Brainstorm: What Testosterone Has in Common with Schrodinger’s Cat

People are often startled by the extent to which environment plays a part in mediating the biological processes behind their behaviors.https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/brainstorm/1004/thumbnail.jp

Brainstorm: Violence, Videogames, and Learning to Say “I Don’t Know” – Part 2

This is the second (and final) installment in a series examining the effects of videogames on aggressive behavior in the people who play them. We just finished looking at a study suggesting that violent videogames represent a deep, causal risk factor for inciting violent behavior in kids — a loving parent’s worst nightmare. We are about to look at a second article, published right after the first, which says exactly the opposite.https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/brainstorm/1028/thumbnail.jp

Brainstorm: What Humans Can Learn From Monkeys

We are exploring the sometimes frustrating, always fascinating distance between genes and behaviors. In this entry, I wish to illustrate a dramatic example of how nature and nurture interact, not by examining humans, but by looking at some genetic next­door neighbors of ours — vervet monkeys.https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/brainstorm/1002/thumbnail.jp

Brainstorm: Head Injuries and the NFL, Part 5: On the Matter of Damaging Neural Circuits

In the last installment, we examined the forces capable of causing brain injury, but left out the most important question: What happens to brain tissues unlucky enough to experience those forces? Now it is time to face the biological facts. In this installment, we will talk about neurological tissue and closed-­head injuries.https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/brainstorm/1016/thumbnail.jp

Brainstorm: How to Take a Multiple Choice Test

In this blog section, we are going to explore the science behind study habits. Most of these topics will concern myth busting, and we begin this segment with a whopper.https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/brainstorm/1025/thumbnail.jp

Brainstorm: A Tale of Two Video Clips

I have spent a lifetime trying to understand the distance between a gene and a behavior. Using the lens of psychiatric disorders, I’ve spent most of my professional life as a private research consultant, primarily to the pharmaceutical and biotech industries, on issues related to mental health. Despite great strides made in the field by literally thousands of colleagues, I am here to report that the rocky terrain between behaviors and genes lies mostly unmapped. For that I blame two video clips, both featuring legendary golfer and famously troubled ex­husband, Tiger Woods.https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/brainstorm/1000/thumbnail.jp

Brainstorm: Of Princesses and Football Players

Sports-­related head injuries are getting a lot of press these days. Learning from injuries sustained by prize fighters, hockey players, and American football players, researchers are beginning to understand there are severe consequences to sustained trauma on the mental life of professional athletes — even amateur, Saturday­afternoon athletes. Sports officials could do well to remember the cautionary tale I am about to relate here.https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/brainstorm/1009/thumbnail.jp

Brainstorm: Head Injuries and the NFL, Part 11: Microglial Cells

We are trying to understand the biology of CTE at the most intimate level possible, the level of cells and molecules. The last entry dealt with the tau protein and its role in mediating closed­-head neural damage. In this installment, let’s consider the role of microglial cells, a little wisp of a cell type with a great big job.https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/brainstorm/1022/thumbnail.jp

Brainstorm: Head Injuries and the NFL, Part 6: Memory Loss

We are in the process of examining the relationship between neurological damage associated with repeated closed­-head injuries and the behaviors of CTE. We’ve been using the example of spearing, illustrating the effects of this banned football behavior on the biological integrity of the human brain. We discussed how damage to one such neurological circuit, the Papez Circuit, can lead to chronic changes in mood. Here we discuss changes in three cognitive gadgets: executive function, memory processing, and motor control.https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/brainstorm/1017/thumbnail.jp

Brainstorm: Head Injuries and the NFL, Part 10: The Tau of CTE, Continued

In our last installment, I wrote about a protein called tau, which necessitated talking about salt. I said that when neurons suffer the types of injury associated with CTE, part of the damage occurs because of a change in salt distribution between the inside of a neuron and its immediate outer exterior.https://digitalcommons.spu.edu/brainstorm/1021/thumbnail.jp