According to wikipedia, “Jean Philippe Arthur Dubuffet (July 31, 1901 – May 12, 1985) was one of the most famous French painters and sculptors of the second half of the 20th century.” “He coined the term Art Brut (meaning “raw art,” often times referred to as ‘outsider art’) for art produced by non-professionals working outside [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Cognition’
rs35753505 C-alleles make de l’Art Brut of the brain
Posted in Fusiform gyrus, Middle frontal gyrus, NRG1, middle occipital gyrus, tagged 23andMe, Add new tag, Art, Brain, Cognition, DNA, Frontal lobe, Functional magnetic resonance imaging, Fusiform gyrus, Memory, Mental disorder, Mental health, Outsider art, Painting on March 10, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Genes in the brain are like genes in muscles
Posted in Basal Ganglia, Caudate nucleus, DAT, Dopamine, Putamen, Substantia nigra, Subthalamic nucleus, tagged ADHD, Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, Basal Ganglia, Brain, Cognition, Development, Frontal lobe, Gene expression, Genetic testing, Genetics, Health, inhibition, Mental disorder, Mental health, Neural network, Personalized medicine, Substantia nigra on March 5, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Image by theloushe via Flickr
I have a little boy who loves to run and jump and scream and shout – a lot. And by this, I mean running – at full speed and smashing his head into my gut, jumping – off the couch onto my head, screaming – spontaneous curses and R-rated body parts [...]
Genetic road signs for super-size coffee SUV drivers
Posted in ADORA2A, DRD2, Uncategorized, tagged 23andMe, Anxiety, Brain, Caffeine, Coffee, Cognition, Disorders, DNA, evolution, Genetic testing, Genetics, Mental disorder, Mental health, panic disorder, Personalized medicine, Psychoactive drug, Starbucks, Stress on March 4, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
If you’re a coffee drinker, you may have noticed the new super-sized portions available at Starbucks. On this note, it may be worth noting that caffeine is a potent psychoactive substance of which – too much – can turn your buzz into a full-blown panic disorder. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for psychiatry outlines a [...]
FMR1 points to mechanisms of tactile defensiveness in autism spectrum disorders
Posted in FMR1, Somatosensory cortex, Thalamus, tagged autism, Autism spectrum, Brain, Cognition, critical period, Development, Mental disorder, Mutation, pruning, Rett Syndrome, sensory overload, synaptic plasticity, synaptic pruning on February 13, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Image by cobalt123 via Flickr
If you have a minute, check out this “Autism Sensory Overload Simulation” video to get a feel for the perceptual difficulties experienced by people with autism spectrum disorders. A recent article, “Critical Period Plasticity Is Disrupted in the Barrel Cortex of Fmr1 Knockout Mice” [doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2010.01.024] provides some clues to the [...]
RARB says I was born when my late born striosomal cells were born
Posted in Basal Ganglia, RARB, Striatum, tagged Ann Graybiel, Basal Ganglia, Brain, Cognition, Development, Dopamine, Mental health, Neural network, Psychology, schizophrenia, self, self awareness, Striatum on February 5, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Image via Wikipedia
Everyone has a birthday right. Its the day you (your infant self) popped into the world and started breathing, right? But what about the day “you” were born – that is – “you” in the more philosophical, Jungian, spiritual, social, etc. kind of a way when you became aware of being in some [...]
Semaphorins integrate the sweetness and development of our cortical 6-layer cake
Posted in RLN, SEMA(1-7), tagged Brain, cerebral cortex, Circuitry, Cognition, Development, economics, Frontal lobe, Gene expression, Mental disorder, Mental health, Messenger RNA, neural migration, Neuron, Prefrontal cortex, schizophrenia, Stem cell, University of Pittsburgh on January 26, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
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For a great many reasons, research on mental illness is focused on the frontal cortex. Its just a small part of the brain, and certainly, many things can go wrong in other places during brain/cognitive development, but, it remains a robust finding, that when the frontal cortex is not working well, individuals have [...]
APOE and the silent brain speak loudly of our destiny
Posted in Cingulate cortex, Hippocampus, Temporal lobe, tagged aging, Alzheimer's disease, Brain, Cognition, default mode network, default network, dementia, E. E. Cummings, Frontal lobe, Functional magnetic resonance imaging, Genetic testing, Health, Hippocampus, Human brain, Japanese poetry, Poetry, Temporal lobe on January 22, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
e. e. cummings via last.fm
***PODCAST ACCOMPANIES THIS POST***
In his undergraduate writings while a student at Harvard in the early 1900’s E. E. Cummings quipped that, “Japanese poetry is different from Western poetry in the same way as silence is different from a voice”. Isabelle Alfandary explores this theme in Cummings’ poetry in her essay, “Voice [...]
rs4680 helps me tonically ponder the Burger King menu and phasically choose the least healthy items
Posted in COMT, Cingulate cortex, Frontal cortex, Hippocampus, tagged Brain, Cognition, economics, Frontal lobe, Functional magnetic resonance imaging, Gene, Gene expression, Mental disorder, Mental health, Neural network, Neuron, Parkinson's disease on January 20, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
One of the complexities in beginning to understand how genetic variation relates to cognitive function and behavior is that – unfortunately – there is no gene for “personality”, “anxiety”, “memory” or any other type of “this” or “that” trait. Most genes are expressed rather broadly across the entire brain’s cortical layers and subcortical systems. So, [...]
C.H. Waddington provides conceptual framework for shifting influences of genes and environment in the development of mind
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Add new tag, Brain, Cognition, cognitive development, Development, evolution, Genetics, Human behavior, Intelligence, Mutation, Population genetics, Psychology, Twin, University of Edinburgh on January 12, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Just a pointer to onetime University of Edinburgh Professor C.H. Waddington’s 1972 Gifford Lecture on framing the genes vs. environment debate of human behavior. Although Waddington is famous for his work on population genetics and evolutionary change over time, several of his concepts are experiencing some resurgence in the neuroimaging and psychological development literatures these [...]
Suffocation and the developmental continuity between childhood separation and panic disorder
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Biology, Cognition, Development, DSM, Emotion, fear, Genetics, Mental disorder, Mental health, panic disorder, parental loss, separation anxiety disorder, Stress, Twin on January 11, 2010 | 1 Comment »
Image by Corrie… via Flickr
Coping with fear and anxiety is difficult. At times when one’s life, livelihood or loved one’s are threatened, we naturally hightenen our senses and allocate our emotional and physical resources for conflict. At times, when all is well, and resources, relationships and relaxation time are plentiful, we should unwind and and [...]
Thousands of genes together with thousands of resting-state nodes actually makes the genes-to-cognition problem LESS complex
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Biology, Brain, Cognition, connectome, default network, Development, DNA, Dopamine, Frontal lobe, Functional magnetic resonance imaging, Genetics, Memory, Mental health, Prefrontal cortex, Psychology, resting state network on January 7, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
DON’T tell the grant funding agencies, but, in at least one way, the effort to relate genetic variation to individual differences in cognitive function is a totally intractable waste of money.
Let’s say we ask a population of folks to perform a task – perhaps a word memory task – and then we use neuroimaging to [...]
Epigenetics and cognitive development – quick sketch overview
Posted in BDNF, MECP2, tagged Anxiety, Art, autism, Cognition, cognitive development, Development, Epigenetics, Gene, Gene expression, MECP2, meme-art, Rett Syndrome, schizophrenia, Stress, synaptogenesis, Transcription on December 16, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Some quick sketches that might help put the fast-growing epigenetics and cognitive development literature into context. Visit the University of Utah’s Epigenetics training site for more background!
The genome is just the A,G,T,C bases that encode proteins and other mRNA molecules. The “epi”genome are various modification to the DNA – such as methylation (at C residues) [...]
Reciprocal genetics of autism vs. schizophrenia
Posted in Chromosome structural variants, Intronic or repetitive sequences, tagged autism, Autism spectrum, Cognition, Genetic testing, Mental disorder, Mental health, Neural development, Neurodevelopmental, schizophrenia on December 7, 2009 | 1 Comment »
The recent paper, “Comparative genomics of autism and schizophrenia” by Bernard Crespi and colleagues provides a very exciting take on how genetic data can be mined to understand cognitive development and mental illness. Looking at genetic association data for autism and schizophrenia, the authors point out that 4 loci are associated with both schizophrenia and [...]
Sharpening the cognitive-genetic scalpel
Posted in Angular gyrus, Middle frontal gyrus, Supramarginal gyrus, tagged Brain, Cognition, Frontal lobe, Functional magnetic resonance imaging, Magnetic resonance imaging, Prefrontal cortex, Psychology, Sigmund Freud, Twin on October 13, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Image by bethd821 via Flickr
Whether you are a carpenter, plumber, mechanic, electrician, surgeon or chef, your livelihood depends on a set of sturdy, reliable, well-honed, precision tools. Similarly, neuroscientists depend on their electrodes, brain scanners, microscopes and more recently their genome sequencers. This is because they are not just trying to dissect the brain – [...]
Interview with Professor Michael Frank: Computational Neuroscience (and Genetics) of Decision Making
Posted in COMT, DARPP32, DRD2, Uncategorized, tagged Artificial Intelligence, Basal Ganglia, Brown University, Cognition, Cognitive science, Dopamine, economics, interviews, podcasts, Working memory on August 18, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
If you’re interested in the neurobiology of learning and decision making, then you might be interested in this brief interview with Professor Michael Frank who runs the Laboratory of Neural Computation and Cognition at Brown University.
From his lab’s website: “Our research combines computational modeling and experimental work to understand the neural mechanisms underlying reinforcement learning, [...]
GPR6 teaches B.F. Skinner that actions have consequences
Posted in G-protein, GPR6, Striatum, tagged Addiction, B.F. Skinner, Basal Ganglia, Cognition, Dopamine, Genetics, inhibition, Neuron, Operant conditioning on November 24, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Image via Wikipedia
I’m not sure what Skinner would have thought, but its clear that, nowadays, mechanisms of behavior can be understood in terms of dynamic changes in neural systems and, furthermore, that individual differences in these neural dynamics are heavily regulated by genetic variation. Consider the recent paper by Lobo et al., “Genetic [...]
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