I noticed this interesting article on Science News about how sighted children of blind mothers don’t need any extra help to develop their communication skills. If anything, children of sighted mothers could use a little extra help. But what really interested me about this article is that it examined the interactions of children with their mothers, not with their fathers or any other primary caregivers. Human studies are always tricky–it’s hard to get large enough sample sizes to get a sense of the variation unrelated to the question of interest, so it makes sense to eliminate any unrelated factors. For this area of research, that might mean examining how children interact with their mothers first (if mothers most commonly serve as the primary caregiver), and then branching out to look at a broader range of interactions.

The same is true in neuroscience: My uncle–who was left-handed–worked for a long time in a neuroscience lab, and he told me that lefties are typically excluded from imaging studies because their brains work differently, which would introduce a whole new dimension of complexity to what is already a complicated question. But that means that when people use neuroimaging scans to learn how the brain works, they can often only tell you how a right-handed person’s brain works. As a lefty, I can’t help but feel that scans of other left-handed folk would be a fascinating addition to any neuroscience study. In any case I think the factors we choose to eliminate as unrelated to the question of interest say a lot about us and our collective blind spots.

When racing dogs retire, they often don’t have any place to go. This has been a problem as more greyhound racing tracks shut down as tastes change too. My neighbors adopted one such ex-racing dog.  They had a large outdoor fenced in yard, and when released into that yard she moved with amazing speed. Always in a circle, and always as fast as she could. She wore her own smooth racing track along the outer edge where grass could not grow back fast enough to keep up with the regular pounding it took from her paws.

I thought it was an interesting that there was a similar process for how neural connections are strengthened in the brain. Repeatedly revisiting the same ideas causes your brain to forge its own kind of self-made race track. Like the greyhound – the more your brain races through the same thought pattern, the more entrenched the connections between the thoughts become by making stronger neural connections in the brain. (This seems to be especially true for obsessive compulsive behaviors and even rehashing the past repeatedly as for post-traumatic stress disorder). But, rather than adding worrying to your list of worries (no ones needs a meta-worry) this Time magazine article suggests we can use this neuroplasticity to our advantage by retraining our brain. Changing thought patterns can change the brain itself. There is some evidence that regular meditation has measureable positive effects on the mind, including stronger gamma waves, which can help with problem solving. (Some members of the group regularly do yoga – is this the secret of their brilliance?)

Anyhow, maybe the trick to getting out of a negative thought holding pattern is to make like an ex-racing greyhound and just forge a new track.

For the first time in my life, I’m living in a country where I don’t speak the language. Or as it may be, languages, as the local language here is Catalan, which is an entirely different language. As a Dutch person, we are taught from an early age to speak English, German and French. I was even taught Greek and Latin, yet, Spanish wasn’t part of the curriculum. It took me by surprise how disabled I felt, and still feel, not being able to communicate. Language is such an important tool in our daily lives, not only for life mattering instances (like the time when Kasper had an illness and I was trying to communicate unsuccessfully with his teacher about his needs and medications), but also for social matters, like making contact with the other moms at the school or asking my baker which bread tastes the closest to our beloved Dutch bread. This is why I am so jealous of Lara who picked up Catalan in a matter of weeks. However, I started wondering: stick me in a nursery class for 9 hours a day, wouldn’t I be just as advanced as Lara? Where is the science that backs up this wide-spread cultural belief that children acquire a new language faster than adults?

Turns out, this evidence is lacking. The observation is certainly that children pick up a language at a much faster pace than adults, but both are generally in extremely different environments, making this an unfair comparison. Also, there are plenty of examples of adults who picked up a new language in a very rapid manner using an intense language learning course (take for instance our soon-to-be Dutch queen, originally from Argentina, who was nearly fluent in Dutch in a matter of months). What is needed is a controlled experiment, yet, on my quick scan of the literature, only one experiment of the sort is reported and dates back from 1925. And here they actually found adults to learn faster than children do. As far as my quick search allows, there is no scientific report that demonstrates that children do indeed learn a language faster than adults do. They do learn a language differently: using mimicry, children generally obtain more accent-free language. Additionally, children have a lower sense of self-conscious and a natural enthusiasm to learn new tasks, which obviously helps in language acquisition. Yet, adults can take advantage of their much larger native-language vocabulary than children. Moreover, adults can make conscious and deliberate use of grammatical generalizations whereas young children are stuck with a less efficient approach of hearing correct phrases over and over again and being corrected.

This quick research into language learning science provided me with two interesting conclusions. 1) My $500 Rosetta Stone course, based on language immersion without native language instruction (as this is the way children learn) is based on shite, and 2) I have no more excuses. The speed at which I acquire these languages can not be blamed on the speed of my grey matter making the necessary new connections, but rather on the amount of hours I invest in surrounding myself with the new language. This second conclusion is a critical one, but that is a whole new blog topic…

It was the birthday of the late and much missed Douglas Adams last month and I noted that google marked it with one of their doodles.

À propos of nothing else in particular, aside from Andrew saying, “you owe me a blog”, I thought an aside from Adams would make good filler. Just in case some haven’t heard of Douglas Adams (I can’t quite believe there would be anyone in this category but then I found out recently that one of us hadn’t heard of Tolstoy – almost as bad as an ignorance of narwhals) he famously wrote the five books constituting the Hitchhikers Guide trilogy. Less well known is that he collaborated with the biologist/author/presenter Mark Carwardine on a book called “Last Chance To See” (which just goes to show that humour, space travel and robot sex sells better than conservation). As far as I can recall there is nothing on parasites, virulence evolution or the importance of temperature in this book, but LCTS does have a tenuous link to the group – it contains a whole chapter on Kakapos.

Anyway, the quote (no, not the one about liking the whooshing sound that deadlines make as they go by – though that is good too) comes from an eclectic collection called “The Salmon of Doubt” put together after Adams died.

“My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Brontë, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantle piece, in order to prove it could be done.



This is not quite true, in fact.

My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees.”

The observation about sloths is rather endearing. One simply wishes the comment about Branwell were true. He died a consumptive alcoholic apparently.

As spring approaches, we will soon be witness to an elegant example of umwelt. A field of flowers is merely a visual and olfactory experience for most of us, but beyond our level of perception it is an exciting superhighway of signals. Flowers present a multimodal schmorgesborg of sights, textures, and stimuli to attract pollinators.  A recent study by Dominic Clarke and colleagues at the University of Bristol adds another type of signal to the already complex interactions between flower and bug by providing evidence that a trip through the daisies for a bumblebee is literally electrifying.

It turns out that flying insects have a positive electrical potential and that flowers generally have negative electrical potentials. Clarke et al. measured the electrical potential of flower stems during bee visits and found that when bees alight on flowers there is an electrical interaction. Further, when bees were trained using “E-flowers” (artificial flowers that had distinct charges and different nectar rewards) they were able to learn that charged E-flowers had rewards and uncharged did not. This means that they can tell the difference.

Flowers before (left half) and after (right half) being sprayed with electrostatic colored powder that allows us to visualize electrical fields.

The cherry on top of this elegant study was an assay showing that bees can also differentiate between patterns of charge. Through miracles of Macgyvery that that are far beyond my comprehension the authors were able to create E-flowers with homogenous versus bulls-eye distributions of electrical charge. The bumble bees were able to learn to associate rewards with one pattern or the other demonstrating that
they were able to distinguish between E-flowers with similar charges, but differing E-field geometries.

How might this all play out in your backyard?  The authors found that adding differential
charges to artificial colored flowers increased learning efficiency in the bees. These signals are new to us, but clearly not to the bees and are likely used in concert with other flower signals. The real test will be examining the importance of these cues in the field.

I was listening to a Radiolab podcast about guts this weekend, and there was a bit on treating mice with a probiotic supplement. After their treatment, the mice were dropped into water as a stress test, because apparently mice can swim but they don’t like to do it. The probiotic mice had an attenuated stress response compared to untreated control mice, and the probiotic mice continued to swim long after the untreated mice gave up.

This made me wonder whether my own stress levels could be improved by probiotic supplements, which lead to me wondering whether I’d actually want to decrease my stress levels. I’m not a particularly stressed out person (maybe I already have good gut bacteria), and the stress I do experience tends to motivate me to work.

Although it wasn’t the point of the podcast, I liked the probiotic mice because they made me think about how negative feelings (like stress) can be channeled towards keeping you swimming. Which leads me to the rejection trophy.

Arguably my greatest stroke of genius during grad school, the trophy began its life as a women’s softball trophy and it ended up in my possession for reasons completely unrelated to softball. One day, my friend Ben had a (now published) paper rejected. Ben was telling me about the rejection over the shared wall of our cubicles and as I was listening to him, I was looking at the trophy. I took a Post-It, wrote “Rejection trophy: Ben” on it, stuck it on the base of the trophy, and a lab tradition was born.

As you can see, the Post-It chain has since been extended as we’ve crossed out names and passed it along to the most recently rejected lab member (Photo credit: Ben Parker).

Last week, Ben was telling me about how he just had a paper rejected in less than 12 hours – a new record. On the bright side, he has the trophy back and we all love getting the trophy. With his permission, I’ve reproduced his acceptance speech below because it really drives home how you can use negative emotions as a source of motivation. You may want to have a tissue ready, just in case.

“We’re always proud to get the trophy. Not because we’re unhappy or we like rejection, but because the rejection trophy represents the spark of achievement in each of us. If we never got rejected, it would mean that we’re not trying hard enough, that we’re not shooting high enough. The trophy reflects our efforts to push the envelope, and if we shoot for the moon and miss, we land among the stars. I’d like to thank the academy editorial board.”

NB: Ben would like to make it absolutely clear that he was being tongue-in-cheek and does not actually say things like “if we shoot for the moon and miss, we land among the stars.”