Brain Festival 2004

Coming Mar 6 2004 10a-4p SciTrek

Huh. Well, y'all missed out. It was way fun.

Jordan Rose and I covered most of the day, and Jay Jones showed up just long enough to give the canonic 3-ball cascade lesson to the two most beautiful women who showed up at the booth all day.

The Brain Fest was awesome as usual. For a miracle, the guy at the Alzheimer's Association table actually knew real stuff about the disease. I usually shy away from the advocacy groups exhibits, because they're usually manned by volunteers who know about as much as I do about the actual science of the disease that the assocations fight. But in this case the Alzheimer's Association guy had some really interesting information on the relationship between cardiovascular health and alzheimer's disease. Apparently folks as young as 45 who have heart trouble also often have indicators of future trouble with Alzheimer's, even if they don't have clinically evident deficits. So the Alzheimer's Association is launching a diet//exercise campaign similar to the ones you commonly find in heart advocacy groups. Who knew?

Other highlights included the Direct Brain Interface guy, a prof in the Comp Sci department at GSU who's working on controlling a wheelchair in real-time with brain waves read from an EEG trace. He had some amusing insights into science-fiction -- apparently a Star Trek episode of a few years back had a DBI-controlled wheelchair in it, but the control was far cruder than the kind of DBI computer control machinery available right now. Amusing that the imaginations of just a few years ago hadn't seen even to today in this technology.

The physical brain exhibit this year was manned by a couple of actual grad students who were studying real brain cellular anatomy. One of them explained to me some additional insights into what parts of your brain work hardest when you juggle -- apparently after the image of the world makes its way from your retina to the visual cortex at the back of your brain, it gets separated into a "what" and a "where" stream for further processing. Those streams, in turn, feed back to your neocortex and (presumably) your parietal lobe to help keep your cascade going.

Jordan did a tolerable good job of explaining the path potentiation model of learning when I jumped him with the question "So... how does practice actually improve your juggling?"

Finmally, I got the scoop on the\xA0 methamphetamine-for-MDMA scandal, involving a science paper which has resulted in yet more idiotic drug legislation (the "Illicit Drug Anti-Proliferation Act of 2003"). The scandal was that a paper purporting to show that MDMA actually damages dopamine production in human and animal brains had to be retracted because the animal subjects were dosed with methamphetamine rather than MDMA. Methamphetamine is already known to damage dopamine production in human and animal subjects. The folks who conducted the retracted study are still trying to assess blame for the substitution.

I carefully kept away from the booth explaining MDMA (ecstacy), although I must admit that the temptation to go over there and say "So... You wanna buy some CRANK for your MONKEYS???" was very high.\xA0

OTOH, the 'quiz' on the effects of cocaine was mostly correct and reasonably unbiased, and the folks at that booth actually were able to construct a reasonable explanation of how cocaine can be both a systemic stimulant and a topical anaesthetic.

-- CHS

-- CharlesShapiro - 18 Feb 2004