I will suck your gruyere

Tyler Cowen on why people love vampire tales:

Vampire stories offer a platform for exploring the theme of pure, limitless, and eternal desire, yet without encountering the absurdities that might result from planting that theme in a realistic, real world setting, such as a man who loves cheese studded with raisins above all else.

Science New, via Wired Science, covers a paper suggesting the finite filing cabinet model may have some application after all. I'd say this needs some replication before it overturns the store-it-all paradigm; file it under "Interesting if true," and remember what I call Ioanidis's Maxim, which is that most novel findings don't prove out.

So let the testing begin. In the meantime, it's intriguing to see Roz Chast's hypothesis bolstered experimentally.

A new rodent study shows that newborn neurons destabilize established connections among existing brain cells in the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in learning and memory. Clearing old memories from the hippocampus makes way for new learning, researchers from Japan suggest in the November 13 Cell.

Other researchers had proposed the idea that neurogenesis, the birth of new neurons, could disrupt existing memories, but the Cell paper is the first to show evidence supporting the idea, says Paul Frankland, a neuroscientist at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto.

Scientists have known that memories first form in the hippocampus and are later transferred to long-term storage in other parts of the brain. For some amount of time the memory resides both in the hippocampus and elsewhere in the brain. What’s not been known is how, after a few months or years, the memory is gradually cleared from the hippocampus.

Researchers have also debated the role of neurogenesis in learning and memory. The hippocampus is one of only two places in the adult brain where scientists know that new neurons form. On the basis of previous studies, many researchers think new neurons stabilize memory circuits or are somehow otherwise necessary to form new memories.

The new study suggests the opposite: Newborn neurons weaken or disrupt connections that encode old memories in the hippocampus.

Is this the foreshadowing of a highly unethical marketing practice? Marketing based on MAO-A genotype, as determined from mailed-in credit card applications and payments? Credit card companies will have in-house labs to extract DNA from stamps and envelope flaps (Sinclair & McKechnie, 2000; Ng et al., 2007).¹ Taking it one step further, entire marketing campaigns will be tailored to specific markers in an individual’s genome.²

Is this what it’s coming to? Not so fast. Are there any limitations in the findings of De Neve and Fowler (2009)? There are many!!

Vintage Neurocritic here. Gotta see it.

Ben Cardin, a Maryland Democrat, has asked the Pentagon for info on how many troops in war zones have been prescribed antidepressants while they were deployed. Cardin sent a letter Tuesday to US Department of Defense Secretary Robert Gates expressing concern about how antidepressants are being administered troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Cardin wants to determine if the Defense Department is prescribing antidepressants appropriately and is concerned about any connection between the meds and suicide rates among troops. In October, for instance, 16 active-duty US soldiers killed themselves, bringing the total number of active-duty suicides in 2009 to 134. At this rate, the number of 2009 suicides will eclipse last year’s total of 140 – the highest yearly number of suicides in Army history. Cardin also notes the rate of active-duty suicides is greater than that of the US population, although he doesn’t question the “long-term efficacy” of the drugs.

Most soldier/vet suicides get blamed on PTSD. This overlooks a couple important things:

1. Depression and drinking problems are both more common than PTSD is, even among combat vets, and have a more robustly established and higher suicide risk.

2. As the story above notes, antidepressant use among younger people, especially if not monitored closely, is shown to carry a significant suicide risk.

Cardin's effort is an attempt to address the second problem. This is a good example of how reflexive diagnoses, as PTSD has become for any combat veteran (and sometimes even prospective combat veterans -- i.e., troops preparing to deploy), can do harm. They can lead you to ignore other possible causes of the symptoms on display.

Hardly a day passes without yet another breathless declaration in the popular press about the relevance of neuroscientific findings to everyday life. The articles are usually accompanied by a picture of a brain scan in pixel-busting Technicolor and are frequently connected to references to new disciplines with the prefix “neuro-”. Neuro-jurisprudence, neuro-economics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-theology are encroaching on what was previously the preserve of the humanities. Even philosophers – who should know better, being trained one hopes, in scepticism – have entered the field with the discipline of “Exp-phi” or experimental philosophy. Starry-eyed sages have embraced “neuro-ethics”, in which ethical principles are examined by using brain scans to determine people’s moral intuitions when they are asked to deliberate on the classic dilemmas. Benjamin Libet’s experiments on decisions to act and the work on mirror neurons (observed directly in monkeys but only inferred, and still contested, in humans) have been ludicrously over-interpreted to demonstrate respectively that our brains call the shots (and we do not have free will) and to point to a neural basis for empathy.

Ray Tallis talks trash to neurotrash who talk too much neuro. Suggested read; good for all your neuromatter.

In the saturation coverage right after the events, the "expert" talking heads are compelled to offer theories about the causes and consequences. In the following days and weeks, newspapers and magazine will have their theories too. Looking back, we can see that all such efforts are futile. The shootings never mean anything. Forty years later, what did the Charles Whitman massacre "mean"? A decade later, do we "know" anything about Columbine? There is chaos and evil in life. Some people go crazy. In America, they do so with guns; in many countries, with knives; in Japan, sometimes poison.

We know the emptiness of these events in retrospect, though we suppress that knowledge when the violence erupts as it is doing now. The cable-news platoons tonight are offering all their theories and thought-drops. They've got to fill time. I wish they could stop. As the Vietnam-era saying went, Don't mean nothing.

Male bats create tents by biting leaves until they fall into shape. These provide shelter and double as harems, each housing several females who the male mates with. Fruit bat sex goes like this: the female approaches and sniffs the male, and both partners start to lick one another. The male makes approaches with his thumbs (like the Fonz) and mounts the female (like the Fonz). Sex itself is the typical rhythmic thrusting that we're used to, and afterwards, the male licks his own penis for several seconds.

But Tan also found that female bat will often bend down to lick the shaft of her mate's penis during sex itself. This behaviour happened on 70% of the videos, making it the only known example of regular fellatio in a non-human animal.

Dave Grossman puts humans into three categories: Ninety-eight percent are "sheep," content to graze and likely to stampede when they're threatened. One percent are "wolves," psychopaths with a propensity for violence who lack empathy. The other 1 percent: "sheepdogs," who have both empathy and a propensity for violence.

The sheepdogs are also called warriors, he said. They're not always liked or appreciated by the sheep, but they come to the herd's rescue when wolves threaten.

Grossman seemed to captivate the crowd Tuesday at a Pentagon-sponsored conference on warrior resiliency. Most in attendance wore camouflage military uniforms, but the two-day meeting includes civilian therapists and health care providers, as well as personnel from Veterans Affairs.

The program continues today with a video address from Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and concludes with a panel of "real warriors" talking about combat experiences.

Grossman, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and former professor of psychology at West Point, acknowledges the reality of combat stress and psychological trauma. World War II's "greatest generation" included 500,000 soldiers who were psychiatric casualties, he noted.

Still, he said, the vast majority of troops return from war stronger for their experience. Too many people believe what he called a Hollywood myth that portrays combat veterans as victims, forever scarred by their service. That myth creates a self-fulfilling prophecy that produces victims and destroys lives, he said.

Grossman is no John Wayne, however. In fact, he used the legendary Hollywood tough guy as an example of another potent myth.

"John Wayne was an actor," he told the packed ballroom at the Sheraton Norfolk Waterside Hotel, letting the message sink in.

He urged the audience to avoid both ends of the spectrum.

"No pity party, no macho man," he said over and over.

A much-needed perspective. When I did my story on the overextension of the PTSD diagnosis in vets (and elsewhere), I found Grossman's take on the psychic toll of killing (and almost being killed) among the most compelling. His "On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society" is a unique and uniquely valuable contribution.

By way of demonstration, the group plugged in stats from the Oct. 11 playoff game between the Angels and the Red Sox:

BOSTON — Things looked bleak for the Angels when they trailed by two runs in the ninth inning, but Los Angeles recovered thanks to a key single from Vladimir Guerrero to pull out a 7-6 victory over the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park on Sunday.

Guerrero drove in two Angels runners. He went 2-4 at the plate.

Just heard of a neat article about why feeling stupid on a regular basis is actually a good sign if you’re doing serious scientific research. The article is by a fellow named Martin Schwartz, a professor of microbiology and biomedical engineering at the University of Virginia, and it was published in April of 2008 in The Journal of Cell Science. Here’s an excerpt:

Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.

What I like about this excerpt - and about the entire article - is that with a very few changes, it could be speaking of writing. Writing seriously, regularly, searchingly, means feeling stupid on a regular basis. For that matter the same applies for writing even reasonably well, at least for me. I’ve had writing students come up to me anxiously after class and say, “There must be something wrong; I find writing is terribly hard work. It takes me hours.” And I tell them, “You can relax - that’s normal.”