What is smaller than dust and undetected when alone, but, in large groups, puts on a light show more spectacular than all of the glow par­ties on East Lorain Street combined? Vibrio fischeri (pronounced fisher-eye), the bacterium, of course!

These tiny flecks of life swim every ocean in solitude, feeding off even more insignificant specks of dead fish flesh and whale poop. Seemingly boring, Vibrio fis­cheri are hot commodities to many marine organisms. Glowing fishes, squids, and corals all selectively recruit V. fischeri to live temporarily in specialized organs in their bodies.

These fleshy homes provide the bacteria with nutrients and a safe environment to multiply rapidly. In return, our bacteria friend offer the host luminence. By sending molecular “triggers” to its colony of V. fischeri, the host makes them glow in patterns of short flashes or sustained subtle emissions. Known as biolumines­cence, these emissions can function to illuminate prey, communi­cate with other fish of the same species, and even keep squid from casting shadows as they hunt. Remember the glowing blue lantern that tried to eat Dori and Nemo? That was Vibrio fischeri living in a female anglerfish host.

How do the bacteria know to only luminesce when living in their hosts? Well, the bacteria constantly secrete a molecular sig­nal into their surroundings. Think of a dirty sock. You wouldn’t smell one sock in a large room, but if several million friends threw their socks in also, the stench would be overwhelming. Similarly, the bacteria have receptor proteins that only cause luminescence when the “stench” of the signaling molecules reaches a threshold.

This phenomenon is known as quorum sensing. Different species throw their proverbial dirty socks around in order to sense how many similar organisms there are in the area, knowledge which aids in many biological processes. As humans, we perform this task with our eyes while bacteria, plants, individual cells, et cetera must accomplish this through other means.

Ben Garfinkel

Remember when you were little and the clothes you bought only a year prior had become awkwardly tight against your fast-growing frame? Believe it or not, this phenomenon is quite common in the world of social insects. Take, for example, honeybees (Apis mellifera). By way of quo­rum sensing, groups of these backyard for­agers annually vacate their long-settled nest for greener pastures when life at the colony gets too cramped.

Finding a new nest is not easy, and it takes significant teamwork. Every spring, colony fission occurs wherein the queen and half of her colony split off in order to seek out a new home. The scouting party starts by forming a cluster on a nearby branch that will serve as their home base for the expedi­tion.

Then, scouts fly near and far looking for good nesting locations. If a suitable location is found, they will return and deliver the news in the form of a “waggle-dance”, which communicates the site’s location relative to the sun, via a series of wiggles and circular motions. The more the scout likes the site, the longer it will dance, thereby increasing its chances to recruit other bees to investigate the site for themselves.

It is here where quorum sensing plays an important role. By keeping track of time between meeting other bees, these insects are able to sense the density of their dancing counterparts. Based on this calculation of density, uncommitted bees are either recruited by a dancer to investigate the site, or go out and scout again. If a site is popular enough to reach a threshold of 10- 20 dancers, the scouting party will move as a collective to their new home. Even as a relatively simple physiological event, quorum sensing is crucial to the success of this decision making process and the eventual relocation to an area with more safety or better resources.

Recent research argues the inner-workings of honeybee communi­ties may lead to new insights in cognitive science, as the way in which each bee affects each other’s behavior can be equated to the neural interactions in primate brains. Bee colonies work as a single functional “mind” by way of thousands of participatory organisms working together, similar to the inter­mingling neural networks of more complex organisms, like humans.

Physcomitrella patens and Ceratodon purpureus, two interesting moss model systems, have convenient haploid genetics and highly developed gene targeting tools, which simplifies McDaniel’s research of genetic distortion. Using these strains of moss widely sampled from the East coast, he and his team of postdoctoral researchers study variation. His presentation, titled “Genomic and macroevolutionary consequences of dioecy: insights from moss model systems,” highlighted the ability of certain organisms to change sexual systems within a species over time. These sexual systems, namely dioecy and monoecy consist of, respectively: 1) two sexes, male and female, offering the promise of genetic diversity, and 2) hermaphroditism, which carries the benefit of reproductive assurance.

Using phylogenetic reconstructions for hermaphroditic mosses and checking them by identifying sister groups, McDaniel found that 60 percent of switches were from single sex to two sexes, showing a slight trend toward diversification favoring sexual dimorphism. McDaniel then proceeded to grow different strains of moss under ideal conditions for crossing, and finally achieved a cross supporting the pattern. This led him to conclude that the benefits of sexual dimorphism outweigh those of hermaphroditic systems. According to McDaniel’s research, this phenomenon fuels the evolution of mating systems in certain moss species.

“Stuart McDaniel.” Faculty Profile – Department of Biology. The University of Florida. <http://biology.ufl.edu/People/faculty/stuartmcdaniel.aspx>. Accessed 10 Feb 2012.

McDaniel, SF, M von Stackelberg, S. Richardt, R Reski, RS Quatrano and SA Rensing. 2009. The speciation history of the Physcomitrella – Physcomitrium species complex, Evolution.

By Sesha Nandyal

Yes, I am here to argue that undergraduates have a lot more power in research labs than most people will acknowledge. And before you launch into some counterattack that highlights the difference between a stipend and a six figure salary, hear me out. As an undergraduate student walking into a scientific lab, the researchers, technicians, and post-docs make a conscious effort to keep you entertained. They provide you with stimulating conversation, and let you play with the buttons of the PCR machine. In return for lending them your undivided attention, they give you tokens of appreciation in the form of Excel spreadsheets or Pyrex jars full of solution. Granted, these items may be required for your experiment, but the fact that they were willing to do the grunt work in setting you up demonstrates their desire to please you.

One of the biggest perks of being an undergraduate engaged in lab work is the almost unlimited mistake quota. People expect you to break test tubes, bend electrode tips, rip tissue samples, and turn on all the wrong things in an incorrect order. When an experiment does not go as planned, someone is there with a broom and a list of suggestions for  “next time”. It isn’t like in chemistry lab courses, where you are limited to ten dollars worth of clumsiness before a professor starts giving you the evil eye.

Finally, as an undergraduate, you have the power to ask whatever you want and it is the ranking lab member’s obligation to not only provide you with the answer, but to not judge you for asking the question in the first place. If someone doesn’t know the answer it is quickly researched and you can expect the prompt arrival of a set of journal articles in your inbox. The fact is, in the lab, research scientists will cater to you, your interests, and your goals. If they learn you are interested in microscopy, they will search through their data for a particularly stunning image or schedule an experiment at a time when you will be free to observe. They want to impress you. These people get a kick out of watching you learn. And while “test tube defroster” or “cell-counter” may not be the first skill you put on your resume, these people have been there, have survived, and are ready at any time to pull out their pom-poms and cheer you on.

I was trying to understand your research. Among other things, you’re trying to charac­terize the abilities of hemoglobin and myoglo­bin [proteins in red blood cells and muscles, respectively] to catalyze reactions of oxygen, right?

That’s what it [says online]. My background from graduate school on has had something to do with heme proteins, if that has meaning for you. The heme is the red component of hemoglobin [the protein which transports oxygen on the red blood cell], and it’s found in other proteins, and it’s important. Hemoglobin, myoglobin, that’s what makes muscle red. The heme is … an aro­matic, organic material. That’s where the color comes from. It’s also a very good ligand [or bind­ing molecule], and it’s a ligand to iron. When the iron is in the plus 2 state, and hemoglobin or my­oglobin [and] oxygen combine, … hemoglobin carries oxygen around and myoglobin serves as a depository for oxygen in muscle cells and also facilitates and speeds up diffusion [movement to areas of lower concentration] of oxygen. Oxygen is very small, so it should move rapidly. However, its diffusion requires a concentration difference. Since oxygen is practically insoluble in water you can’t get much of a concentration difference, but you can sure get a concentration difference for oxygenated myoglobin in two places. …[T]hen oxygen is getting where it needs to be in a cell. And it’s going there, being carried by myoglobin.

So there are a lot of heme-containing pro­teins, [like] the soybean leghemoglobin. It turns out that in legumes — soybeans are one of those legumes — nitrogen fixation [plant pulls in at­mospheric nitrogen, necessary for survival], which requires a lot of ATP [cellular energy], and one of the ways of making a lot of ATP is by us­ing oxidative phosphorylation.

So you need a lot of oxygen, and the only problem is that the enzyme that does nitrogen fixation is very sensitive to destruction by oxy­gen. So what you need is to have something that can carry oxygen, something like myoglobin [but functions at very low oxygen concentrations], in the plant cells that have the symbiotic bacteria in them, because the symbiotic bacteria are the things that under low oxygen conditions will [fix nitrogen in the plant]. So you’ve got to keep low oxygen conditions and provide lots of ATP. This is essential for the plant cell to provide an en­vironment in which the symbiotic bacteria will actually fix nitrogen, [and leghemoglobin serves the role of facilitating oxygen diffusion at very low oxygen concentrations].

I’m still winding down. This is my last year of teaching here at Oberlin.

It is?

Yeah. So I’m trying to finish up. The faculty have a career sabbatical for the semester and win­ter term after stopping teaching, so I still can do some research, but [after that] there’s not room. I can’t stay here.

I did a kind of triage on my many unfinished laboratory research projects, to try to figure out which ones nobody would do if I don’t. Which ones also do I have a chance of getting done before I retire? And one that I’ve been playing around with for literally decades, which is not my main line of research, was something I had found by just investigating a little further a procedure that we used to measure quantities of reducing sugars … Reducing sugars are a class of sugar … You can detect their presence quantitatively or qualita­tively because they serve as reducing agents. They will reduce certain things whose reductions you can monitor [with] a spectrophotometer, or [by] looking at color change for quantitative or pre­cipitation for qualitative assays.

And it is well established in the literature — what happens to reducing sugars — they either have or form aldehyde groups and the aldehyde groups get oxidized to carboxyl groups at high pH … and I just started checking out one such procedure that I was using in teaching labora­tories first in the biochemistry course and then I shifted those experiments to the bioorganic chemistry course … that I am now teaching.

I found that the behavior of this procedure did not fit what people said was going on when reducing sugars acted like reducing sugars. And so I’ve been exploring that because that’s been a settled issue for generations, and what all the textbooks … say is wrong! That’s not what’s hap­pening to the reducing sugar.

Are you going to write to textbooks?

No, we’ll publish this in a journal and hope that textbook writers … notice.

I’m sure they would be reading it, right?

One hopes.

You’ve mentioned you had a graduate school background in hemes and hemoglob­ins. How did you first get led into that area?

Well, I was doing graduate work in a bio­chemistry department and I had known that I was interested in biological chemistry, probably before I even went to college. I was just inter­ested in chemistry particularly, and I was inter­ested in living things also, and I was interested in combining that. When I got to graduate school, I found that I was more interested in doing… more chemical aspects of biology, rather than more biological aspects. In the department that I was in, the major researcher who was doing more chemical work was the one who was working on hemes, so that’s what started it.

So it was kind of almost accidental, then, it was just that he happened to be working on hemes.

Right, because I didn’t know much about hemes before starting work there.

You said that you were interested in bio­chemistry before you even went to college. Do you remember what got you interested in it to begin with or was it just school in general?

The things I was interested in doing, as … a child was collecting insects … [and keeping] vari­ous creatures as pets. In high school, I worked at the Cleveland Natural History Museum. I went to high school in the Cleveland area, and before that I was in south Texas. I was fascinated by marine biology. Before Padre Island became a national seashore and a “spring break” destina­tion, it was a place near where I lived… We could drive to Padre Island. We could drive on that beach, and we could go where there weren’t other people. And I spent some time when I was in … junior high school … with a family friend who was a marine biologist, to learn some more about purple sea snails, [and various other marine crea­tures]. So I was fascinated by these living things and was also interested in chemistry, so I wanted to combine those interests.

Why Oberlin? How did you end up here and why have you stayed?

I had not intended, necessarily, to be teach­ing at a liberal arts college. Oberlin was the only college I applied to. I was interested in academic work and I applied to some university jobs as well, but I got the Oberlin job, and I have not had any regrets.

What’s crucial to my satisfaction in the Oberlin job is two things: working with moti­vated and capable and interesting students, in terms of courses, but also being able to do se­rious research. Because there are, as you may know … liberal arts colleges where the faculty are so pressed to teach what they have to teach that there is no opportunity … or very little oppor­tunity to do research. Oberlin not only has the opportunity, but expects faculty to be active in their fields.

I like both the teaching and research aspects of my job.

So you’ve really enjoyed leading a focused academic life.

Yes. But, as you know, it is not so completely focused [on academics]. I am also involved in the Guatemala work, which has nothing to do with my scholarly work.

And how did you fall into that?

During a period of time, when terrible things were happening to Mayan people in Guatemala, there was a human rights effort by people were working with refugees who were then in Mexican refugee camps — refugees from Guatemala. And then [there was] the coincidence of two people who had been working in human rights work in Guatemala, coming to live in Oberlin at the same time as [former Dean of Students Linda] Gates’ daughter was about to graduate from Grinnell College. She wanted to do human rights work and the people who moved into Oberlin wanted to form a new organization to help with hu­man rights work in Guatemala. My wife, who has long been interested in anthropology, has a master’s degree in [anthropology] from Oberlin College, which once upon a time, offered such degrees. [She] knew terrible things were hap­pening to the Maya but couldn’t … do anything about it, didn’t know details. It all came together and they formed an organization, which is SEPA [Santa Elena Project of Accompaniment]. And I was not involved in it for the first two years of SEPA’s existence, But when SEPA’s first del­egation was being organized to visit Santa Elena in Guatemala … I said two things to my wife. One was, “That’s not a safe place to go. You’re not going alone. I will go, too!” And the other thing I said was, “Why don’t you schedule it for January?” Because then we can take Oberlin Col­lege students. … January 1999 was the first time I went to Guatemala with my wife and some other townspeople … We met [the student group] in Guatemala City and all went to Santa Elena and I was hooked and I have been back many times since … and have been involved for many years as the SEPA treasurer and … have been the faculty sponsor ever since [1999] for the winter term Guatemala project.

Do you have any other main interests or hobbies outside of academia, which you like to pursue or are active in?

I do enjoy gardening. My house is one [where] … most of the front yard is garden; the entire tree-lawn is garden. My wife and I like to plant. We do a lot of planting of native [to Ohio] plants.

My interest in animals has continued, so I do have pets at home. Currently it’s just cats, par­rots, turtles, and fish.

I had a pet skunk [once]. I had a hedgehog. The skunk was an interesting character, but the hedgehog seemed really much less interesting … in terms of its interaction with us.

If you had any advice for young science majors, what would it be, as they try and pur­sue their careers and get jobs in the academic market?

My advice would be to students who think they are interested in the sciences: at some point, earlier is better, get some experience in a research lab, and find out. Because for some people, re­search is really attractive, and it’s maybe what in the end turns people on to a career in science. And for other people, research is not a comfort­able activity. You want to find out early on, in­stead of thinking that research seems like a very attractive thing to do, and perhaps finding out once you have committed to doing it, say in graduate school, that actually you don’t like it so much after all.

College students usually have access to a much higher standard of health care than the Oberlin townspeople. The Lorain County demographics show a 17% minority population, 13.6% over the age of 65, and 7.3% unemployed. With 9.1% of the population uninsured and 23.2% below twice the federal poverty level, health risks become a major issue. Difficult economic circumstances and the lack of insurance greatly limit access to primary care. There are 211 primary care physicians in Lorain County, meaning that there are roughly 1,400 patients per doctor. Of course with varying population densities and eligibility requirements, the number is often much higher.  Furthermore, only 81 of these doctors serve Medicaid recipients, which further deteriorates the primary care accessibility, as many people are not eligible for government health programs. Thus, this situation causes a type of healthcare isolation for the uninsured populations, let alone those with government assistance.

The effects of little or no access to primary care are a 7.6% incidence of low birth weight, 33.6% of adults having high cholesterol, and higher rates of infant mortality than peer counties in the United States. The United Way of Greater Lorain County produced a Community Health Status Report showing a larger population suffering from breast cancer, lung cancer, and coronary heart disease. The most disparaging results, however, are seen in the minority population. In 2008, the infant mortality rate was 24.1 per 1000 births for African-Americans and 9.0 per 1000 births for Hispanics, compared to 4.2 per 1000 births for the white population. The discrepancy between minority infant mortality rates in Lorain County is large compared to those of the state of Ohio. This disparity could be due to fewer minorities with insurance or access to primary care or, most importantly, a lack of prenatal care.

Lorain County’s African-American residents have a 10.1% rate of low birth weight and only 52.9% receive prenatal care in the first trimester, the three most critical months, of fetal development. According to a recent World Health Organization survey, Zimbabwe, a country typically representative of the third-world, has a 12% incidence of premature births, and only 44% of people have four or more antenatal consults. These statistics demonstrate that the African-American population of Lorain County, a locality within these great United States, has two important health indicators within 9% of those of a third-world country.

The reasons for such a stark contrast may lie in a lack of primary care or insurance coverage, or a phenomenon such as vitamin D deficiency. Whatever the cause, this is completely unacceptable for a county within a wealthy and prosperous nation. As college students, it may be easy to take access to healthcare for granted, but it is important to humbly acknowledge this privilege and help this community that nurtures these four or more years of growth during college. For Oberlin College to truly be a great institution of higher learning, its students, many of whom pursuing at least one social cause, must maintain awareness of and be prepared to challenge Oberlin city health disparities.

Lynn, Mary. “Health Insurance by Race and Ethnicity.” Chart 1. Ohio Family Health Survey. Ohio Department of Health. Aug 2005. www.odh.ohio.gov

“Lorain County.” Access to Care Statistics. Ohio Department of Health. http://www.odh.ohio.gov/ASSETS/A9C902A363D44D29977618A1912C4348/lorain.pdf

“Assessment of Needs in Greater Lorain County.” Board Meetings 11/18/10 and 12/9/10. The United Way of Greater Lorain County.

“Zimbabwe: Health Profile.” World Health Organization. Global Health Observatory. 2011. Accessed: January 10, 2012.  http://www.who.int/gho/countries/zwe.pdf

By Sesha Nandyal

1. Occupational therapist — Individu­als in need of this service may have a physical, mental, or even developmental impairment that does not allow them to function in an independ­ent manner on a daily basis. This job may involve re-teaching the task of buttoning up a shirt to a man who has had a stroke, or possibly teaching a teenager with autism how to jump rope or jug­gle to improve coordination skills. You will strive for your patients to come out of your treatment feeling independent so that they may have more control of their lives. This may appeal to neuro­science majors who have a greater understand­ing of how to get the brain and body working in unison to perform certain tasks, or to biology majors interested in the way in which different body parts collaborate.

2. Nuclear medicine technologist — This is similar to a pharmacist, but with a twist. Being a nuclear medicine technologist can be quickly described as using radioactivity not only to treat disease, but also to diagnose it. Nuclear medicine technologists prepare and administer radiophar­maceuticals. Additionally, they take x-rays and develop different types of images which they of­ten supply to physicians. This occupation may be fit for those majoring in physics, or those major­ing in chemistry, who enjoy working hands-on in a laboratory setting with the different chemicals involved.

3. Applied behavior analyst — An applied behavior analyst is a certified specialist who is concerned with how people interact with their environment. Being an applied behavior analyst, you will be working with various people on dif­ferent behaviors such as communication, reading, social skills, and work skills. The program may involve training patients to respond appropriately to punishment, reinforcement, and verbal com­munication, or lack thereof. Becoming an ap­plied behavior analyst may interest those who are majoring in psychology or neuroscience, since all behaviors stem from the brain and make up the personality of the clients.

4. Chiropractor — The main task of a chiropractor is to manipulate the spine into its proper formation. The job also calls for manipu­lating other soft tissues and points. To someone not knowledgeable in the field, it may look like a deep massage. Yet along with these sessions, chi­ropractors perform various other treatments for a patient, involving weights, head slings, and dif­ferent stretching apparatuses. Chiropractic may be a medical career choice for those majoring in biology or neuroscience, because of their knowl­edge of the parts of the body and the connections between the spine and the brain.

5. Clinical dietitian — These are dietitians who work in health care facilities. Their patients include those who have various health condi­tions pertaining to their diets. They review medi­cal charts and work with medical professionals to develop nutrition plans for their patients. Clinical dietitians may also provide seminars or public information sessions pertaining to proper health and nutrition in communities and schools. Chemistry and biochemistry are two areas of study which could lead to becoming a dietitian, along with academic background involving food and nutrition.

6. Anatomist — These biological scientists focus on the structure of living organisms. In most cases, anatomists actually work with hu­man anatomy because most professionals in this field focus their research on humans. Anatomists work at universities and medical centers, where they teach the structure of organisms or conduct research. They help to train many medical pro­fessionals on their way to becoming pharmacists, nurses, and doctors. Those who may be interest­ed in becoming an anatomist may be majoring in biology or neuroscience due to the fact that they already have a general understanding of human anatomy.

Perhaps you’re certain that you want to at­tend medical school, or maybe one of these alter­native choices sounds appealing to you and you might want to learn more. The possibilities are truly endless, and while considering your future may seem a bit overwhelming, if you dig around a little you will always be able to find options you haven’t yet considered. We hold all the keys to our future; it’s up to us to decide which door to open and which path to take, or even to create new paths ourselves. We’re given the tools to make ourselves exactly who we want to be, so consider your options. Don’t wait; start exploring.

There are several prongs to the laboratory. The overarching umbrella … is how the brain constructs reality and how that can be very different inside different peoples’ heads. What I study is time perception and how that can work in different situations, what I study is synesthesia which is a good in road to understanding how one tiny genetic change can make someone different from someone else. I study neural law, how this all matters on a societal level … the fact that people can be very different on the inside and how that makes a difference in how you run the society or how you run social policy. I’m also interested in … issues of empathy how people view in-group and out-group distinctions. Finally the fifth prong is plasticity — how the brain rewires itself, changes itself — and so we are just launching on several projects that will take advantage of plasticity to feed new kinds of data streams into the brain through neural channels.

What is something that most people don’t realize about time perception?

That time is not necessarily a fixed flowing river but is a construction of the brain and it is malleable so that under different circumstances you can think that things are longer or shorter. Maybe people do realize that, but I don’t think people have any notion of the degree to which we can manipulate that in a laboratory and make people think something lasted longer or shorter.

What is synesthesia?

It is a blending of the senses where some sensory stimulation leads to an anomalous or unusual sensory consequence. For example, hearing music that causes someone to see a color or shape or texture, or eating something puts a feeling on your fingertips or hearing something [that] puts a feeling in your mouth physically. So it is a … merging of the senses. It used to be thought people were just being poetic or metaphorical, but now it is clear that it is a genuine perceptual phenomenon triggered by cross talk in the brain.

Could you talk about something you are wondering currently or found out about synesthesia?

Well two things are going on currently. One, [synesthesia] appears to be genetic. It runs in family trees, so we are trying to figure out the genetics of it. It is a real challenge because like many conditions it may be different genes in different families. It may be polygenetic even within a family, so it’s a heck of a challenge to try and find this. We have been working for many years, so I hope to not fail there. Currently we are [also] pursuing a hypothesis that sensory processing dysfunction in autism is actually a form of synesthesia. A lot of autistic kids can’t stand certain words or sights or touches or smells. What I realized in looking at this carefully is, it’s not necessarily that everything sounds louder to them — because if that were the case they would not like loud sounds equally — but it is very particular. Its particular sounds that matter to them and that made me wonder if it was a network property, just like synesthesia, but instead of the sound triggering a color or a texture or a shape instead it is triggering nausea or dizziness or aversion or something like that.

It has always seemed to me that the brain, neuroscience is going to give answers to the big questions as far as accountability goes and so on, would you agree with that, would you finally found sort of your lets say niche or the best way for you to investigate the world?

I think there are many ways of investigating the world and so this is one approach is very fruitful, but it is not the only one. Personally I spent a fraction of time exploring the world through literature also which is a different way of understanding humans and motivations and desires and loves and things that science is a little impotent on.  [But]as far as a day to day job, yeah, I think it is optimal for me as far as how to spend my daylight hours

What do you feel is your role in the neuroscience community?

Well … sometimes I describe myself as a theoretician (which is not quite correct) and people don’t understand that, because what I do is experiments all day. I work with numbers and data and fMRI and so on, but the reason I think of myself … [as a theoretician] is because there are laboratories that study the brain at all these different levels — from molecules to synapses to neurons to networks of neurons — and what’s needed is a theoretical framing to stitch all these pieces and parts together and find out how they fit together and that’s the part that I do.

Now what would you say is the most important thing from neuroscience to communicate to laymen?

It depends what we mean by important. I’ve been really interested in social issues lately. One of the things I think is under appreciated is the degree to which half of us as other people are products of our culture, our communities, our family, and the movies we watch, [and] the fables in our culture. All those things make us who we are so there is no sense in imagining yourself back as a caveman because you would be so totally different in ways you can’t even imagine, or if you were born in a different continent, in a different culture. We all think there is this hardcore version of us that maybe has some decorations of culture on us but it’s probably not that, very little of that hardcore [self] is in there. I think that is a very important concept for people when they think of people from other cultures and choices they make and wonder, “Oh how could they make that sort of choice.” It’s actually a big pluralistic world.

What was your purpose in writing Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain?

Ah interesting question… it was probably multipurpose. When I write a book, it allows me to crystallize my thoughts on something, and I’m always about three times smarter when I finish the book than when I start it. I think there is this illusion that people have when an author sits down and writes a book it’s because the author has got all the stuff figured out and wants to express it to the world. But in fact the process of writing a book translates into figuring a lot of stuff out really crystallizing ideas on the fly. You sort of know generally where you are going and you sort of know what’s happening in front of you but you figure a lot of stuff out along the way about the route. I always learn things from writing a book.

Like making connections?

Yeah . . . so there’s that and the other half of it as far as purpose goes is I believe strongly in the endeavor of popular science. I don’t understand why but popular science sometimes has a bad reputation within the science community, where there is a lot of pettiness about this. People feel like if you are spending your time doing that at night then you aren’t reading academic papers or writing academic papers. But the fact is … [with] Incognito, I spent a lot of time writing that book, polishing that book, making the best book I possibly could. I didn’t know if anybody would be interested in it by the time it is done, but then it became a New York Times best seller for almost four months, and what that tells me is there is a real public appetite for science and these ideas. … Instead of writing an academic paper that is read by 17 people on the planet, here was an opportunity to  turn a lot of people on to a lot of ideas. You know I think it is so critical for the future of education, for our legislation eventually, for our future of warfare, just in terms of … teaching people what is known [and] what has good evidence behind it. It changes how people look at the world, what people think about social policy, how they think about international policy, how they think about what they want to teach their own children. I feel like Incognito is probably the biggest impact that I have had in my life so far, in terms of actually being able to turn people on to a whole constellation of ideas.

You, in the book, discuss the mind as being unaware of any of these processes of the brain and you say that throughout. These terms mind and brain, what do they mean to you and how are you using them?

The way I try to phrase it most consistently in the book is the conscious mind and the unconscious brain. The conscious mind is the part that flickers on when you wake up in the morning it is the part that wasn’t there when you were sleeping but is there when you are awake. The surprise to me when I got into neuroscience and studied it for the last 18 years now is to get this deeper and deeper understanding of how little the conscious mind has to do with what is actually happening under the hood. The vast activity in your brain is unconscious. You don’t have access to it.

Would you agree that the conscious mind is still a physical section or constellation of the brain?

Well, okay, it probably isn’t a section in terms of the geography.

Right.

And the reason we know that is because you can damage essentially any part of the brain and, so far as we know, there aren’t lesions that cause someone to be a zombie in that they keep doing the same things with their conscious mind. … That [the] mind arises as a property of the brain may be an epiphenomenon, and that’s probably the best guess. But as I talk about in the last chapter of the book, I devote it to this issue are there other possibilities. What is our evidence consistent with? Does it necessitate that consciousness is an emerging property of the physical pieces and parts? And the answer is: not necessarily. I mean that is the operational hypothesis that all of us come into lab every day with and [that] we pursue this in lab — how the physical structure of the brain translates to consciousness — but we are absolutely certain that is an unsolved question. Not only do we not know how to translate the physical activity of the pieces and parts into consciousness, but nobody even has a good idea, even a seed of a shadow of an idea about what such a theory would look like. To figure out how you could make a theory that translates one into another … leads to a whole branch of philosophy that suggest that consciousness is an inherent property of the world, a part of the fabric of the cosmos, like gravity. It might be a special thing.

By Francis Lawrence

Much progress is being made with sensory substitution. The vOICe apparatus, for example, helps people to see, by translating visual information from a camera into sound. By interpreting the sounds, one can learn to navigate, recognize, and interact with their surroundings.  Another apparatus, called BrainPort, also helps people to see but through direct electrical input to the brain. A camera feeds electrical information into the brain via an electrode array on the tongue. Similar to using the vOICe, the brain interprets the incoming stimuli to craft a mental image of the environment. Erik Weinhenmayer, a blind man, took the BrainPort on a hike upMount Everest, and it allowed him to climb to the top..  Needless to say, sensory substitution can empower individuals to achieve goals originally thought inaccessible. As an example of sensory substitution, Frank Russo and his team of researchers at Ryerson University think that they can help the deaf and hard-of-hearing experience music in all its glory through the sense of touch.  They call their device the Emoti-Chair.

In short, the Emoti-chair transforms what is essentially a sophisticated chair massage into an emotional experience similar to that of listening to music. It does this by treating the human body like a giant cochlea, an organ in the auditory system that does some remarkable things. The cochlea’s responsibility is to turn sound into electrical information, which it sends to the brain. The cochlea decodes a sound wave’s complexity by separating its overlapping and interacting frequencies into discrete units of information. High frequencies, for instance, activate the entrance to the cochlea, and the lower frequencies activate its center. Consequently, when you hear a melody, the cochlea receives the different pitches of that melody at different places. Russo calls this place coding, a feature of the Emoti-chair that helps researchers translate sound into a tactile experience.

The Emoti-chair feeds vibrations to the skin in a similar way that the cochlea is fed sound. The chair channels frequencies on a continuum along the human back with the higher pitches closer to the head and lower frequencies closer to the ground.  Scientists chose this layout because we perceive different pitches as occupying different physical space.  Low pitches, for instance, feel grounded and earthy, while music with high frequencies can at times ‘descend from the heavens’. The hope is that the brain will make sense of the vibrations in the same way that it processes actual music.

The actual construction of the Emoti-Chair posed considerable challenges.  First, researchers needed to address the differences in sensitivity between the skin and the ear. The ear can detect vibrations ranging from 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz while the skin senses within the range of 5 Hz to 1,000 Hz. With such a discrepancy, pitches must not only be translated but also manipulated to fit within the skin’s range.  Another challenge is that technology does not yet exist for a body “pad” on which one could apply any conceivable vibration at any conceivable point on the body. Instead, they embedded specialized speakers, coined “voice coils,” into the back of the chair. Currently, the model includes voice-coils along the entirety of the back, plus a few on each armrest. Additionally, the chair includes a piston in the seat for percussion sounds and deep bass kicks.

Another important hurdle for the developers of the Emoti-Chair was how to present music to the ‘listener’. Researchers must ‘decode’ the sound before sending it through the Emoti-Chair.  Two methods currently exist for this task: Track Model (TM) and Frequency Model (FM).  To understand TM, imagine a multi-track recording of music created in GarageBand or Logic, then channeled in the voice-coil configuration.  Those with high frequency sounds would go through the voice coils closest to the head, while low frequencies would enter near the sacrum.  The advantage of TM is that single instruments can be heard through their own voice coil.  This allows a very distinct separation of layers, such guitar from bass, or violins from flutes.  Thus, a multi-track recording can be transformed into an ensemble of vibrations that closely resemble the original music.

Ideally, researchers would always use TM, but not all recordings are available in multi-track format. This is where Frequency Model enters the picture. Like TM, it deconstructs a music recording into multiple audio tracks, but by range of frequency rather than by instrumentation.  To illustrate, consider a recording of a rock band consisting of drums, bass, guitar, and vocals.  FM might logically separate this into four tracks. The first of these would include the high pitches — the voice, but also elements of the guitar, and perhaps even the drummer’s cymbal crashes. It includes elements of the entire ensemble because FM processing has created tracks by frequency range instead of instrumentation.  Therefore, if one were to play all the resulting tracks simultaneously, one would hear the original recording.  Most music for Emoti-chair is decoded with this technique.

What makes the Emoti-Chair special is that it attempts to replace, rather than supplement, not only acoustic but musical experience.  You may have relaxed into the massaging vibrations and ambient soundscapes of a spa chair.  Watching the iTunes visualizer while listening to your favorite artist may have mesmerized you.  In these examples, however, the music only informs the nature of the extra-musical stimuli. In other words, the technology offers a pleasurable accompaniment by analyzing the structural content of the sound.  The Emoti-chair takes things further. To get an idea of what that means, recall a concert where you could feel the beat of the music coursing through your body. Then, imagine a similar experience, except with the music in its entirety rather than just the beat.  For that matter, imagine a symphony or any large-scale musical work, electronic or acoustic, coursing through your body. These are the Emoti-chair’s aims.

After all of the hard work, it still remains uncertain as to whether the Emoti-Chair really works.  In one of the first official studies, researchers tested the effectiveness of FM place coding versus none at all. Participants with normal hearing experienced eight different classical music samples; they experienced them as FM and then as a composite sound wave felt equally through all of the voice coils (thus, no place coding). They also listened to the original audio files so that they could compare their experience in the Emoti-chair with the music itself. The selections covered four emotions — joy, anger, fear, sadness.  After experiencing the sample (audio, FM, and control), researchers collected quantitative and qualitative information about the participants’ reactions.

The results were mixed.  On average, participants enjoyed the samples as FM more than the controls, and in particular, the joyful and sad music.  A skeptic, however, might argue that joyful music elicits a high enjoyment rating for reasons intrinsic to the qualities of FM rather than of the music itself. Joyful music, it seems, typically has a wider range of frequencies as well as more rapid movement and development of musical content.  Perhaps the Emoti-Chair conveys only a more interesting experience, rather than one that is truly emotional. That is, the participants may only have enjoyed the complexity of the vibrations rather than genuine an emotional rush.

In further defense of the Emoti-Chair, the mental imagery evoked in qualitative remarks from participants suggested the chair communicated something emotionally significant.  Participants described an FM selection of sad music as feeling “like someone forcing another person do to something — move along, go that way, etc., the other person was fighting back — stalling, passive aggressive.” This reaction has multiple facets. The individual is probably reacting to interacting melodies by personifying them. To describe a soundscape in this manner requires detailed information, suggesting that the Emoti-chair communicated complex musical information to the participant.  Another individual described FM selection from the fear category as “military, urgent, impatient” while the same track as a control was “boring. It didn’t say anything.”  Additionally, a piece of angry music was described as “war.” The importance of these descriptions is that they closely matched the descriptions of the actual audio samples.  That means that not only were the participants more articulate about their emotions when listening to FM, they seemed to experience the same emotions whether they listened to actual audio or FM encoding.

Although the final verdict on the effectiveness of the Emoti-Chair remains in the air, the chair’s accomplishments thus far demonstrate our ability to react meaningfully to new types of stimuli.  Chances are, sensory substitution technology like the Emoti-Chair will improve with advancements in technology.  Until then, consider the possibilities this technology opens up in the realm of entertainment.  In the past, music meant sitting in a hall with only acoustic amplification. In the future, one may don a bodysuit of vibrotactile stimulators. With this garb, Mozart might blissfully massage while filthy dubstep would grind one’s innards.  I can hardly wait!

By Adrian Jewell

What’s going on? Photographs of deep space would have us believe in a Day-Glo universe. We’re accustomed to gorgeous, detailed depictions of nebulas and galaxies, rendered in brilliantly saturated hues. But if you’ve ever been in space, or at least looked at a deep space object through a telescope, you know that those colors aren’t visible to the human eye. In fact, many of the colors you see in astrophotographs were never there to begin with. Typically, we expect photographs to show us the world — and the universe — roughly as if we were seeing it with our own eyes. But astropho­tographs aim to serve a higher scientific purpose, and can show us much more than that.

Catching Rays

To understand how astrophotographers take pictures, it helps to think of a camera as a data-collecting device. It records the wavelength, frequency, and amplitude of the light it receives. Encoded in this data is valuable information. Chemical elements emit light at specific wave­lengths, and if we can identify the wavelengths of light produced by a galaxy or a nebula, we can also identify the chemical elements that compose that galaxy or nebula. We can then infer its origins, its evolution, and the temperatures of its individual stars. A photograph is literally a graph that depicts this information. Color represents wavelength; in­tensity of the color represents amplitude. (When you get sunburned, your skin is a negative pho­tograph; darkness corresponds to level of light exposure.) In a family photograph, the colors cor­respond almost exactly to the wavelengths they represent. But in astrophotography, two chemical elements might emit similar but distinct wave­lengths of light — say, two different shades of red. It’s important that we distinguish these two ele­ments, so an astrophotographer might choose to represent one wavelength of light with a contrast­ing color, the same way you might choose colors to represent data on a bar graph.

Visible Light

To distinguish the wavelengths of light re­corded by a camera, it’s easiest to control the light the camera receives. Astrophotographers use a tool called a filter, a piece of colored glass that blocks all but certain wavelengths of light. A filter allows astrophotographers to take a photo of, say, just red light. Typically, astrophotographers will take three photographs of an object, each through a differ­ent color filter — red, blue, and green. Separating the wavelengths of light into three photographs makes it possible to adjust the brightness and con­trast of specific colors. The three modified photo­graphs are layered to produce a single full-color image with important features made visible.

Most nebulas are surrounded by an abun­dance of ionized hydrogen gas. Hydrogen is the most plentiful element in the universe, but the red light it produces is faint. By amplifying the red layer of a three-color photograph, the hydrogen becomes visible. The rosy haze that character­izes many photographs of nebulas indicates an abundance of hydrogen gas. A bluish-white fog, like that seen in visible-light photos of the cloud nebula, indicates synchrotron radiation, a bright light emitted by charged, fast moving particles passing though magnetic fields. In the case of the Crab Nebula, it suggests the presence of a rapidly spinning neutron star at its center.

 
The pinkish color of nebulas can also be in­dicative of ionized helium gas, which, like hydro­gen, emits red light. In fact, helium and hydrogen are so similar in color that they’re impossible to visually distinguish. When astrophotographers want to differentiate between two elements of the same color, a simple red, blue, or green filter won’t do. Instead, they use filters that only let in one specific wavelength of light — say, light emitted by sulfur. With one photograph that only shows light emitted by hydrogen and another that only shows light emitted by sulfur, they can assign an arbitrary contrasting color to one of the photos. When the photos are layered, the contrasting color stands out and separates the wavelengths.Narrow Band Imaging

Non-Visible Light

While the visible light emissions of celestial bodies are interesting, space objects emit way more than just visible light. That’s why we pho­tograph at nearly every wavelength of electromag­netic radiation there is — x-ray, gamma ray, ultra­violet, infrared, microwave, and radio.

In a recent study published in Nature, scientists from the University of Oxford studied the social organizations of 217 primate species through the lens of evolutionary genetics. The results of their research suggest a strong genetic basis for both social behavior and the changes from one type of social organization to another over time.

The researchers began their study by classifying the social behavior of each primate species into four groups: solitary, pair-living, or group living, which itself was subdivided into single-male and multi-male groups.  A single-male harem consists of one adult male and multiple adult females, whereas a multi-male group consists of several males and several females. The divided 217 species were subsequently arranged onto a primate consensus tree, which summarizes the inferred evolutionary history of the primate species.

Like a typical phylogenetic tree tracing ancestry, a primate consensus tree maps out our current understanding of the species’ evolutionary history. Researchers color-coded each species on the tree according to its social organization. This organization of data revealed that, more often than not, closely related species on this tree had the same color, indicating that related species have similar social organizations. These statistically significant similarities led the researchers to conclude that each species’ social organization was strongly based on genetics.

Using four different models to interpret the data and characterize the species’ changes, the researchers were able to evaluate the rate and manner of transition between the four groups (solitary, pair living/family groups, single-male, multi-male). The first model of transitions between patterns of social organization claims a single rate of transition between all patterns, with all of the changes occurring at the same rate. In contrast, the second model employs variable rates of transition, implying that some transitions are more likely to occur than others (although the model does not provide which of the transitions are more likely to occur, just that some are). The third model restricts the transitions to direct step-wise changes only. On the other hand, the fourth model, or the “reversible-jump-derived” model, uses information derived from the phylogenetic data to identify likely transitions.

Of the four, the researchers found that the reversible-jump model fit the data most closely and explained primate sociality best.  This model suggests social behavior evolved from solitary to multi-male groups, and then from multi-male to either pair-living or single-male harems.  The study identifies the switch from a nocturnal to a diurnal lifestyle as a possible catalyst for primate social evolution from solitary to group structures, as it would have forced the primate ancestors, exposed during the day, to seek safety in numbers from predators. The researchers hence recreated the evolutionary history of social organization using the reversible-jump-derived model.

While the transitions from smaller groups to larger ones have previously been assumed to occur at a consistent rate across species, evidence from this study does not support that theory.  Rather, the phylogenetic data suggests the transitions occurred mostly unilaterally. The shift from solitary living to multi-male groups occurred roughly 52 million years ago, which coincides with the change from nocturnal to diurnal activity.  From this, more stable social structures emerged, eventually leading to the pair-living and single-male groups that emerged around 16 million years ago. Many of these landmark changes in sociality occurred at points where one primate family divided into multiple evolutionary groups.

Researchers explored sex-biased dispersal as another possible catalyst for primate social evolution.  In sex-biased dispersal, which occurs in many primate species, one sex (typically male) disperses much further from the birth site than members of the other sex.  It has been theorized that this allowed members of the sex that remain at the birth site to form cooperative relationships with each other, resulting in increasing sociality within the group.

The data places sex-biased dispersal patterns as appearing after the shift from solitary to multi-male groups.  Thus, these findings discredit the once accepted idea that cooperative relationships led to increasing sociality and therefore larger groups. However, even though the change to sex-biased dispersal did not prompt social living, it can still be credited as a secondary catalyst towards more stable social groups.

Dr. Joan Silk, an expert in primate social behavior at UCLA, asserts, “The existence of a strong phylogenetic signal spells trouble for socioecological models that aim to explain the evolution of primate social organization.” In other words, if ecological conditions, such as resource distributions, were the primary determinant of social behavior, then related primate species in different ecological environments should display a wide range of social organizations.  Furthermore, primates in similar environments should have similar social structures regardless of genetics or evolutionary history. This study shows that neither of those hypotheses is true. This study will undoubtedly play an essential role in future studies seeking to model the evolution of social behavior in primates.

As stated in the study, “Anthropoids [monkeys and apes] differ from other social vertebrates in the prevalence of stable groups and bonded relationships between individuals”. Additionally, this study’s conclusion supports the results of a previous experiment, which demonstrated that male monkeys have a biological predisposition towards certain toys.  In the 2008 study, the researchers found that the male monkeys overwhelmingly preferred to play with “masculine” (i.e. wheeled toys), rather than more “feminine” stuffed dolls.  The fact that these two separate studies came to a similar conclusion confirms that gender roles and social behavior are based largely upon genetic components. Studying primate social behavior will also be revealing of human behavior, serving as a way to understand the underlying basis of our own social structures.

¹ Shultz, S., Opie, C., Atkinson, Q.D. Stepwise evolution of stable sociality in primate. Nature 479, 219-222 (2011).

² Hassett, J.M., Siebert, E.R., Wallen, K. Sex differences in rhesus monkey toy preferences parallel those of children. Hormones and Behavior 54, 359-364 (2008).

By Jessica Lam