CapitalistImperialistPig

Humans have achieved 85% of adult brain volume by age two, but the brain is not fully "wired" until the mid-twenties, long after sexual and other physical maturity.  This has important consequences. Think about this— adolescence and early adulthood are the times when someone is most likely to kill, be killed, leave home forever, invent an art form, help overthrow a dictator, ethnically cleanse a village, devote themselves to the needy, become addicted, marry outside their group, transform physics, have hideous fashion taste, break their neck recreationally, commit their life to God, mug an old lady, or be convinced that all of history has converged to make this moment the most consequential, the most fraught with peril and promise, the most demanding that they get involved and make a difference. In other words, it’s the time of life of maximal risk taking, novelty seeking, and affiliation with peers. All because of that immature frontal cortex. Sapolsky, Robert M.. Behav...

Where are the concepts"anger" and "yellow" represented in the brain? A new Nature article reports some results on activation of brain regions in subjects listening to stories suggesting that there are specific regions in the brain in which such concepts are represented. Interestingly enough, there is a fair amount of consistency between individuals in where general concepts are represented, suggesting, but hardly proving, that there might be a fair amount of pre-wiring. The sample of individuals tested was neither large nor cross-cultural, though.

There is no doubt in my mind that higher animals have a consciousness rather similar to our own. But what about honeybees? James Gorman, writing in the New York Times, takes up the question in Do Honeybees Feel? Scientists Are Entertaining the Idea Bees find nectar and tell their hive-mates; flies evade the swatter; and cockroaches seem to do whatever they like wherever they like. But who would believe that insects are conscious, that they are aware of what’s going on, not just little biobots? Neuroscientists and philosophers apparently. As scientists lean increasingly toward recognizing that nonhuman animals are conscious in one way or another, the question becomes: Where does consciousness end? Andrew B. Barron, a cognitive scientist, and Colin Klein, a philosopher, at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, propose in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that insects have the capacity for consciousness. This does not mean that a honeybee thinks, “Why am I not th...

If you happen to be science, the arts, politics, philosophy... Via Marginal Revolution , a new paper looks at the relationship between family psychopathology and intellectual specialization. It turns out that this idea is not exactly new: A link between intellect and temperament has long been the subject of speculation. Aristotle claimed that “those who have become eminent in philosophy, politics, poetry, and the arts have all had tendencies toward melancholia”, while the physician Benjamin Rush noted a link between manic episodes and “talents for eloquence, poetry, music, and painting” ... Studies of the artistically inclined report linkage with familial depression ..., while among eminent and creative scientists, a lower incidence of affective disorders is found ... In the case of developmental disorders, a heightened prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) has been found in the families of mathematicians, physicists, and engineers ... These threads of evidence suggest that ...

From Slate . Probably not for the squeamish cat lover: What if I told you that last week I predicted all eight winners of a round of the World Cup? And that instead of rankings or divination all I did was look up how many people in each team's home country had a tiny parasite lurking in their amygdalas? Would you believe me? A decade ago, Discover Magazine concluded that parasites ruled the world, and now I'm going to try to tell you that, at the very least, parasites rule the World Cup. Follow the link for an improbable but tantalyzingly suggestive story.