Where it all Begins

Thanks toNew Scientistfor bringing our attention to this
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These are the clearest pictures ever taken of what is the starting point of every human life: ovulation occurring inside a woman's body

I can't exactly say I find it beautiful, but it is breath taking. Check the post for more details.

Illustrating the Cost of Neglect

- Image from the Society for Neuroscience

These are two pictures of rat's brains. The rat whose brain we see on the left was raised in a lab with its mother and littermates. The rat on the right was part of a group that, in the words of Brain Briefings,

... [was] removed from their moms and placed in an incubator as a group for a few hours a day for several days.

So what are the brown spots you ask? Dead neurons. Killed by what? The study continues:

.. lack of touch triggers an inappropriate activation of the stress system. Scientists found that merely stroking the infant rodents with a tiny brush could prevent many of the effects of the long separation.

This is quite an image.

I wonder if those scientists used a special brush to pet the rat pups or rigged their own. What is it about that touch, any touch really, that keeps those neurons alive? Is there a sweet spot for physical contact? Can you stroke a rat pup too much and stress it out? How does the stress of isolation differ from other kinds of stress?

- Tip of the Hat to Brain Briefings.

What's that name?

A fun little article about memory from the The Boston Globe about how we think about remembering. The general consensus used to be that there was an index part of the brain that kept track of everything's whereabouts in memory. Turns out, not so much. Ever had that experience when you..just...can't...quite... remember?

Here's the key passage -

The tip-of-the-tongue experience, however, is leading researchers to question this straightforward model. According to this new theory, the brain doesn't have firsthand access to its own memories. Instead, it makes guesses based upon the other information that it can recall. For instance, if we can remember the first letter of someone's name, then the conscious brain assumes that we must also know his or her name, even if we can't recall it right away. This helps explain why people are much more likely to experience a tip-of-the-tongue state when they can recall more information about the word or name they can't actually remember.

For more on memory, I interviewed Sue Halpern for my day job. You can download the interview here.

The Future of Sleep

The JASONS are a semi-secret research arm of the Defense Department. They issue occasional papers about areas of interest, and when they do, Secrecy News from the Federation of Atomic Scientists is usually nice enough to let us know.

This latest report is at the intersection of neuroscience and war, the subject of a new blog I am writing called The Brain at War. A natural outgrowth of my interest in brain development and function has been an increasing interest in brain damage and dysfunction, especially dysfunction caused by injury in war. For more on Traumatic Brain Injury, PTSD and "normal" brain response to war check it out. We'll be looking at cutting edge imaging and diagnostic tools, developments in brain-mind theories and rehabilitation research. This is our project -

When you break your arm, you know what it means to say you're healed: you can do what you did before the injury. What does it mean to heal from a brain trauma?

In any case, the latest JASON report is of more interest here. Why? Lets start with the title of the research Human Performance. In many ways, thats what we're talking about when we look at brain development. I want the proto-human's brain to be a powerful tool, and want to give him/her every (ethical) opportunity and advantage. Not surprisingly the Pentagon wants the same thing, though we might draw the ethical line in different places.

JASON considers:

[T]he present state of the art in pharmaceutical intervention in cognition and in brain-computer interfaces, and considered how possible future developments might proceed and be used by adversaries.”

“The most immediate human performance factor in military effectiveness is degradation of performance under stressful conditions, particularly sleep deprivation.”

“If an opposing force had a significant sleep advantage, this would pose a serious threat.”

Military technologies have a way of becoming civilian technologies. Thank you for the internets DARPA! Will the threat of enemy advances in high-functioning-sleep-deprived-super-soldiers lead to actual American advances in high-functioning-sleep-deprived-super-soldiers? And will those actual advances lead to High school juniors who never sleep, always adding one more extra-curricular activity, chasing ever higher a seat at Harvard?

We're now into the third trimester, and the proto-human shows periods of activity and inactivity that are reminiscent of sleep. I don't quite know if they are sleep as such though. And will there come a day when sleep outside the womb will be as dim a memory for the proto-human as sleep inside the womb is for me?