More grist for the mill: this here is probably the best genome-wide association study I've seen to date for schizophrenia, and from my POV there are two key points: 1) Most of the genes that influence schizophrenia risk also influence bipolar disorder risk, which means we're probably looking at the same etiology with different courses and ( Read more... )

(I'm rushing this a bit, so no voluminous cites; they're all available upon request if you don't want to take my word for something.)

The thermodynamic model of nerve impulses is badass on grounds of parsimony -- it enables us to make more predictions without making ad hoc assumptions or needing to know much about the fine chemical details -- but ( Read more... )

OK, I know what you're thinking: enough with the cryptic transmissions and vague allusions to a higher calling -- can he still bring the science? Yes we can! I don't intend to do this kind of thing much anymore, but I'm making an exception because I haven't been this jazzed about a new paper since I went ga-ga over Hawks et al (2007)The paper in ( Read more... )

This New Yorker article on cognitive enhancement is actually pretty well-balanced and wise. The whole thing is worth reading if you're interested in this subject, but in particular the comments of "Alex" had a familiar ring for me:
That afternoon, he went to the library, where he spent “too much time researching a paper rather than actually ( Read more... )

Plasticity is a double-edged sword: what you can learn, you can unlearn. This is why critical periods in neural development are so tightly controlled by gene expression, and why habits with which the genes don't particularly concern themselves need to be continuously reinforced if they're not to fade out with time. Temporary interventions don't ( Read more... )

( ProlegomenaLet us ignore, for the moment, the horde of metaphysical questions banging at the gates of "possible" and the normative stormclouds looming ominously over "disorder", but rather focus on the enormous epistemic difficulties involved in making sound decisions in a state of high risks and high ignorance. And ignorance, we got lots of: ( Read more... )

I mentioned in my previous post about synchronization of neural networks that less intelligent people exhibit grater variability in simple inspection & reaction time tasks than smarter people. This also happens to be true of people diagnosed with ADHD, independent of their IQ; these same people also tend to exhibit performance deficits in tasks ( Read more... )

This paper by Moussaieff et al (2008) has been making the rounds for a while; I saw it when it first came out but neglected to mention it. They injected a bunch of rats with incensole acetate (an active ingredient in frankincense) and found that it bound to a vanilloid receptor in their hippocampus. In your peripheral nervous system that receptor ( Read more... )

Soya, flax, and sesame seed all contain significant amounts of phytoestrogens, which structurally resemble a kind of estrogen that's used for cell signalling in humans -- enough to bind to our estrogen-β receptors. Cells in your hippocampus and cortex have these receptors, and when estriadol binds to them it stimulates neurogenesis and inhibits ( Read more... )

I want to revisit another topic I touched on last year -- axon myelination and its possible relationship with intelligence. One problem researchers have encountered in trying to link g directly to biological variables is that while the best studies of the correlation between nerve conduction velocity (NCV) and IQ all point in a positive direction, ( Read more... )