/sci/ - Science & Math

Qualia are something that people who don't know anything about the brain talk about to "formalize" their naive beliefs about how the "mind" works.

>>5224388
Yes.

Non-hydrophobic substances, like ions, can cross the membrane when there are channels present. For example, potassium constantly moves from inside the cell to outside the cell through totally ungated potassium channels.

Hydrophillic substances, like steroid hormones, can diffuse through the membrane into the cytoplasm from the extracellular space and do not need transporters.

All substances will diffuse down their electrochemical gradient unless energy is being used to move them up the gradient. This energy can be in the form of ATP, or force generated by other substances moving down their respective gradients.

>>5222879
Here's the figure. We crush even our closest relatives in BA10 volume, both absolute and relative.

Semendeferi, K., E. Armstrong, et al. (2001). "Prefrontal cortex in humans and apes: A comparative study of area 10." American Journal of Physical Anthropology 114(3): 224-241.

>>5222764
The answer is probably BA10, the frontal pole of the neocortex. All areas of the frontal cortex are massively inflated in primates relative to other mammals, and BA10 is inflated in humans relative to other primates. Humans have the largest BA10 volume to total brain volume of any mammal. Even chimps fall behind us. Hold on, there's a figure in a paper in my endnote somewhere, I'll dig it out...

Although, I think that it's a bold and totally unfounded statement for you to say that other organisms aren't "self-aware," whatever that means. Remember the gorilla that used sign language and showed empathy, for example?

>>5222222
Polite sage and recognition of your fortitude and free time.

Yeah um, hate to say it but, if we didn't have people who spoke to the public about science (ESPECIALLY science with little hope of benefitting us in our lifetimes) then fewer people would be willing to vote for policymakers that give money to science.

Who cares how many nature papers he has?

>>5221602
We use tungsten electrodes for LFP and isolating single units, but not only in cortex. Our lab is also interested in basal ganglia.

I use matlab for analyzing neural/behavior data that we get from our monkeys. I also use C++, but that's mostly back end stuff like data acquisition and rerepresentation.

Maple and mathematica wouldn't be nearly as useful to me as matlab is.

Yale, Ph.D neuroscience.

The perks are insane.

>>5216000
I would never say that. Psychophysics and psychonomics are two mathematically rigorous areas of research that have made wonderful, replicable strides in understanding human/animal behavior and physiology.

What I'm trying to say is that you can only characterize the behavior so much before your work becomes redundant or unsatisfying, or you have to start making assumptions about latent variables that you can't measure. A lot of psychologists are totally okay with doing this, but I'm definitely not.

And it's for exactly that reason that I, as someone interested in human behavior, moved from humans to macaques

>>5215967
Scientists misrepresenting their own conclusions is a major problem in science. You know the discussion section? A lot of shit can go wrong there, and often times that's what happens in purely behavioral research probing "cognitive" processes.

Any social science that wants to get at the real nitty gritty of what's going on "beneath" animal/human behavior needs to be taking concurrent physiological measurements while they run their experiments.

>>5215093
This is about as crazy and stupid as that Hameroff & Penrose 1996 paper.

Oh lawd, I have a few.

>undergrad lab, do EEGs on undergrads
>kid walks in, exclaims "I'm ready for some fucking science."
>wat.jpg
>laugh and spend 40min getting the cap on him and hooking him up
>10 minutes into the experiment he decides he's sick and leaves
>mfw
>grad student alerts me that the kid was obviously high as a kite

More recently...
>work in monkey lab
>have to clean the margin around monkey's cranial implant, lab manager comes to show me how
>gives the monkey ketamine as sedative
>monkey proceeds to trip balls
>randomly flails limbs about
>my sides
>i get paid to watch monkeys get high

>>5213584

>Ph.D in mathematics
>any job I want
>300k starting

>>5213161
Finding a balance means surrounding yourself with motivated people who are also interested in succeeding. I was in clubs with tryhards, so it was easy to also be a tryhard. This is why I suggest something like an honor society or a science related club rather than an anime club.

>>5213168
You and I are friends. I study basal ganglia and prefrontal cortex by looking at value-based decision making tasks in non-human primates. Basically, my research is neuroeconomics. It's a wonderful intersection between psychology, neuroscience, and applied mathematics.

Schools you apply to will understand that your school has grade deflation, especially if you're at a good school (Princeton has serious deflation, and thats widely known). GPA is less important than prior research experience and strong letters of recommendation. If you want to pursue a Ph.D, I *STRONGLY* suggest taking at least two classes in programming (introduction and data structures/algorithms). I consider programming the most valuable skill I learned in college.

>>5213141
>google scholar "the selfish gene"
>14000 citations
>Ph.D

Yeah, not a scientist.

>>5213132
Also, your AP score doesn't affect your college GPA unless you transfer the credits IIRC (and even then, it might not). Go speak to an advisor to clear this up - I do not think that your record is spoiled.

>>5213064
Neuro Ph.D student here, have many successful med friends. Good choice in major, but make sure that your neuro curriculum is going to be heavy in things that interest you - most of neuroscience is not comprised of things that wouldn't (currently) interest a neurosurgeon. You may gain more by taking a biology major with a physiology track.

My tips to you, which are based on my own experiences and the experiences of my friends, are to do extremely well in your introductory chemistry/biology courses and their lab components, and get involved in a research lab during your sophomore year. Three years of research will give you tons of time to learn a lot about something that interests you, and plenty of opportunities to get published and/or earn research fellowships. Both of those things will set you apart from the other 9000000000 soulless premed bio students with 36 mcat scores.

Medical schools also like to see student leadership. get involved with a non-trivial club early (campus emergency response, an honor society, some kind of science something or other) and rise to the top. Get VP or P and it'll look great on your application. Know that you're going to need 3 letters of recommendation from people who know you *well*, not just people who gave you an A. PIs, student club advisors, and similar people are great examples of good letter writers.

I have absolutely no plans to read the contents of this thread because I would bet money that it's a shitstorm of people who have no idea what they're talking about insulting eachother blindly trusting mathematics that they do not know, and the words of physicsts whose work they have not read.

The Hameroff and Penrose paper has been totally discarded and discredited by the scientific community, and now a decade and a half after it's been published, no one even gives it a second thought. Having read the paper quite some time ago, I don't think its anything more than another example of mediocre physicists leaving their own field to make fools of themselves in mine. It's a perfect example of the abuse of mathematics to make a completely ridiculous theory sound totally testable.

An equally absurd, albeit totally formal, mathematical model of consciousness was proposed more recently by Giulo Tonini using completely different axioms. Just because your math is sound doesn't mean that your assumptions are correct, or that overreaching your conclusions is justified.

Chemically, nothing. Hormones can have all different kinds of chemical structures and hydrophobicities (steroid hormones vs. amino acid hormones, for example). A hormone is secreted by one cell and causes a signal transduction in another cell. This can happen locally (paracrine signaling) or via the bloodstream (endocrine signaling).

A neurotransmitter is a cellular signaling molecule, much like a hormone. However, in order to be classified as a neurotransmitter, the molecule has to be synthesized by neurons that package it into vesicles and released at synaptic sites via exocytosis following an increase in calcium concentration in the synaptic terminal. It also has to have an effect on other neurons. There are no restrictions on the size or chemical properties of neurotransmitter molecules - they can be ogliopeptides, single amino acids, catecholamines, etc... Neurotransmission is a specialized form of paracrine signaling.

tl;dr: hormones and neurotransmitters are both cellular signaling molecules. Neurotransmitters need to be made by neurons, released by neurons, and induce signals in other neurons to be classified as a neurotransmitter.

>IQ test
Not accurate in measuring your intelligence, but is very accurate in measuring your performance on the set of questions that they give you relative to the performance of the rest of the population who they have tested. I don't think that we have any non-imagined reason to believe that the set of questions they give you is a measure of intelligence.

Although, given that it's an online test, it's probably bad at scoring you against the rest of the population, too. I'd bet that it's good for nothing.

I'm voting for the party that's going to allocate the most funding to NSF, NIH, NIMH, and other scientific enterprises, because this directly benefits me and increases my career prospects. Since Romney's position on science has been incredibly vague, I plan to vote for Obama who has a track record of supporting the institutions that I just mentioned.

Perhaps most importantly, Obama's campaign is receiving a *lot* of money from major research universities, so I imagine that he has financial incentive to support science.

Also, Romney "supports stem cell research," but wants to halt government funding to human embryonic stem cell research. Given that science in America doesn't happen without government cash, that would halt stem cell research. Essentially, Romney is playing the heartstrings of overly-empathic misguided nuts who want to oppress scientific progress in the name of their imagined moral system at the expense of the values of others. I can't support that.

I allowed myself to have extremely flexible beliefs about how the universe (mainly the anthropocentric universe) behaved. Realizing the error my ways, I entered science.

Now, I realize that scientists aren't much different. Many equally valid interpretations of different systems exist in the scientific literature, no matter how small or large the system. Contradictory views are held in nearly equal popularity, and various attempts to distinguish between the views pop up in favor of either interpretation.

I now realize that science is a business.