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The Primate Paradox and Circuit Psychiatry: similarity between primate and human brains makes primate research potentially necessary for psychiatric cures, but does it also make it unethical?

06Nov16

Circuit Neuroscience Recently, research into psychiatric disease has made great strides, but continued progress may require unpopular and ethically murky research. Joshua Gordon, the new director of the National Institutes of Mental Health writes in this month’s Nature Neuroscience: “At this unique and exciting time for psychiatry, novel therapies for individuals with mental illnesses seem just around […]

Filed under: Animal Rights, Anxiety, Behavior, Circuit Neuroscience, Disease, Ethics, Human, Motor, Mouse, Optogenetics, Primate, Schizophrenia, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
Tags: Animal Rights, Anxiety, Ethics, neuro, Neuroscience, Primates, Psychiatry

From Tasting Urine to Metabolome-Wide Association Studies–Advances towards personalized nutrition and biomarkers for disease

12Oct12

Metabolomics has come a long way since the days of tasting urine. Now techniques like high-throughput mass spectrometry can provide us detailed information about the small molecules we find in the body–which can be influenced by diet, environmental exposure (to toxins, medicine, etc), or even the gut microbiome. Metabolomics will also capture the genetic or […]

Filed under: Disease, Metabolomics, Nutrition, Psychiatric | 3 Comments

Single Base Sequencing of 5-hydroxy-methyl CpGs is Now Possible

13Jul12

5-hydroxy-methyl CpGs (5-hmCs) were first discovered in 2009 and shown to be enriched in the brain, but remain a mysterious epigenetic mark, despite intriguing functional findings such as: environmental enrichment’s reduction of it, MeCP2’s preference for 5mc over 5hmc, and it’s possible role as an intermediate in demethylation. This new technique will aid their characterization […]

Filed under: Epigenetics, Genetics, Human, Molecular, Mouse | 1 Comment

Why Conspiracy thinks he’s possessed by two intergalactic space demons – an Interview with Jonathan Balazs director of Mars Project

11Jul12

You may have seen my tweet about the upcoming documentary Mars Project, which tackles complex issues such as mental illness, drug use, psychiatry, race, and stigma. When director Jonathan Balazs contacted me about his film, I got really excited about it. If you liked the teaser but want to learn more about the project, check out Balazs’s Indie-Go-Go page […]

Filed under: Antipsychotics, Antipsychotics, Drugs, Film, Genetics, Human, Psychiatric, Schizophrenia | Leave a Comment

Top 10 most prescribed psychiatric drugs, top 10 overall, and the 10 we spend the most money on

06Jul12

What prescription drugs do we take and why are we taking them? Get a glass of water, choke down your horse pills, and take a look at the 10 most prescribed psychiatric drugs, 10 most prescribed drugs overall, and the 10 most profitable drugs, followed by a bit of analysis (though maybe what you need is psychoanalysis). […]

Filed under: Antipsychotics, Anxiety, Benzodiazepine, Depression, Dopamine, Pharmacology, Psychiatric, Public Health, Schizophrenia, Serotonin, SNRI, SSRI | 5 Comments
Tags: Drugs, Medicine, Pharmaceuticals, Pharmacology, Pharmacy, Prescription Drugs

Card sorting, pot smoking, pleasure and one gene: COMT

29Jun12

COMT, Catechol-O-methyl transferase, is an enzyme that degrades catecholamines–such as dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine (or adrenaline and noradrenaline as they are called in the UK). It was first discovered in the ’50s by Nobel laureate and pirate Julius Axelrod. More recently, scientists discovered an evolutionarily recent nonsynonomous single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) in the protein-coding portion of […]

Filed under: Behavior, Cannabis, Dorsolateral PFC, Drugs, Genetics, Human, Schizophrenia, SNPs | 9 Comments
Tags: Biology, cogsci, Genetics, neuro, Neuroscience, psychology, Science

Smartest Mouse in the World? – Amazing mouse agility tests show how intelligent rodents are.

13Jun12

Despite having cared for laboratory mice for years, I’m wowed by the complexity of this task! The trainer’s site: http://mouse-agility.com/ describes the animals living conditions and training method. The trainer keeps the mice housed in groups of 3-4 females, in 3-dimensional cages such as a remodeled cupboard, or: a pyramid of different-sized tables, the several floors […]

Filed under: Behavior, Mouse | 4 Comments
Tags: mice, mouse, Mouse Behavior, obedience, training, tricks

Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are – Sebastian Seung’s new book

08Jun12

The connectome is a map of all neural connections in a brain, which I believe only currently exists for the flatworm C. Elegans. Seung’s group and collaborators are working using serial electron microscopy, and partially automated EM analysis and the crowdsourcing site eyewire to reconstruct parts of the mouse retina, with the hope of steadily improving technologies […]

Filed under: Anatomy, Books, Connectomics, Connectopathy, Crowd Sourcing, Development, Electron Microscopy, Mouse | Leave a Comment
Tags: Connectomics, Connectopathy, Development, Electron Microscopy, Neuroscience, Wiring

How many neurons do we really have? (And why we might have 10x fewer glia than we previously thought.)

19May12

This article is my translation of this Brazilian article by RICARDO ZORZETTO (with lots of help from google translate) Revising the Numbers Get to know the anatomy of the human brain, especially how researchers got to a figure of 86 billion neurons,instead of the 100 billions previously estimated. —- On Wednesday, January 11, researchers Casarsa Frederico Azevedo […]

Filed under: Cerebellum, Comparative, Cortex, FACS - Fluorescent Automated Cell Sorting, Glia, Human, Primate, Rat | Leave a Comment

Genoeconomics – Can genetic variation predict economic decisions?

13May12

First, experimental economists and psychologists like nobel laureates Vernon L. Smith and Daniel Kahneman taught us that we aren’t economically rational–we’re influenced by biases and we use flawed heuristics (though often in very testable, repeatable ways).(1) Then, Neuroeconomists showed that biology affects economic decisions–internasal oxytocin raises trust in risky exchanges, serum serotonin levels predict whether […]