"Predictive Health: How We Can Reinvent Medicine to Extend Our Best Years," a new book Emory physicians Kenneth Brigham and Michael M.E. Johns, proposes focusing on health first instead of disease.
Brigham and Johns want to harness the formidable power of medicine and technology — including genome-sequencing, protein-cataloging, massive data-sorting — as tools for health assessment, diagnosis, and intervention. The ultimate goal is to guide people to the improvement and maintenance of their health.
Physicians who practice predictive health would assemble a health portrait by running sophisticated tests on an infant at birth. Potential risk factors for diseases, such as type II diabetes or a genetic propensity for obesity, would become evident long before they are problematic, and physicians could initiate personalized strategies for treatment.
"Our approach involves more than curing disease or making an early diagnosis," Brigham says. "We see it as important to develop a mindset in which to see health as defined positively. We look at disease risk but more importantly at what a person can do to live a healthy, fulfilling life. We look at body fat and what is in a person's blood, yes, but we also look at how you live, where you live, who you live with, and how you react to stress, to determine a healthy lifestyle for an individual."
Among the questions the "Walking with the Dead" conference will tackle is why many people have embraced the zombie fad, such as these enthusiasts in Marietta Square on Saturday.
By Carol Clark
Karen Rommelfanger’s husband got her hooked on “The Walking Dead.” She had resisted, but finally succumbed to the AMC TV series when her husband was watching an episode on zombie neurobiology set at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“He called out to me, ‘You’ve got to see this,’” says Rommelfanger, a neuroscientist and director of the Neuroethics Program at the Emory Center for Ethics.
The fictionalized researchers were gathered around a glorified brain scanner, discussing the “you” part of a brain, where thoughts reside, and whether the “you” part was gone.
“This is exactly the kinds of questions we talk about in neuroethics,” Rommelfanger says. “Is the brain the seat of personhood? What does ‘brain dead’ really mean?”
It wasn’t long before the Emory Center for Ethics coined the term “zombethics” and created a public forum to discuss them. “Walking with the Dead: An Ethics Symposium for the Living” is the brainchild of Rommelfanger and Cory Labrecque, a scholar of bioethics and religious thought at the Center for Ethics.
All the reserved seats for the event on Wednesday, October 31, are filled, but people can still participate in the campus Zombie Walk, starting at the center at 11:30 am and proceeding up to Asbury Circle.
Zombies are becoming as emblematic of Atlanta as the Varsity drive-in.
“The Walking Dead,” filmed in and around Atlanta, has resurrected zombies and turned them into visceral symbols of all sorts of modern-day fears.
“The show is full of ethics questions dressed up in zombie suits,” says Labrecque, who wrote his dissertation on radical life extension and teaches courses on personhood theory and religion and medicine.
A close friend recommended the series to him. “I was initially reluctant about wasting my time on a series about zombies, but was hooked after the first episode,” Labrecque says. “I watched the whole first season in one sitting.”
His fiancée was too afraid to watch the show. But after he described it to her, Labrecque says she wanted to know: “Would you shoot me if I was bitten by a zombie?”
(Apparently, he gave a satisfying response because the wedding went as planned on October 13.)
Since “The Walking Dead” is set in Atlanta, it seemed especially fitting to launch a zombethics conference here, Rommelfanger says.
Harvard psychiatrist Steve Schlozman will be among the panelists at the Emory conference. In the video below, he describes a zombie brain autopsy:
Zombies touch on fears beyond death, such as slowly disappearing to Alzheimer’s, or wasting away in a coma. “We are not equating real-life patients with zombies, we’re using zombies as an entry point to start a conversation about really difficult subjects,” Labrecque says.
The conference panelists include psychiatrists, philosophers, religious scholars, physicians, CDC officials, historians, ethicists and neuroscientists. They will grapple with questions like: When is a human being no longer a person? What is free will? What does end-of-life care look like for those for whom biological death is not the end? How should healthcare resources be allocated when pandemics hit?
And, finally, what’s behind the public obsession with a gory series like “The Walking Dead?”
“Some scholars have suggested that it’s massive group therapy,” Rommelfanger says. “Zombies are a way to experience fears of death, degeneration and other scary things in ways that you can manage.”
It's National Chemistry Week, when chemists show just how clever they really are by cooking up things like periodic tables made of cupcakes. Non-chemists are also invited to join in the festivities at Emory, which will hold its annual Mole Day party this evening at 5:30 pm in the courtyard between the Emerson and Atwood buildings. Bring your own beaker.
While many animals understand the concept of less and more, only humans can learn formal math.
By Carol Clark
The ability to learn complex, symbolic math is a uniquely human trait, but it is intricately connected to a primitive sense of magnitude that is shared by many animals, finds a study to be published by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
“Our results clearly show that uniquely human branches of mathematics interface with an evolutionarily primitive general magnitude system,” says lead author Stella Lourenco, a psychologist at Emory University. “We were able to show how variations in both advanced arithmetic and geometry skills specifically correlated with variations in our intuitive sense of magnitude.”
Babies as young as six months can roughly distinguish between less and more, whether it’s for a number of objects, the size of objects, or the length of time they see the objects. This intuitive, non-verbal sense of magnitude, which may be innate, has also been demonstrated in non-human animals. When given a choice between a group of five bananas or two bananas, for example, monkeys will tend to take the bigger bunch.
“It’s obviously of adaptive value for all animals to be able to discriminate between less and more,” Lourenco says. “The ability is widespread across the animal kingdom – fish, rodents and even insects show sensitivity to magnitude, such as the number of items in a set of objects.”
Only humans, however, can learn formal math, including symbolic notations of number, quantitative concepts and computational operations. While the general magnitude system has been linked primarily to the brain’s intraparietal sulcus (IPS), higher math requires the use of more widely distributed areas of the brain.
For the PNAS study, the researchers wanted to build on work by others indicating that a lower-order sense of number is not just a separate function, but plays a role in the mental capacity for more complex math.
The dot test shows variation in people's ability to intuit number and area.
The researchers recruited 65 undergraduate college students to participate in an experiment. To test their knack for estimating magnitude of numbers, participants were shown images of dots in two different colors, flashed for only 200 milliseconds on a computer screen. They then had to choose which color had the greater number of dots. Most people can quickly distinguish that a group of 10 dots is greater than a group of five, but some people have a finer-grained number sense that allows them to discriminate between 10 and nine dots.
The participants were also shown dots of varying sizes and colors to test their ability to gauge magnitude of area.
They then completed a battery of standardized math tests.
The results showed that the more precise the participants’ abilities were at estimating the magnitude of a number, the better they scored in advanced arithmetic. The same correlation was found between precision at gauging magnitude of area and the geometry portion of the standardized math test.
“By better understanding the psychological mechanisms underlying math abilities such as arithmetic and geometry, we hope to eventually inform how we come to learn symbolic math, and why some people are better at it than others,” says study co-author Justin Bonny, an Emory graduate student of psychology. “It may then be possible to develop early interventions for those who struggle with specific types of math.”
U.S. teens lag in math skills compared to other industrialized countries. China ranked number one in math in 2010, the first year that the country participated in the Program for International Student Assessment, while the United States ranked number 31.
“Falling behind in math is a huge problem,” Lourenco says, “given that we live in an increasingly technological society and a globally competitive world.”
"What does it mean when a highly successful neuroscientist … states that he is disappointed there aren’t more “super model types” at a major conference? Here’s what he wrote:
My impression of the Conference of the Society for Neuroscience in New Orleans. There are thousands of people at the conference and an unusually high concentration of unattractive women. The super model types are completely absent. What is going on? Are unattractive women particularly attracted to neuroscience? Are beautiful women particularly uninterested in the brain? No offense to anyone.
"There are some who will say that it is no surprise, given the large number of attendees (30,000 plus), that an ugly statement appeared on an individual’s Facebook page. Some might say it’s inevitable, and perhaps inconsequential, given how large the membership is, that you will find a bad seed. But dismissing [his] comments would be a mistake and represents part of the problem for women."
medicine and technology — including genome-sequencing, protein-cataloging, massive data-sorting — as tools for health assessment, diagnosis, and intervention. The ultimate goal is to guide people to the improvement and maintenance of their health.
