I thought there was something that came out recently that said that the vast majority of the ancestry in the British Isles was from people who had been there for about 10,000 years. They're pretty much as light skinned as the rest of the European population if not lighter, so it kind of makes me wonder if all Europeans became light and then the British Isles population diverged from the mainland or if they think that the lightending of skin tone happened independently in multiple European populations.

There may be some connection to working memory deficits which are seen in both schizophrenics and their relatives.

I've heard that babies will make various sounds not associated with the language that they will eventually acquire, such as clicks and velar fricatives and that these are lost after exposure to the sounds that are present in the language of the community in which they are raised. Not the same thing as grammar, but still, it's something.

But schizophrenia usually sets in somewhere between 17 to 24 (I think) after a huge amount of brain development has already taken place so....it would be interesting to see if these genes have been in any way related to the time course of brain development. I think some studies have said something about the development of the frontal lobes in the early twenties, meaning they are still developing, and these may have been imaging studies.

A little off topic, but I've never heard of an explanation of why cocaine and amphetamines have such similiar effects if amphetamines make dopaminergic transmission independent of pre-synaptic firing but cocaine does not assuming that is really true.

The correlation is positive. 
 
That's what I meant - positive, not inverse.

How about this: dominant personality is associated with lower IQ which is associated with lower value in the mating market for males resulting in more marriages between chubby women and dumb bossy men that produce chubby kids. But they were talking about bossy moms, not bossy dads. So maybe that doesn't work unless it operates over multiple generations.

but my understanding is that thomist philosophers (e.g., roman catholic religious philosophers) claim to be able to derive natural law independently of theism 
 
The phrase that I've heard is "transpartent to reason" implying that you don't have to take the teaching on faith, you just have to understand its logic and internal consistency. I do think it requires some sort of belief in some kind of deity although they may claim that Muslims and Jews would have the same teaching if they could only get their reasoning straight. What is interesting is to see is the reaction of conservative Catholics to the incoherence of the offical teaching on birth control. They either claim to be able to understand how it makes sense and how others are misunderstanding it or they simply refuse to disagree with it by saying something to the effect of "it's the church teaching, so it must be right and I will never say otherwise." The later reminds me a bit of many people's reaction to the genetic component of the black/white IQ gap. The question is not approached as a logical or factual question, but rather like a moral question or a political opinion. They don't seem to treat their belief as something that could be held for honest reasons, but rather like some stand they are taking or some act of defiance or moral forthrightness.

i assume they use stereotaxic coordinates and then record as tehy move the electrodes in until they get a proper electrophys signal that indicates the cell-type they're after.. 
 
It would be interesting to see if they could do something like that with tone conditioning in the hippocampus - stimulate various neurons during different phases of the tone conditioning to try to isolate the synapses responsible for the change in neural response associated with the conditioning. Then maybe see if both artificially induced LTP and the changes associated with the tone conditioning can be blocked by the same chemical. I'm not sure if that would count as demonstrating that LTP is really the mechanism behind learning during tone conditioning - one problem perhaps being that they can remove the hippocampus and still get the same behavioral response.

Any idea how they can induce LTP in a living animal? I've read stuff about that, but it seems like it would be hard to do if they don't have a slice and can't see what they're doing.

Mortimer, what paper are you talking about? The Duncan et al. (2000) one in Science? Because if I remember correctly, the tasks were not a "whole range" but rather two problems from Catell's Culture Fair Test of g. 
 
 
I think it was that one. I thought I had more than one paper on that, but that's the only one I can find. I've only got the abstract, do you have the whole thing? Here's what the abstract says: 
 
Universal positive correlations between different cognitive tests motivate the concept of "general intelligence" or Spearman's g. Here the neural basis for g is investigated by means of positron emission tomography. Spatial, verbal, and perceptuo-motor tasks with high-g involvement are compared with matched low-g control tasks. In contrast to the common view that g reflects a broad sample of major cognitive functions, high-g tasks do not show diffuse recruitment of multiple brain regions. Instead they are associated with selective recruitment of lateral frontal cortex in one or both hemispheres. Despite very different task content in the three high-g-low-g contrasts, lateral frontal recruitment is markedly similar in each case. Many previous experiments have shown these same frontal regions to be recruited by a broad range of different cognitive demands. The results suggest that "general intelligence" derives from a specific frontal system important in the control of diverse forms of behavior.  
 
So it sounds like they had three different types of tasks: spatial, verbal, and perceptual-motor with two examples of each: one more g-loaded than the other less g-loaded. And when they subtracted activation on less g-loaded from more g-loaded tasks they got prefontal activation. Now if they're using PET, I think they can get absolute levels of activation, so I don't why they didn't just do a large number of different tasks and look for correlations between g-loadedness of task and brain activation. Maybe there is some reason for this three pair design, assuming I'm understanding their methodology correctly. I'm not sure if Catell's Culture Fair Test of g is similiar to the Raven's and what these "spatial, verbal, and perceptuo-motor tasks" with more or less g-involvement were. I'm assumming that they are different from the Catell test.

So, the question: how do we know that the brain regions revealed by subtracting the fMRI signal for an easy RPM-type item from the signal for a hard one have a privileged relationship to g? 
 
 
This issue came up a long time ago, and if I remember correctly, what someone did was look for a correlation between increased activity and g-loadedness across a whole range of tasks and not just the Raven's and the one region whose activation was consistently correlated with g-loadedness was DPFC. In one way, that seemed odd because prefrontal patients are famous for retaining high their premorbid IQ while being impaired in motivation, judgment, planning, social appropriateness, and impulse control, but in another way it seemed to make sense given the DLPFC is associated with working memory which is highly predictive of G.

Probably the sound and smell and all that actually help define the "place" given that rats are smell-y instead of vision-y creatures. This bringing together of all of the features of an episode into a single "index" structure is often referred to as creating a "conjunctive representation." 
 
 
Supposedly some cells fire in response to cues that combine color and place and there are others that fire in response to auditory stimuli that are associated with responses on a discrimination tasks or to the temporal sequence of various tones in an auditory stimulus. And I've read that some of the very same cells that respond to place also respond to the conditioned responses to tone stimuli after classical conditioning. Weird.

There would be several stages of indirect addressing. One for working memory, one that operates within minutes, and one that operates within a day. As memory is consolidated the indirect links would move from stage to stage. The brain reward system might act as a filter that determined which memories passed from stage to stage. 
 
 
Supposedly, there is some evidence for both dorsolateral prefrontal and hippocampal activation during delayed response tasks believed to utilize working memory in primates and evidence for direct connections between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the hippocampus. It could be that these are merely involved in voluntary aspects of memory retention and retrieval and that the formation of long term memories is not necessarily associated with a neural pathways from the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to the hippocampus. This might be consistent with the notion that working memory is not required to form long term memories. It would be interesting to see if it's possible to selectively lesion this pathway and see what happens.

Anyway, is this a reason why animals need to sleep? To give the hippocampus a chance to offload stuff? 
 
Here's some papers that talk about things like that: 
 
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/99/18/11987 
 
http://jocn.mitpress.org/cgi/content/abstract/9/4/534 
 
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=PubMed&list_uids=7546305&dopt=Citation 
 
http://jocn.mitpress.org/cgi/content/abstract/12/2/246 
 
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/101/7/2140 
 
Unfortunately, not all of these are full papers. The rest are just abstracts. It seems that they're saying that different parts of the sleep cycle are important for different types of memory and that the slow wave phase is important for declarative memory and the REM phase is important for procedural memory. I don't know if anyone has tried to record from the striatum during procedural learning and during REM and see if they can get results similiar to the ones with the hippocampus given the striatum's apparent assocation with habit learning. If dreaming occurs in both types of sleep, it does seems odd that dreaming might be required for the formation of procedural memories in addition to declarative memories given that procedural memories do not have explicit declarative content.

I looked at this 
1000 times and I saw hyperfertility. 
 
 
Her butt's almost too round for me. But still, pretty amazing.

I didn't know it was a joke but it seemed wierd that a compnay would care about something like that. And if they did, it would be easy just to change the name.

"It's almost as if low-IQ people need their g for everything but high-IQ people can "outsource" some tasks to modules or subroutines that they have developed." 
 
The patterns of scores may be consistent with verbal, non-verbal and general factors all varying independently of one another for largely genetic reasons, but with the general intelltigence boosting both the verbal and non-verbal alike. Or it may be consistent with a very high degree of verbal or non-verbal ability sucking cognitive resources away from one or the other and creating a larger disparity. Both of these ways of viewing things may be supported by cases in which brain damage actually boosted an ability or by the example of autistic savants or the example of a pictographic memory faculty disappearing after someone learns to read.

"you're saying the correlation itself lowers. Where's that from?" 
 
I could be wrong. If one looked at freaks with very high subscores and ignored the others, I thought that would be a lower correlation between subscores than the non-freaks had rather than just a larger raw difference, but maybe that's not right.

"many cognitive scientists argue that language is adapted from our system for representing space, objects, and forces" 
 
A key difference seems to be that some are associated with specific spatial relationships while others are associated with mental states and intentions. The fact that the correlation between verbal and non-verbal IQ decreases as scores on one or the other increase suggests that there is some tension between the two even though they are correlated. This may be consistent with them sharing common resources and it may be the case that common resources could be used to explain the global nature of global speed and efficiency - or maybe not. If IQ is correlated with speed of neural transmission and complexity of dendritic trees than perhaps these factors could say something about general intelligence without having much of a correlate at a psychological or information processing level - they are only understood as neural concepts.

It seems that there are at least two different ways that general cognitive mechanisms that play a role all aspects of performance can be thought of. One is an "executive" role in which cognitive resources are directed toward a particular problem and another is some common form of conceptual representation that underlies all forms of human intentionality. That latter seems unlikely because understanding the symbolism in literature doesn't seem to have much in common with understanding math, although what seems similiar or different on a psychological level may not correspond to much on a neural level. The former may be associated with "cognitive control" and it may be easier to distinguish the more cognitive forms of control from the more executive forms of control if in fact different intellectual tasks do share much in common in terms of their neural representation. If both tasks require overlapping cognitive/representational capacities, then the process by which resources are directed to one versus another type of task may be a universal cognitive process associated with general intelligence. "Speed and efficiency" of neural processing at first seems unrelated to conceptual understanding, but they may be directly related if more complex neural nets operate more quickly because they can process more information in parallel in addition to having a greater representational capacity. But some intelligence factors seems confusing. For example, it's not at all clear what all of the various tasks associated with "performance" IQ have in common other than that they are generally thought of as non-verbal tasks.