Political power must feel pretty good … especially if you have deep-seated personal insecurities and can conveniently use the notoriety of your office to indulge in a sense of superiority and vanity. Among many, many brain systems that develop slowly during childhood – inflated ego, interpersonal hostility and impulsivity can emerge very early during development. [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Dopamine’
DRD4 and gene-twitter interactions that go badly
Posted in DRD4, Uncategorized, tagged bonding, Dopamine, Narcissism, Relationship, sex on June 17, 2011 | 1 Comment »
Parkinson’s hands that wobble like a newly evolved G:U base-pair
Posted in Dopamine, FGF20, Hippocampus, microRNA, tagged 23andMe, aging, Dopamine, Parkinson's disease on May 23, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Hands shake and wobble as the decades pass … moreso in some. A recently evolved “T” allele (rs12720208) in the 3′ untranslated region (3′ UTR) of the FGF20 gene has been implicated in the risk of Parkinson’s Disease … namely by creating a wobbly G:U base-pair between microRNA-433 (miR-433) and the FGF20 transcript. Since the normal function [...]
Ouch vs. Ouuuccchhhh! Can genotype predict how much pain you feel?
Posted in COMT, tagged Dopamine, Pain on February 26, 2011 | Leave a Comment »
Perhaps someday, but it’s complicated. This is because the brain is not a simple input-output device. If we step on a thumbtack, it hurts … but can hurt more if you are feeling sad and lonely and much less if you are in love and just won the lottery. Expectations and memories matter, and so [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
Catecholaminergic genes may help my son hear things more clearly
Posted in ADRA2A, Frontal cortex, Noradrenaline, Parietal cortex, TH, tagged 23andMe, Brain, Dopamine, Electroencephalography, ERP, Frontal lobe, Genetic testing, ICA, Independent Component Analysis, Literacy, Noradrenaline, Perception, Psychology, Reading, Signal transduction, Single-nucleotide polymorphism on October 9, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
This year, my 5 year-old son and I have passed many afternoons sitting on the living room rug learning to read. While he ever so gradually learns to decode words, eg. “C-A-T” sound by sound, letter by letter – I can’t help but marvel at the human brain and wonder what is going on inside. [...]
echoblog: understanding how neuromodulator (genes) help the brain compute
Posted in 5HTT, acetylcholine, Dopamine, Noradrenaline, tagged Artificial Intelligence, Computation, Depression, Dopamine, Machine learning, Memory, Neural network, Neuromodulator, Research Groups on September 29, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Image by jurvetson via Flickr pointer to: Computational Models of Basal Ganglia Function where Kenji Doya provides computational explanations for neuromodulators and their role in reinforcement learning. In his words, “Dopamine encodes the temporal difference error — the reward learning signal. Acetylcholine affects learning rate through memory updates of actions and rewards. Noradrenaline controls width [...]
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 [...]
Poor li’l orphan receptor becomes master of the dopamine, epigenetic universe
Posted in NURR1, tagged Dopamine, Epigenetics on July 10, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Image via Wikipedia Yesterday, there were some grumblings on the nomination of Francis Collins to the head of NIH. Some folks feel that the genome-wide, genome-everything approach to medicine has somewhat over-promised and under-delivered in its promise to elucidate the molecular pathways of human disease. In the field of mental health, the whole-genome era is [...]
Michael Frank probes neurogenetic basis of “oops!”
Posted in Cingulate cortex, COMT, Dopamine, tagged 23andMe, Dopamine, economics, Frontal lobe on September 24, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Image by Getty Images via Daylife Amidst the current economic panic, I’m feeling more shocked than usual when listening to the flip-flopping, falsehoods, fabrications, backstepping, about-facing and unabashed spin-doctoring spewing forth from the news media. If watched long enough, one may even develop empathy for Henry Paulson who carries the weight of the global economy [...]
Beauty is in the ventral striatum of the beholder
Posted in Dopamine, Striatum, tagged Dopamine, Neuroeconomics on September 16, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Image via Wikipedia You see a masterpiece while I see splatters of paint on a canvas. Why – in neural terms – do we see the same painting and feel so subjectively different ? Understanding the neural crosstalk between visual inputs (the raw neural activity generated in the retina) and our complex internal states (needs, [...]
Sweets now, sweets later: rs165688 makes my holidays hell
Posted in COMT, DLPFC, Dopamine, Frontal cortex, Orbitofrontal cortex, Parahippocampal gyrus, Posterior parietal cortex, tagged 23andMe, Dopamine, Frontal lobe, Functional magnetic resonance imaging on January 1, 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Holiday time is full of all things delicious and fattening. Should I have a little chocolate now, or wait till later and have a bigger dessert ? Of course, this is not a real forced choice (in my case, the answer too often seems – alas – “I’ll have both!”), but there are many times [...]
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 control [...]
Dopamine genes dissociate neural mechanisms for complex decision making
Posted in COMT, DARPP32, Dopamine, DRD2, tagged Addiction, Dopamine, Frontal lobe on September 28, 2007 | Leave a Comment »
Image via Wikipedia To go out tonight or stay home? Hillary or Barack? Curly fries or onion rings? How do I make these important choices and why will others decide differently? Although there are many reasons for not stressing-out and over-thinking one’s decisions (except for really important choices like curly fry vs. onion ring), it [...]
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