Soz - Blank Slate, and and another brain book by Pinker, are amongst the teetering piles of volumes on my "to-read" piles.
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ossobuco
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Mon 28 Jun, 2004 11:29 pm
Sure, back in the Lesbian in Chile thread -
quote -
Riffing on genetics here: I think much sexual desire is mediated by hormone biochemistry, the cycles of which can be triggered by sights, smells, sounds, touches, tastes, memories, and doubtless many other inputs affecting brain receptors via neural pathways. It makes great sense to me that this whole system is derived at least partially by DNA and RNA affected protein synthesis.
It also makes sense that there is an effect, to some extent, from environmental sources. if only that protein receptors that fit certain stimuli affected increased survival in some instances. I am a little less confident that environment actually can cause a hormonal reaction (wait, bear with me) - I mean generate the physical possibility of one, from scratch, as it were - without protein receptors being in place already.
My own estimation is that sexuality is almost unimaginably diverse, as diverse as the numbers of human bodies with their incremental biochemical differences, and their diverse environments. Actually, I think this is rather beautiful in concept, or if not beautiful, elegant.
This doesn't speak much toward the topic situation, except to say that this view of mine doesn't leave a lot of room for the tunneled typecasting that I see occurring in the Lesbian in Chile episode.
end quote.
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neil
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Tue 29 Jun, 2004 04:48 am
For Mormons = The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, it is a three way split: Personality we developed in our pre-existence, environment and genetics, the latter perhaps least important. Neil
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patiodog
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Tue 29 Jun, 2004 09:59 am
osso -- a paragraph froma book I read a few weeks back. your post makes me think back to it:
Quote:
Mice can be bred or canged genetically until the only genetic differences between males and females lie inside of the MHC. Male mice like this, given a choice of mating with MHC identical or MHC-different famles, choose the MHC-different females almost always. And if the male mace are offered instead the urine of females in estrus, in a "Y" maze, the males still seek the end of the "Y" that holds the urine of the MHC-different females much more often than they seek the end of the "Y" with the urine from the MHC-identical female. That is, male mice much prefer to mate with MHC-different female mice, and male mice can identify those MHC-different female mice by the way they smell.
But that's mice. What about humans? Women, too, seem to be able to smell the moelcules produced by the MHC. College-age women given the shirts of MHC-identical men find the smells of the men's shirts either unattractive or at least uninteresting. But these same women are aroused by the smells and the shirts of MHC-different men. It seems we all can smell the products of the genes inside the MHC, and when conditions are right, these smells excite us.
Most of the book is a bit more lyrical than that. Too much so, sometimes, but some interesting ruminations on life and health and water...
("Faith, Madness, and Spontaneous Human Combustion: What Immunology Can Teach Us About Self-Perception.")
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ossobuco
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Tue 29 Jun, 2004 10:19 am
Ahh, Pdog, this explains my life. I can't smell, or do so vary rarely.
I've got hereditary anosmia, have had it checked out by a researcher at UCIrvine. I can detect a few things in their samples, that there is something there, but can't identify them. This is out of, say 75 test tubes to identify. (And yes, I can taste, the two senses don't line up entirely.)
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patiodog
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Wed 30 Jun, 2004 05:57 pm
Interesting. What sorts of foods do you like the best? How do you feel about, say, basil and cilantro?
(If you don't mind me asking some very nosy -- excuse the pun -- questions...)
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dlowan
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Wed 30 Jun, 2004 06:13 pm
What's MHC?
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patiodog
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Wed 30 Jun, 2004 06:18 pm
Major histocompatibility complex -- the bits of stuff expressed on most of your cells and helps your immune system distinguish between you/not you. If the guy's claims are correct (I haven't read anything else about these sorts of studies, and his book is full of some odd claims that are compelling but maybe a bit flighty), the attraction to different MHC might not only point us away from our family but also toward partners that would give our offspring more potential white blood cell (WBC) genetic combinations with which to recognize antigens.
I'd have to look up the chromosomal locations of MHC and of the WBC stuff to verify that last supposition, and I'm too lazy at the moment. Immunology and genetics texts are at the other end of the house, and the dogs want feeding...
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farmerman
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Wed 30 Jun, 2004 06:27 pm
I wish you would not have pulled the article.
There is sufficient evidence that certain behavior patterns can be identified genetically. Alcoholism, for example can be traced in a genetic marker on a specific allele sequence that governs the metabolism of THIQ , T-hydroxy, indyl-quinone. Those with the gene that governs the complete metabolism, show absence of familial association of alcoholism. Those that dont, have entire family and populational sequences with marked alcoholism frequency.Is this some of what the article contains? Cuz its a short hop to discerning the chemical controls of abberant behavior and thus maybe searching for DNA evidence(or not--but it never hurts the science to look, either way its a finding of note)
This is more the pervue of organic chemistry than psychology.
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ossobuco
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Wed 30 Jun, 2004 07:38 pm
Re my nose, yes, I like both basil and cilantro... by, uh, taste.
But back to behavior, or back to immunology. When I worked in the field, the one of the key questions of the moment was about whether (gads, it is hard to remember, surely I will misstate) there was already (let me just make up a word of my own..) an apparatus for dealing with any possible antigen, or did this have to be constructed anew.
This was related to self and non self and recognition of non self.
Yah, I dunno now what I am saying but I understood the question once, it's frustrating.
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patiodog
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Wed 30 Jun, 2004 08:21 pm
Yeah, that was a big time for immunology. They still don't have a mechanism proposed for negative selection of T-cells, or for a whole host of other things... or a proper understanding of how dendritic cells work, or just how the immune and nervous systems interact, or, or, or...
You didn't exactly pick an easy field, osso.
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ossobuco
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Wed 30 Jun, 2004 09:07 pm
It ain't my field now, and I just did the lab work, but I loved it at the time, lots of ongoing discussions in the work day. As to immune and nervous system interactions, that was what my babble of a few posts was about. Wouldn't what triggers a nervous system sequence potentially vary with individual attractions, not only re pheromones, which I can see could be gene based, but to colors, forms, sounds, and smells that engage particular memory environments, even though once the sequence gets going it probably follows common routes.
I'll be quiet for a while and listen. I wouldn't mind reading that tome again, I just skimmed it.
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patiodog
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Thu 1 Jul, 2004 07:23 am
I wanna listen too! There are some hints in the book I quoted and that I gleaned from talking to an immunologist (researcher, not a professor, so possibly a reliable source) while back that there may be a great deal of cross talk between WBCs and neurons -- perhaps even to the extent that some WBCs produce neurotransmitters. Weird stuff, I should read more before I talk about it...
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patiodog
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Thu 1 Jul, 2004 08:40 am
Off-topic, and distracting me from stuff I should be doing...
Gladkevich A, Kauffman HF, Korf J. Lymphocytes as a neural probe: potential for studying psychiatric disorders. Prog Neuropsychopharmacol Biol Psychiatry. 2004 May;28(3):559-76.
Quote:
Numerous studies showed similarities between receptor expression and mechanisms of transduction processes of cells in the nervous system (e.g. neurons and glia) and lymphocytes. In several neuropsychiatric disorders, alteration of metabolism and cellular functions in the CNS, as well as disturbances in the main neurotransmitter and hormonal systems are concomitant with altered function and metabolism of blood lymphocytes. We summarize relevant investigations on depression, stress, Alzheimer's disease (AD) and schizophrenia. New techniques such as cDNA microarray gene expression and proteomics may give clues to define molecular abnormalities in psychiatric disorders and could eventually reveal information for diagnostic and treatment purposes. Taken together, these considerations suggest that lymphocyte could reflect the metabolism of brain cells, and may be exploited as a neural and possible genetic probe in studies of psychiatric disorders. {emphasis mine}
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ossobuco
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Thu 1 Jul, 2004 10:55 am
Oh, that makes sense. Still, I am interested in how one's particular experience can affect the number of receptors or expression of them, where e'er they are, again, the question of whether receptors to every damn thing are already there, just the receptors or 'programs' for them from one's forebears, or if there is a receptor formation or buildup from some neural input. My question undoubtedly rests on my ignorance of receptor formation in the first place.
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patiodog
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Thu 1 Jul, 2004 12:04 pm
Dunno about neurophysiology. That was just a tangent. Receptor proteins must be recycled, though; functional proteins have a finite half life. There must be transcriptional regulation of the receptor genes. All very basic stuff, but I'm in way over my head on this topic.
A very little bit is known about this stuff in the autonomic nervous system (for instance), where prolonged and/or elevated exposure can result in downregulation of receptor protein genes; not sure how much anybody knows about the central nervous system and the brain.
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ossobuco
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Thu 1 Jul, 2004 09:23 pm
Well, then, we're both over our heads, but no one else is listening. I am not just talking neuroreceptors but lymphocyte receptors as well. We did research on a lymphokine, mif, migration inhibition factor (cells moved directionally and some were stopped), way back when, that turned out to be antigen specific, over and over, in our lab. The conjecture was that...
Trouble is, that was around 1974. M'mind, never too swift as y'all can tell, has gone and forgotten all zee ramifications.
It's coming back to me, and I edited the post slightly.
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sozobe
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Thu 1 Jul, 2004 09:36 pm
I'm listening! And interested. Adore this stuff. No insights, mind you, but listening.
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ossobuco
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Thu 1 Jul, 2004 10:29 pm
Dang it, I wish Dlowan would post that thing again - I assume there is a good reason, re publishing stuff and privacy, whatever, for not keeping it posted. I got a flying gist, but needed more time.
