Interesting journal articles for the week of 12/20/2021

Asexuality vs. sexual interest/arousal disorder: Examining group differences in initial attention to sexual stimuli

This isn’t interesting in the sense that it provides valuable data, it’s interesting in the sense that it affirms how fucking horrible behavior based psychiatry is and how it impairs actual understanding of brain function.

defined by their lack of sexual attraction, to women with Sexual Interest/Arousal Disorder (SIAD), a disorder characterized by a reduced or absent interest in sex coupled with significant personal distress.

I can’t even wrap my head around how awful this is. The entire methodology reads like a shit post designed as a satire of statistical methods. I just can’t even.

Clarifying the relationship between alexithymia and subjective interoception

Speaking of shitty constructs, this one is funny because I love how groups always blame heterogeneity on variance in methodology instead of shitty constructs altogether. They hack away to get the mythical significant p-value and never question the overall relevance or reliability of the construct in the first place. Sorry, I’ve been on the phone a lot this morning and that makes me grumpy so I’m probably overly focusing on the bad science theater.

Altered Microstructure of Cerebral Gray Matter in Neuromyelitis Optica Spectrum Disorder-Optic Neuritis: A DKI Study

Studies like this where they stumble across so many really fascinating effects but don’t see them because they are hyperfocused on their hypothesis are funny/sad to me. They are literally tracing a functional circuit but can’t see past the cortex.

Rapid Enhancement of Subcortical Neural Responses to Sine-Wave Speech

Cognitive processes start in the brain stem and all cortical architecture is designed to enhance it.

Detailed mapping of behavior reveals the formation of prelimbic neural ensembles across operant learning

As mice learned the operant task, weakly tuned neurons were recruited into new ensembles, with a bias toward behaviors similar to their initial tuning.

I think I’m going to be super focused on the hippocampal complex, I’m really curious how most brains bias local information from microstates so heavily. Does theta or beta from different areas really “look” all that different?

Functional Subdivisions of the Cerebellum in Naturalistic Paradigm Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

It’s still odd to me that most people don’t look at the cerebellum and see the symmetry with the cerebrum. Functionally they are more similar than dissimilar to me.

Atypical Neural Responses of Cognitive Flexibility in Parents of Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder

Hey, more fucking psychiatry at work. We can’t define what “autism” etiologically, can’t define it functionally, can’t even define it through shitty behavioral phenotypes, but let’s do some research using this useless description to make assumptions about function! The worst part of this study is that they didn’t demonstrate that the parents had “reduced cognitive flexibility”, they demonstrated that there’s no difference in cognitive flexibility. They demonstrated that the diagnostic criteria itself is absolute garbage because it somehow cannot differentiate between individuals with the same functional effects.

I bet these jokers are funded until 2030 though, just have to keep pumping out pop-psych shit like this.

Self-Administration of Right Vagus Nerve Stimulation Activates Midbrain Dopaminergic Nuclei

Midbrain dopaminergic signaling is widely recognized to play a key role in promoting reward-related neuroplasticity throughout the brain

I wonder if I can make a script that replaces “reward/aversion” with “salience” and still have everything be cogent.

Robust BOLD Responses to Faces But Not to Conditioned Threat: Challenging the Amygdala’s Reputation in Human Fear and Extinction Learning

CogSci am cry.

Elevated dopamine in the amygdala disrupts infant’s approach to mother: Implications for development of neurotypical social behaviors and networks

Strong brainstem, weak social (usually, baring other insults). Weak brainstem, strong social (usually, baring other insults).

Two sides of the same amygdala: From shared neural mechanisms to comorbidity of social and affective disorders

Lol, “Growing co-morbidity”. They meant to say shit show heterogeneity.

Bidirectional control of infant rat social behavior via dopaminergic innervation of the basolateral amygdala

In case we were thinking “That doesn’t establish the brainstem as part of this mechanic!”. I gotchu. Actually they gotchu. Good work scientists.

Sleep Quality and Electroencephalogram Delta Power

Delta is the difference between me and normal unfortunately. Haha, difference. Delta. Yeah, I’m retarded. I’ve always thought of my particular phenotype as “the exact opposite of Asperger’s”, and studies which provide clarity on state information for Asperger’s help me understand my own (family) phenotype.

Transcriptomic taxonomy and neurogenic trajectories of adult human, macaque, and pig hippocampal and entorhinal cells

I’ve been pretty solidly on team DG neurogenesis is an exception rather than rule, this study seems to support that. Along with genetic associations with “intelligence”, there’s quite a bit more variation in cognitive flexibility than I think non racist/eugenics types are willing to admit. Ironically it’s pretty likely that the eugenics types are likelier to be on the lower flexibility side.

The impact of psychological theory on the treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in adults: A scoping review

Diagnostic reliability and the resultant treatments for “ADHD” are absolute dumpster fires. Also, water is wet.

Group-Level Ranking-Based Hubness Analysis of Human Brain Connectome Reveals Significant Interhemispheric Asymmetry and Intraparcel Heterogeneities

This is hilarious:

Measure-then-aggregate technique was shown to represent population better than commonly used aggregate-then-measure technique.

The longer you wait to bake in your assumptions the more accurately the data represents the real world? :nic_cage: By the way if anyone ever wonders where I get my 70/30 ventral/dorsal concept from, here it is:

Although highly-connected hub clusters had similar distribution between two hemispheres, average ranking values of homologous parcels of two hemispheres were significantly different in 71% of all cortical parcels on group-level.

Edit:

I think I’m going to be super focused on the hippocampal complex, I’m really curious how most brains bias local information from microstates so heavily. Does theta or beta from different areas really “look” all that different?

Apparently the answer to this is YES.

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