Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroscientist, had a stroke that effectively shut down the left hemisphere of her brain. It took her 8 years to fully recover. In this video she shares her experience of entirely losing her sense of herself as an individual being.

Mystics, meditators, and psychadelic explorers have been to that “place;” a bleeding brain took her there. To her it felt profoundly spiritual but also underscored her understanding of the vastly different roles of the left and right hemispheres of the brain.

Are we spiritual beings capable of having physical experiences or physical beings capable of having spiritual experiences? I think the way that we’re “wired” prevents us from being able to know which is true. Does such a dichotomy even serve us?

Science continues to demonstrate how electrical impulses and chemicals interact to create our perception, which can include vast experiences of consciousness. If we truly are nothing more than extraordinarily complex machines, does that really matter? We do know that what matters in our relation to others and the world is what we do in the physical realm.

[via Open Culture]

Herd immunity arises when enough of the population has been vaccinated against a disease that individual cases cannot spread to enough people to cause an epidemic. We almost got there with measles near the end of the 20th century. Then Andrew Wakefield published a now-discredited study and the myth began that the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine causes autism.

from The Guardian:

The rate of MMR vaccination fell from 91% in 1997 - approaching the “herd immunity” levels that would virtually wipe out the disease - to 80% in 2003. They have recovered only slightly since then. The reason, almost certainly, is that parents were frightened by a possible MMR “link” to autism. This fear carried little credibility among medical professionals. But it received high, sometimes hysterical, media coverage.

[...]

The research that led to suggestions of an MMR “link” with autism came from Dr Andrew Wakefield and 11 colleagues at the Royal Free Hospital, London. It was later discredited. He and two others are now charged with serious professional misconduct before the General Medical Council.

This myth has received enough sensational press coverage that the suspicion that vaccines cause autism has entered common knowledge. Celebrities like Jenny McCarthy and Jim Carrey are furthering anti-vaccination propaganda. This could have serious repercussions on public health in America. Just when science was finally ridding us of a deadly disease, unscientific superstition came along to put us back in danger.

See Wikipedia for a summary of the “controversy” regarding autism and the MMR vaccine, and Science-Based Medicine for a discussion of vaccine side effects from an MD who specializes in Infectious Disease.

Read Montague, the director of the Human Neuroimaging Lab at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, TX, is trying to crack the code of how the brain makes decisions — the neurochemical foundation of free will.

The neurotransmitter dopamine’s effect on creating the sensation of reward in the brain was discovered in the 50’s. Montague’s research is showing that the activity of dopamine neurons influences decision making in a more complex manner than previously thought. Dopamine isn’t just produced when something favorable happens. It’s also produced as soon as there’s an expectation that something favorable will happen.

What’s interesting about this system is that it’s all about expectation. Dopamine neurons constantly generate patterns based upon experience: If this, then that. The cacophony of reality is distilled into models of correlation. And if these predictions ever prove incorrect, then the neurons immediately readjust their expectations. The discrepancy is internalized; the anomaly is remembered. “The accuracy comes from the mismatch,” Montague says. “You learn how the world works by focusing on the prediction errors, on the events that you didn’t expect.” Our knowledge, in other words, emerges from our cellular mistakes. The brain learns how to be right by focusing on what it got wrong.

So the brain learns by avoiding prior mistakes and trying to supply itself with “fixes” of dopamine — kind of a brute force trial-and-error. Is that the meaning of life? Too much dopamine causes an organism to ignore its basic survival instincts even to its own death:

They inserted the needle right next to the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), a part of the brain dense with dopamine neurons and involved with the processing of pleasurable rewards, like food and sex.

Olds and Milner quickly discovered that too much pleasure can be fatal. After they ran a small current into the wire, so that the NAcc was continually excited, the scientists noticed that the rodents lost interest in everything else. They stopped eating and drinking. All courtship behavior ceased. The rats would just cower in the corner of their cage, transfixed by their bliss. Within days all of the animals had perished. They had died of thirst.

Maybe the ultimate goal is to do whatever it takes to keep as much dopamine flowing as possible while still keeping yourself fed, sheltered, and breeding for as long as possible. It’s elegantly simple. Working out the details of pursuing that goal is the interesting part.

[Seed Magazine]

A woman who had absolutely no balance and could not stand without falling due to a loss of vestibular function fully regained it with the use of accelerometers that sent signals through the brain via electrodes attached to her tongue.

A man who had been blind since birth was able to distinguish people and objects and even perceive three-dimensional space by feeling a matrix of vibrating stimulators against his back.

Both of these feats were accomplished by Paul Bach-y-Rita, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They are demonstrations of neuroplasticity — the brain’s ability to reprogram itself — in this case substituting one sense for another.

Bach-y-Rita determined that skin and its touch receptors could substitute for a retina, because both the skin and the retina are two-dimensional sheets, covered with sensory receptors that allow a ‘picture’ to form on them.

It is one thing to find a new data port, or way of getting sensations to the brain, but another for the brain to decode these skin sensations and turn them into pictures. To do that, the brain has to learn something new. This adaptability implies that the brain is plastic, in the sense that it can reorganise its sensory perceptual system.

The entire article is really worth a read.

[The Telegraph via RichardDawkins.net]

It’s a couple of years old, but I finally had a chance to watch the documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?”. Nothing about the history of the GM EV1 surprised me, including GM’s destruction of the entire EV1 fleet.

The documentary includes mention of hydrogen fuel cells, which appears to be more of a stall technique by those invested in fossil fuels than the promising innovation that it’s often portrayed to be. It’s decades away and several times more expensive than gasoline or electricity.

Consumer demand is the only force that will result in plug-in hybrids and electric vehicles being manufactured in this country, and before you can demand it, you have to know that it is possible and already exists with today’s technology.

Here’s the trailer for the documentary:

This isn’t a surprising revelation, but there’s a biological reason for it. From Newsweek [via Schneier]:

The evolutionary primacy of the brain’s fear circuitry makes it more powerful than the brain’s reasoning faculties. The amygdala sprouts a profusion of connections to higher brain regions — neurons that carry one-way traffic from amygdala to neocortex. Few connections run from the cortex to the amygdala, however. That allows the amygdala to override the products of the logical, thoughtful cortex, but not vice versa. So although it is sometimes possible to think yourself out of fear (”I know that dark shape in the alley is just a trash can”), it takes great effort and persistence. Instead, fear tends to overrule reason, as the amygdala hobbles our logic and reasoning circuits. That makes fear “far, far more powerful than reason,” says neurobiologist Michael Fanselow of the University of California, Los Angeles. “It evolved as a mechanism to protect us from life-threatening situations, and from an evolutionary standpoint there’s nothing more important than that.”

Politicians and all religions that claim the existence of “hell” have been capitalizing on this for centuries, and the more we trust the fear-inducing rhetoric they’re feeding us, the less chance reason will have to prevail.

This article, adapted from the book Your Inner Fish and posted on The University of Chicago’s web site, explains the evolutionary origins of varicose veins, hemorrhoids, hiccups, snoring, and hernias. They’re symptoms of some inconvenient consequences of the structures and processes we’ve inherited from our evolutionary ancestors.

What really captured my interest is that we can blame fish and tadpoles for hiccups.

Fish out of water

I commented on this post on a Catholic blog [via Dane101]. Over the last week it had become a lively discussion until today when the priests took their ball and went home.

For my assertion that a rape-induced pregnancy should be a woman’s prerogative to abort, especially at a stage of development where a zygote is months away from the capacity to even feel pain, I was accused of “promoting death” as a “kill-all-the-babies-[relativist].” This wasn’t surprising, but I would have preferred that they stuck to attacking my argument instead of attacking me personally.

Once he started making it about me rather than my argument, I began asking Fr Renzo di Lorenzo: if God is required for moral behavior, then in the absence of God, would you rape, maim, and kill? Again and again he ignored it, preferring instead to speak in parables and insist that I don’t / won’t / can’t see. By the time the thread was closed he had created a caricature of me which was in equal measure entertaining and bizarre.

These seven myths have worked their way into “common knowledge,” but none of them are supported by evidence:

• People should drink at least eight glasses of water a day.
• We use only 10% of our brains.
• Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death.
• Shaving hair causes it to grow back faster, darker, or coarser.
• Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight.
• Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy.
• Mobile phones create considerable electromagnetic interference in hospitals.

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