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It is a long-standing argument among religious believers that religiosity were necessary for morality. In a recent Trends in Cognitive Sciences article (requires subscription), Pyysiäinen and Hauser argue that morality can arise and indeed can be found without and before any religious education and thus religion is a by-product of pre-existing cognitive properties of the brain. Indeed, religion is not ubiquitous, as for instance the Hadza's religion has been described as 'minimal', and yet, cooperation and morality are - as in all human cultures - thriving. In fact, there is a clear negative correlation between socioeconomic status and supernatural beliefs, further arguing that religiosity is not really all that important for morality to evolve or to persist. Pyysiäinen and Hauser cite a series of studies in moral psychology showing that moral judgments for unfamiliar moral dilemmas are unaffected in individuals without any religious background. In their press release, the authors conclude: "This supports the theory that religion did not originally emerge as a biological adaptation for cooperation, but evolved as a separate by-product of pre-existing cognitive functions that evolved from non-religious functions," says Dr. Pyysiäinen. "However, although it appears as if cooperation is made possible by mental mechanisms that are not specific to religion, religion can play a role in facilitating and stabilizing cooperation between groups."
Perhaps this may help to explain the complex association between morality and religion. "It seems that in many cultures religious concepts and beliefs have become the standard way of conceptualizing moral intuitions. Although, as we discuss in our paper, this link is not a necessary one, many people have become so accustomed to using it, that criticism targeted at religion is experienced as a fundamental threat to our moral existence," concludes Dr. Hauser.
This leaves open some other, less social cognitive factors contributing to the origin of religiosity, to which to authors allude towards the middle of their article: "[...] the concept of God is based on extending to non-embodied agents the standard capacity of attributing beliefs and desires to embodied agents. According to this view, religious beliefs are a by-product of evolved cognitive mechanisms." The authors are referring to 'theory of mind'. Besides this, still social capacity, there are several other factors contributing to the origins of religion. One such factor is of course our concept of causality and our hunt for last causes. However, the factor that is, of course, closest to my own field of research is that religion works as an operant behavior. This means that religion, for instance, can provide us with a feeling of control where, ultimately, there is none (think rain dance). This is not counter-intuitive and so I'm not the only person who has realized that this may be an important contributing cognitive factor. There is even prior evidence that when experiencing or remembering an experience of lack of control, these cognitive capacities for imagining control and order are enhanced.Perhaps this may help to explain the complex association between morality and religion. "It seems that in many cultures religious concepts and beliefs have become the standard way of conceptualizing moral intuitions. Although, as we discuss in our paper, this link is not a necessary one, many people have become so accustomed to using it, that criticism targeted at religion is experienced as a fundamental threat to our moral existence," concludes Dr. Hauser.
These insights leave us with a set of pre-existing cognitive abilities providing a fertile ground on which the evolution of religion could occur as a by-product: Our capacity to detect agency (so helpful in our social interactions that we see it even in non-living objects), together with the concept of causality imply that everything happens for a reason and that this reason is the intention of someone. This someone can be controlled using certain rituals as evidenced, for instance, by the rain occurring after a rain-dance. This someone obviously punishes you if you do not perform these rituals, so of course this someone will also punish you if you do not cooperate or otherwise violate the rules of the in-group. In this way, religion provides you with a sense of order and controllability in an uncontrollable world which, in turn, keeps you sane, your society functioning and thus competitive and alive. As one of the commenters on the press release noted, 'competitive' may be the key word here, with religion providing a further tool for promoting self-sacrifice and suicidal fighting which might have provided some particularly religious groups with a competitive advantage.
Methinks it's about time for someone to develop a computer model for the evolution of religion, the data are starting to provide enough parameters for such a project.
Also in reply to one of the comments on the authors' press release, a very pertinent video via Pharyngula:
Ilkka Pyysiäinen, & Marc Hauser (2010). The origins of religion: evolved adaptation or by-product? Trends in Cognitive Sciences : doi:10.1016/j.tics.2009.12.007
Posted on Tuesday 09 February 2010 - 05:20:05 
comment: 0
comment: 0| evolution of religion religion evolution morality Hauser |
People in the US have pretty much agreed that 43,000 deaths annually is an ok price to pay as long as the survivors get to drive their cars. One may think that safety-minded Europeans would never allow such a toll on their streets. Alas, they live happily with three times as many fatalities, or about 127,000 people dead in traffic accidents every year. Yet, nobody seriously questions the usefulness of individual transportation. These sound like a lot of people and it is, but at the same time it's only about 0.03% of the population (US and Europe combined), a tiny fraction by any standard.Every new technology comes with dangers and the potential for injuries and fatalities. The internet is no exception, even though it may seem so blissfully trivial with Amazon, Apple and Ebay. The nefarious sides of social web technology are only now, slowly getting clearer. Examples of information perpetuated by social web technology directly or indirectly threatening human lives seem to accumulate at an increasing rate, the two most prominent at the moment being the anti-vaccine movement and climate denialism. In the end, these movements, if they continue to gain momentum, will cause deaths, the anti-vaccine movement has already caused deaths. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt, that the benefits of social web technology by far outweigh these costs. So far.
The psychology behind these phenomena is highly interesting. What they have in common is that their main statements contradict the available evidence. Besides the above two, there is a lot more of such baseless nonsense floating around: rapture in 2009 (now updated to April 2010), creationism, Geocentrism, 9/11 trutherism, birthers, flat earthers, holocaust denialism, etc. I'm sure you can find many more examples of such weird and often quite silly beliefs. Of course, each one claims that they're the only sane ones among this list. Why do people believe in such weird things? Obviously, such weird ideas have been floating around since the dawn of mankind. What, if anything, does social web technology have to do with it? With currently just under two billion internet users, even the most crazy and outlandish idea is bound to gather hundreds if not thousands of followers. For instance, 0.003% of internet users (so only 10% of the traffic death rate) is still 60,000 people. Following the 90-9-1 principle, this would mean that you have a group of 600 hard-core believers actively contributing to an idea in which only 0.003% of people believe, with about 60,000 users visiting the site. This sort of site, while in objective terms on the very fringe of today's culture, would be one of the more visible and prominent sites currently using social media. Of course, everybody participating in that site would have, quite correctly, the impression that there are hundreds if not thousands of like-minded people around. They can't all be wrong, can they? Of course they can! But that is hard to accept with hundreds and thousands of people constantly confirming each other's far-out opinions. Sometimes these fringes get picked up by the general media, whose employees are - not surspisingly - impressed that thousands of people are discussing such weird ideas. "There's got to be something to it, I smell a story". If politics are involved, money soon follows the media (or even the other way around). The rest, as they say, is history. That's for instance, how the US tea-bag movement started. A bunch of whackos with 18th century fantasies, a hearty dose of superstition, religion and consipracy theories together with a lack of knowledge about history and some of the most basic facts, pimped up by the rich playing the undereducated for their own power games. There is no doubt that this movement also belongs in the category in which traffic accidents belong: dangerous and sometimes lethal consequences of an otherwise useful and beneficial technology.
Social media are a great technology and we haven't even scratched the surface of its potential, yet. Given the pernicious side of the human psyche and its propensity to fulfill Murphy's Law, we better come up with a working solution to curb the influence of obvious kooks and nutcases on the overwhelming majority. Because if money starts flowing, the danger of information cannot be overestimated. I'm not sure what kind of technology could be developed to cushion against such phenomena. Where's the speed-limit, the seat-belt, the helmet and the air-bag of social web technology? Unfortunately, as of yet, this technology does not exist. However, given that these ideas are in many respects similar to organized religion, a letter to the journal Science contains some helpful insights on more traditional remedies:
The News Focus story "On the origin of religion" (E. Culotta, 6 November 2009, p. 784) did not incorporate the growing body of psychosociological research that is revealing the crucial role of socioeconomics in the origin and popularity of religion, as well as in creationism (1–6). Some hunter-gatherers have minimal religion (7), and those who do not believe in the gods and an afterlife have spontaneously expanded in prosperous democracies until they are the majority in some nations, such as France, Sweden, and Denmark (1, 3, 4). Because religion is not universal, as implied in the News Focus article, serious religiosity cannot be the strongly genetically programmed result of major selective evolutionary pressures such as social cohesion (8).
In modern nations, nonreligion and the acceptance of evolution become popular when the middle class majority feels sufficiently secure and safe, thanks to low income inequality, universal health care, job and retirement security, and low rates of lethal crime; this has occurred to greater and lesser degrees in most first-world countries, from Japan to Scandinavia (1–6). Religion thrives when the majority seek the aid and protection of supernatural powers because they are impoverished, as in the third- and second-world countries or, in the case of the United States (the most religious and creationist first-world country), because the majority of Americans fear losing their middle-class status as a result of limited government support, high levels of social pathology, and intense economic competition and income disparity (1–6). Prosperous modernity is proving to be the nemesis of religion.
Gregory S. Paul
E-mail: GSP1954@aol.com
3109 N. Calvert Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.
References
In modern nations, nonreligion and the acceptance of evolution become popular when the middle class majority feels sufficiently secure and safe, thanks to low income inequality, universal health care, job and retirement security, and low rates of lethal crime; this has occurred to greater and lesser degrees in most first-world countries, from Japan to Scandinavia (1–6). Religion thrives when the majority seek the aid and protection of supernatural powers because they are impoverished, as in the third- and second-world countries or, in the case of the United States (the most religious and creationist first-world country), because the majority of Americans fear losing their middle-class status as a result of limited government support, high levels of social pathology, and intense economic competition and income disparity (1–6). Prosperous modernity is proving to be the nemesis of religion.
Gregory S. Paul
E-mail: GSP1954@aol.com
3109 N. Calvert Street, Baltimore, MD 21218, USA.
References
- 1. G. Paul, Evol. Psychol. 7, 398 (2009); www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP07398441_c.pdf.
- 2. T. Rees, J. Relig. Soc. 11 (2009); moses.creighton.edu/JRS/2009/2009-17.html.
- 3. P. Zuckerman, Soc. Compass 3, 949 (2009). [CrossRef]
- 4. P. Norris, R. Inghelart, Sacred and Secular (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge, 2004).
- 5. A. Gill, E. Lundsgaarde, Rational. Soc. 16, 399 (2004). [CrossRef]
- 6. S. Verweii, P. Ester, R. Naata, J. Sci. Study Relig. 36, 309 (1997). [CrossRef] [Web of Science]
- 7. F. Marlowe, in Ethnicity, Hunter-Gatherers, and the "Other," S. Kent , Ed. (Smithsonian Institute Press, Washington, DC, 2002), pp. 247–281.
- 8. C. N. Wade, The Faith Instinct (Penguin, New York, 2009).
This post was prompted by a whole host of events this morning. First, I was interviewed for a regional radio station RBB about our recent research on ADHD in flies (hear the 6min interview here). Then I read a tweet from Beatrice Lugger about this blog post by Richard Grant. The interview, the tweet and the blog post all reminded me that it was high time to give a shout out and promote the best science-y audio the web has to offer. It's been about 5 years since I've last done that, so it's about time! Here are my favorite podcasts which I listen to every week:- Nature
- Neuropod
- Science
- Science Update
- This Week in Science
- Science Weekly
- Science Talk
- Science Times
- Science Friday
- Science and the City
- Wanhoffs Wunderbare Welt der Wissenschaft
- DRadio Forschung aktuell
- Braincast
Today's scholarly publishing system is full of anachronisms. While people still dwell endlessly on such prominent anachronisms as journal rankings, so far only few people are debating the anachronism of the widespread deployment of 'supplementary material'. If you are not convinced that 'supplementary material' is an anachronism, just head over to the Nature Methods website. This journal specializes in publishing scientific methods, yet you won't find any methods in the printed publications. The methods are published as supplements, which you have to download separately from the printed material. In other words, if you really want to read the essential information in Nature Methods, you can safely ignore the journal itself and head straight for the supplements. Now if this isn't absurd, I don't know what is.Given that publishers are developing online article formats, it seems to me that the concept of 'supplements' is diametrically opposite to the way one would design a modern research article. With most researchers accessing their literature online, shouldn't the modern research article contain the full details and information together with the raw data? Personally, if I read an article online (and not just the abstract in a database), I want access to everything on the very first page of the article, and the cell.beta version linked to above comes pretty close. Since there is virtually unlimited space, there is no need for a separate supplement with additional data or methods. In most cases, what currently is in the supplement is essential information for the reader and should be worked into the publication, especially if the readability is enhanced using web-native formatting. In this context, a supplement could be written by the authors in which the research is summarized on one to three or so pages, to appear in the printed version. Some people are known to use the printed versions in very particular locations, for which concise summaries would be more adequate than more elaborate treatises anyway:
For these reasons I have now updated all the downloadable local copies of my research papers which had a supplement such that the supplement is in the same PDF file as the main text, just appended at the end. This means you get all the information with a single click, the way it should be.
Posted on Thursday 28 January 2010 - 07:39:57 comment: 0
comment: 0| supplementary material science publishing science politics |
Blogging about one's own research always feels good: the amount of your work has accumulated enough to at least provide sufficient material for a story and some figures. It has passed the first hurdle of scientific scrutiny, peer review. On the other hand, now an exciting time begins: what will the colleagues say? Will people find the one major flaw that neither you, your co-authors, the people who proof-read the drafts before submission nor the reviewers caught? Will the results lead to new, exciting collaborations, will it be cited or will it just be met with utter apathy and complete indifference? After all, with about 1.5 million scholarly publications in approx. 24.000 journals, it's not at all unlikely that your paper just simply never is found by anyone who might be interested in it.All this of course applies to our latest paper as well. However, for those who do read it, I'm sure it will be a fascinating read. It is, without exaggeration, the craziest scientific story I've ever been involved in, an example of serendipity in science if ever there was one. Here's how it all happened. Shortly after we published our mathematical analysis of spontaneous turning behavior in stationary flying Drosophila, Bruno van Swinderen contacted me about a collaboration. I knew Bruno from before (see here and here), but we had never worked together on a project. So I was very excited to hear that he wanted me to test some of his flies in the Drosophila flight simulator, using the exact same techniques we just had published. The initial idea was to use these mathematical analyses to test his mutant flies for any abnormalities in their spontaneous behavior. However, it turned out that the mutant flies that he had sent me, radish, didn't really fly all that well, at least not well enough to generate enough data to run our mathematics on them. Neither did Bruno tell me about his results, we wanted that I should be blind as to the deficits he had found in radish. I knew radish was a memory mutant for olfactory conditioning, but that it could learn visual patterns just fine. Beyond that, nobody knew what other behavioral phenotypes this strain would exhibit.
So I went on to test a whole bunch of other things for which I had the experimental setups readily available. Of all these experiments, I picked the simplest one and sent Bruno the raw data back. I just measured the flies' spontaneous turning attempts without any visual stimulation for as long as I could get the flies to fly continuously, which was six minutes. As a control experiment, the flies' behavior was measured in a flight simulator-like situation, where they could control their flight direction with respect to four visual landmarks (but still tethered, of course). I sent Bruno the data in blind, which means he didn't know which group was the wildtype control and which was the mutant group. He immediately wrote back accurately identifying the mutant group. I had no idea how he could have figured out which group was which so quickly and the experiments were basically concluded, so he started to show me his data.
Bruno does something very few people on this planet are doing: he can put tiny little electrodes in the flies' brains and record their brain waves. Now with this particular mutant strain, he found that they had a peak in the power spectrum of their brain waves at around 1.6 Hz. Stunningly, when he computed the power spectrum of their turning behavior (i.e., my data), he also found a peak at about 1.6 Hz, but only when the flies were flying with the four visual landmarks. The peak was much less pronounced when there were no explicit stimuli in their environment. It was by this peak that he had recognized the mutants so quickly. But what could this peak mean? One thing it could mean is that the mutant flies become fidgety, if there's something in the environment they need to pay attention to. About one and a half times per second, the flies are initiating some turning maneuver, which can be seen as a peak in the power spectrum. In other words, the flies are hyperactive or fidgety, in this very well-defined, oscillatory kind of way. He then went on to tell me that they also were more easily distractable than the wildtype controls, both in behavior and by inferring from their brain waves when presenting them with various competing visual stimuli.
I thought this was really quite amazing. Flies which are known for their memory loss are both hyperactive and have an attention deficit. I immediately thought of people with attention deficit / hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). They also have learning problems. As a joke, I suggested we put the flies on Ritalin, the drug used to treat patients with ADHD. Bruno replied that these data were actually intended for a different publication, but they indeed would fit very well with this one, too. I was flabbergasted! He had already done the experiments with methylphenidate (Ritalin is just the trade name). To my utter astonishment, the flies on methylphenidate performed like their wildtype counterparts in almost all of the tests we subjected them to. This is even more amazing when you consider that the mutated gene, radish, is required during brain development (late during pupation) and not during the behavioral test. In other words, methylphenidate rescues a deficit in adulthood that even a healthy copy of the originally mutated gene cannot rescue any more.
I find it absolutely crazy to find a fly model for a human psychiatric disorder. On top of that, Ritalin, the drug used to treat ADHD in humans actually also successfully treated the flies. It's even more crazy to find all that by accident, without even looking for it! All we wanted was to study some interesting fly mutants to learn more about some basic brain function. How can it be possible to find something like this just by serendipity? My favorite hypothesis is that there are some fundamental principles about how all brains work and we have stumbled across one of them. We still don't know what it is or how it works, only that it has to do with how brain allocate attention to different processing streams. It is tempting to speculate that this process has to do with switching of activity between separate networks, but there currently is no data to tell either way.
I do have plenty of other interesting results from this mutant, both in flight and in walking. However, I cannot make much sense of them, yet, so a lot of further research is required before part two of this story can be presented.
Of course, as usual, I have a copy of the paper, together with all the supplementary material, on the download page.
van Swinderen, B., & Brembs, B. (2010). Attention-Like Deficit and Hyperactivity in a Drosophila Memory Mutant Journal of Neuroscience, 30 (3), 1003-1014 DOI: 10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4516-09.2010
Posted on Monday 25 January 2010 - 08:32:50 comment: 3
comment: 3| van Swinderen Drosophila ADHD ritalin flight hyperactivity |
Daniel Margulies gave a talk last night entitled "Mapping neuroanatomy with resting-state functional connectivity fMRI". This is the video he showed after his presentation:This is the abstract of his talk:
The delineation of discrete regions of cortex---whether through characterizing micro-architecture, topography, connectivity, or function---has persisted as a focus of neuroscience research since the past century. While the introduction of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) into the toolbox of cognitive neuroscience enabled remarkable strides in functional localization, the description of anatomy nonetheless continues to rely on standard anatomical maps with cytoarchitectonically-defined subdivisions. Though fruitful, such parcellation maps are inherently independent of the brains under investigation. A promising alternative comes from a long-recognized defining feature of neural structure: connectivity. Parcellation based on differential connectivity has been prolific in describing macaque monkey cortex, and emerging non-invasive techniques now enable such mapping of human neuroanatomy.
After briefly reviewing the history of cortical mapping, I will describe the emergence and methodologies of a non-invasive connectivity mapping technique: resting-state functional connectivity with fMRI (rsfc-fMRI). Based on correlations of spontaneous intrinsic fluctuations in BOLD signal, rsfc-fMRI provides a means of describing functional connectivity that is highly consistent with anatomical connectivity (using diffusion tensor imaging) and tract tracing studies in the macaque monkey. The advantage of a short acquisition time (~5 minutes) and the absence of task demands also facilitate application to clinical and developmental questions, as well as cross-species comparative studies. I will present connectivity-based subdivisions which have been observed in functionally heterogeneous regions such as the anterior cingulate and precuneus, as well as research on the variability of large-scale networks across individuals.
The talk will conclude with a short video addressing the history and controversies within resting-state fMRI research.
After briefly reviewing the history of cortical mapping, I will describe the emergence and methodologies of a non-invasive connectivity mapping technique: resting-state functional connectivity with fMRI (rsfc-fMRI). Based on correlations of spontaneous intrinsic fluctuations in BOLD signal, rsfc-fMRI provides a means of describing functional connectivity that is highly consistent with anatomical connectivity (using diffusion tensor imaging) and tract tracing studies in the macaque monkey. The advantage of a short acquisition time (~5 minutes) and the absence of task demands also facilitate application to clinical and developmental questions, as well as cross-species comparative studies. I will present connectivity-based subdivisions which have been observed in functionally heterogeneous regions such as the anterior cingulate and precuneus, as well as research on the variability of large-scale networks across individuals.
The talk will conclude with a short video addressing the history and controversies within resting-state fMRI research.
Posted on Friday 22 January 2010 - 13:12:58 comment: 0
comment: 0| fMRI default network resting-state brain activity spontaneous activity spontaneity |
Well, the title may be a little 'overcondensed' but it captures our essential results. We have discovered that fruit flies with the well-known memory mutant radish exhibit symptoms that are reminiscent of ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) in humans. If these flies are treated with methylphenidate ("Ritalin"), most of the symptoms go away. Read all about it in the Journal of Neuroscience (or get it complete with the supplementary material from our download section).Abstract:
The primary function of a brain is to produce adaptive behavioral choices by selecting the right action at the right time. In humans, attention determines action selection as well as memory formation, whereas memories also guide which external stimuli should be attended to (Chun and Turk-Browne, 2007). The complex codependence of attention, memory, and action selection makes approaching the neurobiological basis of these interactions difficult in higher animals. Therefore, a successful reductionist approach is to turn to simpler systems for unraveling such complex biological problems. In a constantly changing environment, even simple animals have evolved attention-like processes to effectively filter incoming sensory stimuli. These processes can be studied in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, by a variety of behavioral and electrophysiological techniques. Recent work has shown that mutations affecting olfactory memory formation in Drosophila also produce distinct defects in visual attention-like behavior (van Swinderen, 2007; van Swinderen et al., 2009). In this study, we extend those results to describe visual attention-like defects in the Drosophila memory consolidation mutant radish1. In both behavioral and brain-recording assays, radish mutant flies consistently displayed responses characteristic of a reduced attention span, with more frequent perceptual alternations and more random behavior compared with wild-type flies. Some attention-like defects were successfully rescued by administering a drug commonly used to treat attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in humans, methylphenidate. Our results suggest that a balance between persistence and flexibility is crucial for adaptive action selection in flies and that this balance requires radish gene function.
On January 12, 2010, an expert panel of librarians, library scientists, publishers, and university academic leaders from the Scholarly Publishing Roundtable issued a press release, calling on on federal agencies that fund research to develop and implement policies that ensure free public access to the results of the research they fund “as soon as possible after those results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal.” This panel was convened last summer by the U.S. House Committee on Science and Technology, in collaboration with the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP).On January 15, 2010, the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM) has issued their reply in their own press release. Here are my comments on some excerpts:
STM believes the goal of US agencies in establishing a “global publishing system” is redundant and wasteful and ignores the essentially international nature of STM publishing, which has, without any government assistance anywhere in the world, enabled more access to more people than at any time in history.
This sounds to me like "we've reluctantly offered the wealthiest libraries in the world some third-rate access to an arbitrary subset of all the publicly funded research results, which the library users themselves have produced. We siphon off 4 billion in tax dollars annually as our personal profit and this entitles us to tell you what kind of further access you will get to your own research. At the moment, we think the kind if half-assed, technologically backwards and crippling access you have right now is good enough for you." Personally, I don't like billion-dollar corporastions which parasitize on tax funds for researchers should have any say whatsoever in how researchers get access to their own research. IMHO, if researchers are not happy with their access, publishers have a duty to make that access happen, without any further charge to increase their already sky-high profits. Once STM publishers start loosing money, I'd be willing to negotiate this situation (as is the case, for instance, with JoVE).it is through this final version – and the creation and maintenance of their authoritative journals – that STM publishers provide significant added value; to make final published articles (VoRs - Version of Record) free immediately upon publication must involve some mechanism of financial compensation.
Apparently, STM thinks posting a file to the internet is worth a 400% price hike in the last 20 years. Do these guys really believe we don't read their own financial reports? What could STM possibly do that a library couldn't for a fraction of the cost? Do they really believe they're so irreplaceable they're in any position to make such demands for taxpayer money in a time of financial crisis while they post record profits?From their press relrease: "STM is an international association of about 100 scientific, technical, medical and scholarly publishers, collectively responsible for more than 60% of the global annual output of research articles, 55% of the active research journals and the publication of tens of thousands of print and electronic books, reference works and databases. We are the only international trade association equally representing all types of STM publishers ‐ large and small companies, not for profit organizations, learned societies, traditional, primary, secondary publishers and new entrants to global publishing."
Sometimes it's difficult to decide what bugs me more: the gall of these corporate publishers or the sheepish apathy of some of my fellow scientists with which they let themselves be suckered into this travesty of a professional service. This is such a Monty-Python-esque situation, only that nobody's laughing because we're in it, not watching.
Hat-tip: Jill.
I picked up Sathish from the airport yesterday and took him in a tour de force from office to office: sign the work contract, register with the local authorities, move into new aparment. Then we got him a new keyboard and mouse with his new computer and he installed his OS. Today, we got him a bank account, health insurance and filled in some more forms he'll need to submit in the coming days. Not bad for day one and two! Especially when you're coming from balmy southern India to a Berlin of a couple of degrees below freezing and have temperature shock in addition to culture shock and jet-lag 
Sathish's is our new graduate student and his project will be to study the spontaneous turning behavior of wildtype, mutant and transgenic flies in stationary flight. He will use mathematical tools to analyze the temporal structure of the behavior in order to localize the brain regions in the fly brain which are important for proper decision-making. He will thus learn basic Drosophila genetics as well as behavioral biology, data evaluation and some programming besides the neuroscience which is the basis of all our work here in the department. The project is the next step after our initial study on spontaneous behavior in the fruit fly Drosophila.
Welcome Sathish!
UPDATE: I can't believe I forgot to mention the blog post about one of Sathish's competitors for the position. Needless to say, if Sathish is dreaming about a Nobel Prize, he hasn't told me about it (yet?).
It's not information overload, it's filter failure (Clay Shirky)
Bonetta (2009) gave an excellent introduction to the micro-blogging service Twitter and its uses and limitations for scientific communication. We believe that other social networking tools merit a similar introduction, especially those that provide more effective filtering of scientifically relevant information than Twitter. We find that FriendFeed (already mentioned in the first online comment on the article, by Jo Badge) shares all of the features of Twitter but few of its limitations and provides many additional features valuable for scientists. Bonetta quotes Jonathan Weissman, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator at the University of California, San Francisco: "I could see something similar to Twitter might be useful as a way for a group of scientists to share information. To ask questions like 'Does anyone have a good antibody?' 'How much does everyone pay for oligos?' 'Does anyone have experience with this technique?'" It is precisely for such and many more purposes that scientists use FriendFeed, which allows the collection of many kinds of contributions, not just short text messages.
Also in contrast to Twitter, comments to each contribution are archived in that context (and without a time limit), providing a solid base for fruitful, threaded discussions. In your user profile, you can choose to aggregate any number of individual RSS or Atom 'feeds', including scientific publications you bookmark in your online reference manager (e.g. CiteULike or Connotea), your blog entries, social bookmarks (Google Reader, del.icio.us, etc.), and Tweets; and any other items you wish to post directly to your feed. You then look for other users whose profile is relevant to your work and subscribe to them. Every individual item posted in your subscriptions will then appear on your personalized FriendFeed homepage, plus optionally a configurable subset of the feeds you subscribed to. You can choose to bookmark ('like') any of these items (Facebook copied this 'like' functionality just before it bought FriendFeed), comment on them, and share discussion threads in various ways.
At first, this aggregation of information and threaded discussions might seem daunting. However, the stream of information can be channeled by organizing it into separate sub-channels ('lists'; similar to but more versatile than 'folders' in email), according to your personal preferences (e.g. one for search alerts). In addition to individual users, you can also subscribe to 'rooms' that revolve around particular topics. For example, the "The Life Scientists" room currently has 1,267 members and imports one feed.
The feature that makes FriendFeed truly useful is its social filtering system. Active discussions move to the top of your FriendFeed homepage with each new addition, which automatically brings them to the attention of you and everyone else who reads those feeds. In a sense, the most current and the most popular entries compete for attention at the top, making notifications unnecessary. This means that your choice of both rooms and subscriptions affects and filters the content you see. In that way, for instance, you could set your preferences such that you would only see papers with a certain minimum number of 'likes' among your colleagues. Alternatively, you can opt to hide items with zero likes or comments, ensuring that only those that someone found interesting will reach you. Thanks to a very fine-grained search functionality, threads also remain easily retrievable.
Some of the synergistic effects of the many scientists interacting on FriendFeed are already apparent at this early stage of adoption. FriendFeed provides a convenient way to microblog from conferences by means of dedicated threads or discussion rooms created for the event, thus allowing to share comments within and across sessions, or even with people not physically present at the meeting. Such conference coverage has even received direct (e.g. ISMB09, BioSysBio09) or indirect (e.g. ISMB08) support from the conference organizers.
Above and beyond conference coverage, scientists use FriendFeed to share papers, experiences on laboratory equipment, resources for teaching, or anything else commonly asked at mailing lists. A number of real-world scientific collaborations have already been sparked from such interactions. Collaborative grant proposals have been initiated, submitted and some of them approved after the idea was passed around and discussed on FriendFeed. Several bioinformatics problems have been solved by code-sharing and advice. Articles in scientific journals have been published by FriendFeed users after meeting and discussing on the platform [1-5].
Of course, since FriendFeed was not designed for scientists, there is room for improvement in terms of usability for scientific purposes. For instance, files can only be uploaded upon starting a thread, not while commenting on it, and there is currently no functionality which infers a measure of reputation to a user from his/her contributions (though the wide-spread use of real names somewhat allows that to be imported). As with all online contributions, citability and long-term archiving are unresolved issues, as is the permanence of services whose source code is not public. Fortunately, the development of social networks tailored to the needs of scientists is actively being pursued from various angles. The Polymath projects, in which researchers collaborate online to solve mathematical problems, provide a number of examples. The recent award of two NIH grants of over $US10M each for exactly such purposes is another. Ultimately, the continued enthusiastic adoption of the sophisticated variants of social filtering tools by a broad community of researchers interested in sharing their science will only increase the usefulness for and thus the capabilities of the online scientific community.
References:
- Lister, A., Charoensawan, V., De, S., James, K., Janga, S. C. C., Huppert, J., 2009. Interfacing systems biology and synthetic biology. Genome biology. 10 (6), 309+. http://genomebiology.com/2009/10/6/309
- Saunders N, Beltr‹o P, Jensen L, Jurczak D, Krause R, et al. (2009) Microblogging the ISMB: A New Approach to Conference Reporting. PLoS Comput Biol 5(1): e1000263. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000263
- Neylon C, Wu S (2009) Article-Level Metrics and the Evolution of Scientific Impact. PLoS Biol 7(11): e1000242. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1000242
- Daub J, Gardner PP, Tate J, Ramskšld D, Manske M, Scott WG, Weinberg Z, Griffiths-Jones S, Bateman A. (2008): The RNA WikiProject: community annotation of RNA families. RNA. 14(12):2462-4 http://dx.doi.org/10.1261/rna.1200508
- Huss & al. The Gene Wiki: community intelligence applied to human gene annotation. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkp760
Bonetta, L. (2009). Should You Be Tweeting? Cell, 139 (3), 452-453 DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2009.10.017
Posted on Thursday 07 January 2010 - 11:11:37 comment: 0
comment: 0| FriendFeed Twitter Facebook scholarly communication social filtering Web 2.0 |
A quote from Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel in the December 11 issue of Science reminded me of a short article by David Glanzman covering a remarkable paper on pan-neuronal (aka 'intrinsic') plasticity and its involvement in learning and memory. Here is the quote:Q: Synaptic plasticity is a central concept in your work on memory. You've been working with Aplysia since 1962. What else do you think we can learn from these lowly snails?
With almost all kinds of synaptic changes, there is a parallel change in the excitability of nerve cells. For example, in Aplysia, a number of neurons fire spontaneously, in bursts. If you [stimulate] a bursting cell [synaptically], you can change its bursting activity for long periods of time [which implies plasticity not only in the synapse but the neuron itself]. This just blew me away. [But] I've never come back to it.
I received this quote from my postdoc advisor John Byrne. He traced Eric Kandel's mention back to an old finding in Aplysia published in 1977. By now, of course, intrinsic plasticity is a well-documented phenomenon, but its complexity has so far hampered research into the relationship of synapse-specific plasticity and neuron-wide, intrinsic plasticity. Moreover, some forms of intrinsic plasticity appear to be somewhat input-specific, for instance, if the affect only certain branches of the neuron, containing many synapses. Now, Jack Byrne and my then fellow postdoc in his lab Riccardo Mozzachiodi have published a very timely review on our current understanding of intrinsic plasticity with regards to synaptic plasticity, entitled "More than synaptic plasticity: role of nonsynaptic plasticity in learning and memory".The review covers many examples from both vertebrate and invertebrate model systems and is a great primer into the 'other' learning mechanism. The review does of course not yet include the paper on the involvement of Na/K pumps in intrinsic plasticity as this paper came out just now, a few weeks after Mozzachiodi and Byrne was published. This new paper shows that not only ion-channels contribute to intrinsic plasticity, but even such seemingly 'boring' molecules as Na/K-ATPases.With almost all kinds of synaptic changes, there is a parallel change in the excitability of nerve cells. For example, in Aplysia, a number of neurons fire spontaneously, in bursts. If you [stimulate] a bursting cell [synaptically], you can change its bursting activity for long periods of time [which implies plasticity not only in the synapse but the neuron itself]. This just blew me away. [But] I've never come back to it.
I became interested in intrinsic plasticity since evidence started to come in that operant conditioning was relying on intrinsic plasticity in Aplysia. Now that also in Drosophila it appears that a completely different set of genes is required for modifying behavioral circuits during operant conditioning (or self-learning, as we have recently defined it), while the well-known synaptic plasticity genes are not required. Maybe this differential genetic requirement reflects the mechanisms also differentially affecting synaptic vs. intrinsic plasticity? Could it be that intrinsic plasticity allows to modify the firing properties of a central neuron in a behaviorally relevant network and thereby affecting the entire network, rather than just some small-scale property in it? If this were the case, it would make a lot of sense to regulate such far-reaching network alterations and only allow them after sufficient training - which is exactly what we just found in Drosophila. Thus, there is quite some circumstantial evidence suggesting that synaptic and intrinsic plasticity may also be behaviorally differentiable. However, no clear direct experimental evidence is available, yet.
Interestingly, a PubMed search for "Intrinsic plasticity" OR "intrinsic excitability" yields only 274 articles (with only a handful of papers before 2000), while a search for "synaptic plasticity" yields 8564. Anybody out there looking for a cutting-edge research field?
Pulver, S., & Griffith, L. (2009). Spike integration and cellular memory in a rhythmic network from Na+/K+ pump current dynamics Nature Neuroscience, 13 (1), 53-59 DOI: 10.1038/nn.2444
Mozzachiodi, R., & Byrne, J. (2009). More than synaptic plasticity: role of nonsynaptic plasticity in learning and memory Trends in Neurosciences DOI: 10.1016/j.tins.2009.10.001
Posted on Sunday 27 December 2009 - 11:15:04 comment: 0
comment: 0| intrinsic plasticity synaptic plasticity learning operant Byrne Mozzachiodi |
Our article entitled "The biology of psychology: Simple conditioning?" has just appeared in Communicative & Integrative Biology. It is an open access article, so it's free. My postdoc Julien Colomb and I wrote it after I was invited to write an "Addendum" article for my recent Current Biology paper. It summarizes the latest progress on the biological learning mechanisms occuring during operant conditioning and proposes two new terms for these mechanisms. It's only 1000 words long. Here's the abstract:Operant (instrumental) and classical (Pavlovian) conditioning are taught as the simplest forms of associative learning. Recent research in several invertebrate model systems has now accumulated evidence that the dichotomy is not as simple as it seemed. During operant conditioning in the fruit fly Drosophila, at least two genetically distinct learning systems interact dynamically. Inspired by analogous results in three other research fields, we propose to term one of these systems world-learning (assigning value to sensory stimuli) and the other self-learning (assigning value to a specific action or movement). During the goal-directed phase of operant conditioning, world-learning inhibits self-learning (in Drosophila via the mushroom-body neuropil), to allow for flexible generalization. Extended training overcomes this inhibition in a phase transition akin to habit formation in vertebrates, allowing self-learning to transform spontaneous actions to habitual responses. In part, these insights were achieved by reducing operant experiments beyond the traditional set-ups (i.e., ‘pure’ operant learning) and using modern, molecular and/or genetic model systems.
We'll see what people think of this nomenclature and whatever else may come from this really short paper. Apart from the journal website, you can also get the PDF from the download section.
Posted on Wednesday 16 December 2009 - 11:44:25 comment: 0
comment: 0| operant drosophila world-learning self-learning habit formation |
I can't believe this guy keeps sending all these nonsense emails. The dude really needs some serious medical help. On the other hand, it's an interesting window into a deranged mind. In his latest mailing, Rodney Berry (who seems to call himself Elijah paul Moses) tries to convince us of his version of racism by completely making up a story: ""WHY DOES THE LORD GOD JESUS CHRIST LOVE THE GERMANIC PEOPLE?""
"" WHY BECAUSE THEY ARE AS ADAM, AND AS THE TRIBES OF Israel!" Deuteronomy 32:8!" After the destruction of BABEL, the children of God as the heathen cush, was scattered abroad, until God spoke unto Abram, telling him, that He The Lord God was going to make him the father of many nations!" Which Abraham through Jacob became such, But there were many tribes of ADAM/NOAH, which had begun other nations, from Greece to Roman, And the tribe of WHO DAN, {{ SOME AMONG DANS TRIBE }} WERE BREAKING FREE FROM Israel and running here and there, building towns and villages, which didnot follow any longer Israel or Rome or any, AND HAD LOST TOUCH WITH THEIR GOD!" AMOS 8:14 THEY THAT SWEAR BY THE SIN OF SAMARIA, AND SAY, THY god, O DAN, LIVETH; even they shall fall, and never rise again!" They some of the tribe of Dan, had began to speak of DAN their ForeFather as a god!" HENCE ODIN!" From the Germans, to the Danish, the Swedish, finland,
them and many men and wo-men of ADAM CHRIST {{ making them all truly brothers and sisters, all of them being of Adam }} all for centuries before converting back/BACK to the God of the BIBLE, their God, not graphed in, but born in!" They are of Adam in a big way as all those "i" call and gather!" How had they become lost?"" The attack of satan, satan has followed and secretly attacked our people sence the Garden of Eden!" Any tribe showing strenght and creativity in the working of hands, it the filth attacked its leaders, and women, so as to blind and keep them as far from their GOD as it could, so "it" finally the evil spirit of death and old age, that doesnot want to be stopped, caused finally the tribe of Dan to lose members, and this tribe which developed also joined with Those lost from Babel, which had not as ham mingled with the heathen, bringing forth the Germanic tribes!"
""BUT as we see satan failed, the Germanic tribes this day are so deeply rooted in WHAT? Science!"' So many of the great diiscoverie's of medical and physical Science has come from Germany, Denmark/Dan-ish, Sweden, England, Ireland, America, all the Nations made up of the tribe's of DANISH/GERMANIC/HE-BREW OF GOD lost from the house of Adam Christ!" {{ Below in past letters, "i" speak of how, that hitler was caused/possessed by the mutant freak of death, to again try to stop science }} The seven nations, and the satelite nations made up of their people's over the last 2000 years and more!" Spoken of By the Revelation of John!" IT is Hard for some to believe, but the filth called death and old age/satan/wolbachia mutant freak has secretly tried stopping Germany for centuries' as America, and any made up of the Lost House of Adam Christ/DAN/JACOB!" THOSE UNMIRED/MINGLED!" THE TRIBES OF ADAM can mingle among themselve's {{ Deuteronomy
32:8, and Isaiah 56:6-7 }} but not with the cushite/heathen Ezra10:17, Ezra 10:44, Ezekiel 16:3, read the entire 16th chapter of Ezekiel , where God speaks of the polluted blood/mingled!" Ham mated with cush, and it was exposed as a curse!" So when the Germanic tribes/us if of England, Ireland, or America, different languages, but not different souls!" Sweden, Switzerland, if of Dan, or The Tribe of Levi, or Judah, unmingled/unmired of cushite!" As exposed to us by Noah, our Father of ADAM, in Genesis He speaks of the peoples not of Gods book of Life!"
""When the Germanic tribes again joined their Fathers Word, they being lost of/from God!" They began doing many marvelous things for His way, and MISSION OF ENDING DEATH AS THE GOD OF DAN, SAID HE CAME TO DO!" John 10:10 I am Come that they might have Life, and that they might have it more Abundantly!" He is the Great Physician and came to put His children on Track/the trail of the evil filth called lucifer/wolbachia/death and old age!" From Saint Nicholas, who himself was of The tribes of Israel, those exodus by Messiah forty years after His crucifixtion from Israel and Rome and Greece!" Check any painting of artifact from any period around Jerusalem of Greece or Rome and there will be the brown and red, and blond Hair of our People!" The Lost tribes of ADAM/ISRAEL!" AS our Lord has lambs wool Hair, so does His children!" On the wall of the temple of Qumran, is a painting of a priest of Qumron, whose hair is blond/lambs wooled
hair!" Not all His children are blond, some red as stated, and many brown, but none cushite!"
Had to look "cushite" up - utter racist BS. Why is it that human brains go all religious when they start to fail? I wonder how many more of these insane walls of meangless gibberish this dude is going to spam around."" WHY BECAUSE THEY ARE AS ADAM, AND AS THE TRIBES OF Israel!" Deuteronomy 32:8!" After the destruction of BABEL, the children of God as the heathen cush, was scattered abroad, until God spoke unto Abram, telling him, that He The Lord God was going to make him the father of many nations!" Which Abraham through Jacob became such, But there were many tribes of ADAM/NOAH, which had begun other nations, from Greece to Roman, And the tribe of WHO DAN, {{ SOME AMONG DANS TRIBE }} WERE BREAKING FREE FROM Israel and running here and there, building towns and villages, which didnot follow any longer Israel or Rome or any, AND HAD LOST TOUCH WITH THEIR GOD!" AMOS 8:14 THEY THAT SWEAR BY THE SIN OF SAMARIA, AND SAY, THY god, O DAN, LIVETH; even they shall fall, and never rise again!" They some of the tribe of Dan, had began to speak of DAN their ForeFather as a god!" HENCE ODIN!" From the Germans, to the Danish, the Swedish, finland,
them and many men and wo-men of ADAM CHRIST {{ making them all truly brothers and sisters, all of them being of Adam }} all for centuries before converting back/BACK to the God of the BIBLE, their God, not graphed in, but born in!" They are of Adam in a big way as all those "i" call and gather!" How had they become lost?"" The attack of satan, satan has followed and secretly attacked our people sence the Garden of Eden!" Any tribe showing strenght and creativity in the working of hands, it the filth attacked its leaders, and women, so as to blind and keep them as far from their GOD as it could, so "it" finally the evil spirit of death and old age, that doesnot want to be stopped, caused finally the tribe of Dan to lose members, and this tribe which developed also joined with Those lost from Babel, which had not as ham mingled with the heathen, bringing forth the Germanic tribes!"
""BUT as we see satan failed, the Germanic tribes this day are so deeply rooted in WHAT? Science!"' So many of the great diiscoverie's of medical and physical Science has come from Germany, Denmark/Dan-ish, Sweden, England, Ireland, America, all the Nations made up of the tribe's of DANISH/GERMANIC/HE-BREW OF GOD lost from the house of Adam Christ!" {{ Below in past letters, "i" speak of how, that hitler was caused/possessed by the mutant freak of death, to again try to stop science }} The seven nations, and the satelite nations made up of their people's over the last 2000 years and more!" Spoken of By the Revelation of John!" IT is Hard for some to believe, but the filth called death and old age/satan/wolbachia mutant freak has secretly tried stopping Germany for centuries' as America, and any made up of the Lost House of Adam Christ/DAN/JACOB!" THOSE UNMIRED/MINGLED!" THE TRIBES OF ADAM can mingle among themselve's {{ Deuteronomy
32:8, and Isaiah 56:6-7 }} but not with the cushite/heathen Ezra10:17, Ezra 10:44, Ezekiel 16:3, read the entire 16th chapter of Ezekiel , where God speaks of the polluted blood/mingled!" Ham mated with cush, and it was exposed as a curse!" So when the Germanic tribes/us if of England, Ireland, or America, different languages, but not different souls!" Sweden, Switzerland, if of Dan, or The Tribe of Levi, or Judah, unmingled/unmired of cushite!" As exposed to us by Noah, our Father of ADAM, in Genesis He speaks of the peoples not of Gods book of Life!"
""When the Germanic tribes again joined their Fathers Word, they being lost of/from God!" They began doing many marvelous things for His way, and MISSION OF ENDING DEATH AS THE GOD OF DAN, SAID HE CAME TO DO!" John 10:10 I am Come that they might have Life, and that they might have it more Abundantly!" He is the Great Physician and came to put His children on Track/the trail of the evil filth called lucifer/wolbachia/death and old age!" From Saint Nicholas, who himself was of The tribes of Israel, those exodus by Messiah forty years after His crucifixtion from Israel and Rome and Greece!" Check any painting of artifact from any period around Jerusalem of Greece or Rome and there will be the brown and red, and blond Hair of our People!" The Lost tribes of ADAM/ISRAEL!" AS our Lord has lambs wool Hair, so does His children!" On the wall of the temple of Qumran, is a painting of a priest of Qumron, whose hair is blond/lambs wooled
hair!" Not all His children are blond, some red as stated, and many brown, but none cushite!"
Randolf Menzel, professor emeritus of our institute in Berlin started the last session of this fantastic little meeting with an enthusiastic presentation on naviating bees which he followed by harmonic RADAR. His team first trained bees to fly to a certain feeder. Then they removed the feeder and trained a separate group of bees to another feeder, at an angle of either 30° or 60° to the old feeder, as seen from the hive. The second group of bees would then dance to recruite the first group of bees to the new feeder. This first group of bees then had a choice of either flying towards the newly indicated feeder which they had never visited, or towards the remembered one from two days before. It turned out that most bees followed the indicated direction, but some bees also headed at an intermediate angle between the two feeders or turned towards the old feeder after they had arrived at the new feeder. Interestingly, this only happened for the group where the angle between the two feders was 30° and not with the bees where the feeders were separated by 60°.The second speaker of the final session was Thomas Préat telling us about two-photon imaging of protein kinase A (PKA) activity in intact flies. He found that bath-application of dopamine acivates PKA only in the vertical lobes but not in the medial lobes of the mushroom-bodies. In contrast, octopamine activates PKA in all MB lobes. Interestingly, the dopamine receptors are not localized to the vertical lobes. Imaging dunce mutants in this setup, he showed that PKA is activated in all MB lobes in this mutant after dopamine application. Suggesting that the rutabaga adenylyl cyclase is the coincidence detector of CS and US in the mushroom-bodies, these mutants do not show the synergistic enhancement of PKA activation after pairing of acetylcholin with octopamine or dopamine.
The penultimate speaker of our symposium was Ron Jortner telling us about a different model system, the locust. He studies the olfactory system of this insect and presented data about the peculiar synchrony that projection neurons exhibit, which is mediated by the action of inhibitory local interneurons in the antennal lobe. He also showed us that projection neurons make excitatory synaptic connections to local neurons (which in turn make direct inhibitory connections onto the projection neurons). In this system, the projection neurons don't seem to make direct connections with each other. This leads to a star-shaped network where the lcal neurons receive ecitatory input from the projection neurons which leads to inhibition of the projection neurons. This neuronal organization leads to synchronous oscillations in the projection neuron populations acivated by the odor.
The very last speaker of the symposium was Yi-Chun Chen who talked about the role of odor quality in olfactory conditioning of Drosophila larvae. Her project was to assemble a generalization matrix for five different odors using a number of different testing procedures. Reassuringly, the different procedures generated very similar data, allowing for a pooling of the data in a singular larval odor generalization matrix.
This talk concluded a fast-paced, data-packed symposium of 35 different talks. we had an exciting time and I'm looking forward to a future meeting of this great bunch of people in the next couple of years.
Bernd Grünewald had the thankless task of being th first to present on the Sunday monring. He talked about channel physiology in the olfactory learning pathway of the honeybe. Bernd performs classical, pharmacology-based channel electrophysiology in primary cell culture but complements this technique with pharmacological manipulations of intact animals and then testing them for learning performance. Using these techniques, Bernd presented a cellular working model for learning in the mushroom-body Kenyon cells at the end of his talk.The second speaker Alexander Kapustjansky talked about in vivo imaging of cAMP levels in Drosophila. He is still in a fairly early stage of his project and started out by telling us that he uses a fluorophor with which he can see the effect dopamine application (bath applied to the brain) on cAMP levels in the mushroom-bodies and that odor application does not show an effect on cAMP levels.
Lasse Bräcker talked about context-specific modification of CO2 avoidance. Flies normally avoid CO2, but if the experimenter changes the context of CO2 perception (e.g., by adding attractive odors), this avoidance can be modulated. He then went on to tell us about a GAL4 screen for defects in CO2 avoidance. They found a decrease in CO2 avoidance if a subset of projection neurons is silenced and when dopaminergic/serotonergic neurons are silenced.
The final speaker of this penultimate session was Paul Szyska. His project is related to the one Dana presented yesterday and looks at trace conditioning in honeybees. Honeybees can solve a trace conditioning task with an ISI of 1-6 seconds, even when tested 24h after training. However, the honeybees do not show any evidence of timing their conditioned response to the arrival of the US as signalled by the CS. The last point he made was that the bees only encode the initial phase of the CS presentation and that inserting a second odor in the gap between CS and US does not disrupt learning.
The seventh session started with the 24th talk of this meeting by Mirjam Appel. She told us about a mutant screen for forward and backward conditioning in aversive olfactory conditioning in Drosophila. I this setup, an electroshock that follows odor onset leads to an aversive memory (odor signals shock) and if odor offset follows electroshock offset (odor signals shock relief), an appetitive memory for the odor is formed, i.e., dependent on the timing of the electroshock with regard to the odor, in a subsequent test, the odor is either approached or avoided. She uses the same 40 fly lines in which trudy Mackay characterized gene expression using gene microarrays and which we are using for studying the heritability of mate choice. Their screen is straightforward: test all lines in both paradigms and then look for correlation between learning scores and gene expression.The 25th speaker was Michael Schmuker from our department. He's a computational neuroscientist and presented his model on the dual pathway of olfactory coding in honeybees. With 'dual pathway' he was referring to the medial and lateral antennocalycal tract (m-ACT and l-ACT). Neurons in each pathway show similar responses to odors with m-ACT neurons being more broadly tuned and l-ACT neurons being more narrowly tuned to specific odors. His model shows nicely how a broad spread of the strangth of lateral inhibition within the antennal lobe subnetworks can explain the differences between these two neuron populations.
Ayse Yarali continued the session with her work on quantitative models of event timing in associative learning. Her starting point is the approach/avoidance learning paradigms described above in olfactory conditioning in Drosophila. Ayse took data from the activation kinetics of adenylyl cyclases (which is activated by both calcium and serotonin, but the activation is also highly dependent on the relative timing of the stimuli) in Aplysia and derived a model of cAMP production in the fly which seems to fit the inter-stimulus-interval function one can observe in behavior.The 27th and final speaker for today was Thomas Riemensberger who talked about flies without dopaminergic neurons. Lack of dopamine is lethal in flies (they don't hatch from the pupal case), so Thomas showed us his elegant strategy of restricting the lack of dopamine to the adult brain. These flies show a normal lifespan, but impaired aspects of locomotion. These flies also show increased sleep and reduced geo- and phototaxis, despite their vision being unaffected. The flies without dopamine can fixate the stripes in the Buridan paradigm, show no aversive olfactory learning but spatial learning remains largely intact. The flies have a wing-phenotype which means they don't fly.
After a brief lunch break, we went on to the next session. Lisa Bogusch from our department in Berlin started out by telling us how sleep is required for proper long-range navigation of honeybees. She uses RFID technology to track the movements of individual bees in the hive.Next up was my PhD thesis advisor and mentor Martin Heisenberg. His talk was on the fly version of learned helplessness: learned uncontrollability. These experiments were performed in the so-called heat-box: a fly walks back and forth in a dark box, the ceiling and floor of which can be heated, heating the entire chamber almost instantaneously. Whenever the fly walks into the 'punished' half of the chamber, the temperature increases until the fly leaves the half again. When flies are subjected to uncontrollable heat before the experiment, learning performance declines significantly, reminiscent of learned helplessness. Only females show this decrease and if you feed antidepressants to the females, they don't show the decrease. Puzzelingly, Troy Zars in Missouri showed that a superficially very similar treatment enhances performance rather than reducing it. The reason for this difference is still not clear.
The third speaker of the session was Martin Schwärzel. He showed us a very nice series of experiments in which he analyzed the necessity and sufficiency of the dunce phosphodiesterase influencing cAMP levels in the fly brain. By switching the dunce gene off in certain brain areas and leaving it intact in all others or by switching it on only in certain areas and keeping it switched off in all others, he found that dunce expression in the antennal lobes and the mushroom-bodies is sufficient to restore learning in a dunce mutant background. Dunce expression is necessary in either of the two structures. On the level of the antennal lobes, dunce is required in GABAergic local interneurons.
Melanie Hähnel was the final speaker of this session. She recently finished her PhD in our department in Berlin and is now in Frankfurt working on bees. Her project there is to inject caged oligonucleotides to candidate genes into the bee brain and then use laser light to uncage the compounds such that they can down-regulate their target genes in specific brain areas at specific times.
Posted on Saturday 12 December 2009 - 09:40:43 comment: 0
comment: 0| learning meeting insects drosophila honeybee learned helplessness |
Couldn't live-blog the fourth session of our 'family' meeting, because the Max Planck Institute where we are located has a policy that all WiFi guest-accounts expire over night - and I thought a 'day' had 24h...Anyway, the first session this morning (fourth session of the meeting) was all about olfactory conditioning. Two people worked on Drosophila: Claire Eschbach told us about experiments where she conditioned flies to discriminate single odors and mixtures of odors in various combinations. After her, Dana Galili showed that flies can do trace conditioning (this means there is a gap between the end of the conditioned stimulus, CS and the onset of the unconditioned stimulus, US) and that this conditioning is robust across different gap and stimulus durations. Two people from our department in Berlin working on honeybees rounded out this session Dorothea Eisenhardt told us about some behavioral properties of backward conditioning (i.e., the US starts before the CS) and Gérard Leboulle showed how down-regulation of the NR1 subunit of the NMDA glutamate receptor using RNAi in th bee brain interferes with olfactory learning.
Jean-Marc started off the fifth session with a talk on pharamcological disruption of synaptic plasticity in the honeybee and the effect of these treatments on th formation of long-term memory in the mushroom-bodies. His results suggested that maybe the addition of novel synapses in the mushroom-body lip region is associated with the formation of stable memory races. Next up was Johannes Felsenberg, a graduate student in our department. Johannes' boss did not want me to poast anything about his talk here. The person with the longest travel time came next, Judith Reinhard from the Queensland Brain Institute in Brisbane, Australia. She works on the olfactory receptors in the olfactory receptor neurons in the antennae of the honeybee. She uses a heterologous expression system in cell culture to characterize these receptor molecules with respect to floral ligands. She then went on to show that expression levels of the different receptors they characterized varies between different populations of honeybees. Moreover, it appears that the receptor expression also decreases after training the bees to the ligands of these receptors. Wrapping this session up was the postdoc working in my lab, Julien Colomb. He presented my data on the involvement of PKC and FoxP in operant learning in Drosophila at the flight simulator and then showed what he plans to do with his newly set up apparatus.
Posted on Saturday 12 December 2009 - 06:19:49 comment: 1
comment: 1| meeting insects neurobiology mushroom-bodies olfactory learning |
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