Mind Matters - July 22, 2008

Tough Choices: How Making Decisions Tires Your Brain
The brain is like a muscle: when it gets depleted, it becomes less
effective.
By On Amir

The human mind is a remarkable device. Nevertheless, it is not without
limits.
Recently, a growing body of research has focused on a particular
mental
limitation, which has to do with our ability to use...

Understanding How Neurons Communicate May Help Treat Brain Disorders
ScienceDaily (July 21, 2008) - For the first time, Weill Cornell
scientists have
learned important details illustrating how neuronal cells in the brain
communicate at a microcellular level. Such knowledge may help in the
development
of drug compounds used to treat disorders caused by malfunctions in
communication between brain cells, such as schizophrenia, epilepsy,
Parkinson's
and Alzheimer's disease.

Nature Reviews Neuroscience 9, 646-654 (August 2008) | doi:10.1038/
nrn2456

Culture-sensitive neural substrates of human cognition: a
transcultural
neuroimaging approach
Shihui Han & Georg Northoff

NYT
July 22, 2008
Op-Ed Columnist
Madness and Shame
By BOB HERBERT

You want a scary thought? Imagine a fanatic in the mold of Dick Cheney
but without the vice president’s sense of humor.

In her important new book, “The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the
War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals,” Jane Mayer of The
New Yorker devotes a great deal of space to David Addington, Dick
Cheney’s main man and the lead architect of the Bush administration’s
legal strategy for the so-called war on terror.

She quotes a colleague as saying of Mr. Addington: “No one stood to
his right.” Colin Powell, a veteran of many bruising battles with Mr.
Cheney, was reported to have summed up Mr. Addington as follows: “He
doesn’t believe in the Constitution.”

NYT
July 22, 2008
Basics
Mirrors Don’t Lie. Mislead? Oh, Yes.
By NATALIE ANGIER

For the bubbleheaded young Narcissus of myth, the mirror spun a fatal
fantasy, and the beautiful boy chose to die by the side of a
reflecting pond rather than leave his “beloved” behind. For the aging
narcissist of Shakespeare’s 62nd sonnet, the mirror delivered a much-
needed whack to his vanity, the sight of a face “beated and chopp’d
with tann’d antiquity” underscoring the limits of self-love.

Whether made of highly polished metal or of glass with a coating of
metal on the back, mirrors have fascinated people for millennia:
ancient Egyptians were often depicted holding hand mirrors. With their
capacity to reflect back nearly all incident light upon them and so
recapitulate the scene they face, mirrors are like pieces of dreams,
their images hyper-real and profoundly fake. Mirrors reveal truths you
may not want to see. Give them a little smoke and a house to call
their own, and mirrors will tell you nothing but lies.

To scientists, the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of mirrors
make them powerful tools for exploring questions about perception and
cognition in humans and other neuronally gifted species, and how...

Distribution Of Creatures Great And Small Can Be Predicted
Mathematically

Elephant matriarch cow leading a herd. Most species are small, but the
largest members of a taxonomic group -- such as the great white shark,
the Komodo dragon, or the African elephant -- are often thousands or
millions of times bigger than the typical species. (Credit:
iStockphoto/Jonathan Heger)
ScienceDaily (July 19, 2008) — In studying how animals change size as
they evolve, biologists have unearthed several interesting patterns.
For instance, most species are small, but the largest members of a
taxonomic group -- such as the great white shark, the Komodo dragon,
or the African elephant -- are often thousands or millions of times
bigger than the typical species.

Now for the first time two SFI researchers explain these patterns
within an elegant statistical framework.

"The agreement between our model and real-world data is surprisingly
close," says SFI Postdoctoral Fellow Aaron Clauset, who, along with
SFI Professor Douglas Erwin, presented the findings in a July 18
Science paper.

The web address given below doesn't work. This one seems to:

http://web.mit.edu/~tkonkle/www/BiasedVert.html

The article on the Haptic illusion follows:

Scientists create touch-based illusion

Anyone who has seen an optical illusion can recall the quirky moment
when you
realize that the image being perceived is different from objective
reality. Now,
a team of scientists from MIT, Harvard and McGill has designed a new
illusion
involving the sense of touch, which is helping to glean new insights
into
perception and how different senses-such as touch and sight-work
together.

Can you be born a couch potato?

The key to good health is to be physically active. The key to being
active is… to be born that way? The well-documented importance of
exercise in maintaining fitness has created the idea that individuals
can manage their health by increasing their activity. But what if the
inclination to engage in physical activity is itself significantly
affected by factors that are predetermined? Two new studies suggest
that the inclination to exercise may be strongly affected by genetics.

Controlled experiments into the effects of genetics on human activity
have yet to be attempted, but recent studies on mice – the standard
test species for mammalian genetics – have found genetic influences.

In a paper recently published in the journal Physiological Genomics, a
team of researchers led by University of North Carolina at Charlotte
kinesiologist J. Timothy Lightfoot announced that they had found...

Here's an amusing article from the Times about a move in the UK to ban
'therapy' that is expensive and useless:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/mental_health/article4332456...

The bleating from the 'therapists' about how they can't show the value
of what they do sounds like the sort of argument you'd expect from the
homeopathy crowd.

The report on which this is all based can be found at:

http://www.bacp.co.uk/regulation/index.php?cat=&year=2006

It shows the quite amazing spread of different training course, and
different theoretical bases that are claimed for these various
therapies. In response the government has suggested that a small
subset of these 'modalities' (as it calls them) should be licensed and
the rest rejected.

Curiously none of this seems to focus on outcomes - whether patients
are helped or not - which would seem to be the only sensible, evidence
based, way of making decisions.

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