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Looking for love in the genomic age (seen in the subway …)

April 8, 2011 by dendrite

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Splitting in defense of my DRD2 alleles

April 7, 2011 by dendrite

As a big fan of black and white photography, I’m intrigued by the concept of “Splitting” or so-called “black and white” thinking.  It’s something we all do to different degrees … when we avoid dealing with the “shades of gray” and group things in our life into “all good” or “all bad” groups.

Psychologists have considered this cognitive tendency to be a normal part of cognitive development (eg. good guys vs. bad guys), a response to stress, and also a part of various psychopathologies (funny, how psychiatrists have a tendency to group us into the “normal” and “abnormal”, huh?).

Is there anything wrong with seeing the world in black and white?  Perhaps, if you label mildly annoying people as “bad”, you’ll soon have no friends … but otherwise, I’m not sure.  Simplicity can be soothing.

I mean, our brains have a strong tendency to work at the extremes … for example, when it comes to cognition and movement.  We’re wired with so-called striatonigral (Go) and striatopallidal (NoGo) neural pathways that are engaged when cognition is transduced into action.  In the primal world of our ancestors, we didn’t survive very long if we danced around fretfully pondering the costs and benefits of running, or not running, from saber tooth tigers!  So, it’s no surprise, that we’re inherently uncomfortable in the wishy-washy, indecisive, muddling middle ground when making a decision.  We want to “go” or “freeze”, “do it” or “don’t”, “good” or “bad” … just make a f**king decision already.

Here’s a link to some current research on the “Go” and “NoGo” brain systems … and their genetic underpinnings (eg. the DRD2 protein is active when we are flummoxed with uncertainty which keeps us lingering in the NoGo state). Hey, our genome got us here … in one piece … it helped us stay alive … that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

thanks for the pic amadeus

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Jeans as genes

March 31, 2011 by dendrite

Liking the way their legs are helically intertwined.  DNA is everywhere …

photo cred to gildam (nsfw).

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DNA is everywhere … perhaps on your walls

March 30, 2011 by dendrite

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Economic externalities and genome sharing

February 28, 2011 by dendrite

If I pay to have my house fire-proofed, it creates a free economic benefit for my next-door neighbors.  If I smoke and barbecue all day long, the smoke creates an economic risk or cost for those same folks.  These are examples of what economists call “externalities … a cost or benefit, not transmitted through prices, incurred by a party who did not agree to the action“.

So, what happens if I publish my genome sequence online … does anyone else get a benefit? or incur a cost?  My children?  My siblings?  What if I were an identical twin?

Do twins favor being more similar? … in which case, maybe, they might see positive externalities?

Are the epigenomes of identical twins similar?

How does your genome influence your economic behavior?

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My brain has at least 140 loose screws – thanks genome

February 27, 2011 by dendrite

OK, so we have some 20,000-ish genes to help build a brain with billions of neurons and trillions of synapses … and guess what … our brains don’t work as well as we think they might.  Surprised?

Current psychological scientists suggest that there are some 19 social cognition biases, 8 memory biases, 42 decision-making biases, 35 probability-belief biases. Wow! That’s a lot of skewed thinking, not to mention concomitant stress it can generate. As a starting point to probing your own cognitive biases, check out John Grohol’s article on the 15 most common cognitive distortions:

1. Filtering.
Taking negative details and magnifying them …
2. Polarized Thinking.
Things are either “black-or-white” …
3. Overgeneralization.
Coming to a general conclusion based on a single incident …
4. Jumping to Conclusions.
Anticipate that things will turn out badly …
5. Catastrophizing.
We expect disaster to strike …
6. Personalization.
Thinking that everything is some kind of reaction to us …
7. Control Fallacies.
We see ourselves as helpless victims of fate …
8. Fallacy of Fairness.
We feel resentful because life is not fair …
9. Blaming.
We hold other people responsible for our pain …
10. Shoulds.
Rules about how others and we should behave …
11. Emotional Reasoning.
We believe that what we feel must be true automatically …
12. Fallacy of Change.
Needing to change people because our hopes depend on them …
13. Global Labeling.
Generalizing one or two qualities into a negative global judgment …
14. Always Being Right.
Having to prove that our opinions and actions are correct …
15. Heaven’s Reward Fallacy.
Expect our sacrifice and self-denial to pay off …

Oh crap …  I’m loosing it … I do (think) all of these!  Will be fun to sort out what genes relate to what biases.

[Do you know what gene regulates the initiation of new synapses?]

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Dear Diary (#1)

February 26, 2011 by dendrite

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Ouch vs. Ouuuccchhhh! Can genotype predict how much pain you feel?

February 26, 2011 by dendrite

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 – our genotype – is something that reflects the development brain systems used for processing emotions, memories and expectations (like, um, the whole brain does this).

This paper explored this question using a shoulder exercise soreness assay and the COMT genotype and found that:

Participants that endorsed cognitions consistent with pain catastrophizing and had a genetic predisposition to low COMT enzyme activity had significantly higher pain intensity and pressure pain ratings when compared with groups with 1 or no risk factors.

“Pain catastrophizing” is a measure of how much a person ruminates (unable to suppress or divert attention away from pain-related thoughts) and/or focuses on and exaggerates the threat value of a painful stimuli and/or feels helpless and unable to cope with the adversity of painful stimuli.  It may be the most important aspect of coping with pain … an understanding that your perspective modulates your pain.

This may be worth noting given the  “dramatic increase in accidental deaths associated with the use of prescription opioids and also an increasing average daily morphine equivalent dose” despite the finding that “there is no clear evidence that long-term opiate therapy for chronic back pain is efficacious”.


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Is the genome as a blueprint for building your mind?

February 22, 2011 by dendrite

Construction work at the TVA's Douglas Dam, Te...

Image by The Library of Congress via Flickr

Nope …

“On mathematical grounds, it is difficult to understand how 10-to-the-14th synaptic connections in the human brain could be controlled by a genome with approximately 10-to-the-6th genes.”

“… the classic dichotomy between “hard-wired” nativism and the “plasticity” championed by anti-nativists was woefully off the mark. Historically, “Anti-nativists”—critics of the view that we might be born with significant mental structure prior to experience—have often attempted to downplay the significance of genes by appealing to neural plasticity, viz. the brain’s resilience to damage and its ability to modify itself in response to experience, while nativists often seem to think that their position rests on downplaying (or demonstrating limits on) plasticity.”

Well, sort of … think of genes as used for pre-wiring while experience then shapes the pre-wired system.

“… it may be more profitable to draw a distinction, between prewiring and rewiring—each of which can be had in abundance without precluding the other.”

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The public enters the personal genomics discussion

February 22, 2011 by dendrite

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Finding love in the genomic era (#1)

February 22, 2011 by dendrite

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I am (not) my phenotypes

February 21, 2011 by dendrite

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Have you ever wondered what your mind looks like to a cognitive geneticist?

February 21, 2011 by dendrite

Probably not.  But, just in case you were wondering, it looks a lot like this.  Its (um, YOU) are a multi-level model showing overlap in genetic targets as well as signaling and neural systems between disparate latent constructs of memory and intelligence with no less than five levels of phenotype complexity (gene, signaling, neural, cognitive, and syndrome).  This super-techno-geeky-view of humanity is because:

In order to identify phenotype constructs that may ultimately be successful in genetic association studies, the field needs to move beyond the now traditional endophenotype approach and begin to build and refine multivariate multilevel phenotype models.

Check out the paper here and the super-cool PubMed exploration tools … especially PubAtlas.

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Too little MAOA

February 21, 2011 by dendrite


Science article here.

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PubMed to Wordle

February 18, 2011 by dendrite

From a collection of my PubMed articles … link to the application.

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Zoom into the hippocampus

February 18, 2011 by dendrite

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Little known factoid …

February 18, 2011 by dendrite

After writing 4 books and thousands of learned pages on the topic of evolution … all to little avail.  Charles Darwin enjoyed his elder years “shusshhing” priests whenever he had the chance.

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None of us are perfect

February 14, 2011 by dendrite

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Yin Yang kitties ponder genes and brain variation

February 10, 2011 by dendrite

Hey Yin, we have a genome and a brain … what’s the relaionship?

I dunno Yang.  Lets focus on variation.  Genome sequence variation can vary with the brain  … and … gene expression can vary with the brain  … however … genome sequence variation can vary with gene expression … but … here’s a paper showing that gene expression is under the control of genome sequence variation. Purrrr.

Hey Yin, the correlation between genome sequence variation and gene expression confuses me.  I mean, gene expression can change if the environment changes right?  Doesn’t this confound research that uses genome sequence variation?

Meow.

thanks for the pic noyfb.

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Is the human genome too big for our planet?

February 10, 2011 by dendrite

I mean, how many people are really needed to run a sufficiently powered genome-wide association study?  Are there enough people on the planet?  Heather J. Cordell’s review, Detecting gene-gene interactions that underlie human diseases, seems optimistic, but, at this point, it seems a valid question … at least if you want to detect gene-gene interactions.

“The historical lack of success in genetic studies of complex disease can largely be attributed, not to ignored biological interactions, but rather to under-powered studies that surveyed only a fraction of genetic variation …”

thanks for the pic heckyeahart

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