Author: jlolds

Native Angeleno, professor of Neuroscience and Public Policy at George Mason University

Junuary–when June meets Cape Cod weather

That’s what they call June in Woods Hole because it’s usually pretty rainy and chilly. The ideal weather really starts in July but carries through late October.

Tomorrow I’m off to Woods Hole for a short trip. This summer I’m proud to report that the Krasnow Institute, young as it is, has its third generation in residence. One of our neuroscience Ph.D. Students is taking the MBL’s Neural Systems and Behavior Course.
I’m going to be meeting tomorrow with MBL’s Chief Academic and Science Officer, Josh Hamilton, about our century-plus year old journal, The Biological Bulletin, which just reported it’s fourth straight year of increased impact factor.

The details of the Placebo Effect

Here’s a wonderful new blog that I’ve found with a great article on the gradations of the placebo effect.

Money quote:

We not only know placebos “work,” we know there is a hierarchy of effectiveness:

  • Placebo surgery works better than placebo injections
  • Placebo injections work better than placebo pills
  • Sham acupuncture treatment works better than a placebo pill
  • Capsules work better than tablets
  • Big pills work better than small
  • The more doses a day, the better
  • The more expensive, the better
  • The color of the pill makes a difference
  • Telling the patient, “This will relieve your pain” works better than saying “This might help.”

Fermi’s paradox revisited

Fermi’s paradox simply put is this:

If life is really ubiquitous throughout the Universe, how come we haven’t seen any evidence of our fellow biota yet?
Several of my colleagues are now finding increasing evidence that indeed, life is a natural emergent of the periodic table of the elements and therefore should be very common throughout this universe (assuming a potential multiverse scenario where our Universe is perhaps finely tuned).
If my colleagues are correct though, then this implies first, that life would be ubiquitous (given the sheer size of the Universe) but also, quite interestingly, showing no evidence at all of the technological “break out” that our own species has managed to achieve over the last several hundred years.
There are no SETI-radio signals as of yet (and it’s been several decades of searching)
Is life a natural emergent, but higher cognition much rarer?
If we look on the Earth itself, I find it intriguing that there are many big-brained species (Whales and Elephants come to mind) but only Homo sapiens have developed the technology to project evidence of themselves beyond the immediate planet (to say nothing of our solar system).

A novel argument for increasing the NIH budget

Can be found on ScienceInsider.

Money quote:

In this week’s online Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Duke University demographer Kenneth Manton and colleagues compared death rates from 1950 to 2004 for four big killers—heart disease, stroke, cancer, and diabetes—with the rising budgets of their corresponding NIH institutes. For all but diabetes deaths, which have risen recently because of rising rates of obesity, they found an inverse correlation between budgets and age-adjusted death rates 10 years later. And when they plotted the total NIH budget versus overall mortality rates (see graph), they found an “excellent” regression fit.

Brain reward circuitry makes you eat junk food

David Kessler, fellow Amherst College alum, and former FDA Commissioner has just completed a book on overeating. Here’s the New York Times’ take.

Money quote:

In “The End of Overeating,” Dr. Kessler finds some similarities in the food industry, which has combined and created foods in a way that taps into our brain circuitry and stimulates our desire for more.

When it comes to stimulating our brains, Dr. Kessler noted, individual ingredients aren’t particularly potent. But by combining fats, sugar and salt in innumerable ways, food makers have essentially tapped into the brain’s reward system, creating a feedback loop that stimulates our desire to eat and leaves us wanting more and more even when we’re full.