Getting High Throughout HIstory

Hi all! Great class today! As you know, in class I talked a bit about some of the pharmcological
agents people use/have used to ameliorate discomfort, such as magic mushrooms, weed, and even nutmeg. However, if you want to know more about the history of pharmacology, I recommend that you check out this link.

Have a great weekend!

Thanks,
Dr. Stratford

Half-brained takes on a whole new meaning...

Greetings! Sorry for the brief post, but I'm mired in test preparation. I spoke briefly in class about a women who has lived her entire life without a cerebellum.

If you want read more, check out these links (sorry that one of them is an AOL article):

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329861.900-woman-of-24-found-to-have-no-cerebellum-in-her-brain.html#.VBGPCvldU60


http://www.aol.com/article/2014/09/12/woman-found-to-be-missing-an-important-portion-of-her-brain/20961523/?icid=maing-grid7%7Cmaing9%7Cdl10%7Csec1_lnk2%26pLid%3D528529

Cheers!

Close Encounters of a Movie Kind

Hello Budding Behavioral Neuroscientists! Do you ever feel like a mindless zombie when you leave a movie theater? Although I don't have time to write to a full-on blog post this week, I thought you may like to hear about what happens to your brain when you watch a movie in the theater. As we learned in class, one way to visualize brain activity in awake, behaving humans is with fMRI
(functional magnetic resonance imaging).

Researchers at Princeton university recorded brain activity while subjects watched a movie, and found that several brain areas appear to 'sync up.' However, the effect doesn't happen with all movies ('structured' movies are better at syncing). Perhaps as a precursor to mind control, movie studio executives should screen test all their movies with the audience sitting in fMRIs! If you want to know more, please click here.

What Dead Salmon Tell Us About Statistics

Greetings Students of Science!

In class, we discussed the importance of using the appropriate statistical analyses and controls, but it may surprise you to find out that using a dead salmon in a research study can actually lead to a scientific revolution!

In 2010, a study published in the 'Journal of Serendipitous and Unexpected Results' (yes, that is a real scientific journal) showed how important it is to properly analyze your data. In their study, Bennett et al. put a dead salmon in an fMRI machine, showed the salmon a serious of visual images, and then analyzed the fMRI results in several different ways. Typically, fMRI data is analyzed by comparing changes in blood flow
between up to 130,000 different subareas of the brain (called voxels). However, all the different comparisons made exponentially increases the chance of finding a false positive result (e.g. a significant result when there isn't one). While most fMRI researchers correct for these multiple comparisons, at the time that Bennett et al. did their study, some fMRI researchers did not.

Dead Salmon 'brain activation.' Image courtesy of
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/scicurious-brain/2012/09/25/
ignobel-prize-in-neuroscience-the-dead-salmon-study/

To address this issue, Bennett et al., analyzed their fMRI-dead-salmon data in two different ways (either controlling for multiple comparisons, or not). The authors found that when their data were analyzed without correcting to the use of multiple comparisons, the dead salmon's brain showed significant activation in response to various visual stimuli. Surprisingly, the reaction from the scientific community was mostly positive, and encouraged many researchers to rethink the way they analyzed their data.

If you want to read more about this 'fishy' tale, please click here.