new angle. Kostelich is a mathematician. In particular, he's interested in how we can use math to better predict the behavior of complex and chaotic systems. Right now, this mostly means that he studies the weather. In fact, he's part of a team that developed a new algorithm for weather prediction, called the Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter. But Kostelich thinks that the LETKF could have applications outside the nightly news.

In a recent study, published December 21 in Biology Direct, he joined forces with cancer researchers, to see whether the statistical methods that make chaotic weather patterns more predictable could do the same thing for chaotic behavior in cancer cells. The results are promising. A couple of weeks ago, I spoke to Kostelich to find out more about the history of forecasting uncertainty, how algorithms like LETKF work, and what we might learn if we apply these systems to cancer. 

 Maggie Koerth-Baker: When you set out to apply the methods used to forecast the weather to cancer, why did you choose brain cancer? 

Eric Kostelich: Partly it's because I had a family member with a brain tumor. The scientist in me got interested because these really are terrible tumors. Getting to know a number of clinicians, it seemed to me that new ideas, anything that could help people live a little better would be welcome.

From a math standpoint these tumors are interesting in that they don't metastisize on the central nervous system. For instance, melanoma is a process that starts in a mole on surface of skin but spreads to the liver and other vital organs. You have to look at it throughout the entire body, and that's a daunting task. But a brain tumor tends to stay in the brain. That keeps it more mathematically attractive for our initial studies. And the brain also has some interesting geometry, with folds and so on, and with different functions in different places. The liver and kidneys are relatively heterogenous, but where a tumor is in the brain really affects what symptoms you see. My partner in this thought it would be really useful to be able to say, for an individual patient, based on studies of patients with similar tumors, there's a 60% chance that the tumor is more likely to grow in one direction, rather than another. They might be able to give a dose of radiation therapy in that one direction.

If you could help someone live a couple extra months, that would be a big advance for this type of cancer. Patients usually only live 12-14 months. Ted Kennedy suffered from this and his experience was typical. He died about 14 months from diagnosis. We've made a lot of strides in treating other kinds of cancer, but our approach to brain cancer hasn't changed much.

MKB: Why are brain cancers so difficult to treat?

EK: The brain isn't easily accessible. Between the brain and the outside, you've got the skull and accessing it involves drilling a hole. Plus, it's your brain. With a breast cancer you can remove a breast and a margin of tissue and still live. You can live without an arm or a breast. But you can't just remove a big chunk of the brain without crippling the patient. One of the objectives of treatment is to not make the patient's neurological condition any worse than tumor already has made it.

MKB: In this study, you used an algorithm called the Local Ensemble Transform Kalman Filter. What does all that mean? What does this algorithm do when applied to weather?

EK: Meteorologists never make just one prediction. They make many. In any of these models, you always have a grid of points on which you're trying to approximate behavior. To run that model on the computer you put in models for all the grid points, but you can't actually measure them all. What I mean is, you can measure the temperature and barimetric pressure and so forth at one point on the ground and plug it in. But the model also has another grid point above that one, high up in the air, and more points on up into the atmosphere. You can't measure the data at all of those. Another example, if you look at high impact weather like a major hurricane, they get started over remote tropical ocean where it's hard to get any measurements at all. Satellites are a big help, but there's always uncertainty. And because there's uncertainty, you get the idea of an ensemble forecast.

Ensemble forecasts go back to Edward Lorentz. [He's a pioneer in chaos theory—MKB] You run a number of forecasts with slightly different realizations of the numbers at all the different grid points. Forecast uncertainties depend not only on time, but also on space. You might have quite a bit of uncertainty about where a hurricane will end up in five days. But quite a bit of certainty about Phoenix being sunny for five days in June. If you look at many forecasts, you can get a handle of both where your uncertainties are and what magnitude they are. 

MKB: What makes it different from other algorithms used for making predictions about uncertain systems?

EK: You're trying to get mathematical combinations of forecasts that best fit observed conditions. Weather models are updated every six hours. Your uncertainties tend to grow with time. You can forecast tomorrow, but a week from now is more iffy. So the models have to be updated on a regular basis. By doing things locally you get better computational efficiency. We thought, "Well, if we can do this for the weather ..."

Our system outperforms the Weather Service's system by quite a bit. The Brazilian government is actually using our approach for their next gen weather prediction systems. What we try to exploit in our approach is, in a mathematical sense, the uncertainties in a forecast. Uncertainties tend to lie in certain directions. All these mathematical models are partial differential equations in dynamical systems. In math, we have a concept we call a phase space. That's "phase" as in phases of the moon. It's a math abstraction and it's where we think of all the math action taking place. In the case of the weather, it appears that the uncertainties in weather models lie primarily in certain directions of the abstract phase space. Our approach takes advantage of that in a clever way. Because we know where the uncertainties are more likely to be, we can pay more attention to those places.

MKB: The ideas here—combining new observations with prior forecasts, and paying the most attention to where you know the most uncertainty is likely to be—these are things that can seem like a bit of an obvious thing to laypeople. How new are these ideas really? Is there something that makes this more special and surprising than it seems on the surface?

EK: The notion of data assimilation, combining observations and prior forecasts, has been an integral part of weather forecasting for several decades now. Computers were used to do this on a regular basis, starting around the mid 1960s. By that point they were powerful enough that you could build a realistic enough grid to say something about the weather. You and I take weather forecasting for granted. But the reality is that this is one of the great triumphs of modern science.

Think about Hurricane Katrina. It was known three days in advance that this hurricane would come close to New Orleans. Thirty years ago, we couldn't have been able to tell you that. Today we can evacuate a few hundred miles of coastline instead of telling the entire Gulf region, "This is coming and we don't know where." That's a huge advance.

There's some really interesting history on this. The term forecast goes back to Robert Fitzroy, he was the captain of the Beagle, the ship that Darwin traveled on to the Americas in the 1830s and 40s. He was very intersted in questions of weather and storms because he'd lost several crewmen in a gale. The ship basically tipped over. He saved the ship, but lost several lives. When he was back in England he was appointed meterological statist. He was appointed to keep all the records for the crown. So, by the late 1850s, the telegraph had come in and Fitzroy had people at all the ports telegraph in the weather information to him. He looked at patterns of temperature and pressure rising and falling and was able to combine those patterns with new observations and say, "There's a storm coming in. Stay at port." This was the beginning of forecasting. Shipwrecks fell by half in a few years. 

MKB: So where do you make the connection between all of this, and something like brain cancer? 

EK: No forecast is perfect. In Fitzroy's day, if the storm didn't materialize, then there were complaints. People lost money by staying in port and Fitzroy actually got into political trouble. They stopped doing forecasting for a while until a fisherman's lobby brought him and his methods back.

Now fast forward 150 years. Say you have a brain tumor. What you'd like to know is, "What is going to happen to me?" But doctors are really very much where Fitzroy was 150 years ago before he invented forecasting. It's like, stick your finger up in the air and make a guess. Nowadays, for weather, we have mathematical models that, combined with satellites, can predict hurricanes before they materialize. We can tell several days in advance where the storm will go. Doctors can't do anything near that with cancer. All they can do is look at a scan and some bloodwork and say we'll see you in a couple months. But we're on the verge of being able to gather lots more information about what's going on in the human body. 

What we'd like to do with this oncoming data deluge, what we're trying to do, is devise math tools that will help clinicians make sense of all the new data and associate probabilties with that data. Then they can tell people something more useful. Not perfect. But useful.

MKB: I think most lay people operate under the assumption that weather prediction like this isn't very accurate, beyond a day or so ahead of time. You're wanting to do cancer prediction over 60-day cycles. Why would that kind of time frame be reliably accurate enough to matter?  

EK: Weather service looks hard and long at that question. One way in which you can assess the goodness or lack thereof of the forecast is to say, "I'm going to predict the weather two, three, four days out. Then you go out and measure on those days and compare the reality to the forecast. The bigger the difference, the worse the forecast. By that measure, forecasts today made 3-4 days out are as accurate as a 36-hour forecast was 30 years ago. So the weather forecasts are more accurate than people give them credit for. It's just that when you blow it that's what people remember.

A famous case was Veterans' Day a few years ago in Washington DC.  The Weather Service forecasted a dusting of snow, but there ended up being something like 14 inches. Basically, the snow was 100 miles off from where they thought it would be. A 100-mile error, 24 hours out, that isn't so bad really in a global perspective, but the local impact is very great. People remember that. On the flip side, though, in 1900 a hurricane hit Galveston, Texas. The Cubans had telegraphed DC to tell us that there was a storm heading West. But we blew the Cubans off and there were no warnings for Galveston. 8000 people drowned. We still have bad hurricanes today, but we don't have 8000 drowning because they don't know it's coming. In that respect, we're doing pretty good. But it's still not perfect.

Our basic approach here, in thinking about cancer in general and brain cancer specifically, is could we adapt the accuracy of a 3-4 day weather forecast for a month or two or three. So that the models show what is likely to happen to an individual patient's tumor. It's a fair question about whether we can move that timeline up. But it works because of differences in what you're forecasting. For weather, the uncertainties tend to double every couple of days. As far as we understand cancer, the uncertainties you have in the state of a tumor, they don't double every two days. They double over a month or two. It's a different mathematical beast than the weather. A couple of months for cancer is like a couple of days for the weather. Now, they can vary quite a bit in how aggressive they are. There are cases in the literature where in some patients the tumors double in size in a couple weeks. But more typically the doubling times are on the order of a month or two.

On the other hand, forecasting cancer can be harder than forecasting the weather. In the case of the weather, air is a fluid, and there's a couple hundred years of physics that go into understanding how fluids move in laboratory conditions. If you're going to write a weather model there's no doubt what equations you start with. In the case of cancer, we don't know how glioblastoma cells really work very well. It's a much greater challenge to write that mathematical model because our understanding is much less complete. We're trying to take into account that whatever model we write down is likely to be off. Possibly by quite a bit. But the question is, "Can data assimiliation system make a clinically useful forecast?" It doesn't have to be perfect to be useful.

MKB: The brain cancers you're looking aren't really treatable. Like you say, most people die from them within 14 months. What's the benefit, then, of having a more accurate prediction of how they will spread? If you still can't treat the cancer, what does it help to know how it will behave? 

EK:  My understanding, and from personal experience with a family member, is that you're right, this isn't going to cure cancer in general or glioblastoma specifically. But one of the real goals of treatment is to help patients live as well as possible for as long as possible. The age of highest incident for the type of brain cancer we studied is between 40 and 65. If this result allows you to live two months longer than you otherwise would maybe that makes the difference between seeing your daughter get married or not. We can't prevent the inevitable, but we might help them live better or longer. If we can develop good enough mathematical models and be able to tell patients that going through another round of chemo isn't likely to help, then they can decide to spend that time with family instead of in the hospital. That's beneficial in it's own way.

Eric Kostelich's research is available to read, for free, online. 

Turns out, we like food porn for the same reason we like such things as the art of Tom of Finland and certain parts of Dolly Parton. There's a big connection between the way we're attracted to exaggerated sexual characteristics, and the way we're attracted to exaggerated food characteristics.

In a post at Smart Planet, Christopher Mims explains this phenomenon, called supernormal stimuli:

Pioneered in field studies by the ethologists Tinbergen and Lorenz, supernormal stimuli is any phenomenon in which the features of an object — be it a parent, mate, or food — are exaggerated to make an animal respond more strongly to them. In her 2010 book Supernormal stimuli: how primal urges overran their evolutionary purpose, Deirdre Barrett explored the ways in which movie makers, advertisers and fast food companies exaggerate the parts of things we already like in order to hijack our emotions and cravings.

Baby chicks presented with parents with exaggerated versions of the features they’re homing in on — the color of a parent’s beak, say — will respond more strongly to an exaggerated, but artificial, version of their parent than to the real thing. In the same way, humans home in on versions of reality in which the most enticing features are enhanced. In food, that’s texture, color, and anything else we associate with nutrient density, mouth feel and general deliciousness.

That video might not actually be safe for work, by the way.Video Link

The biology of itching and the biology of pain are intertwined in interesting ways, writes graduate student and science blogger Aatish Bhatia. Understanding itching can help us better understand how to treat pain. I'd not seen Bhatia's blog before, but I'm really liking his style. He does a great job of breaking down the science in a clear way.

... In the last decade, researchers have learned about receptors in the nerves under our skin that react specifically to itchy substances. When these receptors fire, they send a signal racing up our spinal cord, headed to our brain where it creates an urge to scratch. Scientists now have a basic map of the roads that an itch takes on its way to our brain. And they have even been able to block some of these roads in mice, essentially preventing them from feeling an itch.

...The picture that is emerging is a complex one, where pain and itch signals are distinct yet subtly intertwined. Of the nerve cells under our skin, some are involved only in signalling pain, and they have pain receptors. Others are responsible for signalling different types of itches, and they have both itch and pain receptors. If the same cell has both receptors, how do we distinguish itch from ouch?

... As the biology of itching becomes better understood, the benefits are making their way from the lab to the clinic. The drug morphine is a powerful painkiller, but has a common side effect of itchiness. Women taking opiates to relieve their labour pain often experience a similar side effect. Zhou-Feng Chen and Yan-Gang Sun, authors of the GRPR receptor study, teamed up with colleagues at the newly founded Center for the Study of Itch and managed to tackle this problem. Their results, published in the current issue of the journal Cell, show that the benefits of morphine can be separated from the itch.

Richard Wiseman found a cow that may have a vase on its face. Or ... maybe ... it has two faces on its face. Is your mind blown yet?

Dopamine does a lot of things, but you're probably most familiar with it as the chemical your brain uses as a sort-of system of in-game gold coins. You earn the reward for certain behaviors, usually "lizard-brain" type stuff—eating a bowl of pudding, for instance, or finally making out with that cute person you've had your eye on. And, as you've probably heard, there's some evidence that we can get addicted to that burst of dopamine, and that's how a nice dessert or an enjoyable crush turns into something like compulsive eating or sex addiction.

Neurologist Robert Sapolsky puts an interesting twist on this old story, though. What if it isn't the burst of dopamine that we get addicted to, but the anticipation of a burst of dopamine? It's a small distinction. But it matters, he says, if our reward system is based less on happiness than on the pursuit of happiness.

For more on this, check out David Bradley's post on this video, which also links back to a more-detailed discussion of the basics of dopamine addiction.

Say it with me now: "F***ing magnets, how do they work?" Mo Costandi explains:

Inga Karton and Talis Bachmann of the University of Tartu adopted a different and novel approach, by examining the natural propensity to lie spontaneously during situations in which deception has no consequences. They recruited 16 volunteers, and showed them red and blue discs, which were presented randomly on a computer screen. The participants were asked to name the colour of each disc, and that they could do so correctly or incorrectly at their free will.

The researchers used a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to disrupt the participants' brain activity during the task. TMS is a non-invasive technique in which pulses of electromagnetic radiation are targeted to a specific brain region, inducing weak electrical currents that can either inhibit or enhance activity in that area.

They split the participants into two groups of eight for the experiment. Half of the participants in one group received magnetic pulses to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) in the left hemisphere of the brain, while half in the other received them to the DLPFC on the right side. The rest of the participants acted as controls, and TMS was targeted to either the left or the right parietal cortex.

Statistical analysis of the results revealed that magnetic stimulation directed at the left DLPFC slightly increased the participants' tendency to lie about the colour of the discs, whereas stimulation of the right DLPFC slightly reduced it. By contrast, stimulation of the left or right parietal cortex had no effect on the participants' propensity to lie.

Costandi has actually made his full interview with the primary researcher in this study available online. In it, he gets a bit more into the nuance of what happens when you turn up a result as odd as this one, why scientists conduct such small studies, and what they do with the results of those studies.

That's no dandelion. It's a painted close-up of a slice of human hippocampus. Jessica Palmer at the Bioephemera blog introduced me to the gorgeous artwork of neuroscience grad student and painter Greg Dunn. His images of different neurons are really lovely. And you can buy prints.

Recently, a host of studies has revealed potential underpinnings for all the elements of such experiences.

For instance, the feeling of being dead is not limited to near-death experiences—patients with Cotard or "walking corpse" syndrome hold the delusional belief that they are deceased. This disorder has occurred following trauma, such as during advanced stages of typhoid and multiple sclerosis, and has been linked with brain regions such as the parietal cortex and the prefrontal cortex—"the parietal cortex is typically involved in attentional processes, and the prefrontal cortex is involved in delusions observed in psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia," Mobbs explains. Although the mechanism behind the syndrome remains unknown, one possible explanation is that patients are trying to make sense of the strange experiences they are having.

This story, by Charles Q. Choi, breaks down several common elements of near-death experiences the same way. But the fact that I found most interesting relates to who has "near-death" experiences. Turns out, it's not limited to people who are actually near death. Choi reports that a study of 58 patients who had had near-death experiences found that 30 of them weren't actually in danger of dying. They just thought they were.

Behavioral therapist Andrea Kuszewski has a great guest post up at The Intersection blog, looking at what we can (and can't) learn from the handful of studies that have attempted to link politics and neurobiology. None of these studies have been perfectly well-done, she writes. But, despite being flawed in different ways, they're coming to some of the same conclusions—conservatives seem to have a more active amygdala and liberals seem to have a more active anterior cingulate cortex. You can shorten that into a headline-grabbing statement about conservatives being driven more by emotions and liberals by logic. But it's really, really not as simple as that.

If you're going to talk about these studies at all, Kuszewski writes, you're going to have to understand the context behind them. In other words: This is an issue chock full of yesbuts. And, without them, you're going to come to some very wrong conclusions.

This is definitely a story worth reading all the way through. It is, however, a difficult story to excerpt ... at least, without committing the very sins the article is meant to correct. But out of all the yesbuts Kuszewski identifies, I'd like to highlight this one, in particular, because I think it's often overlooked in many popular discussions of neurobiology and culture.

1. The brain is plastic. Meaning, every time we engage in any activity, our brain changes somewhat, even if only to a very small degree. In fact, your brain is a little bit different right now than when you started reading this article. And a little different now. Engaging in any activity excessively or intensely over a long period of time changes your brain even more—such as training for a sport or spending a long time practicing and becoming proficient at a skill. Conversely, if you stop using an area of your brain to a significant degree, it will probably shrink in size due to lack of connectivity, similar to the atrophy of muscles. When it comes to the brain areas measured in these studies, we aren’t sure how much of the difference was there to begin with, or to what degree the brain changed as a function of being in a particular political party. I suspect both things contribute somewhat. How much? We have no way of knowing at this point. To say conclusively, we need a longitudinal study, with control groups, measuring brain volume before and after joining, leaving, or participating in a political party’s activities or ideologies.

Even in important moments, our brains are not as good at creating accurate memories as we think they are.

This clip from the World Science Festival features two stories that show how easily the brain can be manipulated. In the first, writer Jonah Lehrer describes how he remembers his cousin ruining his 8th birthday party (except, that, he later found out, this incident never happened). The second is significantly more rattling, as Harvard psycholigst Daniel L. Schacter describes a case of mistaken identity that could have led to an innocent man being tried for rape.

This tendency of the brain to naturally distort memories has been studied in relation to what people believe they remember about September 11th. It turns out, even memories that we think of as being seared into our brains aren't as accurate as they're often treated as being, writes Greg Bousted in a piece for Scientific American. Human memory simply isn't that reliable.

Memories of tragic public events have been of interest to researchers for years. Dubbed as “flashbulb memories” for their extraordinary vividness of detail and photographic recall, these emotionally charged memories are described as being “burned” into one’s mind. Knowing exactly where one was or what one was doing during the assignation of John F. Kennedy, the Challenger disaster, or now, the September 11 attacks has become a quintessential phenomenon of the past few generations. In 1977, a pair of Harvard psychologists studied the reported memories of the JFK assassination. Participants had “an almost perceptual clarity” for recalling when they learned about the assassination and during the immediate aftermath, noting even trivial details with impressive accuracy. The researchers concluded that flashbulb memory is more detailed and accurate than memories of ordinary daily events. The defining characteristic of these types of emotionally charged, shared memories is that one’s confidence in their accuracy tends to be unshakable. But does that really make them more accurate?

In an attempt to answer that, Duke University’s Jennifer Talarico and David Rubin conducted a study on the day after the 9/11 attacks. They gave volunteers a questionnaire about their memories of the morning of September 11 as well as some other unremarkable event a day earlier. They later followed up with the questionnaires at several intervals up until almost a year later. What the researchers found is that the memories of the individuals’ goings-on during the events of September 11—the vivid and picture-like ones—were in fact no better than their recall of, say, lunch the day before. Like most memories, they predictably declined in accuracy over time.

I certainly have very detailed childhood memories that, upon reflection, can't possibly be true—in particular, I remember cooking soup for my mom while she was sick in an apartment that we moved out of somewhere around the time I was 4 years old. Obviously, she didn't actually let a toddler stand over the stove with chicken soup. But my brain "remembers" it. Maybe, at the time, that was simply something I wanted to do and my brain mixed that desire up with later memories of cooking in other, similar, kitchens.

What false memories has your brain concocted up?