Protocol based architectures.

Doyle and Csete offer an interesting essay on "Rules of Engagement" in the recent issue of Nature Magazine. (PDF here). Their summary:

Complex engineered and biological systems share protocol-based architectures that make them robust and evolvable, but with hidden fragilities to rare perturbations.

They draw an analogy between the protocol based architecture (TCP/IP) of the internet and transcription and translation protocols that regulate the horizontal transfer of genes between organisms.

Evolution and Brain science shaping public discourse

I want to mention and pass on two recent Op-Ed columns of David Brooks in the New York Times. He has done a commendable job of learning the basic ideas in evolution and brain science and passing them on in a clear and palatable way.

Here are some clips from the first, titled "The Age of Darwin" (PDF here).

Once the Bible shaped all conversation, then Marx, then Freud, but today Darwin is everywhere... Scarcely a month goes by when Time or Newsweek doesn’t have a cover article on how our genes shape everything from our exercise habits to our moods. Science sections are filled with articles on how brain structure influences things like lust and learning. Neuroscientists debate the existence of God on the best-seller lists, while evolutionary theory reshapes psychology, dieting and literary criticism. Confident and exhilarated, evolutionary theorists believe they have a universal framework to explain human behavior...Creationists reject the whole business, but they’re like the Greeks who still worshiped Athena while Plato and Aristotle practiced philosophy. The people who set the cultural tone today have coalesced around a shared understanding of humanity and its history that would have astonished people in earlier epochs....According to this view, human beings, like all other creatures, are machines for passing along genetic code. We are driven primarily by a desire to perpetuate ourselves and our species.

The logic of evolution explains why people vie for status, form groups, fall in love and cherish their young. It holds that most everything that exists does so for a purpose. If some trait, like emotion, can cause big problems, then it must also provide bigger benefits, because nature will not expend energy on things that don’t enhance the chance of survival...Human beings, in our current understanding, are jerry-built creatures, in which new, sophisticated faculties are piled on top of primitive earlier ones. Our genes were formed during the vast stretches when people were hunters and gatherers, and we are now only semi-adapted to the age of nuclear weapons and fast food. Furthermore, reason is not separate from emotion and the soul cannot be detached from the electrical and chemical pulses of the body. There isn’t even a single seat of authority in the brain. The mind emerges (somehow) from a complex light show of neural firings without a center or executive. We are tools of mental processes we are not even aware of.

The second essay, "The Morality Line," (PDF here) comments on the rush to assign responsibility for the recent killings at Virginia Tech by Cho Seung-Hui.

...over the past few decades, neuroscientists, evolutionary psychologists and social scientists have made huge strides in understanding why people — even murderers — do the things they do...It’s important knowledge, but it’s had the effect of reducing the scope of the human self...in the realm of the new science, the individual is like a cork bobbing on the currents of giant forces: evolution, brain chemistry, stress and upbringing. Human consciousness is merely an epiphenomena of the deep and controlling mental processes that lie within...the killings at Virginia Tech happen at a moment when we are renegotiating what you might call the Morality Line, the spot where background forces stop and individual choice — and individual responsibility — begins. The killings happen at a moment when the people who explain behavior by talking about biology, chemistry and social science are assertive and on the march, while the people who explain behavior by talking about individual character are confused and losing ground...And it’s true. We’re never going back. We’re not going to put our knowledge of brain chemistry or evolutionary psychology back in the bottle. It would be madness to think Cho Seung-Hui could have been saved from his demons with better sermons...There still seems to be such things as selves, which are capable of making decisions and controlling destiny. It’s just that these selves can’t be seen on a brain-mapping diagram, and we no longer have any agreement about what they are.

Neuron competition during memory formation.

Science Magazine summaries an article by Han et al. :

Electrophysiological and cellular imaging studies show that only a portion of neurons are involved in a given memory. Why is one neuron, rather than its neighbor, included in a particular memory? Han et al. ... found that neurons in the lateral amygdala that contain the highest levels of function of the transcription factor CREB at the time of the encoding of an auditory fear memory are those that preferentially express the activity-regulated gene Arc after the recall of the memory. Thus, neurons compete during memory formation, and CREB helps to determine the winners.

The abstract from Han et al. :

Competition between neurons is necessary for refining neural circuits during development and may be important for selecting the neurons that participate in encoding memories in the adult brain. To examine neuronal competition during memory formation, we conducted experiments with mice in which we manipulated the function of CREB (adenosine 3',5'-monophosphate response element–binding protein) in subsets of neurons. Changes in CREB function influenced the probability that individual lateral amygdala neurons were recruited into a fear memory trace. Our results suggest a competitive model underlying memory formation, in which eligible neurons are selected to participate in a memory trace as a function of their relative CREB activity at the time of learning.

Twin Valley Music - Debussy Reverie version II

Now that I'm back with my Steinway B at the house on Twin Valley Road in Middleton Wisconsin, I'm starting to resume recording and posting some of my playing. I am amazed that a recording of this Debussy Reverie that I posted on Aug 29 of last year has been viewed over 9,000 times and drawn 24 interesting and constructive comments. I've decided to respond to the comments - several of which said "slow down" - by recording and posting a version two of the reverie

The social power of groups regulates their variability

Here is the slightly edited abstract of a recent talk at the Univ. of Wisconsin by Markus Brauer, University de Clermont-Ferrand, "Social Power and With-Group Variability: The Mediating Roles of Disinhibition and Pressure to Conform."

People's perception of a group as rather homogeneous or heterogenous determines their tendency to apply stereotypes to that group. For this reason, many social scientists have been interested in "group variability," and the extent to which members of social groups are different from each other.... I present a series of correlational and experimental studies showing that members of high power (advantaged) groups are more different from each other than members of low power (disadvantaged) groups: they report more diverse preferences, they engage in more diverse behaviors, and ­ according on naive observers' judgments ­ they have more diverse character traits. In addition, I present data suggesting that the effect of social power on group variability is mediated by "pressures to conformity" and "disinhibition." We have shown that a norm transgressor in a high power group is reacted to less negatively by fellow in-group members than a norm transgressor who belongs to a low power group. Members of high power groups also behave in a more disinhibited manner in that they are more relaxed and are more willing to engage in potentially embarrassing activities. ... our work suggests that the need for affiliation is more salient for members of low power groups, whereas the need for differentiation is more important for members of high power groups.

Nyotaimori - the latest in thing for "Foodies"

Two items in the food section of the 4/18 New York Times cracked me up, and I had to pass them on. California food styles, like its governor Schwarzenegger, are far ahead of the pack...

A new restaurant opening in West Hollywood features Nyotaimori, associated in legend with Japanese organize crime, the term translating as "female body arrangement" (and - this being gay West Hollywood - prospective customers have also made inquiries about a male model being used instead of a woman). Rachael, the model:

was a human sushi platter for the evening, the centerpiece of an opening party last month for Hadaka Sushi on the Sunset Strip. Taking gentle breaths, she kept as still as possible so as not to disturb the clusters of oil-infused sushi rolls, sashimi and other pieces of raw fish artfully arranged on the banana leaves in a style known as nyotaimori.... [she]..seemed to enjoy the evening as much as anyone could while lying supine and being poked by chopsticks. To an onlooker, the most disturbing aspect of her job might be Hadaka’s rule that forbids a model to eat the sushi that rests inches away from her mouth.

Head up the California coast from LA to San Francisco and you have "Cafe Gratitude"

a raw-food restaurant in San Francisco, where every order is a self-affirmation — I Am Open, I Am Beautiful, I Am Powerful — mirrored back to you by your server....

“We invite you to step inside and enjoy being someone who chooses: loving your life, adoring yourself, accepting the world, being generous and grateful everyday, and experiencing being provided for.”

Wow. So. The appetizers: I Am Bountiful live crustini, “toasts” made from seeds and nuts with such toppings as avocado and not-so-local Himalayan salt. I Am Happy live almond-sesame hummus. (“Live” food has not been cooked above 118 degrees, the temperature that kills enzymes, and incorporates sprouting seeds and nuts.) I Am Insightful spinach-wrapped samosas with cauliflower and macadamia “potatoes.”...And on through the long menu: I Am Giving, I Am Festive, I Am Prosperous, I Am Fabulous, Yo Soy Mucho (Mexican bowl).

Representation of social concepts in superior anterior temporal cortex

An interesting bit of work from Zahn et al. Their abstract:

Social concepts such as "tactless" or "honorable" enable us to describe our own as well as others' social behaviors. The prevailing view is that this abstract social semantic knowledge is mainly subserved by the same medial prefrontal regions that are considered essential for mental state attribution and self-reflection. Nevertheless, neurodegeneration of the anterior temporal cortex typically leads to impairments of social behavior as well as general conceptual knowledge. By using functional MRI, we demonstrate that the anterior temporal lobe represents abstract social semantic knowledge in agreement with this patient evidence. The bilateral superior anterior temporal lobes (Brodmann's area 38) are selectively activated when participants judge the meaning relatedness of social concepts (e.g., honor–brave) as compared with concepts describing general animal functions (e.g., nutritious–useful). Remarkably, only activity in the superior anterior temporal cortex, but not the medial prefrontal cortex, correlates with the richness of detail with which social concepts describe social behavior. Furthermore, this anterior temporal lobe activation is independent of emotional valence, whereas medial prefrontal regions show enhanced activation for positive social concepts. Our results demonstrate that the superior anterior temporal cortex plays a key role in social cognition by providing abstract conceptual knowledge of social behaviors. We further speculate that these abstract conceptual representations can be associated with different contexts of social actions and emotions through integration with frontolimbic circuits to enable flexible evaluations of social behavior.

Legend - (click on figure to enlarge) Regions in which activity was higher for social than for animal concepts and that were independently correlated with descriptiveness of social behavior and meaning relatedness.

A bizarre story - the parasite that lets cats eat rats

From Sapolsky's lab at Stanford:

The protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii blocks the innate aversion of rats for cat urine, instead producing an attraction to the pheromone; this may increase the likelihood of a cat predating a rat. This is thought to reflect adaptive, behavioral manipulation by Toxoplasma in that the parasite, although capable of infecting rats, reproduces sexually only in the gut of the cat. The "behavioral manipulation" hypothesis postulates that a parasite will specifically manipulate host behaviors essential for enhancing its own transmission. However, the neural circuits implicated in innate fear, anxiety, and learned fear all overlap considerably, raising the possibility that Toxoplasma may disrupt all of these nonspecifically. We investigated these conflicting predictions. In mice and rats, latent Toxoplasma infection converted the aversion to feline odors into attraction. Such loss of fear is remarkably specific, because infection did not diminish learned fear, anxiety-like behavior, olfaction, or nonaversive learning. These effects are associated with a tendency for parasite cysts to be more abundant in amygdalar structures than those found in other regions of the brain. By closely examining other types of behavioral patterns that were predicted to be altered we show that the behavioral effect of chronic Toxoplasma infection is highly specific. Overall, this study provides a strong argument in support of the behavioral manipulation hypothesis. Proximate mechanisms of such behavioral manipulations remain unknown, although a subtle tropism on part of the parasite remains a potent possibility.

Egalitarian motives in humans

Dawes et al. play some laboratory games that suggest important factors underlying the evolution of strong reciprocity and cooperation in humans, experiments that distinguish reward and punishment from egalitarian motives. Their abstract below and a PDF of the article here:

Participants in laboratory games are often willing to alter others' incomes at a cost to themselves, and this behaviour has the effect of promoting cooperation. What motivates this action is unclear: punishment and reward aimed at promoting cooperation cannot be distinguished from attempts to produce equality. To understand costly taking and costly giving, we create an experimental game that isolates egalitarian motives. The results show that subjects reduce and augment others' incomes, at a personal cost, even when there is no cooperative behaviour to be reinforced. Furthermore, the size and frequency of income alterations are strongly influenced by inequality. Emotions towards top earners become increasingly negative as inequality increases, and those who express these emotions spend more to reduce above-average earners' incomes and to increase below-average earners' incomes. The results suggest that egalitarian motives affect income-altering behaviours, and may therefore be an important factor underlying the evolution of strong reciprocity and, hence, cooperation in humans.

Bipolar disorder - related to a disorder in the Clock gene?

Coyle offers a review in the April 10 issues of PNAS of a paper by Roybal et al. showing that mutation of the clock gene in mice causes them to show symptoms of bipolar behavior. I give you Coyle's summary:

Bipolar disorder, also known as manic-depressive illness, is characterized by episodes of mania and episodes of depression usually interspersed with periods of relatively normal mood. During the manic phase, affected individuals exhibit elevated mood, irritability, increased activity, reduced sleep, hypersexuality, and increased goal-directed activities. Bipolar disorder in its various forms affects >3% of the population and is associated with a high risk for suicide, substance abuse, and vocational disability. Although several animal models for major depressive disorder have been developed, there are no plausible models for bipolar disorder. In this issue of PNAS, Roybal et al. describe the results of a systematic analysis of the behavior of a mouse with a deletion of exon 19 in the Clock gene, which shows remarkable parallels to the symptoms observed in individuals in an episode of mania. The Clock mutant mice exhibit hyperactivity, decreased sleep, reduced anxiety, and increased response to cocaine, sucrose, and medial forebrain bundle stimulation. Furthermore, many of these behaviors can be reversed by transfection of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) dopaminergic neurons with WT Clock gene or by treatment with therapeutic doses of lithium (Li+), a commonly prescribed mood stabilizer.

And the abstract of the article:

Circadian rhythms and the genes that make up the molecular clock have long been implicated in bipolar disorder. Genetic evidence in bipolar patients suggests that the central transcriptional activator of molecular rhythms, CLOCK, may be particularly important. However, the exact role of this gene in the development of this disorder remains unclear. Here we show that mice carrying a mutation in the Clock gene display an overall behavioral profile that is strikingly similar to human mania, including hyperactivity, decreased sleep, lowered depression-like behavior, lower anxiety, and an increase in the reward value for cocaine, sucrose, and medial forebrain bundle stimulation. Chronic administration of the mood stabilizer lithium returns many of these behavioral responses to wild-type levels. In addition, the Clock mutant mice have an increase in dopaminergic activity in the ventral tegmental area, and their behavioral abnormalities are rescued by expressing a functional CLOCK protein via viral-mediated gene transfer specifically in the ventral tegmental area. These findings establish the Clock mutant mice as a previously unrecognized model of human mania and reveal an important role for CLOCK in the dopaminergic system in regulating behavior and mood.

Enhanced Visuospatial Cognition in Musicians

Yet another piece on how the brains of musicans are different (I continue to be grateful for the apparent side effects of being a serious pianist). The whole title of the article by Sluming et al. is "Broca's Area Supports Enhanced Visuospatial Cognition in Orchestral Musicians"
Their (slightly stuffy) abstract:

We provide neurobehavioral evidence supporting the transferable benefit of music training to alter brain function and enhance cognitive performance in a nonmusical visuospatial task in professional orchestral musicians. In particular, orchestral musicians' performance on a three-dimensional mental rotation (3DMR) task exhibited the behavioral profile normally onlya attained after significant practice, supporting the suggestion that these musicians already possessed well developed neural circuits to support 3DMR. Furthermore, functional magnetic resonance imaging revealed that only orchestral musicians showed significantly increased activation in Broca's area, in addition to the well known visuospatial network, which was activated in both musicians and nonmusicians who were matched on age, sex, and verbal intelligence. We interpret these functional neuroimaging findings to reflect preferential recruitment of Broca's area, part of the neural substrate supporting sight reading and motor-sequence organization underpinning musical performance, to subserve 3DMR in musicians. Our data, therefore, provide convergent behavioral and neurofunctional evidence supporting the suggestion that development of the sight-reading skills of musical performance alters brain circuit organization which, in turn, confers a wider cognitive benefit, in particular, to nonmusical visuospatial cognition in professional orchestral musicians.

The Primate Lineage

Two items on primates:

John Noble Wilford does a nice review of the recent primatology meeting in Chicago in the NY Times science section 4/17/07. His emphasis is on recent work with Chimps, showing them to be social creatures that appear to be capable of empathy, altruism, self-awareness, cooperation in problem solving and learning through example and experience. PDF is here.

The April 13 issue of Science Magazine has a series of articles on the sequencing of the genome of the rhesus macaque monkey. This begins to put the previously sequenced chimp and human genomes into perspective. Macaques are Old World monkeys, which split perhaps 25 million years ago from the ape lineage that led to both chimpanzees and humans. I thought I would pass on this graphic from from Pennisi's article showing the primate evolutionary line.

Researchers plan to eventually sequence the genomes of all these primates and related species, with human, macaque, and chimp now published. The animals are arranged in an artist's rendition of their family tree, with estimated divergence dates in millions of years. CREDITS: (ILLUSTRATION) N. KEVITIYAGALA/SCIENCE; (ADAPTED FROM) E. EIZIRIK ET AL., IN ANTHROPOID ORIGINS: NEW VISIONS, C. F. ROSS AND R. F. KAY (KLUWER/PLENUM, 2004), PP. 45-64.

Amygdala damage impairs eye contact

Here is the abstract of an article from Adolph's group at Cal. Tech.:

The role of the human amygdala in real social interactions remains essentially unknown, although studies in nonhuman primates and studies using photographs and video in humans have shown it to be critical for emotional processing and suggest its importance for social cognition. We show here that complete amygdala lesions result in a severe reduction in direct eye contact during conversations with real people, together with an abnormal increase in gaze to the mouth. These novel findings from real social interactions are consistent with an hypothesized role for the amygdala in autism and the approach taken here opens up new directions for quantifying social behavior in humans.

And a clip from their discussion:

It is intriguing ...to consider similarities between our findings and those in autism. People with autism do not fixate photographs and videos of faces normally, and are anecdotally reported to gaze at the mouth in social interactions. It has been suggested that the amygdala dysfunction is in part to blame for these abnormalities in autism, and recent findings using neuroimaging with photographs of faces support this hypothesis.

Sexual Desire

Natalie Angier writes an engaging review of research into factors regulating sexual desire and sexual arousal (PDF here). The Science section of the April 10 New York Times contains a number of other interesting articles on sex and desire.


One brief edited clip from Angier:

According to the sequence put forward in the mid-20th century by the pioneering sex researchers William H. Masters, Virginia E. Johnson and Helen Singer Kaplan, a sexual encounter begins with desire, a craving for sex that arises of its own accord and prods a person to seek a partner. That encounter then leads to sexual arousal, followed by sexual excitement, a desperate fumbling with buttons and related clothing fasteners, a lot of funny noises, climax and resolution...A plethora of new findings, however, suggest that the experience of desire may be less a forerunner to sex than an afterthought, the cognitive overlay that the brain gives to the sensation of already having been aroused by some sort of physical or subliminal stimulus — a brush on the back of the neck, say, or the sight of a ripe apple, or wearing a hard hat on a construction site and being surrounded by other men in similar haberdashery.

In a series of studies at the University of Amsterdam, Ellen Laan, Stephanie Both and Mark Spiering demonstrated that the body’s entire motor system is activated almost instantly by exposure to sexual images, and that the more intensely sexual the visuals, the stronger the electric signals emitted by the participants’ so-called spinal tendious reflexes. By the looks of it, Dr. Laan said, the body is primed for sex before the mind has had a moment to leer.... arousal is not necessarily a conscious process. In other experiments... when college students were exposed to sexual images too fleetingly for the subjects to report having noticed them, the participants were nevertheless much quicker to identify subsequent sexual images than were the control students who had been flashed with neutral images.

By reordering the sexual timeline and placing desire after arousal, rather than vice versa, the new research fits into the pattern that neurobiologists have lately observed for other areas of life. Before we are conscious of wanting to do anything — wave at a friend, open a book — the brain regions needed to perform the activity are already ablaze. The notion that any of us is the Decider, the proactive plotter of our most lubricious desires, scientists say, may simply be a happy and perhaps necessary illusion.

This is precisely the message of my I-Illusion essay on this website.

Gregariousness of early-adolescent mice influenced by genetic background

Panskepp et al have studied two inbred mouse strains whose infants on weaning show high versus low levels of gregarious social behavior, They controlled a host of behavioral variables during the course of adolescent development to demonstrate specific differences in social motivations among juveniles of the two mouse strains — behavioral variations that could only be explained by genetic differences. Young mice from the gregarious strain seek environments that predict the possibility of a social encounter and avoid places where they have experienced social isolation. The review by Devitt edited for this post quotes the senior author Lahvis: "There is an association between high-pitched calls in mice and positive experience. The quality and quantity of the call are tightly associated with the nature of the interaction itself."

As the mice neared sexual maturity, the genetic influence on social behavior ebbed and the animals became much more responsive to social cues such as gender...the initial genetic predisposition apparently gets masked by reproductive maturity.
Their work suggests that genetic influences on juvenile social behavior may be quite distinct from genetic factors that affect adult social behavior, a finding the potentially useful for understanding social evolution, as well as developing more realistic animal models of pervasive developmental disorders, such as autism.

Just a nap will do it.....

It doesn't take overnight, Nishida and Walker show that just taking a nap boosts memory consolidation.

Two groups of subjects trained on a motor-skill task using their left hand – a paradigm known to result in overnight plastic changes in the contralateral, right motor cortex. Both groups trained in the morning and were tested 8 hr later, with one group obtaining a 60–90 minute intervening midday nap, while the other group remained awake. At testing, subjects that did not nap showed no significant performance improvement, yet those that did nap expressed a highly significant consolidation enhancement. Within the nap group, the amount of offline improvement showed a significant correlation with the global measure of stage-2 NREM sleep. However, topographical sleep spindle analysis revealed more precise correlations. Specifically, when spindle activity at the central electrode of the non-learning hemisphere (left) was subtracted from that in the learning hemisphere (right), representing the homeostatic difference following learning, strong positive relationships with offline memory improvement emerged–correlations that were not evident for either hemisphere alone.

(Note: sleep spindles are a defining electrophysiological signature of NREM sleep involving short (~1 ) synchronous burst of activity (12–15 Hz) that may represent triggers of synaptic potentiation leading to neural plasticity.)

Legend (click to enlarge figure): Spindle density and offline (nap) memory enhancement. a, Correlations between offline motor memory enhancement and spindle density in the non-learning hemisphere (electrode site C3) and learning hemisphere (electrode site C4) individually. b, Correlations between offline motor memory improvement and the subtracted difference in spindle density between the learning hemisphere versus the non-learning hemisphere (C4–C3).

Pain Mechanisms

Nature Magazine offers a nice free summary poster on pain mechanisms.

Framing Science

I give you in its entirety an essay by Nisbet and Mooney in a recent issue of Science Magazine (Vol. 316. no. 5821, p. 56):

Issues at the intersection of science and politics, such as climate change, evolution, and embryonic stem cell research, receive considerable public attention, which is likely to grow, especially in the United States as the 2008 presidential election heats up. Without misrepresenting scientific information on highly contested issues, scientists must learn to actively "frame" information to make it relevant to different audiences. Some in the scientific community have been receptive to this message (1). However, many scientists retain the well-intentioned belief that, if laypeople better understood technical complexities from news coverage, their viewpoints would be more like scientists', and controversy would subside.

In reality, citizens do not use the news media as scientists assume. Research shows that people are rarely well enough informed or motivated to weigh competing ideas and arguments. Faced with a daily torrent of news, citizens use their value predispositions (such as political or religious beliefs) as perceptual screens, selecting news outlets and Web sites whose outlooks match their own (2). Such screening reduces the choices of what to pay attention to and accept as valid (3).

Frames organize central ideas, defining a controversy to resonate with core values and assumptions. Frames pare down complex issues by giving some aspects greater emphasis. They allow citizens to rapidly identify why an issue matters, who might be responsible, and what should be done (4, 5).

Consider global climate change. With its successive assessment reports summarizing the scientific literature, the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has steadily increased its confidence that human-induced greenhouse gas emissions are causing global warming. So if science alone drove public responses, we would expect increasing public confidence in the validity of the science, and decreasing political gridlock.

Despite recent media attention, however, many surveys show major partisan differences on the issue. A Pew survey conducted in January found that 23% of college-educated Republicans think global warming is attributable to human activity, compared with 75% of Democrats (6). Regardless of party affiliation, most Americans rank global warming as less important than over a dozen other issues (6). Much of this reflects the efforts of political operatives and some Republican leaders who have emphasized the frames of either "scientific uncertainty" or "unfair economic burden" (7). In a counter-strategy, environmentalists and some Democratic leaders have framed global warming as a "Pandora's box" of catastrophe; this and news images of polar bears on shrinking ice floes and hurricane devastation have evoked charges of "alarmism" and further battles.

Recently, a coalition of Evangelical leaders have adopted a different strategy, framing the problem of climate change as a matter of religious morality. The business pages tout the economic opportunities from developing innovative technologies for climate change. Complaints about the Bush Administration's interference with communication of climate science have led to a "public accountability" frame that has helped move the issue away from uncertainty to political wrongdoing.

As another example, the scientific theory of evolution has been accepted within the research community for decades. Yet as a debate over "intelligent design" was launched, antievolutionists promoted "scientific uncertainty" and "teach-the-controversy" frames, which scientists countered with science-intensive responses. However, much of the public likely tunes out these technical messages. Instead, frames of "public accountability" that focus on the misuse of tax dollars, "economic development" that highlight the negative repercussions for communities embroiled in evolution battles, and "social progress" that define evolution as a building block for medical advances, are likely to engage broader support.

The evolution issue also highlights another point: Messages must be positive and respect diversity. As the film Flock of Dodos painfully demonstrates, many scientists not only fail to think strategically about how to communicate on evolution, but belittle and insult others' religious beliefs (8).

On the embryonic stem cell issue, by comparison, patient advocates have delivered a focused message to the public, using "social progress" and "economic competitiveness" frames to argue that the research offers hope for millions of Americans. These messages have helped to drive up public support for funding between 2001 and 2005 (9, 10). However, opponents of increased government funding continue to frame the debate around the moral implications of research, arguing that scientists are "playing God" and destroying human life. Ideology and religion can screen out even dominant positive narratives about science, and reaching some segments of the public will remain a challenge (11).

Some readers may consider our proposals too Orwellian, preferring to safely stick to the facts. Yet scientists must realize that facts will be repeatedly misapplied and twisted in direct proportion to their relevance to the political debate and decision-making. In short, as unnatural as it might feel, in many cases, scientists should strategically avoid emphasizing the technical details of science when trying to defend it.

References

1. T. M. Beardsley, Bioscience 56, 7 (2006). www.aibs.org/bioscience-editorials/editorial_2006_07.html.
2. S. L. Popkin, The Reasoning Voter (Univ. of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 1991).
3. J. Zaller, Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge Univ. Press, New York, 1992).
4. W. A. Gamson, A. Modigliani, Am. J. Sociol. 95, 1 (1989).
5. V. Price, et al., Public Opin. Q. 69, 179 (2005).
6. Pew Center for the People and the Press (2007); http://pewresearch.org/pubs/282/global-warming-a-divide-on-causes-and-solutions.
7. A. M. McCright, R. E. Dunlap, Soc. Probl. 50, 3 (2003).
8. Film promotion, www.flockofdodos.com/
9. Virginia Commonwealth University Life Sciences Survey (2006); www.vcu.edu/lifesci/images2/ls_survey_2006_report.pdf
10. Pew Center for the People and the Press (2006); http://peoplepress.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=283.
11. M. C. Nisbet, Int. J. Public Opin. Res. 17 (1), 90 (2005).

Relationships in an e-society: small versus large groups

From the editor's summary of an article in Nature by Palla et al. (PDF here):

The dynamics of social groups as they interact electronically is central to how modern society operates. A study of patterns of information exchange between two groups of individuals — collaborating scientists and cell phone users — has been used to devise an algorithm that relates information exchange to group stability. The data show that small groups have a few strong relationships at their core. And as long as these persist, the clique remains. But for large communities, continuous change is the key to stability. These findings offer a new view on the fundamental differences between the dynamics of small groups and large institutions.

Palla et al.'s abstract:

The rich set of interactions between individuals in society results in complex community structure, capturing highly connected circles of friends, families or professional cliques in a social network. Thanks to frequent changes in the activity and communication patterns of individuals, the associated social and communication network is subject to constant evolution. Our knowledge of the mechanisms governing the underlying community dynamics is limited, but is essential for a deeper understanding of the development and self-optimization of society as a whole. We have developed an algorithm based on clique percolation that allows us to investigate the time dependence of overlapping communities on a large scale, and thus uncover basic relationships characterizing community evolution. Our focus is on networks capturing the collaboration between scientists and the calls between mobile phone users. We find that large groups persist for longer if they are capable of dynamically altering their membership, suggesting that an ability to change the group composition results in better adaptability. The behaviour of small groups displays the opposite tendency—the condition for stability is that their composition remains unchanged. We also show that knowledge of the time commitment of members to a given community can be used for estimating the community's lifetime. These findings offer insight into the fundamental differences between the dynamics of small groups and large institutions.

How pretty faces sell boring products - conditioning our brain's reward system

Bray and O'Doherty's report in the Journal of Neurophysiology illustrates the biology behind the selling power of beautiful models in advertisements for mundane products, and should be of interest to neuro-marketers everywhere. PDF here. Their abstract:

Attractive faces can be considered to be a form of visual reward. Previous imaging studies have reported activity in reward structures including orbitofrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens during presentation of attractive faces. Given that these stimuli appear to act as rewards, we set out to explore whether it was possible to establish conditioning in human subjects by pairing presentation of arbitrary affectively neutral stimuli with subsequent presentation of attractive and unattractive faces. Furthermore, we scanned human subjects with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while they underwent this conditioning procedure to determine whether a reward-prediction error signal is engaged during learning with attractive faces as is known to be the case for learning with other types of reward such as juice and money. Subjects showed changes in behavioral ratings to the conditioned stimuli (CS) when comparing post- to preconditioning evaluations, notably for those CSs paired with attractive female faces. We used a simple Rescorla-Wagner learning model to generate a reward-prediction error signal and entered this into a regression analysis with the fMRI data. We found significant prediction error-related activity in the ventral striatum during conditioning with attractive compared with unattractive faces. These findings suggest that an arbitrary stimulus can acquire conditioned value by being paired with pleasant visual stimuli just as with other types of reward such as money or juice. This learning process elicits a reward-prediction error signal in a main target structure of dopamine neurons: the ventral striatum. The findings we describe here may provide insights into the neural mechanisms tapped into by advertisers seeking to influence behavioral preferences by repeatedly exposing consumers to simple associations between products and rewarding visual stimuli such as pretty faces.

Legend - Prediction error related activity in the nucleus accumbens. A: voxels in the nucleus accumbens were significantly activated in a contrast of prediction error signals for attractive faces vs. unattractive faces, voxels in yellow are significant at P <>