Social limiting factor: your brain

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That humans are social creatures is nothing new. That’s one of the few things in which both at philosophy and biology class they agreed. Among other things because it is with us all through evolution , ever since our cousins the primates; what seemed impossible up to now was to extend this social capacities beyond certain limitations, basically of a physical nature, not so much for the psychological tiredness of chatting with 12 of your old neighbours but because of geographical barriers.

Ever since the internet became part of our lives and with the development of online social networks these barriers have dissapeared -or so one would think, because then meeting someone that lives in your own city sometimes is almost an impossible mission-, so much so that one could think the extension of the human social network these days has become unlimited, but is that really so? In fact, it turns out that regardless of Twitter and Facebook  some limitations still remain to the number of people we can relate to, be it in vivo (facetoface) or in silico (virtual contacts).

100-200. No more.

In the 90s the anthropologist Robin Durbar while studying the social habits of different groups of primates realized that each individual tended to be in contact with a limited number of individuals inside their group and that the bigger the brain of these primates the bigger the number of individuals they could be in contact with. It seemed therefore, that brain size was limiting the social circle of those primates. (ref. 1)

From here and extrapolating to human brain size he concluded that the maximum size of a human’s social circle should be around a 150 people. Several studies have tried to address whether this number adequately reflects maximum people a person can manage to kep contact with and it appears that with little variation, results seem to confirm Durbar’s prediction.

Even more surprising it’s the fact this number seems to be constant throughout History and among cultures, even in our high-tech times. At least that’s what some researchers from Atlanta University have found after analyzing interaction patterns of more than 3 millions tweeters over 4 years!! (ref.2)

It seems at the beginning there’s an exponential increase on the number of cyber-friends that after a while reaches a saturation point and from then on, friendship or contact, is only mantained with some 100-200 people, as Durbar’s numbers predicted.

It looks like, after all, even all the technological advances that allowed us to overcome many physical barriers to social interactions there are some other physical, biological barriers -our heads cannot keep up with so many people- to connect with everyone. Therefore, we will have to just conform to our meagre 150 people circle ;)

8.30am Time to be creative

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Someday I was asked why someone’s most creative time was right before going to sleep. When asked, I remembered having read about the topic of when are the most creative moments in the day for some people. I also remembered that creativity gets potentiated the more our prefrontal cortex (a brain area related to conscious control of our actions and decisions…) relaxes its control; and just by doing a small network search I managed to find the reference to this article: “Time of day effects on problem solving: When the non-optimal is optimal“ .

What the authors of the study did was, like in most of these psycho-studies, to get a group of nearly 500 graduate/undergraduate students and make them solve some tasks. There were 2 test conditions: one early in the morning, at 8.30am, the other in the evening, at 5pm (which for some of us is only midday but that in this work is a proxy for bed time *sigh*). Plus two different kind of tests: the first were analytical –maths- things like solving equations and the like, those things for which you need to be focused and awake. The other kind of tests were more of the insight sort, that require a creative solution, like the one that follows:

“A man has married 20 women in a small town. They are all alive and none has divorced. The man has done nothing illegal. Who’s this man?”

Do you know the answer? If you think of yourself as an owl and are reading this by your morning coffee with your eyes still half open, that’s a yes. Well then, what the researchers found was that in most of those students that defined themselves as nocturnal, like owls, in case your biology classes got forgotten somewhere along the way :P their problem solving ability for the creative tests was higher in the morning than in the evening, whereas math capabilities remained somewhat stable throughout the day.

it might seem crazy but he's higly creative now

Now what does this mean? In this study they only test an early hour in the evening, time in which at least, in most western countries, nocturnal people don’t even start feeling close to bedtime. That’s why this work cannot dismiss the fact that many people, including me, have our insight moments before going to bed, when our prefrontal cortex begins to switch off. Or that we can even have two moments of maximum creativity a day.

What I am going to say now can get me into a dangerous zone because as Jonah Lehrer points out in TheFrontalCortex alcohol consumption –up to a certain level- also relaxes our prefrontal cortex and boost our creativity.

For a rational mind, prefrontal cortex control might seem like the highest evolutionary achievement. However, if it weren’t for the possibility of inhibiting its control from time to time none of all human innovations, discoveries and revolutions would have been possible.
So, c’mon, caress that creativity of yours, for this world need changes, and it needs them FAST!

*The answer to the riddle is the priest!

Politics in the lab: same everywhere

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Politics slips into everything. From the moment you turn on the TV at home to the minute you open the newspaper to read while you drink your morning coffee and even here, in the lab when it comes the time to discuss budgets and project proposals.

But it is not just the good-ol’ politics that comes into the lab thrashing everything around with budget cuts and bureaucratic nightmares, nooooooo, then we also have her sister, scientific politics, the one left to decide which projects are to be made based on their future impact determined by where they are to be published; who deserves a tenure, a permanent position, or a scholarship.

Because like all politics, the scientific sister is also corrupted to the bone. Please do not be mistaken, dear noobies. The scientific ladder is anything but meritocratic. At school they teach that if you study, you get good grades and if so, then you´ll manage to land a good job and eventually climb up that ladder. Well, if you haven´t found it already. They lied. And that also goes for Science.

In Science most of the guys sitting in the old leather chairs are not the smartest nor the best of their field nor do they make the best quality science. They are, however, those that publish in high impact factor journals (like Science, Cell or Nature), and/or have friends in selection committees or by one of those un-investigated phenomena of faculty inbreeding that says that someone born and developed in X University or Department is necessarily better than any other qualified applicant, even if the former never left that University/Department and has a worse CV. Considering the first choosing factor is not bad per se. If we take for granted the impact factor (a factor that results from considering the number of times the articles of a certain journal have been referenced during a year, and indicative of the relevance of those articles for the advance of a certain field or Science, in general) really measures what it should -and that of OpenAccess is another story- then what those scientists publish should be high quality, but it so happens that -just as in the real world- once you have a NAME it becomes much much easier to publish a not-so-relevant piece of research in a top-notch journal than if you are Mr.Nobody. Even if Mr.Nobody’s paper is of higher quality.

And so, what we have is a feedback system in which Science doesn’t improve because all that matters is publishing in those big journals instead of trying to do high quality research or just study interesting topics. That’s business, my friend. That’s capitalism, my friend.

The system is so corrupted that there’s those who say that real power in Science comes not from how much someone has advanced scientific knowlegde but by how much can they impede it. Better with an example. Postdoc T. tries to publish an article which results contest BigFish’s theory which has been accepted in the field for more than 20 years. Since naïve Postdoc T. still believes in Science, asks BigFish to be a reviewer thinking that he would be interested in knowing there might be more to learn from the system he’s been researching so long. ERROR! BigFish doesn’t even consider the hypothesis or the paper worth anything and rejects the paper. Because BigFish has made it to the top of the scientific ladder.

There are other examples.Positive ones. Examples of hard working people who deserve to be where they are. But those are a minority. And it is sad. And annoying.

It is time to start a revolution also in Science. We need new working structures, new evaluation standards and also changes in the publication system. And we need them NOW! #SciRev
p.d. As for how the change in the publishing and distribution network should happen, that is the shift to OpenAccess check TheGuardian

Lighten up! Project NEURON.E.R.D

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Creative protocol 1.0
Code name: NEURON.E.R.D

1)Take a lightbulb holder from an old Ikea lamp -previously broken- accidentally or not.

2)Get cloth, a needle, and some thread -no need to use a sterile one- to make a base to support the lightbulb holder. To provide some weight, fill it up with pebbles or sand -if you’re lucky enough to live by the beach-

3)Now comes the hardest part. Get your hands on a brain scan or some cool X-ray and shape them as you like -cylinderlike, pyramidlike, you name it- If they’re yours it would make it a really cool story to tell if not, you can always ask your doctor for old ones no one might want, that’s what I did.

Expected result:

Voilá!

I know, I know…I am a GEEK. But I DO love my new lamp. Confess: isn’t it really cool? :D

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Awesome insides

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One of the most amazing things of working in science and that my job has to do with imaging and big fancy microscopes is the unbelievable beauty that -sometimes- can be found underneath our data.

Precisely for that reason, there are plenty of scientific photo contest around the world, and I haven’t yet met a person that hasn’t got impressed at least once by an image of a cell, an animal or even a stone at a scale or from a perspective never seen before. Cause just like the artist, the scientist also looks at the world in a special way.

Today’s pictures are the finalists and winners of the spanish National Scientific Photo Contest FotCiencia9 that took place last year; there will be also some from the series “Stunning Scientific Sights” from the american MSNBC. However, the former are of better quality, I believe. Check them out and get your own idea!

Invisible structures from C. Solana.

In this picture we can see the inner structure of soap bubbles, strange? Fore more info check the whole explanation in FotCiencia9 (you might need GoogleTranslate though).The next displays an oxide that is under study as a potential component of chemical batteries (like any you have at home, for your radio for example). Do particles really look like ice cream balls? Not really. The image was taken with scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and then artificially colored. This kind of microscope is used to resolve the surface of very small things, be it cells, organules inside cells, virus, or as in this case materials.

Icecream balls from M. Carbajo.

This psicodelic picture is also a product of electron microscopy, this time transmission (TEM). The difference between the two is that whereas with the other we scanned the surface of things with this one we can see through things, with very high resolution. And what we see here is two bacteria loving each other very much. The picture shows again false colors which are necessary to analyze certain image parameters and not just to make it pretty. No photoshop for these stars…

Bacterial Intimacy from F. Gómez.

The next image was the winner of The International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. I can already tell you that by its title: The Metabolomic Eye, it depicts an eye. A mouse retina where each cell is labelled in a different color depending on their metabolic profile. Cool, right?

Metabolomic eye from Bryan William Jones from University of Utah

Want more? No problem. I promise you there’ll be more here, of course! Meanwhile, if you happen to be so lucky as to set foot in Spain check the dates and places of the FotCiencia9 winners exhibition to enjoy them live…well, sort of.

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