Author: jlolds

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

The dangers of looking to closely

They’re called incidental findings in brain imaging research on “normal volunteers”. In today’s NY Times Gina Kolata looks at microbleeds in the brain:

“If there were more than we knew of in the general population, that might — and I want to stress might — have important consequences,” Dr. Breteler said. “That is why we started to look for them.”

For more than a decade, Dr. Breteler and her colleagues have followed a group of Rotterdam residents age 45 and older. The goal is to do repeated brain scans on 8,000 people; so far they have scanned nearly 4,000 and are analyzing those data.

“What we found came as a big surprise,” Dr. Breteler said. Previous estimates were that 5 to 7 percent of healthy older people had microbleeds. The Rotterdam study found them in more than 20 percent. And the older the person, the more likely the microbleeds. They were present in 18 percent of 60-year-olds and nearly 40 percent of those over 80.

“We now know that these changes are there and that they are frequent,” Dr. Breteler said. “But we don’t know yet what their clinical impact is, what their prognosis is.”

The Carr debate morphs: the internet does not equal a brain

Charles Arthur of the Guardian evolves the debate. It’s now about the complexity of the net versus the complexity of the brain (which of course is not a scientific debate unless you are talking about the brain of a simple animal like Aplysia californica).

Money quote on the idea the hyperlinks are like synapses:

This is simply rubbish. A hyperlink is nothing like a synapse, except that both describe a connection between two points… a synapse is a responsive, organic mechanism that has been tuned by hundreds of millions of years of evolution to react more strongly to some inputs rather than others. Throw in something between 1 and 10 quadrillion (1 quadrillion = 10^16) synapses in a human brain, and you have an organism that somehow becomes conscious, and yet can also function unconsciously, which uses chemicals for its transmission systems (across the synaptic gap, which is key to how synapses can vary in behaviour).

I’m with Arthur here.

Jim

Vacation

After our regular Dean’s and Director’s meeting today I’m headed to the second day of a very stimulating conference on “biologically inspired innovation” that’s being held over at IDA and then am off to my nephew Nate’s wedding in Cambridge Massachusetts. Nate is a doctoral student in Ann Arbor along with his bride-to-be, Seneca. He is a Harvard and Teach-for-America alumnus–I’m pretty proud of him.

After the wedding, We’ll head back to Virginia and ten days vacation at our Wintergreen house in the Blue Ridge. I’ll be blogging.

Jim

Great Ape Trust–Flood News

Our sister research institution, The Great Ape Trust, has been greatly affected by the recent catastrophic floods in Iowa. I’ve offered assistance, where that is possible, and urge readers of this blog to help where they can also.

Jim