Motoneurons!

What was special about Einstein's brain?

It is a question that nags anyone who has reflected upon the brain, be they professional looker-at or simple armchair neurophysiologist. Just what was it that made Einstein Einstein? If there is one brain that defines smart, Albert had it. If we're going to finger the spark, divine the wellspring, that's the noggin to look in. Yes we may hope to develop it in ourselves, but if not then just to know the answer. What was it? What was special?

Weight? Normal. Shape? Normal. Taste? Delicious!

Okay, I made up that last one. But it's true: Einstein's brain has been studied and found to be, well, unremarkable. One might imagine getting inside that haloed head and finding a munificent instrument -- a cathedral of gyri and sulci, eternal verities of the universe made flesh. Alas, postmortem examination of Einstein's brain found it to be largely indistinguishable from the pork chop the rest of us have rattling around between our ears.

With one exception.

Neurons suck

I rarely embed videos here at LabKitty even though all the Blogging fer Dummies books recommend doing so because shiny object. I like to think my traffic is a more refined lot, one who prefers long ranting text bricks about whatever esoterica is driving me this morn. I also don't embed video because Google changes their embedding HTML like my sister changes boyfriends (known throughout the Circle Pines metro area as the "one hitter quitter"). If anything screams blogging fer dummies, it's a dead video link.

Today I make an exception. This because Rafael Yuste and Christophe Dupre (Columbia) recently published an extraordinary result and took the extra PR step to post about it on YouTube.

Here's the vid (fingers crossed):

What you are viewing is the entire nervous system of a live hydra at work. By "entire" I do mean entire. Yuste and Dupre conjured gene magic that makes the hydra transparent and its neurons glow (Corrigendum: Apparently hydra come transparent out of the box. However, the glowy thing is an upgrade). Each flash in the video is one neuron firing. The accompanying everything else is the hydra doing hydra stuff.

This is what we (well, I) in the brain biz call the Niels Bohr Brass Ring of Neuroscience. It comes from Bohr's famous carp Nur die Fülle führt zur Klarheit. Only wholeness leads to clarity. Plainly translated: The brain is so complicated that no matter how many individual or group neuron recordings you make, no matter how skilled your experiment or analysis, it will never tell us what is really Going On. Ergo, somebody best figure out a way to record the whole thing at once. (Bohr was carping about Quantum Mechanics not Neuroscience, but what is Quantum Mechanics if not applied Neuroscience?)

With the advent of glowy hydra, we finally have an experimental platform in which we can record an entire nervous system -- every last neuron -- at the individual cell level and all at once. Bold revelations about biological information processing can't help but follow.

In fact, a casual viewing of the video already tells us one thing above all else.

As far as processing power goes, neurons suck.

LabKitty Recommends: Principles of Brain Evolution -- Georg Striedter

Things are they way they are because they got that way. A remarkably simple idea that explains the complexity of the world. Of course it's true. You need only break open the nearest vertebrate and count cranial nerves to be convinced. And it's a far more satisfying explanation than my Circle Pines VBS could muster, not to mention the shrill shrieking daughters who regularly prowl campus with their mini-wheat bibles railing against the evils of academics, what with our discovering longer-lasting lightbulbs and cures for diseases and whatnot. Say what you will about Darwinists, at least they never bombed a church or flew an airplane into a skyscraper to impress their god.

Still, there are many gaps to fill when considering how we went from amino acids to Shakespeare. This keeps bookstores and libraries well-stocked with evolution titles of every stripe and spot. Alas, I find most of these to be insufferable. Case in point: On the Origin of Species. I've tried to read OtOoS. I really have. It's pretty much required if you want to be taken seriously by the inhaler-and-pocket-protector crowd. But, like the Principia, I just couldn't power through it. The latter because I didn't purchase a Newton-to-reality decoder ring, and Darwin's epic because I couldn't stay awake. How can something so wondrous be made so dull? Beak lengths? Seriously, dude? Darwin could crush the fun out of going to the Moulin Rouge on two-fer night. He's like Malthus for people who find Malthus too randy.

But use cyprinid vagal lobe cytoarchitecture to argue lamination emerged repeatedly during speciation because it's an efficient synaptic geometry and you got a stew goin' baby. So I was muy pleased to recently come across Georg Striedter's (UC Davis) romp through my wheelhouse. In his Principles of Brain Evolution, he sets out to establish, well, principles of brain evolution. How that information processing porkchop in your noggin came to be. How is it different from other brains? What makes mammals special among the vertebrates, primates special among mammals, and humans special among primates?

JCortex -- A Free Gift for You!

Einstein once famously lamented: Now that the mathematicians have got hold of my theory, I myself no longer understand it. This seems to have been a genuine sentiment and not just the usual big-shot faux humility (Feynman, for example, was also famous for eschewing obfuscation, apparently forgetting his Nobel was based on infinite dimensional path integrals in Banach space). Indeed, I once read Albert's slender Relativity on spring break, the Boca motel hotties giving me odd looks and a cold shoulder as usual. I suppose the mathematician's analog would be Wheeler's 200 pound Gravitation, which is a mess of Christoffel symbols and diffeomorphism. Not really the sort of thing you flip through at poolside. Der Herr Gott doesn't play dice, and He ain't exactly keen on covariant derivatives either.

Those of us in the neurogonical arts take a bemused view of these intellectual cat fights. For when the life of the mind is shot though the harsh lens of bastard neuroscience, the whole business reduces to pattern generation. Inside your noggin there are no differential equations. No integrals, no derivatives. No Banach spaces or Sigma algebras. There is only an ongoing pattern of neural firing, a pattern tempered by arriving stimuli. Pop, pop. The quadratic equation is a pattern. E = mc^2 is a pattern. Quantum electrodynamics is a pattern. Witnessing an apple falling from a tree is a pattern. Positing the same force holds the moon in place as the apple is also a pattern, one generated in Newton's noggin but not in others (apparently this made Newton "smart" and others not-so). The version of Relativity Albert understood as well as the one he did not? Different patterns. I think you see the pattern.

What does any of this have to do with Javascript? Read on.

I, Probability

Physicists tell us the universe is random. The laws of quantum mechanics demand it. When we say (or I should say when they say, as I'm certainly no authority, on quantum mechanics or anything really) that, say, the position of an electron is described by a probability, that's as far as it goes. Full stop. Physics is not merely throwing up its hands and saying this is the best we can do. Rather, they mean to say this is all there is. There are no hidden variables, nothing deeper. There is no wizard pulling levers behind the curtain they are currently seeking to uncover.

Such a worldview is hard to accept. Everyone who has confronted quantum mechanics, from lay reader to learned professional, has recoiled at the thought of abandoning determinism. God does not play dice, Einstein famously recoiled. Albert went to his grave in 1955 believing determinism would return. Determinism went to its grave in 1964, Bell's Theorem establishing once and for all there is nothing beyond a shell game.

The mind reels. Yet, your mind has no business reeling. It, too, is built on probability and I don't mean in the sense that everything is. There is a much larger probability at work inside your noggin that has nothing to do with quantum mechanics. What you call thinking, what you call Self, is really just a cosmic game of roulette. A spin of the well-figured wheel. A dance on a volcano.

God might not play dice, but your brain does.

It's playing right now.

What is Brain?

In gloriously screwy Star Trek episode Spock's Brain, Queen Kara of the Eymorg pops by the Enterprise and absconds with Spock's brain. No, really! (the writing on ST has the variance of a Cauchy distribution). Kirk et al. head off in pursuit. Spock's carcass comes with, Dr. McCoy driving it around using a remote control gizmo strapped to its now-vacant noggin (I'm trying to imagine the conversation that led to this device being standard Starfleet issue).

Our heroes corner Kara in the third act and, long story short, ask if she would kindly put Spock's brain back. As it happens, Kara is no longer up to the task. Her surgical skills have vanished, repossessed after she missed a couple of student loan payments, I guess. She claims to have no neuroscience knowledge whatsoever, which is rather odd for someone who only hours ago had a suspicious tub of formaldehyde rolling around in the trunk of her car like Thomas Harvey. Brain and brain, what is brain? Kara famously ruminates when pressed, truly a question for the ages.

There's an explanation for all this involving a magic thinking helmet, and much else besides, none of which need concern us presently. As usual, a plot ex machina arrives and all ends well. Kara gets her comeuppance and Spock gets reunited with his puzzler, sans PTSD or any long-term consequences at all really. I reckon everyone had a good laugh about it down at the space VFW. Hey, Spock. Remember the time some crazy woman SCOOPED OUT YOUR BRAIN? That sure was a hoot!

However, you must admit Kara has a point. What is brain?

The Bloodstained Palace of Memory

Be fruitful and multiply. Odd that the Origin of Species and the Old Testament have the same take-home message. Such revelation might upset the evangelicals, seeing how certain types keep telling them evolution is hostile to everything they hold dear. Then again, who knows. Even the Catholics came around eventually, removing Darwin from the fatwa list back in the 50s and again as recently as last week. Though you never could trust the papists, granddaddy always said. Maybe that's what really got JFK killed.

Origin is also rife with enough smoting to make Yahweh blush. Didn't see your predator? That's a smoting. Can't outrun your prey? That's a smoting. Not diverse enough? Make the unfortunate choice of nesting on top of an oil shale deposit or surfacing next to a Japanese whaling ship? Smoting. It's a wonder species don't go extinct every damn day.

Red in tooth and claw, Tennyson summarized this state of affairs. Which I suppose looks better on a movie poster than ...or form a symbiotic relationship that provides mutual benefit. Nietzsche didn't understand the middle part either. But let's leave such concerns for another day. Today we're interested in doing unto others, where "others" more often than not means members of your own species. Or, as it turns out, yourself.

We have met the enemy, Pogo quipped, and he is us.

LabKitty's Guide to SFN -- Part II : The Conferencing

Like nerd salmon returning to their ancestral home waters, mercifully sans the spawning, tens of thousands of neuroscientists converge, 737s coming out of the sky like John Fogerty on a midnight ride to Memphis, but more likely DC or San Diego. The Society for Neuroscience (SFN) annual conference can easily overwhelm the first-time attendee, a breathtaking GRE score not necessarily translating into a useful skill set where the bright lights and the big city meet. Like marriage or the buffet table, the second go-round usually proves an improved experience for all involved. Fortunately, LabKitty has distilled the conference experience into a collection of sage observations for those looking to get a leg-up on the learning curve. Think of LabKitty as the Princeton Review of SFN, sans the hefty price of admission.

In Part I of LabKitty's Guide to SFN, we traveled from Alma Mater to conference city, battling dragons and trolls along the way. Purchasing. The TSA. Ground transportation. Hotel dicks. We also learned some tricks for good poster design. I prep you for the show. What to expect, what to see. Where to go, who you know. And, of course, your own personal 15 minutes of fame (or four hours of humiliation, depending on the crowd): your poster presentation.

The hall is now rented, the orchestra engaged.

It's time to see if you can dance.<

Neuroswag

SFN week continues here on LabKitty with a cornucopia of neuroscience-themed swag for you to own! A veritable Ammon's horn of shirts, mugs, pendants, phone covers, and more the stylish neuroscientist cannot be without. In the classroom or lab, study section or vivarium, LabKitty products give you good mojo as you chase after the wily and elusive foe we call Knowledge. It's like a Nobel prize in awesome!

Neuroscience on LabKitty

LabKitty's Guide to SFN -- Part I : Planes, Trains, and Automobiles

The Society for Neuroscience annual conference (SFN) is a rite of passage for neurowonks everywhere. Thousands of us converge on some lucky city for a week to mingle and learn. It's junior high science fair all over again, except not quite so many potato batteries.

Like falling in love, the SFN experience is something that remains inexplicable until you experience it yourself. Fortunately, that hasn't dissuaded LabKitty from explaining stuff before. Join me now for an insider's look at SFN, focusing on helpful tips for graduate students and others attending the conference for the first time. Sure, the Society sends you a booklet and handy email reminders, and your advisor may have one or two things to say, but LabKitty dishes the dirt. What to expect, what to see, what to avoid. Missed flights. Conference food court poisoning. Fistfights with hobos in the parking lot. Provocatively-dressed women offering to demonstrate "a little patch clamping" for $200 back at the hotel.

Learn from LabKitty's mistakes.

Learn.

Five things it'd be nice if neuroscience could explain but can't yet

The problem with neuroscience (other than Congress expecting university faculty to do it as a hobby) is that, by and large, answers to the really fun questions remain but gross speculation. Sure, we have a pretty good handle on, say, the pharmacokinetics of the α_2B receptor, but that's not really the sort of thing that impresses the squares at some cocktail party. They want to know a Big Answer; the brain weirdnesses that have vexed the sages through the ages. That Socrates or Confucius didn't even know what an α_2B receptor was doesn't get you off the hook. They retain their dead famousness, and you continue to labor in your live obscurity.

It would be nice if we could get a big win for our side. What would a big win look like? Read on.

Now, this

Instructions: (1) focus on red dot, (2) wait, (3) be amazed! I'm guessing the illusion results from the differing characteristic spatial frequencies of the background and foreground that generate error signals during micro-saccades that the brain cannot cancel simultaneously. Or, you know, magic.

Only 10% of your brain. Uh, make that 1%

Those of us who study the noggin for a living inevitably get asked The Question. At every art galley soiree, at every sock hop, at every hootenanny and ribbon-cutting, let slip that you are a mage in the dark arts of the brain and some swervy minx with a gut full of cheap single malt wearing a Versace knock-off will pop The Question.

Is it true we only use 10% of our brain?

Sigh. They never want to see a derivation of the Nernst equation, or ask about the use of wavelets in fMRI source localization, or want to debate whether the proliferation of pyramidal cell types when calcium binding proteins are used as a classification metric has any real functional significance. Brain and brain. What is brain? This must be how Pete Townshend felt when he tried to play selections from his jazz introspective and the punters in the front row just kept yelling out "Magic Bus! Wooo!"

And then, just to add insult to injury, just when neuroscience is all pfft like I'm so sure gag me, we find out the truth is worse than everyone thought.