You mean these types of executives? No … well, sort of, maybe. Some people can control their thoughts and actions better than others. Individuals vary widely in their abilities to control their own thoughts and actions. Some people seem ruled by impulses, while others manage successfully to regulate their behaviors. From the perspective of cognitive [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Frontal lobe’
Are individual differences in executive functions almost entirely genetic in origin?
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged executive function, Frontal lobe on January 5, 2012 | 1 Comment »
Mother Nature loves that party rock
Posted in SNAP25, Uncategorized, tagged Art, evolution, Frontal lobe on January 4, 2012 | Leave a Comment »
… but you knew that already. Here’s an example of how a phenomenon known as exon shufflin’ can lead to evolutionary diversity (here involving SNAP25‘s exon 5a variant for early brain development while the exon 5b variant is used later in development) . Perhaps we owe our awesome, ahem, “higher” cognitive abilities to this ancient [...]
Some 40 million-year-old ancestors have all the luck
Posted in 5HTT, Amygdala, Frontal cortex, tagged 5-HTTLPR, Anxiety, Brain, Cognition, Depression, Development, Frontal lobe, Gene expression, Genetics, Klaus Peter Lesch, Mental health on August 30, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
One day, each of us may have the dubious pleasure of browsing our genomes. What will we find? Risk for this? Risk for that? Protection for this? and that? Fast twitching muscles & wet ear wax? Certainly. Some of the factors will give us pause, worry and many restless nights. Upon these genetic variants we [...]
Don’t ask what the genes for Prader-Willi syndrome do, ask where
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Brain, Conditions and Diseases, Development, Epigenetics, Frontal lobe, Gene expression, Genomic imprinting, Mutation, Prader-Willi syndrome, visual system, Williams Syndrome on April 8, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Image by Si1very via Flickr In an earlier post on Williams Syndrome, we delved into the notion that sometimes a genetic variant can lead to enhanced function – such as certain social behaviors in the case of WS. A mechanism that is thought to underlie this phenomenon has to do with the way in which [...]
rs2132683, rs713155 and white matter near the left posterior lateral ventricle emerge from 14 billion statistical tests (vGWAS)
Posted in Frontal cortex, White matter, Temporal lobe, Lateral ventricle, tagged 23andMe, Add new tag, Brain, Development, Frontal lobe, Neuroimaging, Genetics, White matter, Temporal lobe, brain structure, Genome-wide association study, GWAS, Statistical hypothesis testing, Statistics on March 12, 2010 | 1 Comment »
An historic find has occurred in the quest (gold-rush, if you will) to link genome variation with brain structure-function variation. This is the publication of the very first genome-wide (GWAS) analysis of individual voxels (voxels are akin to pixels in a photograph, but are rather 3D cubes of brain-image-space about 1mm on each side) of [...]
rs35753505 C-alleles make de l’Art Brut of the brain
Posted in Fusiform gyrus, Middle frontal gyrus, middle occipital gyrus, NRG1, 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 »
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 [...]
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 ** PODCAST accompanies this post** 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 – [...]
A look inside brains that carry (my) genetic risk for autism
Posted in Cerebellum, CNTNAP2, Frontal cortex, Frontal pole, Fusiform gyrus, Rostral fronto-occipital fasciculus, Thalamus, White matter, tagged 23andMe, Add new tag, autism, Autism spectrum, Brain, Development, Frontal lobe, Functional magnetic resonance imaging, Genetic testing, Genetics, Grey matter, Health, Mental disorder, Mental health, Neural development, Neurodevelopmental, synaptogenesis, White matter on March 5, 2010 | Leave a Comment »
Image via Wikipedia The A-to-T SNP rs7794745 in the CNTNAP2 gene was found to be associated with increased risk of autism (see Arking et al., 2008). Specifically, the TT genotype, found in about 15% of individuals, increases these folks’ risk by about 1.2-1.7-fold. Sure enough, when I checked my 23andMe profile, I found that I’m [...]
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 »
Image via Wikipedia 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 [...]
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 [...]
rs4680 helps me tonically ponder the Burger King menu and phasically choose the least healthy items
Posted in Cingulate cortex, COMT, 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, [...]
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 [...]
Recalling finch beaks using variable decision criteria to learn from whence we came
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Charles Darwin, Development, episodic memory, evolution, Frontal lobe, Functional magnetic resonance imaging, Galápagos Islands, Genetics, individual differences, John Gould, Jonathan Weiner, Memory, Natural selection, Neuroimaging, Psychology on December 14, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Image via Wikipedia In his book, The Beak of the Finch, Jonathan Weiner describes the great diversity of finches on the Galapagos Islands – so much diversity – that Darwin himself initially thought the finch variants to be completely different birds (wrens, mockingbirds, blackbirds and “gross-bills”). It turns out that one of the pivotal events [...]
Genetic causes and non-genetic consequences of schizophrenia play out within 2mm of neocortex
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Archives of General Psychiatry, Brain, cerebral cortex, Development, Frontal lobe, Genetics, Mental disorder, Mental health, neocortex, Neuron, schizophrenia, synapse, synaptogenesis on November 15, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Image by Biking Nikon PDX via Flickr One of the difficult aspects of understanding mental illness, is separating the real causes of the illness from what might be secondary or tertiary consequences of having the illness. If you think about a car whose engine is not running normally, there may be many observable things going [...]
Know thy epigenome in fatal purpose of the Heart
Posted in Cerebellum, Frontal cortex, NTRK2, tagged Depression, Development, DNA methylation, Epigenetics, Frontal lobe, Gene expression, Mental disorder, Mental health, Suicide on November 11, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Image by sludgegulper via Flickr Few events are as hard to understand as the loss of a loved one to suicide – a fatal confluence of factors that are oft scrutinized – but whose analysis can provide little comfort to family and friends. To me, one frightening and vexing aspect of what is known about [...]
Interview with Dan Weinberger, M.D. on KCNH2 and schizophrenia
Posted in Uncategorized, tagged Development, evolution, Frontal lobe, Gene expression, Genetic testing, Mental health, Podcast, schizophrenia on October 27, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
Image by Oliver Lavery via Flickr Daniel R. Weinberger, M.D., Chief of the Clinical Brain Disorders Branch and Director of the Genes, Cognition and Psychosis Program, National Institute of Mental Health discusses the background, findings and general issues of genes and mental illness in this brief interview on his paper, “A primate-specific, brain isoform of [...]
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 [...]
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. [...]
Timing is everything – K+ channel bears the evidence across milliseconds and millenia
Posted in KCNH2, tagged 23andMe, Action potential, Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, Frontal lobe, Gene, Gene expression, Hippocampus, Neuron, schizophrenia, Single-nucleotide polymorphism on August 22, 2009 | Leave a Comment »
**PODCAST accompanies this post** In the brain, as in other aspects of life, timing is everything. On an intuitive level, its pretty clear, that, since neurons have to work together in widely distributed networks, they have a lot of incentive to talk to each other in a rhythmic, organized way. Think of a choir that [...]
Animal model reveals timely insights into immuno-genetic risk of schizophrenia
Posted in Frontal cortex, Hippocampus, MHC loci, tagged Development, Epigenetics, Frontal lobe, schizophrenia on August 19, 2009 | 1 Comment »
Image via Wikipedia Among the various (and few) significant results of recent landmark whole-genome analyses (involving more than 54,000 participants) on schizophrenia (covered here and here), there was really just one consistent result – linkage to the 6p21-22 region containing the immunological MHC loci. While there has been some despair among professional gene hunters, one [...]
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