mbScience.org http://mbscience.org Integrating Brain Science + Human Experience Tue, 15 Jul 2014 14:33:15 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.9.1 From The Web – 7 kittens and a flying toy http://mbscience.org/from-the-web-7-kittens-and-a-flying-toy/ http://mbscience.org/from-the-web-7-kittens-and-a-flying-toy/#comments Tue, 15 Jul 2014 14:12:07 +0000 http://mbscience.org/?p=6554 7 kittens and a flying toyA spectacular video of eye-paw coordination in 3-month old kittens.

It could almost be faked, but it’s not. The kittens have different fur patterns, and their movements are not exactly timed. But it’s darned close!!!

AND there’s always a non-conformist — this time the second guy from the left end of the Rockettes Music Hall performance.

… and YES, it does tell us a lot about human and cat brains, and how they develop from birth and before.

(Big hat tip to the videographers at TriskelVideo)

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The sexiest mammal on earth? http://mbscience.org/the-sexiest-mammal-on-earth/ http://mbscience.org/the-sexiest-mammal-on-earth/#comments Sun, 13 Jul 2014 13:45:03 +0000 http://mbscience.org/?p=6541

Meadow voles could show Miss Piggy a thing or two.

Meadow voles could show Miss Piggy a thing or two. (Copyright Disney, under fair use, via Wikipedia).

Consider the love life of the meadow vole, the sexiest little mammal on Planet Earth.

Voles are small mouse-like mammals who live all around North America in prairies and meadows.

They are sometimes called field mice.

Like Charles Darwin’s finches on the Galapagos Islands, who show small changes in the shape of their beaks, depending on the food they are specialized to grasp, voles are a wonderful natural experiment in evolution. Like  Galapagos finches, they live in strikingly similar places, with similar food, predators, social habits and the like.

But some are voles are monogamous and other are polygamous.

What are the biological pressures that cause some mammals to be faithful to their mates? (pair bonding)

What conditions favor sleeping around?

So you see, meadow voles ARE relevant to human behavior.

This is a fundamental question in evolution, because Darwinian adaptation has only two big drivers — the chances of survival and the chances of reproduction.

To give a human example, humans living in traditional European culture tended to favor monogamy — though not 100% of the time. After the Sexual Revolution — when birth control became practical — the same genetic population tends to favor multiple sexual partners.

(Oddly enough, modern urban cultures do not reproduce faster than their parents did two generations ago. Urban cultures do not replace their members, and having more partners does not necessarily mean more children.)

Voles are a wonderful “model species,” since they live only a few months and reproduce with amazing rapidity. Vole populations can explode very fast under good conditions, and collapse very quickly when predators multiply, or when the weather turns bad. Males compete with each other for access to fertile females, and females may compete with each other for access to males.

The problem with being a mole is reproducing before you die. You average life span is only two months — but if you luck out, dodge all the predators, get lots of food, you could live for 10 months. Still, the AVERAGE mole has to be very busy getting on with business.

In your average two-month lifespan you need to:

1. Grow to sexual maturity: around a week.

2. Mate selection, beating the competition, and insemination: two to three months.

3. Time of pregnancy (gestation): less than one month.

Now, notice that if you add up points 1.-3. above, you get almost twice as long to reproduce as the average life span of the poor meadow vole.

This SEEMS like a contradiction, but it’s not. The average is only the peak of a distribution of life spans. Moles are hunted fiercely by cats, owls, dogs, and other predators. To make up for their short lifespans, moles have multiple litters of about five pups each. Sheer survival pressure selects only some of the moles in each generation to reproduce. The unlucky ones never reproduce.

In other words, if you’re a male vole you need to impregnate a female before some cat or owl eats you at the end of your two-month average life. If you’re a female, you need to get pregnant around one month of age to have at least one litter before the end of your average life.

Everything is a race for time.

Your average vole doesn’t have time to live out their Golden Years in leisurely retirement.

With ultrafast reproduction, local populations can expand very fast, only to collapse when predators catch up with that great new food supply. As Darwin wrote, animal populations expand to use all the available food, space, and other resources, and collapse when they bump into a natural ceiling — they run out of food, or predators multiply — only to repeat the cycle again and again. Each population collapses could mean the end of the species, but somehow mouse-like mammals have been around for about 200 million years! Individual moles have little time, but as a biological system their species is amazingly successful.

Think of it as a high-speed High School dating scene. Ups and downs, every minute of the day.

Voles act can be sociable when they’re not in the mood for love, and very aggressive when they are. Males fight to gain the favors of a female — but only if the female shows readiness by odor signals (from hormones) and by receptive behavior.

Once meadow vole lovers meet, they bond for life. And yes, they do cheat on their partners at times, but once a mate dies, the grieving survivor may never take another mate.

This creates a natural experiment: What is the difference between monogamous and multi-partner voles?

Voles in Love.

The meadow vole is adapted for pair bonding with a single partner. The male vole has a continuous contact with its female, which lasts for all of their lives.

Pair bonding is related to the oxytocin and vasopressin hormones. The oxytocin receptors of the female  are located more densely in the brain reward system, and have more receptors than other species, which causes a sort of an ‘addiction’ to the mate.

I’m hooked on you
Oh, oh, oh, oh
I’m hooked on you
What can I do? It’s over you

Sweet Sensation – Hooked On You Lyrics | MetroLyrics)

In the male meadow vole, the gene for the vasopressin receptor has a longer segment, as opposed to the montane vole, which has a smaller segment. This segment is longer in other bonding animals (such as humans) and shorter in other nonbonding animals (such as chimpanzees).  (Hat tip to Wikipedia).

So prairie voles are romantics.

… because VOLE spells L-O-V-E backwards!

(So much for science.)

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]]> http://mbscience.org/the-sexiest-mammal-on-earth/feed/ 0 Microbes may trigger Alzheimer’s Disease. http://mbscience.org/microbes-may-trigger-alzheimers-disease/ http://mbscience.org/microbes-may-trigger-alzheimers-disease/#comments Sun, 06 Jul 2014 09:55:36 +0000 http://mbscience.org/?p=6520 A fascinating update on Alzheimer’s Dementia has just been published by James Hill and colleagues in Frontiers in Aging.

Microscopic brain damage found in AD.

AD is a lethal form of brain degeneration. It is currently incurable, and is now one of the major causes of death in old age.

Advanced AD shows many kinds of pathology in the brain, including cell death, immune dysfunction, protein tangles (plaques), inflammation, changes in gene expression and molecular waste products. In other words, the advanced AD brain is a biological mess. Behaviorally, AD patients have trouble recognizing family members and doing other everyday tasks.

The fundamental question is what causes AD to take over a perfectly healthy brain —  because many people grow older with no sign of AD. The traditional answers come from examining AD victims using brain imaging, and from brain samples after death. AD brains show a great many protein tangles (called “tau plaques,” after the Greek letter  “t”). Tau plaques do interfere with normal neural signaling in the brain. But are they causal? Or are tau plaques just a byproduct of other disease processes in the brain?

Like our bodies, our brains are constantly assaulted by toxins, bacteria, viruses, molecular waste products, emotional stress, overwork, injuries, oxygen lack, glucose overload, and nutrient deficiencies.

Like our bodies, our brains maintain a delicate balance with trillions of micro-organisms. Our stomachs and intestines contain whole ecosystems of microbiota, tiny organisms that may benefit us (like yogurt) or that may do harm (like tapeworms). The brain has an extra protective barrier of densely packed cells, called the blood-brain barrier (BBB). But the BBB can develop leaks.

For many years stomach ulcers were thought to be due to stress, because experiments showed that stressed monkeys developed more stomach ulcers than stress-free monkeys. Then it turned out that stressed monkeys provided a better growth medium for the bacterium H. pylori. Stomach ulcers have multiple factors, but H. pylori is often the critical one, the one that sets off the disease more than any other. Ulcers are a multi-factorial disease; and now it looks like AD may be similar. Today, antibiotics are an effective first-line treatment for ulcers. Ulcers are therefore an excellent example of how biomedicine works, because many disorders are multifactorial, showing that even if there are a dozen big factors, some single factor can still be the most decisive one.

Microbes in the gut. The rod-shaped structures may be e. coli.

Your old car may have rusty wheels and worn tires, the battery may be low and the oil full of gummy gook; but the critical problem may be the worn transmission that finally stops the car in its tracks.

Hill and colleagues now propose that microbes may be the key to AD. This has been shown in some patient groups, although the causal role of microbes is not clear. Microbes multiply fast wherever brain tissue is damaged, even by a physical injury.

For example,

1. AD is associated with fungal infections.

2. .. and with herpes simplex.

3. … and with prion diseases like the “Mad Cow” particle.

4. … and with C. pneumoniae, the pneumonia bug.

5. … and even with the HIV virus.

6. … plus protozoan parasites like t. gondii.

7. … Also tiny plant viruses called viroids, and RNA fragments called micro RNA’s.

9. … plus the hepatitis virus.

Is that enough for you?

Now this may seem ridiculously complicated.

But remember stomach ulcers. In the beginning it looked like dozens of factors played a role, but in the end, the biggest clout was carried by H. pylori. Knock out H. pylori with an antibiotic, and most of the other problems go away.

Again, it’s like your old car. Keep up regular lube and oil jobs, rotate the tires, and it might last twice as long.

Many researchers are therefore looking at the “microbiota” (tiny living things) that could impact the brain.

Hill et al write that “Virtually every type of microbe known has been implicated in contributing to the …  AD process.”

Still, there are a lot of microbiota in your body, estimated at 10 with 14 zeros. Some may be penetrating the brain under some conditions. The brain is surrounded by a dense tissue filter called the Blood Brain Barrier. But in AD the BBB often gets leaky.

So – it’s not that we don’t know what aggravates AD —rather, far too many things play a role.

The big question is: Could AD have some single “magic bullet,” like H. pylori in the case of stomach ulcers?

The answer might lie in some of those 10/14 microbiota making a riotous living in your gut.

With a little luck and a lot of hard work, we might find the answer.

It could even happen soon.

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Has the Turing test really been cracked? http://mbscience.org/has-the-turing-test-really-been-cracked/ http://mbscience.org/has-the-turing-test-really-been-cracked/#comments Thu, 26 Jun 2014 11:48:29 +0000 http://mbscience.org/?p=6508 It’s every headline writer’s dream: A scientific breakthrough! Named after the great mathematician Alan Turing, so it has to be important!

It was a dream nobody could resist.

Does he pass the Turing test? Does it matter?

When the The University of Reading (UK)  announced at the Royal Society in London that, 60 years to the day after Alan Turing’s death, his proposed test for human-like computer intelligence had been passed, the announcement took the media by storm.

It was science fiction come to life. A story too good to check.

But skeptical voices piped up, and a few days later another wave of headlines went viral, saying just the opposite.

Many scientists didn’t believe the Turing test had been passed.

So what’s up?

Let me start with a common confusion. Every computer science student learns about Turing Machines, which are not machines at all, but mathematical fictions that are used to prove theorems about computation. Math is full of powerful fictions like this — straight lines that have length but not breadth, a natural number series that goes to infinity, a square root of 2 that can only be expressed as a dwindling, infinitesimally small fraction of the real number line.

The Turing Machine is another useful fiction. It is Alan Turing’s greatest contribution to the mathematics of abstract automata.

But the Turing “test” is whole ‘nother ball of wax. It’s not math. It’s a hypothetical. The Turing test only suggests that computers might be said to have human-like intelligence when a human judge can no longer tell the difference between the output of a computer program and the (typed) responses of a human being

Chances are that headline writers don’t know the difference between TM’s and TT’s. So let’s put the Turing Machine on the shelf as a useful concept for proving theorems about programs. It’s been studied for half a century, and it is as useful as the Pythagorean Theorem. But it’s old news.

Millions of kids on the web are excited by robots, zombies and brain hacking, and the PR release from Reading University caused a flurry of excitement in that huge audience, until those boring old skeptics piped up.

But if you are interested in real science there’s a lot to learn from this whole brouhaha. One is that

you can’t do science if you don’t know the meanings of words. Mark Twain wrote that “The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between the lightning and the lightning bug.” Turing tests have nothing to do with Turing Machines. One is the lightning, the other is the lightning bug.

A second big lesson is that in frontier science there is always a hot debate between proponents and skeptics. Everything is up for grabs. Even the recent (apparent) discovery of the Higgs boson particle is still a matter of some debate. You can’t understand frontier science if you don’t think about the arguments pro and con. In real science nobody is always right, and skeptics always get their turn.

A third great lesson is knowing the proof conditions of any proposed idea. That is: When do we know that some idea is really true?

And this is the real question about the “Turing test”.

If you think about it you’ll realize that there is not one, single TT, but literally millions of them.

That’s because:

(a) human beings can do millions of things that could be imitated by computers, and

(b) human judges who try to compare people to machines don’t use standard metrics. They are no thermometers. Some are smarter than others, some know more about computer programming or about human beings. Some are more skeptical and others are more gullible.

In general, humans can be fooled with amazing ease.

If you doubt that, look at all the stage magicians and snake-oil salesmen who make a living from human gullibility. In a way the “Turing test” is not about computer programs at all, but about the judges who are supposed to tell the difference. Since humans have an astonishing tendency to personify things like plastic dolls and planet earth, everything depends on what the judges know.

The latest set of judges might have remembered that, when it comes to solving computational problems, machines have been faster and more efficient for decades, since the early days of air conditioned rooms full of vacuum tubes. That’s what computers are FOR, to solve math and other specific problems. Headline story: Machines are smarter than people! They really are.

But that’s old news.

Things get more interesting when we try to make computers understand and produce human language. Language is the most distinctive human specialization, not shared with any other living species. Language and speech are enormously complex adaptations, some of which emerged over millions of years, while others — like our new web jargon— are still being invented  today. Language is not just one “thing.”

If language is many things, there is NOT likely to be a single “test” to see if computers can do it. There has been good progress over decades in machine processing of natural language. Apple’s Siri is a good example — an important step in speech recognition, but with poor syntactic capabilities and NO semantic (meaning) or pragmatic (purposeful) capabilities at all. Siri works with a long list of things users are likely to say, like “what’s at the movies today?” It’s very cool, but it doesn’t “solve” the Turing test, because only young children could believe there’s actually a little person inside.

And that’s the biggest fallacy about “the” Turing test. At a low level of performance, we’ve had computers that can fool people for decades. In the 1970s Professor Ken Colby ran a simulation of a paranoid personality called PARRY at UCLA Medical School, and was able to fool medical residents into believing they were talking to a real patient in the hospital. Colby’s PARRY passed the Turing test for those medical residents. PARRY was run by a list of fixed questions and answers, and it was easy to beat PARRY by asking it to do things outside of its very narrow domain. I was able to beat PARRY by asking it questions like “What did you just say?” and “What did you mean by “he” in the last sentence?” PARRY could not solve referents in language, even by referring to its own speech. But people do that all the time, without even thinking about it.

Still, PARRY’s developer, Prof. Ken Colby, did a remarkable job. Language scientists have been getting better at true language perception and comprehension over time. It is still only partly solved — as you know from playing with Apple’s Siri.

The point is that there is NO breakthrough in the “Turing test” because there IS NO SINGLE TURING TEST. There are as many TT’s as there are human skills — AND as long as there are human beings who are willing to be fooled. The Turing Test should really be called the Turing Illusion, because it tells us more about the people who fall for the stunt than about computer programs.

For headline writers the Turing Illusion is a gift that keeps on giving. Every year or two they can run the Turing Illusion again, and every time millions of innocent readers fall for the trick.

The Turing Illusion tells us more about human gullibility than it does about artificial intelligence. Human gullibility defies the Second Law of Thermodynamics, because gullibility isn’t dissipated, like heat in a closed system. Gullibility expands as a function of the number of innocent minds available. The web has a billion users, and the audience for The Great Hype Machine is now in the hundreds of millions.

Skepticism — but not rigid denial — is the mark of good science.

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Where does visual input become conscious? (Baars, hat tip to Prof. Alumit Ishai) http://mbscience.org/where-does-visual-input-become-conscious-baars-hat-tip-to-prof-alumit-ishai-2/ http://mbscience.org/where-does-visual-input-become-conscious-baars-hat-tip-to-prof-alumit-ishai-2/#comments Wed, 18 Jun 2014 14:11:41 +0000 http://mbscience.org/?p=6501 Baars-fpsyg-04-00200-g010There are at least forty visual “maps” in the visual cortex — each sensitive to a different aspect of vision. The first map in visual cortex, conveniently dubbed V1, responds to a visual scene pixel-by-pixel. At higher levels, visual feature maps respond to color, motion, objects, faces, and entire scenes. These higher-level visual maps “live” outside of the occipital lobe, in the parietal and temporal lobes. The medial temporal lobe (MTL) is close to the “evolutionary root” of the cortex, from which that giant structure grew hundreds of millions of years ago. There we find object-sensitive, face-sensitive, and scene-sensitive visual maps, where single neurons can evoke whole scenes.

Conscious vision combines multiple maps into a single, integrated experience with color, motion, location, contrast, faces, emotional expressions, and more. To trigger all those maps to combine their information into a single, integrated experience it helps to stimulate cortex high up in the visual hierarchy. V1 only triggers a few layers. The Face Area or the Place Area (both in lower temporal cortex) trigger many other maps more easily.

Pierre Megevand and colleagues now report in the Journal of Neurosciences that direct electrical stimulation of the human PPA area (parahippocampal place area) can result in conscious glimpses of entire places. “Para” means “near,” so that “para-hippocampal” means “near the hippocampus.” But the hippocampus is wrapped like a sausage inside of the temporal lobe, which seems to emerge from the huge cortex like an arm emerging from the body. Because so many important structures reside inside of the “arm” of the temporal lobe, or even in the “armpit,” this is a confusing part of the brain to visualize. The metaphor of a sausage in a bun is not a bad first approximation. To understand the brain slices shown in this article, imagine that the “sausage-in-a-bun” is sliced to reveal the inside (the hippocampus). In this region the two temporal lobes also come together in one place, the medial temporal lobe (MTL). So the MTL is neocortex that wraps around hippocampus. (Which is actually the ancient ancestral cortex with only three layers).

Got that? Never mind. We’ll look at it later on. It’ll all one giant knotty structure, and you have to mentally fly around it many times before it becomes clear. (See the figures here and here).

OK. Now here’s the cool part. Direct low-voltage electrical stimulation in this “place area” of the visual cortex produces ***visual hallucinations of whole scenes and places.*** For example, a conscious surgical patient with implanted electrodes in this area experiences “specific topographic hallucinations: the patient reported seeing … the train station in his neighborhood, the stairs, a blue cabinet and the office of his optician.” In contrast to the “place” area, Electrical stimulation of the neighboring face zone, triggered “visual hallucinatioms with other content, such as his team of doctors and scientists who seemed to be present in the operating room, and Italians wearing aprons working at a pizza parlor. ”

Other sites of stimulation triggered a “sense of déjà vu” (“I’ve seen this before!”) but without the visual content. Thus an abstract “feeling of knowing” emerged from some very small and specific part of this region. Other nearby regions triggered NO particular conscious experience at all. This is not a simple part of the brain.

Experiments in human patients always have to worry about the fantastic adaptive capacities of the brain, especially after injury. But we can only study human patients if it is medically justified to do so — which means they have always experienced some brain injury, either local or very widespread. The brain is extremely dependent on a constant flow of oxygen and glucose, as well as physical protection against impact. Thus we never study a human brain directly with invasive methods that is exactly the way it was before injury. Fortunately we now have a dozen non-invasive methods like EEG and fMRI, which have created a whole new world of insight.

Notice that visual cortex is ALSO the place where we can sometimes elicit *CONSCIOUS* visual hallucinations and *CONSCIOUS* feelings of deja vu.

Also notice that people can stay conscious and able to communicate even during brain surgery, as long as they are given local anesthetic around the surgical incisions in the scalp. In this way brain surgery is much like a dental operation. Local anesthetic works well, because the brain itself does not have pain-sensitive receptors.

The pioneering work on conscious brain surgery was done by Wilder Penfield and colleagues in Montreal circa 1950. It has taken six decades for the operation to become a gold standard for both treatment and scientific research.

Flow in the Zone 2013 http://mbscience.org/sci2art/flow-in-the-zone/ http://mbscience.org/sci2art/flow-in-the-zone/#comments Sun, 01 Dec 2013 05:40:20 +0000 http://mbscience.org/?post_type=os_sci2art&p=4941 A Global Perspective on the Inner Experience of the Traditional Artist

Flow – a smooth uninterrupted movement or progress
Zone – a temporary state of heightened concentration that enables peak performance

[nggallery id=1]

International contemporary fine artists contributed to this exhibition:

  • Alete Burgé-USA
  • Alicia Falcone-Argentina
  • Luisa Mesa-Cuba
  • Jose Polet-Belgium
  • Policarpo Ribeiro-Brazil
  • Nathalie Sebregts-Netherlands
  • Ricardo Triana-Colombia
  • Tonietta Walters-Jamaica

The Flow by José-Xavier Polet

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The Feeling Brain: Exploring the Neural Basis of Emotion http://mbscience.org/scicon-review/the-feeling-brain-explore-neural-basis-of-emotion/ http://mbscience.org/scicon-review/the-feeling-brain-explore-neural-basis-of-emotion/#comments Tue, 08 Oct 2013 15:38:57 +0000 http://mbscience.org/?post_type=os_scicon_review&p=6125 Our goal: to allow emotion scientists to explore their field in greater "mbSci Logo for Studio One Pilot The Feeling Brain"depth than has been done before for a wide spread audience, translate frontier science across disciplines, and offer high level perspectives on neuroscience in the news. Our Pilot participants include Stuart Firestein, PhD, Professor and Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences and author of the acclaimed book Ignorance, How It Drives Science, who moderated programs One and Two, joined by scientists Jay Giedd, Scott Russo, Marcel Kinsbourne, and Moran Cerf in ‘roundtable discussion’ on camera during each segment.

Guest moderators included journalist and war correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Melik Kaylan; Internationally Best Selling Author of Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, Family / Relationship Therapist and clinician, Esther Perel. NYU neuroscience student Alea Skwara provided a student’s inquiry perspective.

Distinguished Participants

Marcel Kinsbourne, PhD

"Marcel Kinsbourne Participates in mbSci Studio One Pilot"Marcel Kinsbourne, PhD – Neurologist & Cognitive Neuroscientist, Professor of Psychology, The New School for Social Research. Dr. Kinsbourne obtained his D.M. degree at Oxford University in 1963, where he served on the Psychology Faculty before relocating to the United States in 1967. He has held Professorships in both Neurology and Psychology at Duke University and the University of Toronto, and headed the Behavioral Neurology Research Division at the Shriver Center in Boston, Massachusetts. He also served as Presidents of the International Neuropsychology Society and the Society for Philosophy and Psychology. Dr. Kinsbourne’s considerable body of research involves multiple areas of cognitive neuroscience, including brain-behavior relations; consciousness; imitation; laterality among normal and abnormal populations; memory and amnestic disorders; unilateral neglect; attention and Attention Deficit Disorder; autism; learning disabilities; mental retardation, and dyslexia.

Recent Publications:

Imitation and Entrainment: Brain Mechanisms and Social Consequences (2004); The Corpus Callosum as a Component of a Circuit for Selection (2003); How the Senses Combine in the Brain (2003); The Brain and Body Awareness (2002); Adult ADHD: Controlled Medical Assessment (2001); Dynamic

Self-Organization of the Cerebral Network (2001); Disorders of Mental Development (2000); Unity and Diversity in the Human Brain: Evidence from Injury (1998); Time and the Observer: The Where and When of Consciousness in the Brain (1992).

Jay N. Giedd, MD

"Dr. Jay Giedd discusses Adolescent Brain Research in mbSci Studio One Pilot"Jay N. Giedd, MD – Chief, Brain Imaging Section, Child Psychiatry Branch, NIMH. For more than twenty years, Dr. Giedd has studied the development of the adolescent brain. Decades of imaging work have led to remarkable insight and more than a few surprises. Dr. Giedd’s research team at the Child Psychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health seeks to use cutting edge technologies to explore the relationship between genes, brain and behavior in healthy development and in neuropsychiatric disorders of childhood onset. They conduct longitudinal neuropsychological and brain imaging studies of healthy twins and singletons as well as clinical groups such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, childhood-onset schizophrenia, and others.

Over the past 10 years they have acquired over 3000 MRI scans making this the largest pediatric neuroimaging project of its kind. The lab also studies sexual dimorphism in the developing brain (especially important in child psychiatry where nearly all disorders have different ages of onsets, prevalence and symptomatology between boys and girls) by exploring clinical populations which have unusual levels of hormones (congenital adrenal hyperplasia, familial precocious puberty) or variations in the sex chromosomes (Klinefelter’s syndrome, XYY, XXYY). The lab also conducts studies of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, which are beginning to unravel the relative contributions of genes and environment on a variety of developmental trajectories in the pediatric brain. The group is also involved in the development and application of techniques to analyze brain images and is actively collaborating with other imaging centers throughout the world to advance the image analysis field.

Dr. Scott Russo

"Dr. Scott Russo Panelist in mbSci Studio One Pilot in NYC"Dr. Scott Russo – Assistant Professor of Neuroscience at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. His research is focused on understanding how the brain adapts to stress and drugs to guide future behaviors that are relevant to addiction and depression.

The Russo Laboratory of Neuroplasticity and Behavior uses a wide variety of experimental approaches to understand how the brain adapts to stress and drugs leading to altered synaptic connectivity and behavioral changes relevant to depression and addiction. We do this by integrating well-established behavioral models, with molecular and biochemical techniques and traditional neuroanatomy.

Moran Cerf, PhD

"Dr. Moran Cerf is Panelist in mbSci Studio One Pilot in NYC"Moran Cerf, PhD – Neuroscientist at the California Institute of Technology (‘Caltech’), at the UCLA department of neurosurgery and at New York University. His research focuses on understanding the neural mechanisms of consciousness and free will using direct recording of single neurons from the brains of patients undergoing brain surgery. Dr. Cerf completed his Ph.D at Caltech in computational neuroscience, and holds an MA in Philosophy of Science and a B.Sc in Physics, both from the Tel-Aviv University. Prior to his career as a scientist, Dr Cerf worked as a hacker – breaking into banks and financial institutes, an air pilot and an inventor. Dr. Cerf currently holds a faculty position at the American Film Institute, teaching screen-writing, and is currently the winner of the U.S Moth story- telling competition.His research focuses on studying the ways by which visual inputs are processed in the brain to create a conscious perception.

The studies are conducted with human patients undergoing brain surgery to enable the research of the neural coding underlying our attention. In addition, he conducts eye-tracking studies with subjects with neurological disorders (autism, face blindness, amygdala lesion, agenessis of the corpus calosum, etc) to study mechanisms underlying emotions.

This Pilot Episode of The Feeling Brain: Exploring the Neural Basis of Emotion features:

Tutorials in Specialized Fields

20-minute presentations by each participant’s current research or teaching points.

Roundtable Discussion

A passionate, in depth, high level scientific dialogue across disciplines, focused on the emotion sciences.

Neuroscience In the News: Can Neuroscience Read Minds?

Discussions by scientists and experts in various fields, both skeptics and advocates, on the latest headline stories, this being our first pioneering effort. Thoughtful interdisciplinary dialogue to provide insights that are often missing in the media, and even in the journals.

This segment is first in a consecutive 9 episode series of focused topics on innovative brain research and treatment. Studio One Preview Video

The Feeling Brain Pilot Audience & Uses

We are grateful to have an incredible group of creative professionals offer their ideas, support, expertise and studio facilities. Targeted towards a scientific and scholarly audience—content will be used to develop educational webcasts, supplemental classroom materials, and a broadcast quality series. Participants may also utilize edited footage for their professional goals.

mbSci Moderators

"Stuart Firestein Professor and Author Moderates mbSci Studio One Pilot"Stuart Firestein, PhD, Professor and Chair, Department of Biological Sciences, Columbia University. Professor Firestein teaches biology and the popular “Ignorance,” a course that invites professors to speak to students about what they don’t know and what they question in their field.

He was recently recognized for his “pioneering work” on the mammalian olfactory system and elected as fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Firestein’s lab focuses on understanding how mammals, equipped with what he describes as “possibly the best chemical detector on the planet,” are able to sense and discriminate a vast number of molecules known to us as odors. Dedicated to promoting the accessibility of science to a public audience, Firestein also serves as an advisor for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation’s program for the Public Understanding of Science.

Recently he was awarded the 2011 Lenfest Distinguished Columbia Faculty Award for excellence in scholarship and teaching. His recent and acclaimed book on the workings of science for a general audience is called Ignorance: How It Drives Science, published by Oxford University Press. His areas of research include Stem Cell Biology, Biophysics/Ion Channels; specialization — Molecular physiology of olfactory transduction.

"Melik Kaylan Portrait"Melik Kaylan has worked as a journalist based mostly in New York for twenty-five years. Among other places, he has been an editor at the Village Voice, contributing editor at Spy magazine, associate editor at Connoisseur magazine, Arts editor at Forbes.com, editor-at-large at ReganBooks. His work has been published widely in the US and UK in the above publications and the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, New York Times, the Times of London, the Spectator, and other places. He has won Cultural Awards in Italy and Turkey for print and television work on antiquities smuggling.

He has been to the Middle East numerous times, to Iraq five times, to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Burma, the Caucasus. His Travel and Leisure article on Tbilisi, Georgia, is included in the 2008 Best American Travel Writing collection. He has scuba dived for bodies with the NYPD scuba unit (New York Magazine), dived with the Cousteau ship in the Red Sea (Forbes.com), searched for Inca treasure in Ecuadoran mountains (Outside magazine), investigated the murder of a fellow journalist in Peshawar, Pakistan (the Spectator). Currently, he writes for the Wall Street Journal about culture.

"Alea Skwara Guest Moderator for mbSci Studio One Pilot"Alea Skwara – NYU Social Psychology MA Student. Alea received her BA in Theatre from Davidson College in 2009 and began her MA in Psychology at NYU in 2011.

Her research interests focus on traumatic emotional experience and the resolution of these experiences, and on interpersonal bonding. More specifically, what are the neural correlates of emotional trauma, and how do they shift over time and with treatment?

What individual and social differences affect this process? Alea is now Lab Manager for Leah Sommerville’s Affective Neuroscience Lab at Harvard.

Location & Development Details:

  • State-of-the-art, high definition, 4-camera studio in midtown Manhattan – with sets/mobile green screen capabilities, control room, and award-winning directors & professional production crew.
  • Development Committee: Dr. Heather Berlin, Dr. Richard Brown, Alea Skwara, Natalie Geld, Dr. Bernard Baars

Our purpose is to allow scientists to discuss new findings as well as media stories, and to “webcast” the discussion on a timely basis. We will also be in direct contact with news desks, web and print publications worldwide.

Shift Communication and MBSci’s broadcast quality media program allows scientists and researchers to benefit from a very high quality of scientific communication, along with unprecedented outreach to scientific, educational, media and the general audiences.

Better communication in science and education can have vast ripple effects for advancing creativity, innovation, entrepreneurialism and humanity. By integrating excellent brain science with human experience and harnessing the powerful influence of digital and broadcast media to create dynamic teaching and learning environments, we believe mbSci can contribute to the potential for improvement in the human condition.We sincerely hope that you share our enthusiasm for this project. We are happy to answer any questions and will, of course, share the results of our Pilot with you and other scientists in the field.

Love a Gradient http://mbscience.org/scicon-review/love-a-gradient/ http://mbscience.org/scicon-review/love-a-gradient/#comments Tue, 08 Oct 2013 15:19:22 +0000 http://mbscience.org/?post_type=os_scicon_review&p=6119 "Love a Gradiant"

A chorus of voices through millennia:

Heaven’s breath, moving rhythmically, puts life into things.

- Chinese (?)

The one, the few, and the many.

- Aristotle

- Henry David Thoreau

- Henry George

…a peculiar harmony of structure and function in the devices organisms contrive to accomplish things.

- J. Scott Turner

Energy moving through a system tends to organize that system.

- Herbert Morowtiz

Self-organizing systems, variational principles, self-organizing criticality, power laws, random graphs, homeodynamics, chaos, edge of chaos, non-equilibrium thermodynamics, dissipative systems, phase transitions, small world phenomena, entropy maximization, entropy minimization, autopoiesis are terms, concepts, theories, principles of the time and/or space evolution of gradients in a medium.

While listening to a talk by Ilya Prigogine in September, 1995, Adrian Bejan -Duke University Distinguished Professor of Mechanical Engineering – had an epiphany. Prigogine had asserted that nature’s ubiquitous tree pattern was due to aléatoires – a crap shoot. Dr. Bejan recalls, In a flash,. I realized that the world was not formed by random accidents, chance, and fate but that behind the dizzying diversity is a seamless stream of predictable patterns.

His insight, which he terms the constructal law, is this:

In the years following, this law has been used to predict both qualitatively and quantitatively patterned phenomena such as: natural generation-of-flow configurations like river drainage basins, bronchial trees, snowflake patterns, laminar versus turbulent flow, evolutionary change, hierarchical organization and many others.

From Wikipedia:

The constructal law represents three steps toward making “design in nature” a concept and law-based domain in science:

  2. Design generation and evolution is a phenomenon of physics.

The constructal law is a first principle of physics that accounts for all design and evolution in nature. It holds that shape and structure arises to facilitate flow. The designs that arise spontaneously in nature reflect this tendency: they allow entities to flow more easily – to measurably move more current farther and faster for less unit of useful energy consumed. Rain drops, for example, coalesce and move together, generating rivulets, streams and the mighty river basins of the world because this design allows them to move more easily. The constructal law asks the question: Why does this design arise at all? Why can’t the water just seep through the ground? The constructal law provides this answer: Because the water flows better with design. The constructal law covers the tendency of nature to generate designs to facilitate flow.

The constructal law defines the time direction of all evolutionary design phenomena. It states that designs should evolve, acquiring better and better configurations to provide more access for the currents that flow through them. It defines in physics terms what it means to be “fittest”, to “survive”, and to be efficient. Not all changes are improvements, but those that stick measurably enhance flow. The constructal law states that design generation and evolution are macroscopic physics phenomena that arise naturally to provide better and better flow access to the currents that run through them. This occurs at every scale. Each component of an evolving flow system—each rivulet, each tree, each road—acquires evolving designs to facilitate flow access. As these elements coalesce into larger and larger structures (into evolving river basins, forests and transport networks), a hierarchy emerges such that the varying sized components work together so that everything flows more easily. This is seen in the shape and structure of the neural networks in the brain, of the alveoli in the lung, the size and distribution of vegetation in the forest and of human settlements on the map. (Emphasis added.)

http://www.constructal.org/ is the Constructal Theory Web Portal maintained by Dr. Bejan. A theory of such elegance and power begs to be included in the toolkit of everyone studying consciousness science.

http://mbscience.org/scicon-review/love-a-gradient/feed/ 0


Affiliated Experts

Meir Statman

Glenn Klimek Professor of Finance, Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University; Visiting Professor, Tilburg University, The Netherlands

Analysis Group Contact
Bruce Deal

Ph.D., Columbia University; M.B.A., Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Summary of Experience:
Meir Statman's research focuses on behavioral finance. He attempts to understand how investors and managers make financial decisions and how these decisions are reflected in financial markets. The questions he addresses include: What are the cognitive errors and emotions that influence investors? What are investor aspirations? How can financial advisers and plan sponsors help investors? What is the nature of risk and regret? How do investors form portfolios? How important are tactical asset allocation and strategic asset allocation? What determines stock returns? What are the effects of sentiment? Professor Statman's research has been published in the Financial Analysts Journal, The Journal of Portfolio Management, The Journal of Finance, and many other leading journals. He is a member of the Editorial Board of the Financial Analysts Journal, the Advisory Board of The Journal of Portfolio Management and the Journal of Investment Consulting, and is an associate editor of several other professional journals. The recipient of a Batterymarch Fellowship and three Graham and Dodd Awards of Excellence, Professor Statman has consulted with many investment companies and presented his work to academics and professionals in many forums in the U.S. and abroad.


Photo: Getty

Almost everyone starts a new year with plans to exercise more - getting fit is a perennial resolution. But it's not just squats and sweat that deliver results. Some of the most important exercise can happen within.

Having a healthy body doesn't protect you from self-doubt, says yoga therapist and counsellor, Nikola Ellis. “You can reach all your fitness goals and still feel inadequate,” she says. “Feeling good comes from the inside.”

For a new you, shift your focus from toning your abs or losing weight to building emotional core strength and losing self-doubt with this inner workout.

Accept who you are

Self-acceptance is crucial to wellbeing, says Ellis. “It's part of a process of coming to terms with reality rather than living in the past or projecting into the future, both of which will make you miserable.” However, accepting who you are isn't the same as resigning yourself to things you don't like. “Failing to accept your current reality makes it harder to move forward.”

Life coach Kirri White agrees. “Part of self-acceptance is accepting that we all have flaws and we shouldn't try to suppress them,” she explains. To build emotional strength we must first develop a greater self-awareness. “Developing self-awareness begins by knowing what's important to you. Follow your inner compass and behave in a way that is consistent with your values and purpose,” says White.

Practice gratitude

Practicing gratitude is a highly effective tool for developing your inner self, explains White. “Many people begin the year with dreams of wanting more,” she says. “While wanting more is great, we will never be fulfilled if we fail to appreciate what we already have.”

We can train our minds to be more optimistic and more grateful, says White. To achieve this, really pay attention when something great happens. “Sit in that place of gratitude and create a 'mind movie' of the experience,” she suggests. At the end of the day replay that moment of happiness and notice how you feel about it. “By mentally recording the moment you are able to hold on to the experience which makes it more significant.”

Boost your confidence

Comparisons are confidence crushers, White says. “There's always going to be someone who appears more successful than you and when you focus on that you start to feel less than them,” she explains, adding that comparisons are particularly unhelpful on social media. “We are often just getting the highlights reel; it's a really subjective experience.”

Ellis agrees that comparing ourselves with others is a slippery slope, adding that patterns of self-doubt start early. “We're taught from childhood to compare ourselves with others, from the exam hall to the sports field, and nobody can be the winner all the time,” she says. The first step towards breaking this cycle is awareness. “When you become aware of these repetitive patterns, you are more able to take control of them.”

Awareness of the inner critic is also vital. The key is to transform that negativity into self-belief, explains White. Catch yourself thinking those negative thoughts and question them. By doing this you can talk back to them and argue against them. “See the inner critic as a younger version of yourself, trying to protect you. Respond with compassion and reassure your younger self that you're going to be OK.”

Still the mind

Just as it's important to exercise our brains, it's equally important for our minds to be still. According to Ellis, meditation is the ultimate inner workout. “Numerous studies have shown that meditation reduces stress, anxiety and pain, and improves sleep, energy levels and overall wellbeing,” she explains.

Consciously taking time out for just five minutes will have enormous benefits for your mental health. “If sitting quietly is too daunting, try a guided meditation,” she suggests. “Much like a gym workout, it might seem tough at first. However, with a bit of practice, you'll find that you really look forward to those moments of inner bliss.”

If sitting quietly isn't for you, yoga is also an effective tool for cultivating self-acceptance and inner strength. “Yoga is a system of psychology that uses physical movement to positively influence the mind,” says Ellis. Put simply, it can help override the negative stories in your head.

An inner workout, much like physical exercise, needs to be sustained, says Ellis. “You have to work at it daily to feel good on the inside. It's a truism that when you change your mind, you change your life.”


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Planning 101

An Introduction to Comprehensive Planning

What is a comprehensive plan?
Comprehensive plans often address the topics of land use; economic development; neighborhoods; urban design; infrastructure, transportation, and mobility; parks, open space, and the environment; and special districts within the city.  Most important, the plan should address opportunities and issues that are likely to affect the city's future growth, development, and vitality.

Why have we created the Envision Garland 2030 Comprehensive Plan?
The City of Garland is legally required to have and maintain a comprehensive plan.  Garland's first comprehensive plan was developed in the 1960s.  Another plan was developed in the 1980s and had been periodically updated.  Envision Garland is the current comprehensive plan, which addresses the community's future through the year 2030.

How will Envision Garland affect my property?
Envision Garland does not impact current zoning regulations or property usage.  It reflects the community's vision for its future and provides a guide for making future decisions through goals, policies, and strategies outlined in the plan.

How has the public been involved in Envision Garland?
Garland residents, businesses, property owners, and the City of Garland worked together on Envision Garland for over two years; several hundred Garland stakeholders particiapted in its development.  Their hopes and vision for our community's future were sought by the City through surveys, community workshops, and other public outreach activities.  Local Garland stakeholder input and vision are the foundation of Envision Garland;  that public participation and support was invaluable and is reflected throughout the document.

A summary of public input methods and events can be found in background information found on the Document Library page.  Additional information about the public input process can be reviewed in the plan document itself.  The Plan Commission and City Council hosted a series of public hearings to discuss the Envision Garland draft document. These public hearings were televised on CGTV and can now be viewed on CGTV's Streaming Video website

How will Envision Garland be accomplished?

Will there be updates to Envision Garland?  When?
Yes, updates will occur periodically over the 20-year lifespan of Envision Garland.  A five-year update cycle is not uncommon; however, the frequency of comprehensive plan updates depends on the particular community and related economic and physical factors, such as changes in population numbers and composition; construction and development; and general employment and economic conditions.

All downloadable documents are in Adobe PDF format, unless otherwise noted.


Reaction Times to Light Stimulus Before and After Exercise

Brian Head, Justin Busch, Tyler Bies

CU Boulder, Fall 2007

         A study conducted by the department of human physiology at the University of Brussels found that physical exercise influences neurotransmitters in the brain3. It is also known that exercise increases blood flow and oxygen levels throughout the body.  Our experiment was designed to test whether these physiological changes had any effect on reaction times. Reactions can be thought of as an information pathway: information is received by a sense, in this case visual, and is immediately sent to the brain where it is processed.  Then an appropriate response signal is sent via neurological pathway to the muscles causing a reaction. For this experiment it is presumed that physiological changes in the brain caused by exercise are indicated by a raised heart rate1. We hypothesized that the physiological changes induced by exercise would have an effect on reaction times.

            We selected 5 different subjects who were college-aged (18-25) and in visibly good health. For each trial, the subjects reacted to 10 random lights, before and after exercise, by pressing the button that corresponded to the appropriate light stimulus. To limit some variation all subjects were instructed to place their hand on the table rather than Reaction Timer (RT) prior to the stimuli. The mode of exercise used to increase blood pressure was 20 consecutive jumping jacks. To confirm that physiological changes had indeed taken place, we measured heart rate in Beats per Minute (BPM) before and after exercise.

            The results of our experiment showed that the reaction time after exercise (mean = 0.498 seconds) was significantly shorter than the reaction time before exercise (mean = 0.545 seconds); (t = 2.242, P = .0114 < .05).

            After comparing both means we found that they were statistically different, and thus support for our hypothesis. However, a problem with our experiment may have been caused by using random lights. Through experimentation, it became apparent that sometimes the subject missed the light that he/she was reaching for, resulting in an inflated reaction time. In other words, hand-eye coordination was being tested along with reaction times. The best way to fix this problem would have been to use only one light, and let the subject rest his/her finger on the button, thus eliminating the hand-eye coordination variable. While there were no other experiments that resembled ours on the CABLE web site, a study by Sanchez et al.2 , confirmed our results by showing a significant decrease in reaction times with exercise. It is clear that reaction times are improved by exercise, but do they directly correlate to better choices made by an athlete? For example, does a NFL running back make better choices because his reaction times are decreased? Are the faster reaction times a benefit or a detriment to his choices, directions, or routes to the end zone? This is no doubt an intriguing question for sports sciences and would offer a compelling area for further study.

1.              Filipovsky J, Ducimetiere P, Safar ME: Prognostic significance of exercise     blood pressure and heart rate in middle-aged men. Hypertension 1992,         20:333–339

2.              Shanchez X, Barnes K.J., Jones M.A.: The effect of exercise intensity on        visual choice reaction times performances.(Part V. psychology).       Journal of Sports Sciences. Feb 2005, 23.2:156

3.              Mueensen R, Meirleir K: Exercise and Brain Neurotransmission. Journal

Of Sports Medicine. Sep 1995, 3:160-188


Cellular modems provide wireless data communication over worldwide cellular networks.

All modems modulate an original analog signal (such as a human voice) in order to transmit it to a specific destination. When the signal reaches the destination it is then demodulated back to the original signal. (The term "modem" is actually a portmanteau of these two concepts: "modulation-demodulation.") In cellular modems, the destination for the modulated signal is a cellular tower; the tower then retransmits the signal to cellular phones, tablet computers, and other wireless devices. The source for a cellular modem's signal is usually a computer or similar digital device.

Cellular modems may use one of several different network types, including Global System for Mobile (GSM), 3G, 4G, and Code Division Multiple Access (CDMA). In terms of form factor they may exist as external (requiring a physical computer port to operate) or as an embedded card within a computer's hardware.

cellular modems selection guide

A cellular modem within an industrial cellular network. Image credit: SixNet


 Plot To Punctuation, LLC: editing services by Jason Black
Plot to Punctuation Logo

Who is the Robin to your novel's Batman?

Ah, sidekicks. Those indispensable minor characters who, if you do them right, can add life to a book or even threaten to steal the show. Sidekicks come in two basic forms: new friends and old friends. Each has different applications in story-craft.

Make new friends

Sidekicks are often new acquaintances for your main character. There is a lot to be said for these new friends. They give you many wonderful opportunities for showing your readers what your main character is all about. New friends can act as stand-ins for your reader. They learn about your protagonist at the same time your readers do. New friends also create opportunities for mystery and drama.

New friends mean new relationships. When a relationship starts, platonic or otherwise, both parties must share of themselves in order to build trust with the other. What they choose to share and how they share it speaks volumes. Is your main character warm and open with this new friend, inviting and generous with his or her time and attention? Or is your main character stand-offish, closed and guarded, seeming always to give the new sidekick the brush-off as quickly as possible? These types of personality traits, ones that have to do with how people treat one another, can be shown very clearly in watching a character develop a relationship with a new sidekick.

New friends are clueless. I don’t mean they’re stupid (and I hope they’re not), they’re simply not up to speed on your main character’s life. The sidekick hasn’t yet learned what the protagonist can do, what he knows, what he has been through, what practical and political realities matter to the protagonist’s life. This is wonderful, because it gives you natural opportunities to explain things to the reader while the protagonist is explaining it to the sidekick, without resorting to an infodump. If the reader truly needs to know that the bridge leading into town was built by a sleazy, lowball contractor, chances are the sidekick does too. And if the sidekick is a new friend from out of town, the protagonist has every reason in the world to explain it. It feels natural because, in that situation, it is.

But, as unknown as the new friend is to the protagonist, the reverse is also true. The protagonist starts out clueless about the sidekick. The sidekick must work to earn the protagonist’s trust and the reader’s trust as well. This gives you the delicious opportunity to create some drama and mystery, if that’s appropriate for your story, as the protagonist wonders whether the sidekick is on the up-and-up.

Especially in mysteries crime dramas, and other such mainstream genres, dangling the tantalizing possibility that a trusted sidekick might really be a spy, a mole, or a back-stabber can really ratchet up the drama in the book. In this situation, it is the protagonist who is the stand-in for the reader. That’s half the fun of reading an engaging novel, taking turns putting yourself into the shoes of different characters.

But keep the old

Old friends, sidekicks who are presumed to be well acquainted with the protagonist when the book starts, are tremendously useful but give you different options and challenges.

Old friends already have a rapport with your protagonist. They’ve been pals for a long time, so readers will naturally expect your protagonist to behave more openly and honestly with this type of sidekick. How your protagonist acts around his old friend—and how he interacts with that old friend—indicates his true personality. But be warned: it isn’t always easy to portray a well-established friendship because you, the writer, haven’t lived that particular relationship yourself. You have to invent and stay true to the myriad in-jokes and verbal shortcuts that old friends have with each other. Either that, or borrow these markers of deep friendship from your own life.

Old friends are also a smooth vehicle for revealing your protagonist’s backstory, because the old friend already knows it and can refer to it. Your old friends already know all your dirty laundry. Not only have they already seen the skeletons in your closet, they probably know how those bones got there. This means that in times when your protagonist is wrestling with a choice or trying to figure out how to proceed, the old friend can quite naturally bring up some relevant fact from the protagonist’s background. You can show this fact to the reader in the course of reminding the protagonist about it. Take care not to go overboard—the old friend will merely refer to this fact, he won’t recount the story in full detail. After all, the protagonist has his own memory of it. You need to keep the dialogue short and to the point; make it revealing without being overly explicit.

There is a danger with old friends, though: readers don’t know about them until you introduce them to the story. If you introduce a supposed old friend late in the story at a point where that friend’s influence or connections or resources are suddenly of critical importance to your protagonist, but the reader has never heard of this person before, it falls flat. It feels like a deus ex machina solution to a plot problem, rather than a character naturally calling on his network of friends and acquaintances in time of need.

Old friends can present a problem for writers, because on the one hand people do have old friends who they are very close to, but who they may only see on rare occasions. Never the less, these old friends still have strong connections to us through our past. The same is presumably true for any protagonist who is old enough to have a past.

For example, if I needed a piece of legal advice I could call up my friend Mike from High School, who I haven’t seen in quite some time. He’d probably take my call and help me out. But if an observer in the story of my life had no idea Mike existed, this would be a surprising and too-convenient thing for me to do. The observer—and your reader—will be much less surprised and much more likely to believe this had Mike been introduced earlier in the story.

It’s a fine line between introducing the friend early and often enough so as to be believable when the need for that friend’s help arises, while not giving that friend so much screen time throughout the story that you telegraph the friend’s ultimate importance. You have to be believable, without undermining the drama.

One is silver, and the other gold

The eyes may be the window to the soul, but relationships can be a big bay window to the personality. Use sidekicks, whether new friends or old, and the relationships they have to your protagonists to show readers what makes your protagonists tick.

March 05, 2010 20:03 UTC

Tags: character, sidekicks, relationships, trust, backstory, infodumps, batman, robin

Three ways relationships can reveal your characters

Characters are never alone. You ever notice that? Abbot had Costello, Lucy had Ricky, Holmes had Watson, and Gilligan had The Skipper. Why is this? Psychologically it’s because people are social creatures. We go better together. Some part of us needs to be able to share our thoughts and feelings with others. But as writers, we create sidekicks and foils because relationships are a marvelous tool for revealing your characters.

Even characters who seem alone, aren’t. There’s always a sidekick, even if it isn’t human. Tom Hanks, in Cast Away, had his volleyball. Bruce Dern’s character in the Sci-Fi classic Silent Running had three cute little robots with him. And of course, Keir Dullea’s murderous computer nemesis in 2001: A Space Odyssey needs no explanation at all. Those characters’ sidekicks weren’t people, but they still provided a relationship that revealed a lot about the character.

You could probably write a whole book on this, but let me instead just give three highlights, three quick methods for using relationships to show what kind of people your characters are.

Use shared or borrowed goals

Any time you have one character seeking to enter the good graces of another, it can work well to have that character adopt as his own something that is a goal for the other character. You might have your love-struck hero take up volunteering at an animal shelter, because he learns that the girl he’s sweet on has a soft spot for homeless animals. He might even adopt a sad, mangy dog, despite his own allergies (they’ve got pills for that, right?) just to impress her.

Although this technique is particularly apt for unrequited love, it works for other situations too. Not long ago, I finished Michael Snyder’s book Return Policy, in which there’s a sub-plot about one character seeking to land a promotion by voluntarily taking on a tedious, boring data entry job that everyone else in her office has been avoiding. It means longer hours, time away from her son, but she knows it will make her manager look good and hopes it will tip the scales toward her.

Let relationships reveal deeper motivations

Relationships always have levels to them. For example, you might have a character who is always creating little competitions between himself and his friends. His notion is that he’s creating opportunities for fun and that this will make people like him. How he reacts says a lot: is he gracious in victory and defeat, or obnoxious in victory and a sore loser to boot? How his friends react should be very telling, too: are they in fact having fun, or are they annoyed? It’s this interaction between the characters that is your vehicle for showing the primary character’s competitive streak. How the relationship plays out on the page says everything.

Or going back to the love-struck mangy dog owner, while that behavior may seem sweet and fawning at first, there’s a darker side lurking underneath. It is ultimately selfish: he doesn’t actually care about the dog, except to the extent that the dog can help win him the girl. And how disrespectful he must be of her, if he thinks she’s dumb enough to be manipulated in that way, or that she won’t see right through him. Does he even actually love her for herself? If he’s so willing to alter his outward image—and mask his inward nature—to impress her, perhaps he is more attracted to his outward image of her than to the person she is underneath.

The levels inherent in any relationship are a great source of surprises. Affection can mask selfishness. Competition can mask self-importance. Actions that seem driven by one motive can, in fact, be hiding a deeper and completely opposite motive. Revealing those deeper motives can make for wonderful dramatic reversals. It’s the best way to surprise a reader, by letting them learn something new about your characters that they didn’t necessarily expect.

Show multiple points of view

Finally, as I wrote last month, nobody sees themselves the same as other people see them. If your story has multiple POV characters, you can readily exploit this to show the contrast. For example, the competitive boy sees his competitive habit as an attempt to create fun between himself and his friends. But his friends, who have grown weary of seeing who can throw a crumpled napkin into the trash can from the farthest away, see it as something else: annoying egotism.

There’s an opportunity with multiple POVs, though, that goes deeper than simply showing a contrast between some character’s self-opinion and how others see him, and it’s one you shouldn’t miss out on. Try to show the contrast in a way that creates mystery rather than solves it. That is to say, when you’re done showing both parties’ view of the situation, have you left the reader wondering who is right?

If so, you have a wonderful opportunity to also create a great dramatic reversal: Solve the mystery a few chapters later by springing yet another layer on the reader, revealing that nobody is right! Reveal that he’s not as fun-loving as he thinks he is, but neither is he as egotistic as his friends think. Rather, they’re both wrong: deep down he’s just insecure. Beyond the fun-and-games facade, underneath the ego, he creates all these competitive situations because really he’s struggling to reassure himself of his own abilities.

It’s not a meaningless reversal, of course. It’s not there just to keep the reader guessing. To really work, it had better be part of a meaningful character arc. But I hope that at least gives you gives a taste of how these strategies—just like people—go better together than alone.

November 09, 2009 21:50 UTC

Tags: character, relationships, Michael Snyder, goals, reversals

Do you know the real reason not to use passive voice?

Passive voice hides your characters from view.

September 03, 2009 23:49 UTC

For older posts, see archive links in the sidebar


Peggin Lite

The Ultimate Peg Game!

Features Include:
-normal gameplay
-saves your record
-Hint that highlights an available peg to be moved
-Labels that show the number of possible moves and the pegs remaining

-Pick a starting peg to remove (peg will disappear)
-Select the peg you wish to move and then the hole you want it to move to (only a valid move will occur)
-Continue moving until no valid moves remain

Upgrade Includes:
-peg and board color selection
-Includes HOW TO WIN simulator that guides the user through each step to show them how to only leave one (works for any given starting peg)


Why Choose a BCIA-Certified Professional?

Why Choose a BCIA-Certified Professional?

BCIA-certified professionals are internationally respected for seven reasons.

1. BCIA is a non-profit institute that has been an effective advocate for our field. The American Psychological Association (APA) has recognized biofeedback as a proficiency in professional psychology because of the petition that BCIA filed with them. BCIA has been dedicated to a singular mission since 1981:

    "BCIA certifies individuals who meet education and training standards in biofeedback and
     progressively recertifies those who advance their knowledge through continuing education."

2. BCIA's biofeedback certification is the only program that is recognized by the three major international membership organizations: the Association for Applied Psychophysiology and Biofeedback (AAPB), the Biofeedback Foundation of Europe (BFE), and the International Society for Neurofeedback and Research (ISNR).

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Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Ayn Alissa Rand (1905—1982)

randAyn Rand was a major intellectual of the twentieth century. Born in Russia in 1905 and educated there, she immigrated to the United States after graduating from the university, where she studied history, politics, philosophy, and literature. Rand had always found capitalism and the individualism of the United States a welcome alternative to the corrupt and negative socialism of Russia. Upon becoming proficient in English and establishing herself as a writer in the U.S., she became a passionate advocate of her philosophy, Objectivism.

Rand’s philosophy is in the Aristotelian tradition, with that tradition’s emphasis upon metaphysical naturalism, empirical reason in epistemology, and self-realization in ethics.  Objectivism is rational self-interest and self-responsibility – the idea that no person is any other person’s slave. The virtues of her philosophy are principled policies based on rational assessment: rationality, productiveness, honesty (in order to rationally make the best decisions we must be privy to the facts), integrity, independence, justice, and pride.

She wrote both technical and popular works of philosophy, and she presented her philosophy in both fictional and non-fictional forms, the most philosophically complete and popular of which are Atlas Shrugged and Fountainhead. Her philosophy has influenced several generations of academics and public intellectuals, as well as having had widespread popular appeal.

Table of Contents

  1. Life
  2. Rand’s Ethical Theory: The Virtue of Selfishness
    1. Reason and Ethics
    2. Conflicts of Interest
  3. Rand’s Influence
  4. References and Further Reading

1. Life

Ayn Rand’s life was often as colorful as those of her heroes in her best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Rand first made her name as a novelist, publishing We the Living in 1936, The Fountainhead in 1943, and her magnum opus Atlas Shrugged in 1957. These philosophical novels embodied themes she then developed in non-fiction form in a series of essays and books written in the 1960s and 1970s.

Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, on February 2, 1905, Rand was raised in a middle-class family. As a child, she loved story-telling, and she decided at age nine to become a writer. In school she showed academic promise, particularly in mathematics. Her family was devastated by the communist revolution of 1917, both by the social upheavals that the revolution and the ensuing civil war brought and by her father’s pharmacy’s being confiscated by the Soviets. The family moved to the Crimea to recover financially and to escape the harshness of life the revolution brought to St. Petersburg. They later returned to Petrograd (the new name given to St. Petersburg by the Soviets), where Rand was to attend university.

Having studied American history and politics in university, and having long been an admirer of Western plays, music, and movies, she became an admirer of America’s individualism, its vigor, and its optimism, seeing it as the opposite of Russian collectivism, decay, and gloom. Not believing, however, that she would be free under the Soviet system to write the kinds of books she wanted to write, she resolved to leave Russia and go to America.

Rand graduated from the University of Petrograd in 1924. She then enrolled at the State Institute for Cinema Arts in order to study screen writing. In 1925, she finally received permission from the Soviet authorities to leave the country in order to visit relatives in the United States. Officially, her visit was to be brief; Rand, however, had already decided not to return to the Soviet Union.

On Rand’s second day in Hollywood, an event occurred that was worthy of her dramatic fiction and one that had a major impact on her future. She was spotted by Cecil B. DeMille, one of Hollywood’s leading directors, while she was standing at the gate of his studio. She had recognized him as he was passing by in his car, and he had noticed her staring at him. He stopped to ask why she was staring, and Rand explained that she had recently arrived from Russia, that she had long been passionate about Hollywood movies, and that she dreamed of being a screen writer. DeMille was then working on “The King of Kings,” and gave her a ride to his movie set and signed her on as an extra. Then, during her second week at DeMille’s studio, another significant event occurred: Rand met Frank O’Connor, a young actor also working as an extra. Rand and O’Connor were married in 1929, and they remained married for fifty years until his death in 1979.

As with We the Living, Rand had difficulties getting The Fountainhead published. Twelve publishers rejected it before being published by Bobbs-Merrill in 1943. Again not well received by reviewers and intellectuals, the novel nonetheless became a best-seller, primarily through word-of-mouth recommendation. The Fountainhead made Rand famous as an exponent of individualist ideas, and its continuing to sell well brought her financial security. Warner Brothers produced a movie version of the novel in 1949, starring Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal, for which Rand wrote the screenplay.

In 1946, Rand began work on her most ambitious novel, Atlas Shrugged. At the time she was working part-time as a screenwriter for producer Hal Wallis. In 1951 she and her husband moved to New York City, where she began to work full-time on Atlas. Published by Random House in 1957, Atlas Shrugged is her most complete expression of her literary and philosophical vision. Dramatized in the form of a mystery story about a man who stopped the motor of the world, the plot and characters embody the political and ethical themes first developed in We the Living and The Fountainhead, and integrates them into a comprehensive philosophy including metaphysics, epistemology, economics, and the psychology of love and sex.

From 1962 until 1976, Rand wrote and lectured on her philosophy, now named “Objectivism.” Her essays were during this period were mostly published in a series of periodicals, The Objectivist Newsletter, published from 1962 to 1965, the larger periodical The Objectivist, published from 1966 to 1971, and then The Ayn Rand Letter, published from 1971 to 1976. The essays written for these periodicals form the core material for a series of nine non-fiction books published during Rand’s lifetime. Those books develop Rand’s philosophy in all its major categories and apply it to cultural issues. Perhaps the most significant of the books are The Virtue of Selfishness, which develops her ethical theory, Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, devoted to political and economic theory, Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, a systematic presentation of her theory of concepts, and The Romantic Manifesto, a theory of aesthetics.

During the 1960s Rand’s most significant professional relationship was with Nathaniel Branden. Branden, author of The Psychology of Self-Esteem and later known as a leader in the self-esteem movement in psychology, wrote many essays on philosophical and psychological topics that were published in Rand’s books and periodicals. He was the founder and head of the Nathaniel Branden Institute, the leading Objectivist institution of the 1960s. Based in New York City, N.B.I. published with Rand’s sanction numerous Objectivist periodicals and pamphlets, and gave many series of lectures live in New York which were then distributed on tape around the United States and the rest of the world. The rapid growth of N.B.I. and the Objectivist movement came to a halt in 1968 when, for both professional and personal reasons, Rand and Branden parted ways.

2. Rand’s Ethical Theory: The Virtue of Selfishness

a. Reason and Ethics

Thus Rand advocates rational self interest: one’s interests are not whatever one happens to feel like; rather it is by reason that one identifies what is to one’s interest and what isn’t. By the use of reason one takes into account all of the factors one can identify, projects the consequences of potential courses of action, and adopts principled policies of action.

One such virtue is rationality: having identified the use of reason as fundamentally good, being committed to acting in accordance with reason is the virtue of rationality. Another virtue is productiveness: given that the values one needs to survive must be produced, being committed to producing those values is the virtue of productiveness. Another is honesty: given that facts are facts and that one’s life depends on knowing and acting in accordance with the facts, being committed to awareness of the facts is the virtue of honesty.

Independence and integrity are also core virtues for Rand’s account of self interest. Given that one must think and act by one’s own efforts, being committed to the policy of independent action is a virtue. And given that one must both identify what is to one’s interests and act to achieve them, a policy of being committed to acting on the basis of one’s beliefs is the virtue of integrity. The opposite policy of believing one thing and doing another is of course the vice of hypocrisy; hypocrisy is a policy of self-destruction, on Rand’s view.

The moral person, in summary, on Rand’s account, is someone who acts and is committed to acting in his best self-interest. It is by living the morality of self interest that one survives, flourishes, and achieves happiness.

This account of self interest is currently a minority position. The contrasting view typically pits self interest against morality, holding that one is moral only to the extent that one sacrifices one’s self interest for the sake of others or, more moderately, to the extent one acts primarily with regard to the interests of others. For example, standard versions of morality will hold that one is moral to the extent one sets aside one’s own interests in order to serve God, or the weak and the poor, or society as a whole. On these accounts, the interests of God, the poor, or society as a whole are held to be of greater moral significance that one’s own, and so accordingly one’s interests should be sacrificed when necessary. These ethics of selflessness thus believe that one should see oneself fundamentally as a servant, as existing to serve the interests of others, not one’s own. “Selfless service to others” or “selfless sacrifice” are stock phrases indicating these accounts’ view of appropriate motivation and action.

The core difference between Rand’s self interest view and the selfless view can be seen in the reason why most advocates of selflessness think self interest is dangerous: conflicts of interest.

b. Conflicts of Interest

Traditional ethics takes conflicts of interest to be fundamental to the human condition, and takes ethics to be the solution: basic ethical principles are to tell us whose interests should be sacrificed in order to resolve the conflicts. If there is, for example, a fundamental conflict between what God wants and what humans naturally want, then religious ethics will make fundamental the principle that human wants should be sacrificed for God’s. If there’s a fundamental conflict between what society needs and what individuals want, then some versions of secular ethics will make fundamental the principle that the individual’s wants should be sacrificed for society’s.

Taking conflicts of interest to be fundamental almost always stems from one of two beliefs: that human nature is fundamentally destructive or that economic resources are scarce. If human nature is fundamentally destructive, then humans are naturally in conflict with each other. Many ethical philosophies start from this premise – for example, Plato’s myth of Gyges, Jewish and Christian accounts of Original Sin, or Freud’s account of the id. If what individuals naturally want to do to each other is rape, steal, and kill, then in order to have society these individual desires need to be sacrificed. Consequently, a basic principle of ethics will be to urge individuals to suppress their natural desires so that society can exist. In other words, self interest is the enemy, and must be sacrificed for others.

If economic resources are scarce, then there is not enough to go around. This scarcity then puts human beings in fundamental conflict with each other: for one individual’s need to be satisfied, another’s must be sacrificed. Many ethical philosophies begin with this premise. For example, followers of Thomas Malthus’s theory that population growth outstrips growth in the food supply fall into this category. Karl Marx’s account of capitalist society is that brutal competition leads to the exploitation of some by others. Garret Hardin’s famous use of the lifeboat analogy asks us to imagine that society is like a lifeboat with more people that its resources can support. And so in order to solve the destructive competition the lack of resources leads us to, a basic principle of ethics will be to urge individuals to sacrifice their interests in obtaining more (or even some) so that others may obtain more (or some) and society can exist peacefully. In others words, in a situation of scarcity self interest is the enemy and must be sacrificed for others.

Rand rejects both the scarce resources and destructive human nature premises. Human beings are not born in sin or with destructive desires; nor do they necessarily acquire them in the course of growing to maturity. Instead one is born tabula rasa (“blank slate”), and through one’s choices and actions one acquires one’s character traits and habits. As Rand phrased it, “Man is a being of self-made soul.” Having chronic desires to steal, rape, or kill others are the result of mistaken development and the acquisition of bad habits, just as are chronic laziness or the habit of eating too much junk food. And just as one is not born lazy but can by one’s choices develop oneself into a person of vigor or sloth, one is not born anti-social but can by one’s choices develop oneself into a person of cooperativeness or conflict.

Nor are resources scarce in any fundamental way, according to Rand. By the use of reason, humans can discover new resources and how to use existing resources more efficiently, including recycling where appropriate and making productive processes more efficient. Humans have for example continually discovered and developed new energy resources, from animals to wood to coal to oil to nuclear to solar; and there is no end in sight to this process. At any given moment, the available resources are a fixed amount, but over time the stock of resources are and have been constantly expanding.

Because humans are rational they can produce an ever-expanding number of goods, and so human interests do not fundamentally conflict with each other. Instead Rand holds that the exact opposite is true: since humans can and should be productive, human interests are deeply in harmony with each other. For example, my producing more corn is in harmony with your producing more peas, for by our both being productive and trading with each other we are both better off. It is to your interest that I be successful in producing more corn, just as it is to my interest that you be successful in producing more peas.

Conflicts of interest do exist within a narrower scope of focus. For example, in the immediate present available resources are more fixed, and so competition for those resources results, and competition produces winners and losers. Economic competition, however, is a broader form of cooperation, a way socially to allocate resources without resorting to physical force and violence. By competition, resources are allocated efficiently and peacefully, and in the long run more resources are produced. Thus, a competitive economic system is in the self interest of all of us.

Accordingly, Rand argues that her ethic of self interest is the basis for personal happiness and free and prosperous societies.

3. Rand’s Influence

The impact of Rand’s ideas is difficult to measure, but it has been great. All of the books she published during her lifetime are still in print, have sold more than twenty million copies, and continue to sell hundreds of thousands of copies each year. A survey jointly conducted by the Library of Congress and the Book of the Month Club early in the 1990s asked readers to name the book that had most influenced their lives: Atlas Shrugged was second only to the Bible. Excerpts from Rand’s works are regularly reprinted in college textbooks and anthologies, and several volumes have been published posthumously containing her early writings, journals, and letters. Those inspired by her ideas have published books in many academic fields and founded several institutes. Noteworthy among these are the Cato Institute, based in Washington, D.C., the leading libertarian think tank in the world. Rand, along with Nobel Prize-winners Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, was highly instrumental in attracting generations of individuals to the libertarian movement. Also noteworthy are the Ayn Rand Institute, founded in 1985 by philosopher Leonard Peikoff and based in California, and The Objectivist Center, founded in 1990 by philosopher David Kelley and based in New York.

4. References and Further Reading

  • Branden, Nathaniel. The Psychology of Self-Esteem. Los Angeles: Nash Publishing, 1969.
  • Kelley, David. The Evidence of the Senses. Baton Rouge: L.S.U. Press, 1986.
    • Written by a philosopher, this is a scholarly work in epistemology, focusing on the foundational role the senses play in human knowledge.
    • This is the first comprehensive overview of all aspects of Objectivist philosophy, written by the philosopher most close to Rand during her lifetime.
    • Rand’s magnum opus of fiction.
  • Rand, Ayn.Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal. New American Library, 1967.
    • Rand’s theory of concept-formation. Also includes an essay by philosopher Leonard Peikoff on the analytic/synthetic distinction.
    • A collection of Rand’s essays on the nature and significance of philosophy.
  • Rand, Ayn.The Romantic Manifesto. World Publishing, 1969. Paperback edition: New American Library, 1971.
    • A scholarly work by an economist, developing capitalist economic theory and connecting it to Objectivist philosophy.

Author Information

Stephen R. C. Hicks
Rockford College
U. S. A.

Last updated: July 7, 2005 | Originally published:


Alter, Ehrlich, Bundist Leaders, Reported Re-arrested in Russia

Victor Alter and Henryk Ehrlich, Polish Jewish Socialist Bund leaders, recently released from imprisonment in the Soviet Union, have been re-arrested, it was officially reported here today.

According to Dr. Ignacy Schwartzbart, who was officially informed of the arrests, the reason why Alter and Ehrlich were taken into custody by the Russi ans is not known, nor is there any information available as to where they are incarcerated. Efforts by Polish officials in Russia to secure their release have been so far unavailing, Dr. Schwatzbart learned.