Neuroscience and Sex

Faculty position: Neuroscience and Sex. at Kinsey Institute, Indiana University.

These people want someone who is proficient in both neuroscience and sex. I am afraid I am short in experience and training:-)

http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/research/facultyannouncement.htm

I almost got fooled by the heading:-)

Check out the video collection in their library. This might be the only library where they have to regulate large enthusiastic crowds of graduate students coming for 'research'.

Ranulfo Romo

The recent issue of PNAS (Sept 2006) has a profile of Dr. Ranulfo Romo. He has made some exciting advances in the understanding in the area of neural basis of perception, decision making and sensory representation working on the somatosensory system.

This profile follows his induction in the prestigious National Academy of Sciences. Its rare to find scientists working on perception and decision making the somatosensory system, as most of the information about such basic attributes of the brain come from studies in the visual system. Somehow information about him was difficult to find in the web (apart from his HHMI page) so this profile would be useful for people interested in his work.

Here is the link
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/103/39/14263

Guilt Laundry

Grandmothers have a keen insight into human nature, accumulated by years if idleness and general whining. My grand mother firmly believes that taking a dip in the holy river of Ganges absolves one of all wrong doings. Her conviction is similarly strong for the south Indian ritual of tonsuring one’s head. Many of my relatives have made that trip to a church leaving them unfashionably bald for a week and even more unfashionably stubble-headed for a longer time. People who go through this act of cleansing/tonsuring vouch for the feeling of a their guilt being reduced.

In the realization of a ‘wrong-doing’ a strong desire to correct the wrong deed arises. In the event of it being irreparable, despair and guilt arises. This guilt can affect the behavior of the person and can also lead to depression. So one turns to religious/cleaning rituals to deal with the guilt and go back to a morally sound self-image.

And God thrives on guilt, in a completely helpless situation; religious rituals, however irrational they are give a feeling of relief and forgiveness from the wrong deed. This belief is so deep rooted that the very act of cleansing like washing or tonsuring can give a feeling of relief to the person, although the wrong doing has not been undone. This psychological pairing of the physical act of cleansing and mental state of being morally pure was investigated in a study reported in Science.

In one of the studies the authors wanted to connect the morally compromised mental state with the need for physical cleaning. Subjects were asked to hand copy a story, either an ethical one or an unethical one, and later asked to evaluate the desirability of objects, some of which were cleaning products and others were neutral products. The subjects who copied an unethical story rated cleansing products as more desirable consistently than the other objects. These subjects also preferred to take cleaning products like an antiseptic wipe as free gifts over other gifts like pencils.

Does physical cleaning restore the self-image of moral purity of the subjects? A guilt-ridden person is likely to compensate for his wrong doing by doing altruistic and penitential acts, like volunteering. Have the people who have undergone the physical act of cleansing recovered their morally pure mental state, would that make them less likely to volunteer for an altruistic job? It seems from this study that it did. Subjects were asked to describe an unethical deed from the past and only one group was given an antiseptic hand. Both groups were then asked if they liked to volunteer a student in need of help. Less number of subjects in the group that has washed their hands volunteered than the other group.

For the reasons and importance of this study, I will quote the authors

Would adherence to a rigorous hygiene regimen facilitate ethical behavior? Or, would cleansing ironically license unethical behavior? It remains to be seen whether clean hands really do make a pure heart, but our studies indicate that they at least provide a clean conscience after moral trespasses.

On a personal note, I have never trusted anyone who exhibit excessing cleaning behavior. May be they are subconsciously trying to clean their guilt of some super sin that they have commited. By the same (flawed) logic, I live like a slob, I feel no need for cleaning, hence I have commited no sins:-)

Link to Gordon Sheperd interview

I found an interview of Prof. Gordon Sheperd at the IBRO website. GS is a special man, as he is one of the few who has a brilliant scientific career and has written an influential basic textbook. His 'Neurobiology' was the first neuroscience text book I read (and thoroughly enjoyed) in the dusty Loyola College library.

Click on this link for a scientific and personal interview.

If the hyperlink doesnt work here is the URL http://www.ibro.info/Pub_Main_Display.asp?Main_ID=550

Manesar Premier League

Oh the red, that many fight for. That tastes better to some than others.

The winning captain with the coveted bottle of wine.

The winning team. The Theoretical Thunders. OK. I admit its a lame name. But they didn't look very lame when they pumped in 5 goals on the favourites.

The three captains Leslee (systems ,white), Buddha (theoretical, black) and Sandy (Molbio, Red) with the referee, Manoj Uncle of stem cells fame(Grey T). Without his no-nonsense and professional approach this tournament would have lost all decency and would have become a kickboxing convention.

(I wonder what Sandy is all cheerfull about. Atleast I had the weekend to forget my pain).

Two (of the three) things that rock my fucking world. I will give away one free inflatable sheep to anyone who comments with the correct answer to what's the third.

Who're you trying to scare. Bitch.

Pepsi helps bring in the crowds.

Practice. Untill November comes.

Port wine on wet grass. Buddha Laughs his way to help himself to some more chicken

It became clear when the Buddha laughed on the green grass with a bottle of port wine that the battle was won, convincingly, leaving the opponents search for excuses and ice to numb their pain. Sprays and creams didn’t work, because the pain was somewhere deeper. This battle had gone awfully wrong for a group with vociferous supporters, for the other this was the end of a roller coaster ride, a ride that took them to the depths of despair, kicks on the shins inflicted by their own boots, and ultimately the sweet and poetic victory of the underdogs, the written-offs over the over-confident and the under-smarts (is that a fucking word, but that’s how I can describe my team in mild terms).

So it all started in a rather dull mood before the ball was kicked, with murmurs that the weekend break cooled down the insanity of football supporters. It was like having foreplay and taking the weekend off to have sex. But people who know what I am talking about will know that this break can make one mad and change the normal course that was indicated before the break. OK I will leave the sex analogy alone. I don’t want people to falsely accuse me of talking about sex all the time.

But when the ball was moved from the central spot, there was something different in the way the game was defining itself. The Molbios were lacking in something, passes were awry, strikers came to the spot seconds after the ball passed by, defenders gave away passes. Everyone seemed like they had just woken up after partying with the Rolling stones the previous night.

Whatever the Molbios were lacking, the computationals excelled, their trio of Buddha, Jyoti and Vishnu make great short passes, held the ball and passed it around and found the net they did, not once but five fucking times. There was nothing but silence and awe, apart from the munching of chips and samosas in the audience who came to see another routing of the computational dudes by the Molbios, like the opening 3-0 drubbing.

It was raining goals, everyone made merry, Buddha, Jyoti, Vishnu and Venkat on the once infallible opponents. When the first goal was scored by computational, the molbios conceded that they were in trouble, shoulders were drooping, basic trapping went wrong and passes missed by miles. By half time there was no cohesion in their game, just anger and disbelief. It was then easy for the computationals with experienced and intelligent players to capitalize on this lack of confidence to dominate the game completely. Only a late resurgence saw some kind of fight back, which resulted in a late Sandy goal. Just once did Sanjay let the ball go past him and especially on wet grass, this was a tough job.

All is well that ends in a flurry of goals, so the first tournament in the Manesar Premier League was a roaring success. Until the next one comes along to whip some enthusiasm in the rural hinterlands of Haryana, this 5-1 unlikely victory by the Computational Biologists will be talked and deconstructed many many times.

So long…until November.

The ‘sour-less’ mouse that solved a tasty mystery.

Our brain constructs a perception of taste from the food we eat. Foods that taste similarly also have some chemical commonality. Actually they taste similar because they have a common chemical group. For example sugars have a glucose moiety, which will be sensed by specialized cells in the tongue, which fire electrical impulses to the brain, which in turn constructs a percept of ‘sweetness’. We perceive many different tastes of which the main basic types are sweet, bitter, sour, salty and umami (taste of monosodium glutamate).

We are able to digest far more chemical groups than the number of tastes we perceive. Why evolution gave us only these five basic tastes is debatable. (I would have liked finer taste discrimination for humans, sometimes Old Monk and Old Cask tastes similar, although I know in my heart of hearts I know they are not). Actually biochemists get into a philosophical argument with psychologists about taste classification, the latter don’t believe in such a classification casting doubts on the physiological basis of such a classification.

The five main basic tastes are thought to signals important information about the food we ingest. Sweet taste is an indicator of how ripe a fruit, which contains more nutrients that raw fruits. Bitter is a good indicator of whether a fruit or plant is poisonous. It makes good sense to evolve a mechanism to know ripe fruits from raw ones and poisonous from non-poisonous. Salty taste evolved probably as an indicator of salt intake since animals have to maintain salts levels to maintain homeostasis and sour taste is elicited by acidic pH, which is abundant in rotten and unripe fruits, which has to be avoided by animals.

Most of the tastes have been well studied in terms of the cell types that sense the molecules and the mechanism that senses these chemicals and makes the cells fire electrical impulses. But the mechanism behind the sour taste was speculative till last week. Some believed that sour and salty taste shared a common mechanism of detection. Many hypotheses were put forward, but there was no proof for anything.

With the Human Genome Project available to fish for genes that could have specific properties, a group at UCSD did just that, fishing out an ion-channel gene that would sense pH (and hence acidity). They found one a gene called PKD2L1. They found that this gene was present in subset of cells in the tongue, which were not sweet, salt or bitter sensors, making it a prime candidate for acid sensing in the tongue.

Now that the cells are found in the tongue, the next question is, what do these cells do? (They could be cells that produce bad language for all we know). So these scientists selectively killed the cells that expressed this gene in mice and tested these animals for their ability to taste. These animals were unable to taste sour taste, although their capacity to detect other tastes was intact, including salty taste. This showed that these cell types were exclusively responsible to the detecting sour taste only. (Wow so neat.)

Adding further feathers to their hats, the group found that these ion-channel genes were also expressed in the central canal of the spinal cord (the small hole that runs through the middle of the spinal cord, where the cerebrospinal fluid runs through). This fits into an even older story. The acid sensing mechanism is important in many ways to an organism, to maintain the functional state of body fluids. For example pH is the way to detect the carbon-di-oxide levels in blood and CSF. The cellular basis of pH sensing mechanism is not known in the CSF. This ion-channel PKD2L1 could be the mechanism that senses pH in CSF being expressed in the edge of the central canal and also firing action potentials for minor changes in pH.