World explodes

Ok it doesn't. But the scouring of the web for NLRG worthy posts was really hard for a while and now I'm snowed under with interesting articles.

The first is really just a scientific tragedy that is fairly sobering. The NYTimes reports on the sentencing of University of Vermont's Eric Poehlman. After one of his lab tech turned him in and investigation showed that Poehlman had been making up data to support his hypotheses for a decade. Sad really.

I think the following article is reporting on single cell studies in monkey that connect sounds to reward. Click on to read quotes from the report.

“When something starts to predict a good outcome is going to happen, the sensory part of the brain that responds to those events starts to respond more strongly, making it easier for the brain to cause a behavioral response,” says Dr. David T. Blake, neuroscientist at the Medical College of Georgia and lead author on a study in the Oct. 19 issue of Neuron.

By monitoring the action potentials of about a dozen key neurons in monkey test subjects, researchers found neuronal responsiveness increases dramatically after just a few training sessions.

These neuronal fireworks were short-lived, replaced by a rewiring of the brain that shows the animal has learned, Dr. Blake says.

In the few monkeys that initially didn’t make the connection that a change in pitch in a series of sounds meant they were getting a juice reward, no brain changes occurred.