MITPressLog

Brain Awareness Week: A Q&A with Paul H. Patterson

It's Brain Awareness Week! To celebrate, we'll post a series of mini-Q&As with MIT Press authors throughout the week. Paul H. Patterson, neurobiologist and author of Infectious Behavior: Brain-Immune Connections in Autism, Schizophrenia, and Depression, kicks us off.

 

 

What sparked your interest in developmental neurobiology?

I did my PhD in membrane biochemistry and then wanted to "figure out how the brain works". I chose dissociated neuronal cell culture as an informative and feasible approach to biochemical questions. These neurons growing in vitro presented an attractive preparation for studying neuronal development, and one could add other types of cells at will and see how that affected development. It turned out that adding certain non-neuronal cells to cultured neurons radically altered the type of neurons that eventually developed. We pursued the active factor that drove these changes and eventually found it to be a cytokine, later termed LIF. Over the years, we found that LIF is critically important in the brain's response to injury and disease. In this way, we accidentally stumbled on interactions between the brain and immune systems. In fact, we just published on a gene therapy approach, delivering LIF to a multiple sclerosis mouse model and achieved remarkable remyelination. 

How have your research interests and methods changed over the course of your career?

Starting at Harvard and then at Caltech, I gave lectures on mental illness and became dissatisfied with the mouse models available at the time. I thought we should try to make a contribution in this area. We made use of the epidemiology showing that infection during pregnancy can increase the risk of schizophrenia in the offspring. Making a mouse model of this risk factor has proven a productive approach, allowing us to examine how the maternal response to infection alters fetal brain development. The model is also useful for exploring potential therapeutic approaches. It is now being used in at least 35 laboratories around the world.

What kinds of changes (if any) do you think we need to make in brain science education?

I'd like to see more information on the brain introduced early on in school--by 4th grade, for instance. I've given such lectures and demos to young kids and they are really intrigued. It's a natural inroad to getting kids interested in science, as everyone wants to know how we think, remember, communicate etc. 

Monday Eye Candy: Climate Refugees

 

Today's eye candy comes from Climate Refugees by Collectif Argos, which features 171 color photos. Happy Monday!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

October 2005. New Orleans. Post-Katrina chaos.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even several kilometres from the shore, the lake is never over head-height.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

October 2005. New Orleans. Post-Katrina chaos. An inhabitant exiled in West Virginia returns to her house fifteen days after the hurricane to salvage whatever she can.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"Sometimes when the landuntern arrive unexpectedly, they carry away with them hay that was freshly cut earlier on a beautiful summer's day, or worse, they drown a few cows or sheep that we didn't have time to get to safety."

As voters, we don’t like changing our minds.

As a Super Tuesday follow-up, Mike Edwards uses the Ohio primary exit polls to illustrate the difficulty candidates face in convincing voters to change their minds.

 

As voters, we don’t like changing our minds.

It takes only a fraction of a second for us to make a first impression. As much as we might like to believe that our votes are not influenced by something as irrational as a biased first impression, research has indicated quite the opposite: our first impression of how a candidate looks goes a long way toward determining whether or not we will vote for him/her.

Of course, first impressions aren’t everything. Over time, that first impression takes on weight; we add to it a variety of other perceptions and biases based on what we think a candidate is doing or saying, and based on the impressions of the people around us.

Eventually, we tend to create these narratives about political candidates, which may or may not have any connection to reality. George W. Bush, despite his Ivy League education and tremendous political acumen, became a down-to-earth (although perhaps not the brightest bulb) man of the people. Bill Clinton was a charismatic philanderer and an incredibly astute political operative, despite the fact that he never won more than 50 percent of the vote in a presidential election.

In the case of the current presidential election, the big narrative is Mitt Romney: the pro-business, favorite of the GOP insiders, moderate who has trouble relating to blue collar Americans. That narrative, based on a combination of first impressions, media coverage, and our mass perception of Romney as a man and a candidate, has become deeply ingrained.

And as voters, we don’t like changing our minds.

In particular, Romney spent tens of millions of dollars and gave dozens of stump speeches in Ohio trying to change voters’ opinions about three things in particular:

1)      He was more of a fiscal conservative than Rick Santorum.

2)      He was just as conservative as Santorum on the basic issues important to evangelicals, particularly opposition to abortion and support for Israel.

3)      He was capable of understanding and relating to the concerns of average, blue-collar Ohioans.

So how well did that work? Did the massive ad campaign change how Ohioans perceived him? Well, let’s look at the exit polls from the Ohio primary.

Who won poor and middle class voters?  Santorum.

Who won self-identified “conservative” voters?  Santorum.

Who won evangelicals?  Santorum.

Who won voters who care most about abortion?  Santorum.

All of Romney’s money and all of his time and energy campaigning was not enough to change the underlying perception of Romney as the pro-business, moderate option who’s a bit out of touch with evangelicals and working class Americans.

Of course, advertising is useful. It can do a lot to help a candidate: by creating a first impression among people who aren’t very familiar with the candidate, by improving name recognition, by reinforcing negative impressions about a candidate’s opponent, or, alternatively, by reinforcing positive impressions about a candidate’s own image. But fundamentally changing voters’ minds is almost impossible, no matter how much time or money you throw at the problem.

 

Strategic Voting on Super Tuesday

Mike Edwards, co-author (with Danny Oppenheimer) of Democracy Despite Itself: Why a System That Shouldn't Work at All Works So Well, on voting "strategically" and Super Tuesday. Mike founded and regularly contributes to Leftfielder.org, a blog on politics and media.

 

I grew up in a very liberal neighborhood in Minneapolis, MN, surrounded by people who thought that Paul Wellstone and Jesse Jackson were clearly the two most qualified men in the country to be President. Yet, virtually all of those people fell neatly in-line behind the Democratic Party nominee every November—and in most years, by the time the Spring caucuses rolled around they had already thrown their support behind a slightly less palatable, but perhaps more electable, candidate.

In short, they were faced with the same set of options now confronting Republican voters; when, and how, should one vote “strategically”? We all vote strategically—or for candidates who aren’t our first choice—and it is really a very rational approach to a winner-take-all election. The problem is that strategic voting ultimately relies on a self-fulfilling prophecy that can cause voters to abandon preferred candidates prematurely.

Take the Georgia election in the upcoming March 6 Super Tuesday primary. Recent polling in Georgia, according to the analysis by Nate Silver at the New York Times 538 blog, showed that Newt Gingrich holds a sizeable lead in Georgia, his home state and a place where he remains popular. Clearly he will win the state on Super Tuesday, right?

If the election were held in a vacuum, perhaps.  Unfortunately for Gingrich, those Georgia voters have been feeling significant pressure  leading up to Super Tuesday to vote strategically. Gingrich’s candidacy is no longer taken seriously outside of Georgia. Which means that, heading into Super Tuesday, those pro-Gingrich voters will have basically three choices:

1)   Vote for Gingrich, despite the fact that it looks increasingly unlikely that Gingrich can win the nomination.

2)   Vote for their second-place candidate—most analysts believe this to be Rick Santorum—because he has a more realistic chance to win the nomination.

3)   Vote for whichever candidate they believe to be the inevitable nominee—most analysts believe this to be Mitt Romney—because of a desire to end the primary process quickly.

The irony, of course, is that Gingrich might have a chance to win the nomination if not for strategic voting concerns—or “momentum” as the pundits often call it. Until recently, after all, Gingrich had a sizeable lead in Georgia, and was seen as a viable contender in the other Super Tuesday states, especially Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and the various Western caucuses. But as voters in Michigan watched a few thousand caucus-goers in Colorado and Minnesota choose Santorum as their preferred non-Romney candidate, they decided to follow suit. And now, as Santorum is coming off a respectable 2nd place showing in Michigan, and holding a small lead in the Ohio polls, he has positioned himself as the “only viable” non-Romney candidate in all of those other Southern and Western states. This has in turn left Georgia as Gingrich’s last chance to demonstrate his “viability”—or perhaps as the place where the self-fulfilling prophecy of Gingrich’s doom finally comes to fruition.

 

Monday Eye Candy: Persuasive Games

Today's eye candy comes from Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames by Ian Bogost, which contains 50 fun black-and-white illustrations. Enjoy!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

PBS’ Freaky Flakes offers a simple representation of practices of children’s advertising. Courtesy of KCTS Television. © 2004 KCTS Television. All rights reserved.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Take Back Illinois offers a procedural representation of legislative candidates’ opinions on public policy issues.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Demonstrative advertisements highlight the functional aspects of the vehicle, such as storage space and fuel economy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Johnson & Johnson’s mail-order Atari VCS game Tooth Protectors offers a logical rather than a moralistic rationale for dental hygiene.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Playmobil toys allow children (and adults) to construct social and cultural situations. This unusual situation was constructed and photographed by the author.

 

Thirty Percent-Off Friday: March

Happy Friday! Like last month, we are excited to offer a 30% discount on an MIT Press title to our blog readers (when purchased through the MIT Press website). 

Celebrate St. Patrick's Day with a "green" book! Our March discount pick is The Green Paradox: A Supply-Side Approach to Global Warming by Hans-Werner Sinn. Hans-Werner Sinn is Professor of Economics and Public Finance at the University of Munich and President of the CESIfo Group. Author of Can Germany Be Saved? The Malaise of the World’s First Welfare State and other books, he is former president of the International Institute of Public Finance, and former chairman of the German Economic Association.

 Follow this link, which will automatically apply the discount, to get your copy of The Green Paradox. *In the (unlikely) event that the discount doesn't appear when you click the link, have no fear--simply manually enter the discount code "SGPFRI12" in the shopping cart to get the discount.*

Here's an excerpt from The Green Paradox. Check back on the first Friday of April (4/6) for our next "Thirty Percent-Off Friday" pick.

 

The coupling of oil and food prices occurred in the past few years with astonishing force and abruptness. Apart from the political influence…the abruptness can be explained by the fact that crude oil and foodstuffs aren’t substitutable in both directions: foodstuffs can be turned into fuel, but fuel can’t be converted to foodstuffs, at least not in a direct, chemical sense. We can’t use the oil we buy at a filling station to fry food or to spice up a salad, and even with sophisticated bio-chemical methods we can’t turn it into animal feed. However, when the price of diesel fuel peaked in 2007 and 2008, some people bought vegetable oil in grocery stores and ran their old diesel cars on it. Modern diesel cars have trouble running on vegetable oil, but chemistry can easily circumvent them and convert the vegetable oil to biodiesel. Most gasoline engines can tolerate a certain blend of bioethanol, and Brazilian flex-fuel engines can even run on pure ethanol.

 This one-sided substitutability implied that the energy equivalent prices in the two markets couldn’t converge when the price of oil still hovered below the price of food, measured in energy equivalents. It was tempting to convert crude oil to food, but all chemists who tried to do it failed. The situation changed dramatically when all of a sudden the price of oil caught up with the price of food and even hinted that it would go above it. In that situation, the two markets became coupled, as farmers and energy companies were able to make profits by using energy crops as feedstock for the production of gasoline and diesel fuel. Oil prices were linked to food prices in a way akin to the link between a bicycle’s pedals and its rear wheel. But if you pedal faster, the gears engage and the force applied to the pedals is transferred to the wheel. It is a sort of ratchet effect.

In the aftermath of the worldwide financial crisis, with sharply declining oil prices, the bike was coasting once again, but this was only a temporary phenomenon, disappearing when the world’s economy recovered and oil prices perked up again. In all likelihood, the coasting periods for food prices will become increasingly rare in the years and decades to come, if they don’t disappear altogether, as oil prices, because of the finite nature of that resource, will trend ever upward, exerting increasing upward pressure on food prices.

In real life, of course, this coupling isn’t as rigid as that between a bike’s pedals and its wheel. But one need not be an economist to see that the farmers and energy companies will have an incentive to redirect land from the production of food to the production of biofuels if the price of oil tends to exceed the price of food. And it is also easy to understand why this implies that the price of oil will pull the price of food along, while the reverse can’t be the case because fossil oil tastes bad on a salad. In view of this, we should indeed be afraid that our farmers will be tempted to hold hands with OPEC.