Last week we asked readers to tell us under what circumstances they would be likely to use a public restroom reserved for the other gender. We've all been in the situation where there's a long line for one restroom and...
Uwe Reinhardt, an economist at Princeton, has a thoughtful explanation of why macroeconomists were so blindsided by the economic downtown of 2008: Fewer than a dozen prominent economists saw this economic train wreck coming -- and the Federal Reserve chairman,...
The familiar buzzing sound made by a mosquito may be irritating to us humans, but it is an important mating signal. The sound, produced by the beats of the insect's wings, has a characteristic frequency called the "flight tone"; when...
I caught this neuroscience question over at a new blog I like, Think Markets. Sandy Ikeda comments on a section of Daniel Gilbert's book Stumbling on Happiness: I've been thinking about the following from Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness: Experiments...
As a young child, my family was poor and we had to go to a public clinic for dental work. Since we were being seen by dental students, often the process was painful and took much longer than it should...
For those of you at this year's Terry talks, you'll obviously be aware of our little YouTube experiment. In any event, I present to you the fruit of that labour below. If you weren't at the conference, here is the...
An early classic in computational neuroscience was a 1993 paper by Elman called "The Importance of Starting Small." The paper describes how initial limitations in a network's memory capacity could actually be beneficial to its learning of complex sentences, relative...
You'd never know it from my recent article on the urban brain (and the cognitive benefits of nature) but I love walking in cities. In fact, a leisurely stroll in a metropolis is one of my favorite things to do....
Every year about this time, we start thinking about an exciting television event: the Super Bowl. I'm excited because it's the biggest football game of the year. The rest of the family just likes to watch the commercials. No doubt,...
The ability to suppress unwanted thoughts and actions is thought (by some) to be crucial in your ability to control behavior. However, alternative perspectives suggest that this emphasis on suppression or "inhibition" is misplaced. These perspectives, largely motivated by computational...
Healthy aging is characterized by a gradual decline in cognitive function. Mental processes such as attention, memory and the ability to process information are at their peak when people are in their 30s and 40s, but as we get older,...
Neuroskeptic has written a great post evaluating the much-hyped 2008 study that showed people will more readily accept information if a neurosciency-explanation is attached - even if the neuroscience is irrelevant. If this effect is real, it has big implications...
As all y'all know by now, I'm an experienced caffeine junkie. Currently, I'm trying to forgo it again (this Diet Coke right here is merely an aberration, do not look at the caffeine behind the curtain...). But really, it's everywhere...
From Mind Hacks: Deodorants boost sexiness by getting men in the groove: I keep running into fascinating articles that The Economist ran over the Christmas period and this one is no exception - it covers research that suggests that men's deodorants do increase sexual attractiveness, but by increasing confidence and hence the behaviour of the wearer. The smell alone seems to have little impact on women....
'Tetris' as cure for PTSD? can birds smell? Panda genome and evolution; Sensing the Reproductive Environment; Allele-Specific Gene Expression; Endemic fauna in the Deep Ocean; Oxygen limits insect size; Sleep and Memory; DNA Barcoding in birds; Preferences across the Menstrual Cycle for Masculinity; Neighbourhood Socioeconomics and mortality....
Or is it the kind of thing those other people do? In the car yesterday, I caught a story on Marketplace that was looking for insight into why people on Wall Street cheat. In the piece, host Kai Ryssdal interviewed...
For the basics about multivariate fMRI "mind-reading" techniques, see the video below. Some of it is based on this 2007 Haynes et al paper from Current Biology, described in more detail following the video....
Here's an interesting finding, which is summarized by Kevin Lewis in the Boston Globe Ideas section: If you've ever had to take a test in a room with a lot of people, you may be able to relate to this...
When I was in training, the chairperson (John Greden) of the department never spoke about schizophrenia. Instead, he always used the phrase, "the schizophrenias." He believed that there were different disease states that all produced similar clinical presentations. But because...
After the New York Times ran an article last week reporting on an interesting review by a pair of university psychologists suggesting that religious belief is positively correlated with self-discipline, it was inevitable that this proposition would be extrapolated beyond...
A recent post up at the Frontal Cortex points approvingly to a study of strollers, prams, toddlers and parental conversation. Jonah Lehrer concludes: It would be nice to see this research filter down to stroller manufacturers, so that even cheap...
Professor Janet Mann of Georgetown looked at a population of bottlenose dolphins in Shark Bay in Western Australia to observe the sponging behavior. Only female dolphins were witnessed using sponges as a means to protect their noses while disturbing the ocean floor, and only 11% seemed to display this behavior.
I just wanted to draw attention to two fantastic blog posts that describe a new paper by Edward Vul, a grad student at MIT, and colleagues at UCSD. The first post comes from Vaughan over at MindHacks: I've just come...
Seriously, when I read the headlines to this article, I wanted to wretch retch. (Ed. I need to learn how to spell.) Scientists discover true love Scientists: True love can last a lifetime I can feel it welling up now...eh...OK,...
I had a longish article in the Boston Globe Ideas section yesterday exploring some recent research on how living in a city affects the brain: The city has always been an engine of intellectual life, from the 18th-century coffeehouses of...
Truism 3: Humans are moral because that is the nature of the species - moral is what humans do Corollary: Morality is not based on commands from on high Subcorollary: If God is dead, how could everything be permitted? We...
The winners of Open Lab 2008 are finally out! Thanks to all of you that submitted entries on our behalf, we actually had seven entries up! And it turns out, one got in! It's that post of mine that never...
Continuing with the recent book review theme, allow me to say a few words about The Accidental Mind: How Brain Evolution Has Given Us Love, Memory, Dreams and God, by David J. Linden. Linden is a professor of neuroscience at...
I posted last night (you can tell this is serious, I really am blogging on the weekend!) about the concept of "Prozac withdrawal". I drew a little heat from Drugmonkey about this, due to the distinction I used between "physical"...
There are 9 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services...
Ok, I tried to post this earlier, but then Sci's wireless internet went out (grrr). So Sci bore herself back to the lab at 8pm on a Friday night to prove how dedicated she is to SCIENCE. I saw an...
Yesterday on our way back from a vacation in New York, we stopped to get coffee and use the bathroom. There was a long line at the women's room, and a much shorter line at the men's restroom. These were...
Baby strollers have become the latest bougie status symbol, but it's worth noting that one of the most important stroller features is almost always ignored. Here's VSL: According to a new study, babies who sat in strollers that faced their...
Matt Fitzgerald, a senior editor at Triathlete and the author of a number of books on training for endurance sports, is currently hard at work on Racing Weight. Of a chapter called "Guidelines for Beginners," Matt notes: [It] encourages beginning...
The Psychology of Cyberspace is a course taught by John Suler in the Department of Psychology at the Science and Technology Center at Rider University. The website is a collection of a large number of thought-provoking essays on various aspects...
There are 24 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social...
Posted on December 30, 2008 9:42 PM • 0 Comments •
Phew. Another year almost over and it's been a really good one. This time last year, I was still blogging at Wordpress, and it was only in late February that I beamed aboard the mighty ScienceBlog mothership. It's been a...
Several of the blogs have pointed to the Disco. Inst.'s shameful abuse of the suicide of Jesse Kilgore in an end-of-year fundraising pitch. Kilgore, a college student who had recently returned from military service in Iraq, had been challenging aspects of his upbringing, and his father (a fundamentalist pastor) concluded that reading Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion inspired Jesse to kill himself. The Disco. Inst. decided that the best thing to do was to glom onto that father's grief in order to drum up end-of-year donation. Given that the suicide rate for Iraq veterans keeps rising, I'd look past Jesse's...
Posted on December 30, 2008 5:02 PM • 5 Comments •
SciAm has a great article about the evolution of intelligence throughout the animal kingdom. The details are interesting--for example, certain birds have demonstrated a kind of recall not seen in nonhuman mammals--but perhaps the greatest value in the article lies...
Posted on December 30, 2008 4:07 PM • 2 Comments •
Being so closely related to our own species, monkeys serve as important model organisms, and have provided many insights into the workings of the human brain. Research performed on monkeys in the past 30 years or so has, for example,...
It is with great sadness that I learned that Dr.Greg Cahill died a few days ago, at the Houston airport, waiting for his flight. I have met Greg at several meetings of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms and...
Posted on December 30, 2008 9:37 AM • 3 Comments •
I've written before about the the failure of basic neuroscience research to advance neuropharmacology (at least, it's been a failure so far), but it's nice to see Eric Kandel, my old mentor (and one of my scientific heroes), make the...
Posted on December 30, 2008 9:17 AM • 9 Comments •
[This entry was originally posted in April 2007] The Beck effect is difficult to replicate online, because it involves testing reaction times. However, I think I've figured out a way to approximate the effect. This movie (Quicktime required) will show...
When I saw this article in the NY Times, I literally ignored everything else around me for about ten minutes straight. Working in drug abuse research (as I do), I get a lot of questions from people asking a) what...
My suspicion is that many of you went home for the holidays, and my suspicion is that many of you were not entirely honest with your relatives while you were there. While it is not my intention to encourage this...
Posted on December 29, 2008 2:47 PM • 1 Comments •
[This article was originally posted in February, 2007] The setting was an integrated suburban middle school: nearly evenly divided between black and white students. As is the case in many schools, white students outperformed black students both in grades and...
We (I) here at Zooillogix have a thing for lobsters. It involves Belgium, pasta tongs, and a Dutch boy named Lourens. I'll leave it at that. Anyway, this mutant lobster was pulled out of the briny depths near Newport, RI...
Posted on December 28, 2008 3:13 PM • 11 Comments •
So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology and PLoS Pathogens this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own...
I have been informed that Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians (2007) is now available in audiobook format from Cherry Hill Publishing. Cherry Hill is now selling an eight-CD recording of the book read by the author, with a foreword by John...
Posted on December 26, 2008 1:15 PM • 5 Comments •
[Originally posted in December, 2006] So it's December 22, and you are one of the few people who hasn't already bagged out of work to get ready for the holidays. You've been absolutely deluged -- swamped with work -- the...
Larry, Amanda, John, Mike and others are comenting, quite positively, on the recent Scientific American article - Evolution of the Mind: 4 Fallacies of Psychology by David J. Buller. And I agree - this is an excellent, well-deserved and well-thought...
Posted on December 25, 2008 6:15 PM • 4 Comments •
Your face is a major component of your self-identity, but when you look into a mirror, how do you know that the person you are seeing is really you? Is it because the person in the reflection looks just like...
I found this quite intriguing: Those thinking that online social networking is a substitute for face-to-face interactions might want to think again. Recent research in psychology suggests there are some benefits to real-life socializing that the Internet just can't provide;...
Posted on December 24, 2008 3:56 PM • 3 Comments •
There's a fair bit of evidence that playing games can enhance your cognitive ability and prevent decline as we age. Or at least that's the excuse I use when I take a few minutes off during the course of the...
Posted on December 24, 2008 12:35 PM • 21 Comments •
Naughty male Australian satin bower bird selectively steals blue items to decorate his nest. The female bower birds rate their partner by their home decor so they do a lot of stealing....
Posted on December 24, 2008 9:15 AM • 0 Comments •
Honeybees are known for responding strongly to rewards, with foraging varieties performing a "dace" in response to a particularly good cache of pollen. Cocaine is a drug which lights up the reward centers in the human brain with aplomb. Considering...
Posted on December 24, 2008 8:12 AM • 1 Comments •
Synchiria is a neurological condition in which a stimulus applied to one side of the body is referred to both sides. If, for example, one's left hand is touched, he experiences tactile sensations on both hands. People with intact brains...
My second article for the Scientific American Mind Matters website is online now. This one is about the recent study which demonstrated that distorting the body image alters pain perception - specifically, it was found that using inverted binoculars to...
Posted on December 24, 2008 4:35 AM • 2 Comments •
Deceit is a useful behavior if one can get away with it while pursuing happiness; in evolutionary terms that would be to live and leave behind more copies of ones genes. A NY Times article by Natalie Angier that connects...
Posted on December 24, 2008 1:15 AM • 0 Comments •
A well-written press release on a very well done and exciting study: Honey bees on cocaine dance more, changing ideas about the insect brain: In a study published in 2007, Robinson and his colleagues reported that treatment with octopamine caused...
Posted on December 23, 2008 8:57 PM • 1 Comments •
What a Christmas present - there are 32 new articles in PLoS ONE today and they are amazing! As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can...
Posted on December 23, 2008 6:34 PM • 0 Comments •
Two summers ago in Paris, I was astounded at the volume of traffic that somehow managed to negotiate the traffic circle at the Arc de Triomphe without incident. Here's the (poor quality) video I made to document traffic flow there:...
A NY Times article by Natalie Angier describes a study of primate behavior out of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland that found a direct relationship between an animal's capacity for deceiving others and its brain size. Not only...
I was very pleased when I received my first ever book from a reader! Granted, it was Mr. SiT, but still, I was pleased. It was a copy of "Welcome to your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but...
At io9, Annalee Newitz asks, "can robots consent to have sex with humans?" Do you think the blondie bot in Cherry 2000 was really capable of giving consent to have sex with her human boyfriend? Or did her programming simply...
Evolutionary curveball for curvy?: While women with curvy figures might enjoy more attention from men in Western culture, and find it easier to become pregnant, new research suggests they may also face some evolutionary disadvantages compared to women with thicker...
Brian Knutson, a very clever neuroeconomist at Stanford, sheds light on some of the cognitive biases currently holding back the economy over at Edge.org. From the perspective of the brain, uncertainty is hell: The brain responds to uncertain future outcomes...
Posted on December 22, 2008 10:24 AM • 4 Comments •
Spatial navigation is the process on which we rely to orient ourselves within the environment and to negotiate our way through it. Our ability to do so depends upon cognitive maps, mental representations of the surrounding spaces, which are constructed...
I've been waiting for this day all month. My article "Predatory Intelligence," which considers the beauty and ugliness of spotted hyenas, is now available for free in the journal Antennae. For some reason it is not listed in the table...
Posted on December 21, 2008 6:13 PM • 6 Comments •
Those with a yen for philosophical musings are no doubt aware of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, a repository of freely accessible articles. I don't read much on the subject compared to many here, but I did catch this piece,...
Happy Anniversary, PLoS ONE! Today is PLoS ONE's second anniversary and we're celebrating by announcing that the winner of the second PLoS synchroblogging competition is SciCurious of the Neurotopia 2.0 blog. "This fluent post captures the essence of the research...
Posted on December 20, 2008 12:00 PM • 2 Comments •
Researchers at Santa Clara University in California have replicated the results of a famous--and notorious--1961 study that found that the majority of people willingly deliver what they believe to be painful shocks to unseen, unknown, but very much heard victims...
Last week's Casual Fridays study was inspired by my (incorrect) observation that the latest beta version of Firefox always displays tabs. (Actually, while it defaults to that setting, it's possible to disable it.) When I pointed this out on Twitter,...
As winter break approaches, the younger Free-Ride offspring had an unscheduled nightmare. OK, none of the nightmares is scheduled. Still, this is a week where we could all use more sleep, not less. Younger offspring: I thought I didn't have...
Last week, Nature published an editorial arguing for the mainstream acceptance of "cognitive enhancing drugs": Today, on university campuses around the world, students are striking deals to buy and sell prescription drugs such as Adderall and Ritalin -- not to...
Posted on December 19, 2008 10:07 AM • 9 Comments •
Two very interesting papers this week: The Circadian Clock in Arabidopsis Roots Is a Simplified Slave Version of the Clock in Shoots: The circadian oscillator in eukaryotes consists of several interlocking feedback loops through which the expression of clock genes...
Posted on December 19, 2008 12:49 AM • 0 Comments •
So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS ONE this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are...
Posted on December 18, 2008 11:43 PM • 0 Comments •
[This is our synchroblogging post in honor of PLoS ONE's second birthday. Why not write your own?] Ever wonder whether it's better to study all night before a big exam, or to get a good night's sleep, but maybe not...
Starting High School One Hour Later May Reduce Teen Traffic Accidents: A new study shows that after a one-hour delay of school start times, teens increased their average nightly hours of sleep and decreased their "catch-up sleep" on the weekends,...
Posted on December 18, 2008 9:45 AM • 0 Comments •
I already wrote one entry for PLoS ONE's second birthday, but I'm feeling sparky today, and I think I like this paper better. I don't know about you guys, but when I was a sprog, my parents dragged me to...
It sounds like the beginning of a joke: Why do dolphins carry sponges? To...um...to...well technically, it's to scoop up fish, but that's not funny...to get to the other side? No? Dang. This paper from PLoS ONE has recently been covered...
Hmmm so it seems that we have to abandon some old cherished beliefs: Scientists debunk the myth that you lose most heat through your head: When it comes to wrapping up on a cold winter's day, a cosy hat is...
Posted on December 17, 2008 10:48 PM • 5 Comments •
There are 13 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services...
Posted on December 17, 2008 7:41 PM • 0 Comments •
Earlier today we asked readers to imagine an angry face. Then, in a surprise poll, we asked what gender the face was. So far our results match those of a study led by D. Vaughn Becker: over three-fourths of the...
I really love coming to visit you, Grandpa. Researchers at the University of New South Wales are using sarcasm to determine whether patients have frontotemporal dementia (FTD), otherwise known as Pick's disease: Researchers at the University of New South Wales...
One of the bigger challenges facing researchers who are developing artificial limbs is to create prostheses that not only act but also feel like real limbs. This is especially true for the hand, which is one of the most sensitive...
When I was 12 years old, I sometimes got to ride the train from Seattle to my aunt's house in Portland. Staring at the countryside flashing past the train window, it seemed to me that the landscape was rotating in...
When you need to stop yourself from committing some response, do you simply freeze - like a deer in the headlights - or can you selectively inhibit only the undesired action? The question is important because the ability to stop...
I find the epic Ponzi scheme of Bernard Madoff morbidly fascinating. He managed to lose 50 billion dollars, which can't be easy: A busy stock-trading operation occupied the 19th floor, and the computers and paperwork of Bernard L. Madoff Investment...
Posted on December 15, 2008 9:59 AM • 12 Comments •
Scientists at the University of New South Wales, which is right up there with Harvard and Oxford in terms of its renown as a research locus, have proposed that sarcasm may be useful in diagnosing certain types of dementia. The...
Posted on December 15, 2008 9:24 AM • 2 Comments •
I'm sure everyone has heard by now about the commentary that appeared in Nature on use of stimulants as cognitive enhancers. Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to read the commentary myself until this weekend, when I curled up (at...
Deborah Solomon and the Times Magazine were kind enough to ask me a few questions about my new book, How We Decide. You can read the interview here. And yes, I'm jumping in the photo....
Posted on December 14, 2008 8:23 AM • 12 Comments •
The New York Times has a piece, Bad Times Draw Bigger Crowds to Churches: But why the evangelical churches seem to thrive especially in hard times is a Rorschach test of perspective. For some evangelicals, the answer is obvious. "We...
This is certainly interesting, though it points more to a problem than to a solution. Researchers at UC-Berkeley have found that kids from low-income backgrounds demonstrate "a noticeably lower level of activity in the prefrontal cortext [sic], the part of...
Posted on December 13, 2008 5:02 PM • 3 Comments •
As you know, H.M. died last week. Listen to this brief (9 minutes) NPR Science Friday podcast - you will be able to hear Henry Gustav Molaison's voice. But most importantly, he has donated his brain to further scientific study....
Posted on December 13, 2008 2:12 PM • 0 Comments •
Why is mainstream media obsessively focused, out of all the cool science out there, on silly titillating EvoPsych garbage, presented in a "shocked! shoked!" tone? Here is today's crop - feel free to savage them on your own blogs: 46%...
Posted on December 12, 2008 11:52 PM • 2 Comments •
There are 11 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services...
Posted on December 12, 2008 7:40 PM • 0 Comments •
A few days ago after downloading the latest beta version of the FireFox web browser, I posted what I thought was an innocuous complaint on Twitter: The software assumes you will always have multiple web pages open. Even if you're...
Posted on December 12, 2008 2:15 PM • 30 Comments •
Recent advances in functional neuroimaging have enabled researchers to predict perceptual experiences with a high degree of accuracy. For example, it is possible to determine whether a subject is looking at a face or some other category of visual stimulus,...
So I was showing Zooillogix to a few folks at my friend's party in San Francisco and this guy broke out this sweet dumbo octopus tattoo. I'll show you mine, if you show me yours can be a risky move...
Posted on December 12, 2008 9:58 AM • 3 Comments •
UGH. First off my apologies for the weird scheduling. I have no idea why it posted itself four days ago. And I have to start this with a personal porn anecdote. You KNOW you wanna hear it. Woodard et al....
There are 10 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services...
Posted on December 11, 2008 11:42 PM • 0 Comments •
I caught this article on ScienceDaily about the work of Professor Bart Hoebel at Princeton who has been attempting to show that sugar is an addictive substance like a drug. He presents data at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology meeting...
Yesterday's post showed that our memory for objects depends on the background information available when we first see the object: If you see a toy in a room, you remember it better later if you see it again in the...
A lot of evolutionary psychology goes into the "They did a study on what?" category. So check out Daniel Kruger's paper, Male Financial Consumption is Associated with Higher Mating Intentions and Mating Success: Cross-culturally, male economic power is directly related...
In the latest New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell has a thought-provoking article on the difficulty of figuring out what sort of person is best suited for a particular job. He begins by discussing the challenge of choosing college quarterbacks, a topic...
Posted on December 11, 2008 9:54 AM • 14 Comments •
There are 11 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services...
Posted on December 10, 2008 11:18 PM • 1 Comments •
In the never ending quest for death gadgets Mercedes has come up with a specialized screen that will show the driver one thing and the passenger another. Just think, now in addition to a driver watching a movie while they...
Change blindness is a truly remarkable phenomenon. There are so many ways that the human perceptual system can be tricked into missing a change that appears right before our eyes, that it's sometimes astonishing that we aren't constantly running into...
In an update to their groundbreaking earlier demonstration that high-IQ children initially show a thinner cortex, and later show an initially thicker one than their average-IQ peers, Shaw et al. have now documented those trajectories of cortical thickening which are...
Sine-Wave speech is a wonderful example of the importance of patterns when it comes to our sense of sound. When people first hear a sentence that's been artificially degraded, the sentence sounds like a sequence of "simultaneous whistles, or science...
Posted on December 10, 2008 9:41 AM • 7 Comments •
On request from several people, I am here reposting my post that I wrote on cocaine way when I was but a little blogging larvae. Now, I think I have reached pupa stage, and then when I go into my...
In my department this year, someone has decided to hold a "deck the doors" contest. Basically, you sign up for a door, deck it out, and whoever has the best door gets pizza. I'm actually not a HUGE fan of...
In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin noted that facial expressions vary little across cultures. We all recognize that someone whose eyes and mouth are wide open, and whose eyebrows are raised, is afraid. This...
I'm sitting at the dining room table eating lunch, when I get the feeling of being watched. I look around, and see the dog across the room, curled up on her pillows staring at me. She's quietly chanting to herself...
The absence of reward induces inequity aversion in dogs: One crucial element for the evolution of cooperation may be the sensitivity to others' efforts and payoffs compared with one's own costs and gains. Inequity aversion is thought to be the...
The other day I was teaching a whole passel of high school students about cocaine and the brain. I usually give them choices about what they want to hear about, and they ALWAYS pick cocaine. I was so happy when...
What you remember about your life is almost certainly not accurate. Adults have very few memories before age five, and there is a systematic bias to the memories most people have for the rest of their lives. We are more...
While researching this story, I came across a fascinating (and controversial) take on the "depression epidemic" called The Loss of Sadness: How Psychiatry Transformed Normal Sorrow into Depressive Disorder. It took a few months, but I've got a new interview...
Posted on December 8, 2008 11:49 AM • 13 Comments •
When University of Virginia neuroscientist Bankole Johnson first introduced the idea two decades ago that alcoholism lends itself to pharmacological treatment in just the same way other diseases do, he was regarded as something of a rogue by his peers....
Oh pareidolia. I mean I understand seeing something that maybe looks like something else in the clouds or one time I accidentally peeled an orange that looked like a penis. But thinking that there is something actually significant and...
Why The 'Perfect' Body Isn't Always Perfect: How Hormones Interact With Waist-to-hip Ratios In Women: Having an imperfect body may come with some substantial benefits for some women, according to a new article in the December issue of Current Anthropology....
Everyone who's ever taken a Neuroscience class in college remembers the strange case of H.M. H.M. suffered from epilepsy. Back in 1953, his brain was operated on - some large chunks (the hippocampi) were removed. Epilepsy was gone. So was...
Posted on December 5, 2008 10:21 PM • 3 Comments •
There are 9 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services...
The last place I lived before small-town Davidson, North Carolina, was New York City. One thing that seemed extremely different to me when I moved from New York to Davidson was the behavior of pedestrians and drivers. In New York,...
The Radiological Society of America recently issued a press release entitled "Robotic Technology Improves Stroke Rehabilitation". It sounds like good, instantly Slashdottable fare: brain scans and robots? The only way to improve that would be to run it on Linux...
Patient H.M. just died: In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation in Hartford to correct a seizure disorder, only to emerge from it fundamentally and irreparably changed. He developed a syndrome neurologists call profound amnesia. He had lost the...
The National Academies is working to identify topics in science, engineering, and medicine that matter most to the public. They developed this 2-minute survey and we encourage Intersection readers to participate: What topics in science, engineering, and medicine matter most...
Yawn. Just seeing that word made you more likely to open your mouth in a big inhalation, contort your face and stretch out your arms. In other words, yawning is a contagious experience. Now it turns out that happiness is...
The amnesic patient known as H.M., who is the best known case study in neuropsychology, has died, at the age of 82.H.M., whose full name has now been revealed as Henry Gustav Molaison, lost completely the ability to form new...
A sports magazine writer asked me about the different techniques one could use to distract an athlete... here's what I said: About a year ago another graduate student and I were planning on doing some research in my lab...
When I was asked to review Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and my My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend, by Barbara Oakley, I was pretty certain that my life as a Science Blogger had reached its...
The man who constituted one of the best explored case studies in cognitive psychology, perhaps the best explored case study ever, has passed away. As reported in the Montreal Gazette: The 82-year-old man scientists have known only as HM died...
Posted on December 4, 2008 7:50 PM • 11 Comments •
Can you hear colors? Can you see sounds? Do words have colors or images associated with them? It may sound impossible, but there are many documented cases of people who experience all these things. We've discussed it before on Cognitive...
Arguably the most important and certainly the most famous single case study patient in Psychology and Neuroscience passed away on Tuesday December 2nd. H.M. as he was known to probably every student of Psychology can now be revealed as...
Posted on December 4, 2008 12:00 PM • 4 Comments •
"Henry G. Molaison, 82, of Windsor Locks, CT died on Tuesday. He is known in the medical and scientific literatures as "the amnesic patient, H.M." He was born in Manchester, CT and graduated from East Hartford High School. In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain...
Posted on December 4, 2008 10:56 AM • 1 Comments •
Nicholas Kristof has an important column on the link between iodized salt and IQ in developing countries: Almost one-third of the world's people don't get enough iodine from food and water. The result in extreme cases is large goiters that...
Though Barbara Oakley's Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend is ostensibly about Machiavellian behavior, it is also a testament to her intellectual ambition. The subheading is a clear pointer to...
'Try to be the smartest boy in class.' ..writes 9 yr old Alec Greven in How To Talk To Girls. Sure, he may not have much dating experience--and admittedly, I haven't read the book--but this charming little guy is onto...
There are 10 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services...
Posted on December 3, 2008 12:28 AM • 0 Comments •
We can quickly spot a face staring at us in a crowd. We can do this much quicker, for example, than we can determine that no one is staring at us, as this movie demonstrates. A grid of 100 pictures...
What would it be like to have an immaculate memory, so that every detail of life was instantly inscribed in the brain? It's actually unbearable. Here's Der Spiegel: Price can rattle off, without hesitation, what she saw and heard on...
Posted on December 2, 2008 2:21 PM • 11 Comments •
Vaughan Bell, of Mindhacks fame, wrote a really interesting article on "post-bereavement ghosts" over at Mind Matters. I had no idea that such hallucinations were so ubiquitous: Mourning seems to be a time when hallucinations are particularly common, to the...
Body ownership - the sense that one's body belongs to one's self - is central to self-awareness, and yet is something that most of us take completely for granted. We experience our bodies as being an integral part of ourselves,...
Give this video at least a minute and you'll see some spectacular shadow art. I particularly like the last style (1:15) using sculptured mass to create recognizable form:...
Let's see what is new in PLoS Medicine, PLoS Biology and PLoS ONE today: Time-of-Day-Dependent Enhancement of Adult Neurogenesis in the Hippocampus: Adult neurogenesis occurs in specific regions of the mammalian brain such as the dentate gyrus of the hippocampus....
Posted on December 1, 2008 10:18 PM • 0 Comments •
A pair of gay penguins at Polar Land in Harbin, north east China has taken to stealing the eggs of straight couples and leaving rocks in place to fool their victims.
Posted on December 1, 2008 8:02 PM • 10 Comments •
One of the...conceits? tropes? myths? facts? benefits? poorly realized aspirations? of the scientist has been perplexing me today whilst skirmishing elsewhere. In theory, science is all about the unknown outcome and empiricism. We start an experiment, test or inquiry as...
Posted on December 1, 2008 5:50 PM • 89 Comments •
Synaesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimuli of one sensory modality evoke experiences in another modality. This is thought to occur as a result of insufficient "pruning" during development, so that most of the pathways connecting parts of the...
Cerebrum just published an interesting article on the ethical implications of using drugs to treat drug addiction. In particular, the scientists examine the benefits of naltrexone, an opioid receptor antagonist. (This means that the drug blocks receptors that normally bind...
Posted on December 1, 2008 10:51 AM • 11 Comments •
It's the best show on the radio* and it's all about science. If you're not listening to Radio Lab, then you're missing something quite special. The new season has just begun with a fantastic episode on "Choice," and I'm not...
A few years ago I blogged about prosopagnosia, "face blindness." Nature Neuroscience now has a new paper finding some correlates with brain architecture, Reduced structural connectivity in ventral visual cortex in congenital prosopagnosia: Using diffusion tensor imaging and tractography, we...
The raw material for Miriam Sach's solo contemporary dance was her 2004 Ph.D. thesis at the University of Düsseldorf, Germany, titled "Cerebral activation patterns induced by inflection of regular and irregular verbs with positron emission tomography: A comparison between single subject and group analysis."...
Posted on November 29, 2008 12:30 PM • 1 Comments •
Greta walks a mile to work every day. I work at home, so I don't walk around town much. I'm much more likely to be driving down the street where we live than walking on it. Does this affect our...
Posted on November 28, 2008 4:10 PM • 42 Comments •
Can physics tell us about ourselves? To phrase the question more narrowly: can the statistical tools which physicists have developed to understand the collective motion of large agglutinations of particles help us figure out what our brains are doing? If...
The good Dr. Isis has posted her concern that recent developmental advances exhibited by Little Isis will permanently ruin Dr. Isis' sleep. Little Isis is no longer contained by the four walls of his crib and Dr. Isis awoke to...
It's Thanksgiving tomorrow and the question (of the title of this post) pops up on the internets again. See SciCurious and Janet for the latest local offerings. Short answer: we don't know. But there is endless speculation about it, each...
(This entry was originally posted in May, 2006) We've discussed implicit attitudes on Cognitive Daily before, but never in the context of food. The standard implicit attitude task asks you to identify items belonging to two different categories. Consider the...
The term body image was coined by the great neurologist Henry Head and refers to a mental representation of one's physical appearance. Constructed by the brain from past experience and present sensations, the body image is a fundamental aspect of...
Play cognitive engineer: if you were designing an intelligent system, you'd probably use the same system to detect novelty as that used to detect familiarity. After all, one is simply the inverse of the other - so novelty can be...
My latest Science Progress column, about a recent, cutting edge attempt to bring science and Hollywood together, is now up. It's entitled, "Attack of the Nerds from Outer Space," which should be more than enough of a teaser. You...
Posted on November 26, 2008 12:00 PM • 0 Comments •
For years, you've heard the tremendous fatigue experienced after an American Thanksgiving dinner laid at the feet of the turkey -- or more precisely, at the tryptophan in that turkey. Trytophan, apparently, is the go-to amino acid for those who...
Throughout our language, the vocabulary of physical cleanliness is also used to describe moral cleanliness. We describe saints as pure and thieves as dirty; consciences can be clean and sins can be washed away. But more and more, psychological studies...
Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday, hands down. Well, ok, I also celebrate a series of personal holidays on the day after Valentine's, the day after Easter, the day after Halloween, and the day after Christmas. Why hinge your emotions on...
There are 11 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services...
Posted on November 25, 2008 10:25 PM • 1 Comments •
To efficiently direct learning, it may be useful for the brain to attend to those items which are maximally novel - this novelty may obscure some predictive or rewarding value that has not yet been learned or exploited. This is...
The next few months are going to be full of news and riffs on my next book, How We Decide, which comes out in February. As a result, I'm trying to pace myself and limit the shameless self-promotion, at least...
Posted on November 25, 2008 1:30 PM • 4 Comments •
For most of us, visual perception is crucial for spatial navigation. We rely on vision to find our way around, to position ourselves and localize objects within the surroundings, and to plan our trajectory on the basis of the layout...
This is from an interesting open-access article in Annals of General Psychiatry. It describes two studies, relating to two different catastrophic events. The authors examine the differences in how various risk factors may contribute to the development of PTSD in...
Prosopagnosia is a neurological condition characterised by an inability to recognize faces. In the most extreme cases, the prosopagnosic patient cannot even recognize their own face in the mirror or a photograph, and in his 1985 book The Man Who...
Boundary extension is a phenomenon we've discussed a lot on Cognitive Daily. It's typically described as a memory error: We remember scenes as having bigger boundaries than what we originally saw. Take a look at these two pictures of Jim:...
I have a feeling that this holiday season there will be even more drinking than usual, as people self-medicate with booze. Worried about your 401(k)? Have some egg nog. The good news is that there's a new studyshowing, once again,...
Posted on November 24, 2008 9:49 AM • 15 Comments •
Think of a copper tea kettle (I'm cold, tea is warm...). When you think about it, where is it? It's in a kitchen, right? Possibly on a stove. It's definitely in a context where you would expect it to be....
"Defective Man A. Age, 45 years. ....Ranch laborer in the experimenter's employ... nervous suspicious, "muddled" person, with a grievance against society in general, and a surprising fund of self-acquired misinterpretations relating to social environment. He expressed a belief that my experiment was dangerous meddling with the human mind... constant dread of apparatus...labored under a suspicion that it was not the simple structure that it pretended to be"
The flavors of Greece, Sicily, and even Croatia (don't tell Bora Zivkovic) - but who would've intended for their wine to smell of Vicks VapoRub? Some great values, great drinking, and great company!
Last week we wondered how having kids affects our own childhood memories. In many ways, our kids remind us of our own childhood, allowing us to relive our favorite memories. But kids also distract us by being so adorable (or...
So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens, PLoS ONE and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about...
. . . or, brain worms could be on the rise! Mo at Neurophilosophy has a really freaky story/video about a parasitic worm that invaded a woman's brain. This one is worth watching. . . and you can use it...
Posted on November 20, 2008 5:00 PM • 3 Comments •
I'm a contributor to Very Short List: Science, the latest offshoot of the VSL brand. (David Dobbs is another contributor.) For those who don't know, VSL is a very short email on something interesting sent daily to your inbox. We...
Posted on November 20, 2008 7:59 AM • 4 Comments •
A Necker cube is bi-stable figure, meaning that it can be perceived as two different three-dimensional objects, depending on how you look at it: Cube A is ambiguous -- the true Necker cube. Cube B and cube C show the...
Last Thursday's episode of the Radio 4 programme In Our Time featured a very interesting discussion about recent developments in neuroscience research. Presenter Melvynn Bragg was joined by psychologist Martin Conway of Leeds University, cognitive neuroscientist Gemma Calvert of the...
Posted on November 19, 2008 8:25 AM • 2 Comments •
Except that someone I trust far more than I do myself thinks this might not be so bad. To most of you I'm a semidescript blogger who tends to wax and wane in his anti-religious, anti-nonsense ways, coming and going...
Mass Mortality of Adult Male Subantarctic Fur Seals: Are Alien Mice the Culprits?; GP-9s Are Ubiquitous Proteins Unlikely Involved in Olfactory Mediation of Social Organization in the Red Imported Fire Ant, Solenopsis invicta; The Neural Basis of Object-Context Relationships on Aesthetic Judgment; A Green Fluorescent Protein with Photoswitchable Emission from the Deep Sea
Posted on November 18, 2008 11:30 PM • 0 Comments •
Optogenetics is a recently developed technique based on microbial proteins called channelrhodopsins (ChRs), which render neurons sensitive to light when inserted into them, thus enabling researchers to manipulate the activity of the cells using laser pulses. Although still very new...
This looks like a pile of wooden cubes with odd images on them. Assemble them correctly, and you get a 3-D image of the brain...except you can't see it when you are done... ...because the image is entirely inside....
Posted on November 18, 2008 7:42 AM • 2 Comments •
One of things I was taught over and over again when I was in education school was the importance of getting parents involved in kids' learning. If you get the parents on your side, my professors insisted, then you're going...
A nice summary of "humaniquness," or the cognitive talents that make homo sapiens such an unprecedented species: [Marc] Hauser describes animals as having "laser-beam" intelligence, in which each cognitive capacity is locked into a specific function. Humans, by contrast, have...
Posted on November 17, 2008 11:21 AM • 6 Comments •
While at The Salk last month for Beyond Belief 3, I also taped this episode of The Science Review for The Science Network with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Nita Farahany, Lawrence Krauss, and Roger Bingham. It's a discussion on neurolaw, neuropolitics, and...
Posted on November 17, 2008 10:08 AM • 0 Comments •
"Does electrophysiology really need to be out of reach of the amateur or budget-restricted scientist? What if you were to leave your lab tomorrow? What if the zombie apocalypse happened, you somehow survived, and you still wanted to do neuroscience?"
Atheists are smarter than Calvinists in Dutch Study. But, the Calvinists are quicker at identifying small shapes than the Atheists. Despite the abundance of evidence that human perception is penetrated by beliefs and expectations, scientific research so far has entirely neglected the possible impact of...
From the SfN website: G20 Summit in Downtown Washington As Neuroscience 2008 approaches, SfN is monitoring Washington heightened security in effect due to the G20 summit meeting at the National Building Museum. No disruption of meeting activities is anticipated, but...
Posted on November 14, 2008 4:35 PM • 2 Comments •
The current issue of Nature contains an interesting article about Sir Christopher Wren's contribution to neuroanatomy, by art historians Martin Kemp and Nathan Flis of Oxford University.The article focuses on the anatomical illustrations produced by Wren for Thomas Willis's 1664...
This morning I was having a conversation with Nora about her AP European history class, and it got me thinking about my own experience taking the same class about 25 years ago (yes, kids, they did have AP classes back...
Posted on November 14, 2008 1:48 PM • 18 Comments •
It's one of the more annoying side-effects of the financial collapse: instant updates of the Dow Jones Industrial Average are suddenly everywhere, popping up in the corner of cable news shows, in between weather reports on the radio, highlighted on...
Posted on November 14, 2008 12:55 PM • 18 Comments •
I actually had another piece in mind for this Friday's Weird Science, but a friend of mine sent me a link to this paper, and I HAD to do it. It's not just weird, it's awesome! Long, Fee. "Using temperature...
Here are a few examples. One will feed you greasy bacon every morning. The other will donate to the GOP. Others will force you to perform either menial or mental tasks. I prefer a more gradual approach - a system...
Posted on November 13, 2008 5:05 PM • 3 Comments •
This is an exciting time for chessplayers. First the big Anand-Kramnik match, which certianly exceeded expectations. Possibly a Kamsky-Topalov match later this month. And now the big olympiad in Dresden, Germany. The U.S. is represented by a strong team consisting...
Posted on November 13, 2008 4:18 PM • 1 Comments •
Yesterday, I wrote about the sad case of Motl Brody, a 12-year-old Orthodox Jew whose brain tumor had rendered him brain dead and whose parents are fighting the efforts of the hospital to disconnect him from the ventilator and to...
Posted on November 13, 2008 3:28 PM • 21 Comments •
Remember this video? A few weeks ago we used it to demonstrate that facial expressions can disrupt the perceptual system in fundamental ways. Actually, because we could only show a few short clips, we weren't able to duplicate the research...
I WAS going to blog on the history of action potentials tonight, but it's late, I'm really tired (14 hour days in the lab add up), and action potential history is hard. Luckily for all of us, a new and...
So wrote the renaissance humanist, Erasmus of Rotterdam: Man is to man either a god or a wolf. Here, courtesy of Leiter, is an article in The Telegraph, in which philosopher Mark Rowlands describes his life with a wolf,...
Posted on November 12, 2008 10:31 PM • 6 Comments •
When Jim and Nora were toddlers, they were huge fans of everything Disney. Here they're wearing their Disney pajamas as they play next to their Seven Dwarves figurines, underneath their TV, which was frequently used to watch Disney videos. We...
I've been really enjoying Alex and Me, the new book by Irene Pepperberg, and not only because I've got an African Grey of my own. It's full of wonderful anecdotes like this: The students occasionally took Alex to the washroom,...
Posted on November 12, 2008 3:15 PM • 2 Comments •
It is now well established that the adult mammalian brain - including that of humans - contains at least two discrete populations of neural stem cells which continue to generate new nerve cells throughout life. These newborn neurons are quickly...
(Previously: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4) O.K. o.k. so I've been ultra delinquent with keeping on top of the PF3 puzzle, and for that I heartily apologize. But here we go - the proverbial home stretch. As it...
Posted on November 12, 2008 7:11 AM • 8 Comments •
There are 13 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. You can now also easily place articles on various social services,...
Posted on November 11, 2008 11:45 PM • 2 Comments •
Philosophers have wondered for centuries whether someone who was blind from birth would "see" the world in the same way as people with normal vision. After all, there's much more to perceiving the world than properly functioning eyes. Think of...
Think, for a moment, about one of your cherished childhood memories, one of those sepia-tinged recollections that you've repeated countless times. I've got some bad news: big chunks of that memory are almost certainly not true. According to scientists, the...
Posted on November 11, 2008 11:15 AM • 10 Comments •
Every autumn, millions of songbirds embark upon long distance southerly migrations to warmer climes. Some species migrate during the day, but the majority - including sparrows, thrushes and warblers - do so at night, leaving their daytime habitats just after...
My first contribution to the Scientific American Mind Matters website is now online. The article, called "The Power of the Memory Molecule", is about the recent study which showed that memories can be selectively erased from the brains of mice...
Posted on November 11, 2008 8:05 AM • 4 Comments •
Action potentials are special to me. They are special to me because action potentials are what got me into science in the first place. Well, ok, they didn't really get me in to science. Little Sci had been a Biology...
There are 10 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go...
Posted on November 10, 2008 7:56 PM • 0 Comments •
A team of Japanese researchers has demonstrated that embryonic stem cells obtained from mice and humans can spontaneously organize themselves into cortical tissues when grown in a culture dish under special conditions. Reporting in the journal Cell Stem Cell, the...
Thoreau would have liked this study: interacting with nature (at least when compared to a hectic urban landscape) dramatically improves improve cognitive function. In particular, being in natural settings restores our ability to exercise directed attention and working memory, which...
Posted on November 10, 2008 11:10 AM • 20 Comments •
Political Behavior through the Lens of Behavior Genetics: These are all fascinating questions and Fowler and colleagues are only beginning to uncover the answers. I anticipate that Fowler and his partners in crime will continue to leave a trail of...
Last week we asked our readers to predict the result of the election. How did they do? Out of the 474 people who guessed the results of this year's presidential election, only six got the electoral vote right - 365...
Anthropology.net & prefonal both have posts up which survey a new paper, A Functional Genetic Link between Distinct Developmental Language Disorders: We found that FOXP2 binds to and dramatically down-regulates CNTNAP2, a gene that encodes a neurexin and is expressed...
Now that the big election is over, it's time to get away from political blogging for a while and return to what this blog was created to do: bash creationists. So have a look at this article from The New...
PalMD poses a really interesting question regarding the medical ethics of running lab tests on a patient to determine if they are drunk: So here's a non-life-and-death question: if a patient comes to see you and smells of alcohol, can...
From the fanastic series of just-released Newsweek articles on the presidential campaign: Obama was something unusual in a politician: genuinely self-aware. In late May 2007, he had stumbled through a couple of early debates and was feeling uncertain about what...
Posted on November 6, 2008 12:10 PM • 11 Comments •
Whatever It Takes, the new book by Paul Tough that profiles Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone, is one of the most bracing, sobering and inspiring books I've read in a while. It's the story of one man's attempt...
Posted on November 6, 2008 10:56 AM • 17 Comments •
Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, has a great article in Scientific American about the limits of interpreting fMRI scanning studies -- particularly how they are presented in the media. The biggest point is that the brain is not a...
First of all, I just want to say that I am in a wonderful mood today. This day would have to totally kick puppies to ruin my mood. The only dark spot is Prop 8 in California. But there is...
I play soccer every week with an ever-changing group of people. We're all busy, and people get injured or lose interest, so every week the crowd is slightly different; it often feels like we need to re-acquaint ourselves before every...
There were 15 new articles in PLoS ONE published last night but I was too busy watching the election returns. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers....
The Boston Globe Ideas section recently published a short interview I did with Kelly Bulkeley, author of the quite interesting "Dreaming in the World's Religions". It's an attempt to extract some common psychological themes from the descriptions of dreaming and...
Rolling Stone recently published a truly excellent article by David Lipsky on the struggles, triumphs and suicide of David Foster Wallace. It's a heart-breaking read, a chronicle of a genius done in by a mental illness. (It reminded me, in...
The Men's Final of the 1981 Wimbledon Tennis Championships is one of the most memorable events in sporting history. John McEnroe, who was playing against Bjorn Borg, famously challenged one of the referee's calls by throwing a tantrum, during which...
FuturePundit points me to new work on a genetic mutation which might predispose one to Season Affective Disorder, A missense variant (P10L) of the melanopsin (OPN4) gene in seasonal affective disorder: SAD participants had a higher frequency of the homozygous...
OMG, teh blags aspoloded! And it's all revolving around Dr. Isis. I urge everyone to check out Bora's post, it generated some great discussion and it appears that people are friendly again. And Bora said nice things about me, which...
Take a look at this quick movie. You'll be shown a "ready" screen, followed by a quick flash of eight letters arranged in a circle. Your job is to spot either a "Z" or a "K" in that circle of...
Duke's behavioral economist Dan Ariely, author of "Predictably Irrational" and founder of MIT's Center for Advanced Hindsight, was in DC for a talk today. He is a damn entertaining speaker. For example, his advice on wingmen/women: "If you ever go...
Yesterday's episode of the CBS programme 60 Minutes featured this report called Brain Power, about the use of brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) by a number of patients who have been paralysed by various conditions. (The 12-minute report is preceded by...
Learning and memory are widely thought to involve long-term potentiation (LTP), a form of synaptic plasticity in which a neuron's response to the chemical signals it receives is enhanced. This leads to a strengthening of the neuronal circuit, so that...
This is an image of a human brain. It is constructed using an imaging method known as diffusion spectrum imaging. The technique has been discussed at Neurophilosophy and Anthropology.net; both posts were based upon a paper in PLOS Biology....
Ageism More Prevalent Than Racism Among Presidential Voters, Study Finds: An ongoing study by UCLA and Stanford University researchers of 20,000 registered voters has found that far more of them would vote against Sen. John McCain because of his age...
If you live in (most places in) the United States as well as many other countries, you have reset your clocks back by one hour last night (or last week). How will that affect you and other people? One possibility...
Posted on November 2, 2008 2:46 PM • 54 Comments •
With the U.S. presidential election just a few days away, many of us are in a frenzy to get information about the polls and who might be the winner. And everyone has an opinion about who'll win. Today, you can...
I can't freehand a parallelogram to save my life, but I can bisect an angle with the best of 'em! Woohoo! How good are you at eyeballing geometry? Test yourself with this game. It's addictive, although your eyes will tire...
Posted on October 30, 2008 10:18 PM • 6 Comments •
Carmen Miranda is probably best-known today as the former spokesperson for Chiquita bananas, but she was equally famous -- and outrageous -- as an actress, singer, and dancer in the 1940s and 1950s. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological phenomenon that...
Evolution of trust and trustworthiness: social awareness favours personality differences (Open Access): Interest in the evolution and maintenance of personality is burgeoning. Individuals of diverse animal species differ in their aggressiveness, fearfulness, sociability and activity. Strong trade-offs, mutation-selection balance, spatio-temporal...
Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan discusses a fascinating new paper on how psychotic delusions take on different manifestations over time: A Slovenian research team, led by psychiatrist Borut Skodlar, discovered that the Ljubljana psychiatric hospital had patient records going as...
There are 25 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go...
Dienekes has a interesting, if not surprising, post on how names can mold how we perceive people. I've posted on this before. The most extreme illustration of this tendency I've ever read is the fact that during segregation some southern...
The pioneering experiments performed by Hubel and Weisel in the late 1950s and early 60s taught us much about the development of the visual system. We now know, for example, that neurons in the visual cortex are organized into alternating...
Encephalon is up at Mind Hacks! Go check it out! Greta and I are off to vote today, so you'll have to get your psychology fix over there. Oh, and out of curiousity: Have you voted yet? ( surveys)...
Posted on October 28, 2008 10:16 AM • 5 Comments •
Until I read this paper, I seriously had no idea that spontaneous eyeblink was a clinical indicator for dopaminergic function. I guess this shows you how divorced the pure research side can be from the clinic. But before I cover...
There are 13 new articles published Friday night and 10 new articles tonight in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my...
Posted on October 27, 2008 11:00 PM • 0 Comments •
When Jimmy was around 18 months old, Greta and I were both in graduate school. I attended classes at night and Greta taught and worked in the lab during the day. In the late afternoon I'd drive into the city...
Ewan made a generous donation to one of the projects in my challenge and, as he did last year, he requested a poem illustrated by the sprogs on the subject of memory. It turns out that drawing "memory" is pretty...
The term phonagnosia refers to an inablity to recognize familiar voices or to discriminate between unfamiliar ones. This is a rare condition that is usually associated with brain damage: the ability to recognize familiar voices is impaired by damage to...
There's something poignant about the possibility that one of the reasons obese people eat too much is because they are unable to take pleasure in the taste of their food. But according to a new study published in Science, that's...
Posted on October 27, 2008 10:31 AM • 9 Comments •
Last week, I reviewed Buyology, a new book on neuromarketing, in the Washington Post. Although the book is based on a large, privately funded neuromarketing experiment, I wasn't so wowed by the science: If "Buy-ology" itself is any indication, these...
Posted on October 27, 2008 8:54 AM • 11 Comments •
There are many ways one can paint a portrait of the brain: as an organ that evolved from the simple beginnings as a few neuronal tissues in worms to one of the most interconnected mass of tissues anywhere in the...
Erasing memories has long been a popular plot device for Hollywood scriptwriters. In the 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, for example, Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet play a separated couple who undergo a radical treatment in order...
Aren't grandparents adorable? They're sweet and kind, they've been married for decades, and they've got wonderful archaic 1920s names like Edward and Edwina. Last week, based on the anecdotal evidence of my own grandparents and a couple from an NPR...
Does anyone else find "priapism" a horrifically difficult thing to pronouce? This may partially be because it's so...entertaining. Well, ok, it's entertaining for me. I imagine it leaves most guys wincing. Tran et al. "Priapism, ecstasy, and marijuana: is there...
Over at Mind Matters, I've got an interview with Sheldon Solomon. We talk about fear, death, the fear of death, and politics. In this excerpt, Solomon describes an extremely clever experiment, in which he primed judges to think about death...
John Wilkins points me to a piece by Pascal Boyer,* Being human: Religion: Bound to believe?: So is religion an adaptation or a by-product of our evolution? Perhaps one day we will find compelling evidence that a capacity for religious...
There's a new scientific appreciation for the importance of self-control. This trend began with Walter Mischel's astonishing marshmallow experiments, in which the ability of a four-year old to resist the temptation of a second marshmallow turned out to be a...
Posted on October 23, 2008 12:37 PM • 11 Comments •
So this is the second installment for general information on the things I like to blog about. Today's topic: DOPAMINE As you might be able to tell from many of my older and newer posts, I like dopamine. It's one...
Nora was an excellent talker, starting at a very young age, but that didn't mean that she couldn't express herself in other ways. Here, for example, she points to a the item she wants. It's entirely possible that she didn't...
There are 26 new articles published last night and 12 new articles published today in PLoS ONE. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are...
The fourth dimension - time - is essential for many cognitive processes, and for rhythmic movements such as walking. Recent research has begun to elucidate how neuronal activity encodes events that occur on the timescale of tens to hundredths of...
Yesterday Dan Ariely came to Davidson to give a few lectures and meet with faculty in the Economics, Philosophy, and Psychology departments. Greta attended two of the lectures and had dinner with him (along with the rest of the Davidson...
I am a little late to this party, but I do want to talk about this paper in Nature Neuroscience. Moritz et al. implanted an electrode into a monkey's motor cortex. The electrode was designed to only record from a...
Last Saturday I penned a snarky comment about the philosophy of science, and within a week I read something that's particularly interesting from that very perspective. Well, might as well use it when it has its uses. Some preliminary: It...
Posted on October 21, 2008 10:00 AM • 19 Comments •
There is a new blog some readers might find of interest, Culture and Cognition. Dan Sperber, who did a 10 questions nearly 3 years ago, is a contributor. Imagine, what if cultural anthropology was dominated by people who didn't behave...
I'm a big proponent of exercise. I'm a runner, and when you've had a stressful day, it's amazing what a good run can do to make you feel better. I've noticed for grad students (at least at my school), when...
You know I have a soft spot for crayfish, so I was excited to read about the new study about their nervous system, nicely explained by Mo: When confronted with threatening stimuli and predators, the crayfish responds with an innate...
When confronted with threatening stimuli and predators, the crayfish responds with an innate escape machanism called the startle reflex. Also known as tailflipping, this stereotyped behaviour involves rapid flexions of the abdominal muscles which produce powerful swimming strokes that...
You're given $15. Which of these bets would you gamble your $15 on? An 80 percent chance of winning $18.75 A 40 percent chance of winning $37.50 A 20 percent chance of winning $75 A 5 percent chance of $300...
Carborexia is not a word. Any string that garners only six hits on Google is not a word. But the string appears in the New York Times, so maybe it will be a word soon. Perhaps even by the...
Dashi, a Japanese stock made from kelp and dried fish, is going mainstream. It's suddenly appearing on the menus of all sorts of fancy restaurants, many of which have little to do with Japanese food. The reason? Umami. "It's basically...
Posted on October 20, 2008 7:59 AM • 11 Comments •
Eric Schwitzgebel, Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside, and Fiery Cushman, a psychology post-doc at Harvard, are conducting an online experiment which involves comparing philosophers' and non-philosophers' responses to questions about moral dilemmas....
We've all acted impulsively before, and we have the horrendous clothes, echoing bank accounts and hilarious memories to show for it. But science is beginning to show that impulsive people may be particularly vulnerable to drug addiction, and there...
If you're in Australia or North America, chances are your first experience with Shiraz was in the form widely-available from Rosemount Estates. Shiraz is derived from the same stock as Syrah that is grown in France's Rhone Valley. The Australian...
My grandfather's name was Vern, and he married a woman named Verna. They were together for more than 30 years until she died. Then he married Elvira. That's them (and great-granddaughter Nora) off to the right. They were together another...
Posted on October 17, 2008 11:52 AM • 29 Comments •
Another way that credit cards dupe the brain into spending way too much money on interest payments: New research by the University of Warwick reveals that many credit card customers become fixated on the level of minimum payments given on...
Researchers from the University of Washington have demonstrated that paralysed monkeys can move using a simple neuroprosthesis consisting of an external electrical circuit which connects individual neurons in the motor cortex to muscles in the arm. Similar prostheses have been...
Ben and Bernice Finn have been married for 60 years. And they still remember their first date. "I was very nervous," Ben said. "She was so pretty." "I remember that day very well," Bernice said. "And no, you weren't pretty."...
It occurred to me that some readers may be interested in the grant project, so I put the details beneath the fold. I am funded for an Australian Postdoctoral (APD) research fellowship for three years....
The scientific process is composed of generating hypotheses and testing those hypotheses through experiment. Yet we don't know a whole lot about how about hypothesis generation happens on the level of the brain. Recognizing that I am dealing with a...
Along with my passion for science (say it with me, "SCIENCE!" Don't you feel awesome now?), I have a passion for history. I love history books (yes, really) and history podcasts, and nothing is cooler than when Mr. SiT takes...
Yesterday we tried to replicate the effect that John Eastwood, Daniel Smilek, and Philip Merikle observed -- that negative facial expressions distract us from even the simplest tasks more than positive facial expressions. Hundreds of our readers watched one of...
Or so says this BBC article: A University of California Los Angeles team found searching the web stimulates centres in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning. The researchers say this might even help to counter-act the age-related physiological...
Posted on October 14, 2008 11:56 AM • 3 Comments •
It seems that, due to the increased number of people who are out and about, you are 18% more likely to die in an auto accident on Election Day then other days of the year (Superbowl Sunday included). Yes sir, voting can be hazardous to your health!
I have only ever seen one car crash and I remember it with crystal clarity. I was driving home along a motorway and a car heading the opposite way simply veered into the central reservation. Its hood crumpled like...
When David Savage was 19 years old, his right hand was crushed in a metal-stamping machine and subsequently amputated at the wrist by doctors. Afterwards, Savage was fitted with a mechanical cable-hook prosthesis, which he wore until December, 2006, when...
An Autonomous Circadian Clock in the Inner Mouse Retina Regulated by Dopamine and GABA: The circadian clock in the mammalian retina regulates many retinal functions, and its output modulates the central circadian clock in the brain. Details about the cellular...
Posted on October 14, 2008 12:30 AM • 0 Comments •
There are 12 new articles in PLoS ONE this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week -...
Posted on October 14, 2008 12:26 AM • 0 Comments •
Over at Mind Matters, I've got an interview with Dr. Robert Burton on the danger of certainty and its relevance during a presidential election: LEHRER: To what extent does the certainty bias come into play during a presidential election? It...
I realize it's been a few weeks, but I'm FINALLY getting a look at all the responses that poured in in response to this post. I'm a good little scientist, and we all have to look carefully at our data....
Here's a really interesting experiment that we may be able to replicate online. Take a look at this very short video. You'll be shown a set of 12 arcs. Some of the arcs will be upturned and some of them...
The Archives of General Psychiatry has an open-access article about bipolar disorder in childhood (Child Bipolar I Disorder). I started to write about that. But then, as often happens, I stumbled upon something else. The LA Times has a consumer-oriented...
The BBC has film footage of the legendary Bluegrass musician Eddie Adcock playing the banjo whilst having his brain operated on.Adcock is suffering from essential tremor, a progressive neurological condition characterised by tremors in the arms which appear during voluntary...
It's mid-October. For most of us, our New Year's resolutions have long been forgotten and our bad habits remain frustratingly habitual. The things that are bad for us often feel strongly compelling, be they high-fat foods, gambling or alcohol....
In today's PLoS Computation Biology: Circadian rhythm is universally present from unicellular organisms to complex organisms and plays an important role in physiological processes such as the sleep-wake cycle in mammals. The mammalian circadian rhythm presents an excellent system for...
Posted on October 10, 2008 11:20 PM • 0 Comments •
Last week we asked our readers about an illusion (created by Nobuyuki Kayahara) that's been circulated very widely recently: While the illusion can't actually determine whether you're "right-brained" or "left-brained," we were curious about what actually affects people's perception of...
For Friday Weird Science, there is really nothing better than a good case report. And you guys are getting a GOOD one this week. Partially because it's really good, and partially because I have just returned from the bachelorette...
At any given moment, the cortex is riven by disagreement, as rival bits of tissue contradict each other. Different brain areas think different things for different reasons; all those mental components stuffed inside our head are constantly fighting for influence...
There are 11 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go...
Circadian Clock May Be Critical For Remembering What You Learn, Researchers Say: The circadian rhythm that quietly pulses inside us all, guiding our daily cycle from sleep to wakefulness and back to sleep again, may be doing much more than...
There's a new paper out which models human behavioral ecology, Dynamics of Alliance Formation and the Egalitarian Revolution. Anthropology.net has a good review, so I'll just point you there. I was going to read this paper, and a few others...
Take a look at this video: You may have seen it before -- it's the work of a CGI animation studio that takes the motions of human actors and turns them into animated models, giving them the ability to put...
There are 8 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go...
In his 1941 book Man on His Nature, the Nobel Prize-winning physiologist Sir Charles Sherrington described the brain as "an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern." Little could he have known that within 50 years...
When Sarah Palin was introduced to the country, most Americans had never heard of her -- but many people noticed that she looked very similar to the then-more-famous actor Tina Fey. Can you tell which is which? Let's make this...
The transmissible spongiform encephalopathies (TSEs), which include variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease in humans, "Mad Cow" Disease in cattle and scrapie in sheep, are progressive and fatal neurodegenerative disorders characterized by the accumulation within nerve cells of an abnormally folded and insoluble...
It is the instinct of every mother to protect their children as they grow up, shielding them from the dangers of the outside world. Right from birth, life can be a difficult experience. Within a few hours, the child...
From SCONC: Tuesday, Oct. 14 6:30-8:30 pm Science Cafe Raleigh: The Behavior and Misbehavior of Dogs Barbara Sherman, of NC State's College of Veterinary Medicine and president of the American College of Veterinary Behaviorists (pet whisperers) discusses dog behavior, and...
A fundamental problem in the financial markets right now - a problem that's often traced to the failure of Lehman Brothers last month - is the breakdown of trust. Because financial institutions don't "trust" the solvency of other institutions and...
Gene Expression In Alligators Suggests Birds Have 'Thumbs': The latest breakthrough in a 120 year-old debate on the evolution of the bird wing was published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, October 3, by Alexander Vargas and colleagues at Yale...
I'm pretty sure that if Dante had known about locked-in syndrome he would have rewritten the chapter in the Inferno devoted to the ninth circle of hell. In the most recent Esquire, Joshua Foer has an excellent profile of Erik...
My latest article in the Boston Globe Ideas section is on presidential decision-making and the virtues of metacognition, or being able to think about thinking: For the last eight years, America has had a president with an audacious approach to...
This is a peculiar article: Costs and effects of paliperidone extended release compared with alternative oral antipsychotic agents in patients with schizophrenia in Greece: A cost effectiveness study. It's a open-access article in the Annals of General Psychiatry, dated 28...
Thanks again for all of your comments. I'll try to address a few of your excellent suggestions and criticisms. Regarding my characterization of children with autism: I think one of my limitations in writing this book is that I'm not...
We like to think that we are masters of our own fates. The thought that others might be instead controlling our actions makes us uneasy. We rail against nanny states, we react badly to media hype and we are...
Constructivism. Determinism. It is all a bunch of hooey. A recent paper published by PLoS (Culture Shapes How We Look at Faces) throws a sopping wet blanket on widely held deterministic models of human behavior. In addition, the work underscores the sometimes spooky cultural differences...
Last night, while stuck in an airport (the inevitable delay), I decided to get a Wendy's milkshake. Not a particularly noteworthy decision - when traveling, I like to subsist entirely on fast food - but it occurred to me, while...
There are 12 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go...
I actually heard about this paper from the glorious Dr. Isis, who covered it a few weeks ago with her usual panache and sparkles. Since I read her post, I've been itching to get my hands on this paper,...
You've probably seen the "spinning woman" illusion as it circulated around the internet, complete with bogus claims that it can somehow be used to determine whether you're "right-brained" or "left-brained" (themselves concepts of amorphous meaning and validity). But nonetheless it's...
What if training ourselves on one task yielded improvements in all other tasks we perform? This is the promise of the cognitive training movement, which is increasingly showing that such "far transfer" of training is indeed possible, while short of...
There are 13 new articles published last night and another 12 new articles published today in PLoS ONE. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are...
You're at a bar, club, or church social and you've just met an absolutely stunning member of the opposite sex. You're single and available, and you detect no signs of romantic commitment in your new conversation-partner. Could he/she be interested...
When elephants become separated from their group they can use their keen senses of smell and sight to locate their brethren, OR they can use the Earth like a giant telephone and call their herd with rumble vocalizations.
According to a recent National Geographic article primates pay a lot of attention to their friends asses. But not only that, they can actually identify them based on their fabulous booties. In humans facial recognition is based on a...
You are not the person you used to be. Two weeks ago, the surface of your skin was covered with a completely different set of cells, which have since died and flaked off. Four month ago, you had a...
One of the enduring mysteries of neurogenesis - the process of creating new neurons in the brain - is the purpose of all these new cells. After all, one of the reasons scientists believed that neurogenesis didn't exist (this was...
I want to thank all of you who took the time to read the book and comment. Many of you had kind things to say about the writing and content, clearly understanding what I was trying to do and...
When Jim was 12 or 13, he seemed to want to watch almost every R-rated movie that came out. PG-13 movies were okay, and PG and G-rated movies were beneath his dignity. Was he simply interested in these movies because...
Cataract 3, Bridget Riley, 1967. In the 1960s, the British artist Bridget Riley began to develop a distinctive style characterised by simple and repetitive geometric patterns which create vivid illusions of movement and sometimes colour and often have a...
My name is Paul Offit. I'm the chief of the division of infectious diseases at the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and my published expertise is in the area of vaccine safety and rotavirus-specific immune responses. (I'm the co-inventor of the...
Posted on October 1, 2008 4:51 AM • 146 Comments •
There are 13 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go...
Posted on September 30, 2008 10:35 PM • 0 Comments •
Over the next few days, lots of people are going to be poring over their investment portfolio, trying to figure out which stocks to keep and which stocks to sell. Unfortunately, many of these investors will make the exact same...
Posted on September 30, 2008 12:51 PM • 4 Comments •
Thomas Levenson has written an interesting post about John McCain and his fascination with high-stakes gambling. While it's clear that his gambling habit isn't going to put McCain in any serious financial danger, it does raise questions about his personality....
Learning to play a musical instrument is known to involve both structural and functional changes in the brain. Studies published in recent years have established, for example, that professional keyboard players have increased gray matter volume in motor, auditory and...
The hypocrisy is dazzling. Charles Murray (of Bell Curve fame) just wrote a book arguing that the vast majority of American college students shouldn't actually be attending college, since they lack the cognitive ability to "deal with college-level material." Instead,...
Posted on September 29, 2008 10:44 AM • 33 Comments •
The PLoS ONE paper about the way shimmering wave behavior in honeybees repels hornets, as discussed by high-school students here, has an aaccompanying video of the behavior on YouTube:...
Posted on September 27, 2008 7:34 PM • 0 Comments •
Around 15 years ago, researchers discovered that the adult rodent brain contains discrete populations of stem cells which continue to divide and produce new neurons throughout life. This discovery was an important one, as it overturned a persistent dogma in...
I think the best part about this weird Friday is that I don't have to write it! A good thing too, I have a life outside the blog (crazy, I know), and that life has been nothing short of...
My friend Geoff once said that "all cognition is social." Smugly, I reminded myself that the conclusions of cognitive psychologists are drawn on evidence where social cues are kept constant. But even in the absence of confounding social cues, perhaps...
Last week we sought to uncover the truth behind the stereotype: Are Prius owners really just like Mac owners? In a non-scientific fashion, we quizzed our readers about several of the most common stereotypes that seem to follow these two...
In this post: the large versions of the Medicine and Health, Brain and Behavior and Technology channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week. Medicine and Health. From Flickr, by sevenbirches...
Notwithstanding the cute pictures from yesterday's post, Jim is now nearly seventeen years old. He's taller than me, has a beard, and is much less interested in having his photo taken, so I don't have any recent pictures. He also...
Dave, Maria, Grrl, and I will all be at Ozzie's in Lower Queen Anne on Saturday afternoon. I've never met the other three bloggers but after checking out Maria's wedding...
Posted on September 25, 2008 1:00 PM • 0 Comments •
Radiation therapy is a common treatment for adults and children who present with tumours in or close to the brain. In the last 20 years, advances in radiotherapy have significantly improved the prognosis for brain cancer patients. However, the resulting...
I couldn't sleep last night. As far as I can tell, there was no particular reason for my insomnia. I wasn't stressed, or anxious, or caffeinated, or sick. My mind was tired, but my brain just wasn't in the sleeping...
Posted on September 25, 2008 9:39 AM • 9 Comments •
Formula Discovered For Longer Plant Life: Molecular biologists from Tuebingen, Germany, have discovered how the growth of leaves and the aging process of plants are coordinated. Human Or Animal Faces Associated With At Least 90 Percent Of Cars By One-third...
Posted on September 24, 2008 10:24 PM • 0 Comments •
When Jimmy and Nora were toddlers, we bought them great little plastic scooters to ride around the house. They were the perfect size for a small child. Yet Jimmy preferred to ride around on a plastic garbage truck instead, despite...
The September issue of Scientific American contains an excellent and lengthy article about a state-of-the-art technique called optogenetics, by molecular physiologist Gero Miesenböck, who has been instrumental in its development. As its name suggests, optogenetics is a combination of optics...
Posted on September 24, 2008 11:05 AM • 2 Comments •
The power of Warren Buffett is impressive. He decides to invest a few billion in Goldman Sachs and panicked investors calm down. And why not? Nobody has an investing record that can even come close to comparing with Buffett's record:...
Posted on September 24, 2008 10:57 AM • 5 Comments •
Over at BLDGBLOG, Geoffrey makes an astute observation about how the latest consumer technologies have a way of becoming metaphors for the mind. Before the brain was a binary code running on three pounds of cellular microchips, it was an...
Posted on September 23, 2008 12:57 PM • 5 Comments •
We continually rely on our abilities of spatial navigation, be it for the daily commute to work, a trip to the local supermarket, or simply to make our way to the bathroom in the middle of the night. These tasks...
This is interesting stuff. As G.K. Chesterton is said to have once said: "When people stop believing in God, they don't believe in nothing - they believe in anything." "What Americans Really Believe," a comprehensive new study released by Baylor...
Posted on September 23, 2008 10:49 AM • 21 Comments •
Ever since the inception of the Global and Perpetual War on Terror, there has been concern about the role of professionals with training in psychology and psychiatry in the design, conduct, and interpretation of torture programs. The American Psychiatric Association...
Statistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama's support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.
Posted on September 22, 2008 12:07 PM • 3 Comments •
Last week, I had a short article in Play, the NY Times sports magazine. It was on how quarterbacks make decisions and why the Wonderlic is such a waste of time: Three and a half seconds: that's how long, on...
Posted on September 22, 2008 11:12 AM • 5 Comments •
Your must-read academic link of the week is today's Inside Higher Ed article by Gary Lewandoski, with the provocative title: Stop Trying to Get Tenure and Start Trying to Enjoy Yourself. His thesis is pretty much clear from the title:...
Posted on September 22, 2008 9:51 AM • 6 Comments •
You might think the zoo is an odd place for psychology bloggers to meet up. But on Saturday not only did Greta and I get a chance to connect with some of our readers and fellow bloggers, we also received...
Carl Zimmer has a post up where he points to a piece he just wrote for Scientific American, Searching for Intelligence in Our Genes. Here's the major point: Intelligence tests do identify a difference among people that has predictive power,...
Posted on September 22, 2008 2:38 AM • 4 Comments •
The economic crisis is reported to be responsible for a recent increase in calls for mental health services: Economy worries driving more people to seek help By ROB WATERS and DAVID OLMOS September 20, 2008...
Hey high school teachers! Are your students interested in the brain? Who isn't? Three winners will win all-expense-paid trips to present their work in a poster session in Seattle at...
Posted on September 20, 2008 8:08 PM • 0 Comments •
Political Views Affect Firms' Corporate Social Responsibility, Study Finds: A new study in The Financial Review establishes a relationship between political beliefs of corporate stakeholders and the corporate social responsibility (CSR) of their firms. Companies with a high CSR rating...
Posted on September 19, 2008 9:43 PM • 0 Comments •
A few days ago I noticed a comment on an online forum: "Prius owners are just like Mac owners." As a Mac owner and Prius owner, I felt that this comment needlessly stereotyped me. Were they implying that there was...
Posted on September 19, 2008 11:09 AM • 62 Comments •
FuturePundit points me to a new paper in Science, Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits: Although political views have been thought to arise largely from individuals' experiences, recent research suggests that they may have a biological basis. We present evidence...
Absinthe, the storied liquor that Hemingway and other artists drank, was once thought to induce neurological effects far beyond that which could be explained by its alcohol content (which is almost always high - three-digit proof)....
In the new Atlantic, Ross Douthat argues that porn is a moral slippery slope, and is part of the adultery continuum: Yes, adultery is inevitable, but it's never been universal in the way that pornography has the potential to become--at...
Posted on September 18, 2008 10:28 AM • 35 Comments •
One of the most depressing things about an election cycle is the way it splits America into a series of demographic and ideological tribes. There's red states and blue states, whites and blacks, liberals and conservatives, hockey moms and soccer...
Posted on September 18, 2008 10:26 AM • 7 Comments •
Well, well, well, well. Sometimes science and ethics do win out after all: CHICAGO (AP) -- A government agency has dropped plans for a study of a controversial treatment for autism that critics had called an unethical experiment on children....
What a bleak day on Wall Street. Although the financial contagion long ago spread beyond subprime mortgages, it's worth remembering that this all began when lenders decided that millions of people could afford loans that were actually unaffordable, at least...
Posted on September 17, 2008 5:51 PM • 7 Comments •
Fastest Flights In Nature: High-speed Spore Discharge Mechanisms Among Fungi: Microscopic coprophilous or dung-loving fungi help make our planet habitable by degrading the billions of tons of feces produced by herbivores. But the fungi have a problem: survival depends upon...
Posted on September 17, 2008 4:14 PM • 0 Comments •
Well, looky here: The ScienceBlogs Book Club is back! From October 1 through October 10, we'll be discussing Autism's False Prophets, by Dr. Paul Offit. Dr. Offit will be joined on the blog by a panel of experts, and we're...
Posted on September 17, 2008 4:00 PM • 8 Comments •
One of Jimmy's favorite toys as a toddler was a simple little bucket of blocks. There were three shapes: a rectangular prism, a triangular prism, and a cylinder. The bucket's lid had three holes: a square, a triangle, and a...
In response to my post yesterday which argued that Democrats and Republicans are both vulnerable to what's politely referred to as "motivated reasoning" - in other words, we're all partisan hacks - some commenters objected. They pointed out that the...
Posted on September 17, 2008 10:26 AM • 7 Comments •
The new issue of Seed contains a short piece by me called Beauty and the Brain, about the emerging field of neuroaesthetics, which seeks to investigate the neural correlates of the appreciation of beauty in art. Neuroaesthetics was pioneered...
We've settled on some final plans for the Midwest middle of nowhere cornfield Scienceblogs millionth comment party!. Here's the details: Time and Place Date: Saturday, September 27, 2008 Time: 7:00pm - 9:00pm Location: Jupiter's Pizza Street: 39 Main St City/Town:...
Posted on September 16, 2008 8:07 PM • 1 Comments •
Yesterday, we looked at some new research that found that when conservatives were exposed to evidence demonstrating the falsity of a partisan belief - such as a report demonstrating that Iraq didn't have WMD, or that lowering taxes doesn't increase...
Posted on September 16, 2008 12:58 PM • 22 Comments •
How much can we learn about disease from studying genetics? A few months ago, Nature published an interesting article on the possible impossibility of ever finding the faulty genes behind many mental illnesses. Today, Nicholas Wade in the Times had...
Posted on September 16, 2008 10:23 AM • 7 Comments •
The SAUSAGE links...mmm...sausage... sorry, that was brought to you by the list of things I wish I had for breakfast. The life of a starving grad student is full of things you WISH you had for breakfast. Or lunch. Or...
How Corals Adapt To Day And Night: Researchers have uncovered a gene in corals that responds to day/night cycles, which provides some tantalizing clues into how symbiotic corals work together with their plankton partners. Corals are fascinating animals that form...
Posted on September 15, 2008 6:51 PM • 1 Comments •
Much has been written about the nonspatial functions of the parietal lobe, but these nonspatial functions are rarely evaluated as to whether they are also nonmotoric or reflect some covert form of spatial attention. Establishing whether the parietal lobe has...
It's now taken as a given that the musical score of a movie can have huge influence on our perception of the movie. From the pulsating terror achieved in films like Psycho and Jaws, to the triumphant victories in Star...
This makes me sad: When gasoline prices shot up this year, Peggy Seemann thought about saving the $10 she spends weekly on lottery tickets. But the prospect that the $10 could become $100 million or more was too appealing. So...
Posted on September 15, 2008 10:58 AM • 11 Comments •
A few months ago, when it looked as if the financial maelstrom had mostly passed - after the Bear Stearns bailout, things calmed down - I decided to write an article about Read Montague and the weird habits of dopamine...
Posted on September 15, 2008 10:55 AM • 1 Comments •
Welcome to the 54th edition of Encephalon, the neuroscience and psychology blog carnival. This edition has everything from the perception of colour and shapes to behavioural economics, the neuroscience of sports and squabbling psychologists.First up is the editor's choice: an...
Sleep researchers rarely pay attention to stuff like sleep position and sleep behavior, as opposed to EEG data, sleep duration, timing and patterns. But now Darren reviews that neglected aspect of animal sleep. Also see my post on the same...
Posted on September 15, 2008 7:43 AM • 0 Comments •
Photos Reveal Myanmar's Large And Small Predators: Using remote camera traps to lift the veil on Myanmar's dense northern wild lands, researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society have painstakingly gathered a bank of valuable data on the country's populations...
Posted on September 14, 2008 8:16 PM • 0 Comments •
One important concept in psychotherapy studies is the concept of ambiguous loss. This is a loss that is, in some way, less than definitive. If you are at the hospital visiting an ill beloved family member, and see the death,...
Male-specific Neurons Directly Linked To Gender-specific Behaviors: New research identifies a few critical neurons that initiate sex-specific behaviors in fruit flies and, when masculinized, can elicit male-typical courtship behaviors from females. The study, published by Cell Press in the September...
Posted on September 13, 2008 12:40 PM • 1 Comments •
As you read this post, your computer is probably busy. You may have multiple programs running in the background, with email clients, anti-virus software or file-sharing software all competing for valuable memory. The ability of computers to multi-task has...
There are 10 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go...
Posted on September 12, 2008 9:52 PM • 0 Comments •
I would love to watch this sport in person: Goalball participants compete in teams of three, and try to throw a ball that has bells embedded in it, into the opponents' goal. They must use the sound of the bell...
Posted on September 12, 2008 4:47 PM • 4 Comments •
Last week we asked readers how much sleep they lost staying up to watch the political coverage of the Democratic and Republican conventions, and how that compared to the sleep they lost a few weeks earlier watching the coverage of...
Much evidence supports the idea that parietal cortex is involved in the simple maintenance of information, such as in object permanence paradigms (also here) and other tasks. This evidence is part of the justification for the "parietofrontal integration theory", which...
In recent days, there has been a lot of discussion about Sarah Palin's lack of experience in foreign policy. These criticisms all depend on the same assumption: that knowing more about foreign policy is always better. (Experience is typically used...
Posted on September 12, 2008 9:49 AM • 19 Comments •
Female Spiders Eat Small Males When They Mate: Female spiders are voracious predators and consume a wide range of prey, which sometimes includes their mates. A number of hypotheses have been proposed for why females eat males before or after...
Posted on September 12, 2008 6:11 AM • 0 Comments •
So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers....
Posted on September 11, 2008 9:59 PM • 0 Comments •
There are 11 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go...
Posted on September 11, 2008 9:55 PM • 0 Comments •
Hallucinations are often associated with psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia or with LSD and related drugs. Hearing voices is a characteristic symptom which is reported by about 70% of schizophrenic patients, as well as by some 15% of patients with...
Let me first start by saying that if your doctor tells you that praying is your last hope of your loved ones survival GET A NEW DOCTOR. Now that I've said that let me show you part of this ridiculous...
Posted on September 11, 2008 3:57 PM • 7 Comments •
Are you concerned that you are just sleeping with waaaay too many people? Do you want to avoid getting STD's? Do your neighbors give you dirty looks in every morning when a new person comes waltzing out of your apartment?...
Posted on September 11, 2008 3:33 PM • 8 Comments •
One big problem with many of the studies of video game violence is that they compare different games. Sure, people might behave more aggressively after playing Carmaggeddon instead of Tetris -- they're completely different games! What would be more impressive...
I was living in Manhattan on 9/11. I can vividly recall the horrifying details of the day. I can still smell the acrid odor of burnt plastic and the pall of oily smoke and the feeling of disbelief, the sense...
Posted on September 11, 2008 10:23 AM • 4 Comments •
You have to give Uncommon Descent poster DaveScot credit. He's not one of life's overly specialized intellects. He's a good, old fashioned generalist, able to talk about absolutely any area of science with exactly the same degree of spectacular...
Anyone who read my previous blog will probably know that I've got a couple of big interests: blows to the head, diabetes, sex (who doesn't?). I've also got a really big interest in both psychiatric disorders such as depression...
There are 12 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go...
Posted on September 10, 2008 5:06 PM • 0 Comments •
Let's say I flash you a picture containing a mixture of blue and yellow dots for one-fifth of a second. You clearly don't have time to count the dots - you barely have time to register the image - but...
Posted on September 10, 2008 10:19 AM • 4 Comments •
Anthropologists Develop New Approach To Explain Religious Behavior: Without a way to measure religious beliefs, anthropologists have had difficulty studying religion. Now, two anthropologists from the University of Missouri and Arizona State University have developed a new approach to...
Posted on September 10, 2008 9:03 AM • 0 Comments •
There are 12 new articles in PLoS ONE today. I guess picking all 12 would not really be 'picking'? But all 12 are interesting to me! OK, here are six, and you go and look at the other six as...
Posted on September 9, 2008 5:41 PM • 0 Comments •
Can I just say how much I LOVE these old papers! Today I present to you one of the best historical papers neuroscience has to offer, and a real classic in the field. Parkinson, J. "An Essay on the Shaking...
Fake News Shows Don't Teach Viewers Much About Political Issues, Study Finds: A new study suggests that entertainment news shows such as The Daily Show or The Colbert Report may not be as influential in teaching voters about political issues...
Posted on September 9, 2008 3:52 PM • 0 Comments •
Over at Economics of Contempt, there is an argument that liberal media bias has to exist because there is evidence that partisanship changes the way that our brains process information. (This is not his only evidence, but it is part...
PLoS ONE has already published a large number of papers in chronobiology. But we want more. Hey, I work there - I want to see more. So, when I went to the SRBR meeting in May, I did whatever I...
Posted on September 9, 2008 1:09 PM • 2 Comments •
Readers of my blog are surely familiar with Scicurious, a frequent commenter here and someone whose posts I have linked several times over the past few months because they are, well, sooooo cool! So, I am super-happy to announce that...
Posted on September 9, 2008 12:42 PM • 0 Comments •
My first reaction on hearing that SciMonkbling Evil Monkey had signed up a co-blogger was "Did you vet properly?" I mean, geez, you all know what can happen when you fail to properly vet the person who will be sharing...
Oliver Sacks, writing on mania and manic depressive disorder in the New York Review of Books: One may call it mania, madness, or psychosis--a chemical imbalance in the brain--but it presents itself as energy of a primordial sort. Greenberg likens...
Posted on September 9, 2008 10:39 AM • 9 Comments •
Take a look at these pictures. Each picture depicts four shapes -- irregular vertical columns spanning the height of the picture. It's easy to tell which letter is on a column and which is not, right? If our readers are...
There was a request for a Millionth Comment party here in Champaign-Urbana Illinois... I would totally be up for getting together with a bunch of like minded folk and throwing a few down.... say at the Blind Pig? Anyone else...
Posted on September 8, 2008 4:19 PM • 3 Comments •
A couple months ago I became a subscriber to Very Short List, an email list that sends you just ONE web link a day, 5 days a week, as a way of clueing you in to something that is both good and overlooked: Might be a movie, a web site, a blog, a book. I've now become a (modestly) paid "advisor" to a new VSL email sub-offering, VSL Science, a science-only version of the same daily email. The Shirky talk on Gin, Television, and Cognitive Surplus in my previous post is today's VSL Science offering, and it was something I managed to stumble over and offer up in my advisor role. It's a fun list to get, so you might want to subscribe (free) and see if you like it. In any case, from time to time I'll include...
Posted on September 8, 2008 12:11 PM • 0 Comments •
The great Laurie Colwin, on learning to cook and eat without salt: After a few weeks I felt I had gotten the hang of my new regime. I had discovered saltless bread, smoked mozarella, green peppercorns and fresh sage. I...
Posted on September 8, 2008 11:29 AM • 5 Comments •
Long-held Assumptions Of Flightless Bird Evolution Challenged By New Research: Large flightless birds of the southern continents - African ostriches, Australian emus and cassowaries, South American rheas and the New Zealand kiwi - do not share a common flightless...
Posted on September 7, 2008 10:25 PM • 0 Comments •
A 2001 Unicef report said that the United States teenage birthrate was higher than any other member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The U.S. tied Hungary for the most abortions. This was in spite of the fact...
Posted on September 6, 2008 12:06 PM • 6 Comments •
A stranger walks up to you and a friend and offers to give you both £100. As always, there is a catch - your friend must choose how to split the money between you. Accept his offer, and you...
Language Log has an excellent critique of the media stories around AVPR1a and its effect on male behavior. This sort of media criticism is warranted, but I don't know exactly how headline writing will clearly communicate that a given dependent...
Posted on September 6, 2008 2:18 AM • 0 Comments •
Thinking People Eat Too Much: Intellectual Work Found To Induce Excessive Calorie Intake: A Universite Laval research team has demonstrated that intellectual work induces a substantial increase in calorie intake. The details of this discovery, which could go some way...
Posted on September 5, 2008 7:25 PM • 1 Comments •
Read the following text. As you read it, try to empty your mind. When you encounter grammatical errors or jargon that is impossible to understand, do not try to translate what you are reading. Rather, become one with the obscurity. Read slowly, thoughtlessly, with emptiness...
In this clip from The Simpsons, Homer explains why he wouldn't benefit from an adult education course: "How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of...
Can anyone send me the actual paper that is described in the first press release on this list, please? What Is A Gene? Media Define the Concept In Many Different Ways: Even scientists define 'a gene' in different ways, so...
Posted on September 5, 2008 9:28 AM • 4 Comments •
A Woman's History of Vaginal Orgasm is Discernible from Her Walk: In the sample of healthy young Belgian women (half of whom were vaginally orgasmic), history of vaginal orgasm (triggered solely by penile-vaginal intercourse) was diagnosable at far better than...
Posted on September 5, 2008 3:47 AM • 12 Comments •
From the Science Communication Consortium: "Ten Lessons from the Political Psychology" A talk by John Jost The Center for Science Writings Stevens Institute of Technology October 29, 4:00pm, Babbio Center Room 122 Jost is an authority on the "cognitive and...
Posted on September 4, 2008 10:13 PM • 5 Comments •
There are 10 new articles in PLoS ONE this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you...
Posted on September 4, 2008 4:32 PM • 0 Comments •
Cigarettes' Power May Not Be In Nicotine Itself, New Study Suggests: There may be a very good reason why coffee and cigarettes often seem to go hand in hand. A Kansas State University psychology professor's research suggests that nicotine's power...
Posted on September 4, 2008 4:17 PM • 2 Comments •
Is it football season already? It seems like I just got over the epic disappointment of the Superbowl. (Yes, I'm a Pats fan) So, in honor of football season, I think it's worth highlighting one of the major trends to...
Posted on September 4, 2008 10:53 AM • 28 Comments •
I am sure this has happened to many. I find catching myself out at times in that strange land where an Explanation has taken the place of Truth. I stand there looking lovingly at the face of Clarity and Certainty...
Posted on September 4, 2008 7:51 AM • 2 Comments •
In the Nature Neuroscience podcast NeuroPod, presenter Kerri Smith talks to authors of new papers from that journal about their research. The August 2008 episode (which is embedded below) includes discussions about the development of the concept of fairness in...
The 53rd edition of Encephalon is online now at Ionian Enchantment and includes entries about grid cells, cochlear implants and how culture affects the perception of faces. The carnival comes back to it's original home for the next edition -...
Posted on September 3, 2008 4:11 PM • 2 Comments •
You may have heard of the idea that people can only remember seven things at a time -- a seven-digit phone number, a license-plate, etc. While the size of working memory actually varies from person to person (it usually ranges...
When young tree hoppers feel threatened they will shake the leaves and stems that they live on, signaling their mothers to sit on top of them and chase away any attackers. Burying beetles and earwigs kick their mothers in the face until they regurgitate delicious filth into their babies' open mouths...
So there's been a lot of talk about how John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin for VP demonstrates the danger of trusting your instincts and making important decisions with your gut. But I think such a conclusion is unfair -...
Posted on September 3, 2008 1:11 PM • 15 Comments •
Visual perception is constantly challenged by visual occlusion: objects in our environment constantly obscure one another, and seem to "disappear" when in fact they are nonetheless present. Young infants begin to demonstrate a basic understanding of "object permanence" at some...
Brain Imaging Links Chronic Insomnia To Reversible Cognitive Deficits Without Changes In Behavior: A neuroimaging study has found that cognitive processes related to verbal fluency are compromised in people with insomnia despite the absence of a behavioral deficit. These specific...
Posted on September 3, 2008 11:03 AM • 2 Comments •
Panhandling is a surprisingly lucrative profession: Anecdotal surveys by journalists and police, and even testimony by panhandlers themselves, suggest that begging can yield anywhere from $20 to $100 a day--though police in Coos Bay, Oregon, found that local panhandlers were...
Posted on September 3, 2008 10:13 AM • 6 Comments •
Once again, Seed is planning parties with readers and you're invited! Around the world, wherever sciblings are, we'll be celebrating our one millionth comment (expected to happen some time mid-September). There will be shindigs in Michigan, Oklahoma, Iowa, Minnesota, New...
Posted on September 3, 2008 9:08 AM • 0 Comments •
Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) currently is under investigation for treatment of sever, treatment-resistant depression (TRD). It is not really news. I wrote about it in 2005. The background information in the earlier post still is pertinent, so I won't repeat...
The post below on AVPR1A and fidelity alluded to the fact that this locus has been implicated in many other behavioral traits. I spent some of today digging through the literature. So check it.... AVPR1a and SLC6A4 Gene Polymorphisms Are...
I love these experiments, if only because everyone assumes that the basic finding doesn't apply to them. It's only these other simpletons who can't tell the difference between red and white wine, or cheap plonk and fancy Bordeaux, or strawberry...
Posted on September 2, 2008 1:42 PM • 6 Comments •
Over the years I've blogged a fair amount on the AVPR1A gene. Variation on this locus has been associated with differences altruism in humans and mating preferences in voles. Now a new paper is out in PNAS, at some point...
I definitely think it's a contender. This is a slide I quickly made for the "Things to avoid when speaking publicly" video (see below), where I tried my best to make it as jarring as possible....
On the last day of every golf tournament, Tiger Woods insists on wearing a bright red polo shirt. Woods says the habit is merely superstition, but new research suggests that his fashion sense might actually come with athletic benefits. A...
Posted on September 2, 2008 11:44 AM • 2 Comments •
An absence of evidence is not itself evidence for the absence of a particular effect. This simple problem - generally known as the problem of null effects - yields many difficulties in cognitive science, making it relatively easier to parcellate...
You've got to feel very sorry for Bristol Palin. The poor teenager isn't running for political office and yet she's the subject of two front page stories in the NY Times today. All of a sudden, every talking head on...
Posted on September 2, 2008 9:59 AM • 13 Comments •
The London Eye is a gigantic tourist trap rotating wheel, which you can ride to get a great view of London. The trip takes about 30 minutes. While riding it the other day, I noticed an odd illusion. The London...
Posted on September 1, 2008 11:54 AM • 2 Comments •
Sorry for the radio silence - I've been out and about doing some reporting. But I've got a story in the Sunday Boston Globe on the benefits of daydreaming and the default network: Teresa Belton, a research associate at East...
Posted on September 1, 2008 8:48 AM • 4 Comments •
More Genes Are Controlled By Biological Clocks Than Previously Thought: The tick-tock of your biological clock may have just gotten a little louder. Researchers at the University of Georgia report that the number of genes under control of the...
While everyone else has been focused on politics this week, several science bloggers posted some amazing posts about, gasp, science! Check these out - amazing weekend reading (and potential anthology entries!): Neurophilosophy: Wilder Penfield, Neural Cartographer: The patient lies on...
War and the evolution of belligerence and bravery: Tribal war occurs when a coalition of individuals use force to seize reproduction-enhancing resources, and it may have affected human evolution. Here, we develop a population-genetic model for the coevolution of costly...
Unexpected Large Monkey Population Discovered In Cambodia: Tens Of Thousands Of Threatened Primates: A Wildlife Conservation Society report reveals surprisingly large populations of two globally threatened primates in a protected area in Cambodia. 'Pristine' Amazonian Region Hosted Large, Urban Civilization:...
One of the problems brains must overcome to behave effectively is to discretely encode all the different responses that they can produce. Considering movement alone, you can move in a lot of different ways. Selecting which one is appropriate is...
Is it possible to form and execute motor intentions without being aware of when those intentions were formed? Precisely this pattern was observed by among (ha!) patients with parietal damage, as reported by Sirigu et al. They showed that patients...
Eyes Evolved For 'X-Ray Vision': Forward-facing Eyes Allow Animals To 'See Through' Clutter In The World: The advantage of using two eyes to see the world around us has long been associated solely with our capacity to see in 3-D....
So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers....
I've always been a fan of literary studies -- I was an English major in college and I continue to blog about literature on my personal blog. But when I first learned about the concept of alliteration (I must have...
There are 11 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go...
Noah Gray, previously of the Action Potential blog of Nature Neuroscience, skirmisher on the old DM, and occasional punching bag of YHN has started a new blog called Nothing's Shocking at our mortal enemy friendly rival science-blogging-network-thingy place. I've found...
Fortune favours the brave; but the brave are motivated by favours of another kind: If courage makes it significantly more likely that small bands of tribes-men will win military confrontations with their neighbours, its overall advantages can easily outweigh its...
Ideally, our real-world behavior is strongly determined by our context, for the simple reason that some behaviors are only appropriate in some situations (e.g., eating during an internal context of hunger, or using slang during an external context of casual...
There are 13 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go...
Wilder Penfield (1891-1976) The patient lies on the operating table, with the right side of his body raised slightly. The anaesthetist sterilizes his scalp and injects it with Nupercaine to produce analgesia - the patient will remain fully conscious...
"Impossible objects" like the etchings of M.C. Escher have fascinated adults for centuries. You can't help but stare and wonder at a drawing like this, which seems to defy the laws of nature: The drawing seems strange to us because...
Parietal cortex is critical for the maintenance of object information over delays. This is true both in tests of working memory (e.g., 1, 2 and 3) as well as simple visual manipulations involving the occlusion of visible objects. A great...
Exploring The Function Of Sleep: Is sleep essential? Ask that question to a sleep-deprived new parent or a student who has just pulled an "all-nighter," and the answer will be a grouchy, "Of course!" But to a sleep scientist, the...
Small Scattered Fragments Do Not a Dwarf Make: Biological and Archaeological Data Indicate that Prehistoric Inhabitants of Palau Were Normal Sized: Current archaeological evidence from Palau in western Micronesia indicates that the archipelago was settled around 3000-3300 BP by normal...
A classic Candid Camera prank using some social psychology. I'll be posting many more of my Psych 100 videos as I run across them for the rest of the semester :)...
Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher has dementia.In her forthcoming book, which is serialized in the Mail on Sunday (a paper which, I hasten to add, I do not read), Carol Thatcher reveals that her mother's mental faculties have been...
The latest Men's Vogue has a rather interesting article (not online) by Jay McInerney on a small group of real estate moguls who like to drink very, very expensive wine. For these oenophiles, a 1982 Romanee-Conti is a young wine...
originally published August 16, 2007 by Chris C. Mooney So: Whenever I have a new book out--or an old one out in paperback--I tend to do a lot of radio shows. And as a result, I've noticed a particular phenomenon...
Posted on August 26, 2008 11:08 AM • 14 Comments •
Once upon a time, back when the Human Genome Project threatened to unravel the mystery of human nature - every aspect of individuality would be reduced to a SNIP - the Nature/Nurture debate seemed like the most hotly contested question...
Posted on August 26, 2008 10:16 AM • 12 Comments •
Andersen et al discuss both the attentional and intentional aspects to the function of the intraparietal sulcus. What's the distinction between attention and intention? First, let's talk about attention. The modal view, based on the biased competition model of Desimone...
Cells In Eye Could Help Control Sleep: A set of nerve cells in the eye control our levels of sleepiness according to the brightness of our surroundings, Oxford University researchers have discovered. The cells directly regulate the activity of sleep...
People often use the concept "hand-eye coordination" without appreciating its neural basis. Evidence collected by Andersen & colleagues over the past ten years indicates that different areas of parietal cortex are recruited to represent targets which require different effectors, all...
In their already-classic 2001 article, Miller & Cohen use a "train track" metaphor to illustrate the function of prefrontal cortex. The idea is that myriad learned associations interconnect sensory representations with motor commands (metaphorically, these are the "train tracks"). The...
Take a look at this short video -- it's a list of animals. Try to remember as many animals as you can. If you're like me, you're pretty confident that you will remember the entire list, even after ten minutes...
Tiny Cellular Antennae Trigger Neural Stem Cells: Yale University scientists today reported evidence suggesting that the tiny cilia found on brain cells of mammals, thought to be vestiges of a primeval past, actually play a critical role in relaying molecular...
The BBC has produced an interesting series called Blood and Guts about the modern history of surgery and the first episode, which is about neurosurgery, is now available online at the BBC iPlayer website. (For those outside the U.K., it...
Foul Owls Use Feces To Show They Are In Fine Feather: Some years ago, within the Department of Conservation Biology of the Estación Biológica de Doñana (EBD-Consejo Superior de Investigaciones CientÃficas; Seville, Spain), a recently established group (colloquially named...
Nearly 70 years ago, Karl von Frisch described the alarm response in a species of small freshwater fish called the European minnow (Phoxinus phoxinus). Frisch, who was one of the founders ethology - the scientific study of animal behaviour -...
With Skate Eyes, Scientists Peer Into Human Disease: Paradoxically, the photoreceptor cells in our retinas release more of their neurotransmitter, glutamate, in the dark, when there is nothing to see, than they do in the light. This is doubly surprising...
Stroke can be extremely debilitating, but if the damage is not too severe, and appropriate rehabilitation is administered, the brain can reorganize itself to compensate for the loss of function. This reorganization can occur because the brain remains 'plastic' throughout...
In my Fun with Christians and worldviews piece, I made a passing comment: Some views are just not amenable to a good life. I think Christianity is one, and not because I have some well-worked alternative I'd like to...
Face Recognition: Nurture Not Nature: Researchers have discovered that our society can influence the way we recognise other people's faces. Because face recognition is effortlessly achieved by people from all different cultures it was considered to be a basic mechanism...
Since vaccines seem to be back in the news again, I would be remiss if I didn't mention a fantastic post that I saw the other day over at A Photon in the Darkness. Read it. Read it now. I've...
Posted on August 22, 2008 11:42 AM • 39 Comments •
There have been many collections and compendia of artistic works by persons with psychiatric illness. They are interesting. In fact, it was a chance encounter with such a book that first got me interested in psychology. Thre is a story...
This advertisement for Ritalin comes from a 1966 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA). Ritalin, or methylphenidate, is widely - and controversially - prescribed to children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The drug is an amphetamine-like...
In 2000, researchers from the Yale University School of Medicine made a surprising discovery that would start to change the way we think about the causes of depression. Ronald Duman and his colleagues chronically administered different classes of antidepressants to...
I've often suspected (based on a highly unsystematic series of conversations with classic New Hampshire independents) that most undecided voters are really just low-information voters, who have actually made a decision but don't quite know how to explain their decision....
There are 10 new articles in PLoS ONE today. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you go...
Over at Neurophilosophy, Mo highlights one of my favorite William James quotes: The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage....
Tailor-made Functional Garments For Olympic Horses: When the horses and competitors go through their paces at the Summer Olympics in Hong Kong in 2008, it will be very hot and very humid - just as it is every summer there....
As a child (and like most children, I imagine) I used to think conducting an orchestra entailed something like what Bugs Bunny does in this video: Waving the hands, as conductors frequently do, seemed largely for show. The conductor appeared...
William James on consciousness and memory: The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to...
A typical adult human recognizes that the image one sees in a mirror is oneself. We do not know how much training a mirror-naive adult requires to do this, but we think very little. When a typical adult macaque (a species of monkey) looks in...
Here's Seth Godin: A journalist asked me, Most people have a better standard of living today than Louis XIV did in his day. So why are so many people unhappy? What you have doesn't make you unhappy. What you want...
Posted on August 20, 2008 12:47 PM • 11 Comments •
As I announced this morning, there will be several guest posts here over the next several weeks. The first one, by Barn Owl of the lovely Guadalupe Storm-Petrel blog, is likely to appeal to a lot of my readers as...
Over at Mind Matters, we've got an interesting article on how believing in free will can affect our ethical behavior: In a clever new study, psychologists Kathleen Vohs at the University of Minnesota and Jonathan Schooler at the University of...
There are 45 new articles in PLoS ONE this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you...
The notorious Australian bushranger Edward "Ned" Kelly was apprehended in 1878, following a confrontation during which he and his gang killed three policemen. Upon his arrest, Kelly was thus described by the police: 5'10" tall, weight 11st 4lbs, medium build,...
A field study published in the journal Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research manipulated sound levels in a bar while observing the beer drinking behavior of male patrons....
Self-recognition was long believed to be unique to humans. However, it was established more than 30 years ago that the great apes are capable of recognizing themselves in the mirror, and more recently it has been found that dolphins and...
Encephalon 52 is online now at Ouroboros, and includes entries about grandmother cells, the neurobiology of sleep and the use of transcranial direct current stimulation to improve bad driving....
I had an article this weekend in the Washington Post looking at the recent spate of "age defiance" - Dara Torres, Madonna, John McCain, etc. - and some recent neuroscience research: A s a 27-year old science writer who still...
Sweets Make Young Horses Harder To Train, Study Finds: Young horses may be easier to train if they temporarily lay off the sweets, says a Montana State University study where two-year-olds wore pedometers, wrist watches and Ace bandages. A commercial...
Now EVERY dolphin is going to be tail-walking on the water. Remember the moonwalk phenomenon in the 80s?? Yeah, you thought that was bad? Well, just think how bad it will be when all the dolphin's start tail-walking? Great job...
One of my claims is that religion proper arose along with the settlement in sedentary townships made possible by agriculture. The reason why this is religion, and not, say, the shamanic "religions" of nomadic tribes, in my view, is...
That is an interesting question, an answer to which was attempted in this paper: Who blogs? Personality predictors of blogging: The Big Five personality inventory measures personality based on five key traits: neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, openness to experience, and conscientiousness...
Light Receptors In Eye Play Key Role In Setting Biological Clock, Study Shows: Biologists at the University of Virginia have discovered a switching mechanism in the eye that plays a key role in regulating the sleep/wake cycles in mammals....
Some really cool stuff just got published a few minutes ago in PLoS Biology: A cool paper: Mirror-Induced Behavior in the Magpie (Pica pica): Evidence of Self-Recognition: A crucial step in the emergence of self-recognition is the understanding that one's...
Thanks to a reader, Daniel Keogh, we have a wonderful video detailing what the Imperial March from Star Wars would taste like to one particular synaesthete who has some particularly odd sensation pairings. Check it out: The Professor Funk...
John McCain remarked last week that the hostilities in Georgia marked the "first serious crisis" since the end of the Cold War. His surrogates on the news shows have expanded on that position, as they repeat the talking point about...
One of the first things I did after my 90-mile hike with Nora in the North Cascades was play some music on the car stereo. We'd been in the wilderness for seven days, and other than birdsong, we hadn't heard...
There is a fascinating review in Nature Reviews Neuroscience this month about the cognitive science of magic tricks -- authored by both scientists and practicing magicians (sadly behind a subscription wall). The article attempts to list and describe in neuroscientific...
My latest article for the Boston Globe Ideas section looks at some recent criticisms of fMRI, at least when it's misused: The brain scan image - a silhouette of the skull, highlighted with bright splotches of primary color - has...
Last week, I wote about the robot controlled by a "brain" in a culture dish, and in that post, I mentioned that several other groups, including members of the Neuroengineering Lab at Georgia Tech, have been doing similar work. Steve...
p-ter points me to a new paper in Trends in Ecology, Pleiotropy in the melanocortin system, coloration and behavioural syndromes: In vertebrates, melanin-based coloration is often associated with variation in physiological and behavioural traits. We propose that this association stems...
Glow worms glimmer on cue: University of Queensland researcher and lecturer Dr David Merritt has discovered that Tasmanian cave glow-worms are energy conservationists: they switch their lights off at night-time. The discovery was made during a partially funded UQ Firstlink...
Earlier this year, Sam Wang kindly sent me a copy of Welcome to Your Brain, the recently published book he has written with Sandra Aamodt. In a note slipped inside the book, he tells me that "We've done our best...
Snooze Button For Body's Circadian Clock: We may use the snooze button to fine-tune our sleep cycles, but our cells have a far more meticulous and refined system. Humans, and most other organisms, have 24-hour rhythms that are regulated by...
Published by Yale University Press A Portrait of the Brain by Adam Zeman is a new book describing how the brain works (and does not work) in something of an Oliver Sack's experiential manner, but with a twist. Zeman is a Professor of Cognitive...
From The National Humanities Center: The National Humanities Center will host the third and final conference on "The Human & The Humanities," November 13 - 15, 2008, once again attracting scientists and humanities scholars to discuss how developments in science...
In this post: the large version of the Medicine & Health, Brain & Behavior and Technology channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week.
Over at the Times website, Harold McGee takes a question on salt and baking: Q: Is there any truth to the old cook's adage that adding a pinch of salt brings out the sweetness in sugars? If so, can you...
Sleep Selectively Preserves Emotional Memories: As poets, songwriters and authors have described, our memories range from misty water-colored recollections to vividly detailed images of the times of our lives. Now, a study led by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical...
There's a very cool study in the latest Nature Neuroscience that looks at how professional basketball players make predictions about whether or not a shot will go in. Obviously, this is a key skill, as being able to anticipate the...
It's a nightmarish scenario: after a car crash, a man is brought into a hospital with a severe injury to his frontal lobes. When he wakes up, the doctors realize that their patient is missing one crucial mental faculty: his...
[This article was originally published in December, 2006] As parents of a 1516-year-old, Greta and I are very interested in what causes people to behave aggressively. We know a lot about specific causes of aggression -- violent media, testosterone, guns,...
It's always a Bad Idea to critique a paper on the basis of summaries, but I just can't seem to make Proceedings of the Royal Society let me download this article. Randy Thornhill and Corey Fincher have proposed another...
A robot controlled by a blob of rat brain cells could provide insights into diseases such as Alzheimer's. Created at the University of Reading, the project marries 300,000 rat neurons to a robot that navigates via sonar. The neurons are now being taught to steer...
A ScienceFriday video podcast from over a year ago on how the star-nosed mole and other mammals can actually sniff for prey underwater. I wonder if this is what my dog is doing and she sticks her nose to the...
Researchers from the Cybernetic Intelligence Research Group at the University of Reading have developed a robot whose movements are controlled by neurons growing in a culture dish.The robot's "brain" consists of several hundred thousand neurons isolated from embryonic rat neocortex....
This article was brought to my attention by the male minority (we have 2 men and 8 women) in my lab. They suggested that the article supports their plea to recruit more men into the lab in order to neutralize...
Over at Sciam's Mind Matters blog, Greta and I have written a guest post about tone deafness and bad singing: Although there have been many studies of perceptual tone deafness, or amusia, few have compared people's ability to hear differences...
So... my girlfriend studies categories and concepts and her adviser wanted her to show a video for her first year project. Of course I went out to youtube and tried to find something sensible since I'm procrastinating right now on...
Posted on August 13, 2008 12:34 PM • 10 Comments •
My profile of Read Montague and the dopamine prediction-error hypothesis is now online. I wanted to write this article for two main reasons. First of all, I think the dopamine story is incredibly exciting and remains one of the best...
Sometimes, I wish America had British libel laws. This sort of dishonesty masquerading as "scholarship" makes me furious: Mr. Corsi has released a new attack book painting Senator Barack Obama, the Democrats' presumed presidential nominee, as a stealth radical liberal...
Okay, let's try again. Almond BR. Monstrous infants and vampyric mothers in Bram Stoker's "Dracula". Int J Psychoanal. 2007 Feb;88(Pt 1):219-35. "Vampires and the state of being "undead" are representations of intense oral needs, experienced in a context of passivity...
Participation in most sports requires agility, impeccable timing and the planning and execution of complex movements, so that actions such as catching a ball or throwing it into a hoop can be performed. Performing well at sports also requires anticipating...
ScienceBlogs wants your help... and is willing to pay. Well sorta... they're giving away some ipod type goodies to some people who complete a short survey. Here's the schtick: Dear Reader, We launched Seed and ScienceBlogs because we believe...
I was on The Takeaway this morning talking about the ineffectiveness of Human Growth Hormone (HGH) and the potency of the placebo effect. Even though most studies demonstrate that HGH does little to enhance athletic performance, world class athletes continue...
Elephant Memories May Hold Key To Survival: A recent study by the Wildlife Conservation Society and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) suggests that old female elephants--and perhaps their memories of distant, life-sustaining sources of food and water--may be the...
National Library of Medicine / Hot Medical NewsThis silent film clip shows several victims of a disease called kuru. They are - or rather were - members of the South Fore, a tribe of approximately 8,000 people who inhabit the...
[This article was originally published in December, 2006] Take a look at these two images. Do they belong in the same category or different categories? You say the same? Wrong -- they're different! The one on the right is a...
This seems a wee bit reductive to me, but it's still an interesting hypothesis: One of the more intriguing patterns in psychology is that different cultures are characterized by different personality types. A team of psychologists has proposed a new...
Feeling exhausted after a long day is an all too familiar part of modern life. We drag ourselves into bed, hoping to shut down our minds for a night, waking up recharged the next day. But contrary to popular...
The classic Nobel Prize-winning studies of David Hubel and Torsten Weisel showed how the proper maturation of the developing visual cortex is critically dependent upon visual information received from the eyes. In what would today be considered highly unethical experiments,...
A few weeks ago, I wrote about a paper in Science(1) that I read on a connection between a mutation in the dopamine D2 receptor and the genetics of learning....
In The Conjurer, by Hieronymus Bosch (above), a medieval European magician performs in front of a small crowd. As the spectators marvel at the conjurer's tricks, their attention is diverted away from the pickpockets who steal their belongings. The...
I love reading lists of fragrance chemicals. The assignment of pleasant, qualitative fragrance descriptions to chemicals with hard-nosed, rigorous functional group names always makes me giggle a little. Acetophenone, for instance, smells of orange blossoms. Today, I came across one...
The use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs, or roadside bombs) has led to an increase in the numbers of troops sustaining traumatic brain injury during military service in Afghanistan and Iraq. Such injuries are caused by the high pressure shock...
Olympic Games: Researchers Explore What Makes Better Athletes, The Physiology Of Performance, And More: The world-record pace for the marathon continues to improve for both men and women. For men, the record pace for the marathon is now about as...
I was on the Brian Lehrer show (no relation) this morning talking about insight, firefighters and the right hemisphere. Give it a listen. And I'm curious how readers engineer their own insights. Warm showers? Long walks? Richard Feynman preferred strip...
[This article was originally published in April, 2007] There is a considerable body of research showing that eye contact is a key component of social interaction. Not only are people more aroused when they are looked at directly, but if...
Over at Mind Matters we recently featured an interesting article by Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Adina Roskies (two philosophers at Dartmouth) reviewing a recent paper by Joshua Greene, et. al. The paper tested the dual-process model of morality, which argues that...
A very cool discovery out of Caltech: auditory synesthesia. Synesthesia, you probably know, is an effect wherein the stimulation of one sense causes automatic sensations in another sense. For example, grapheme-color synesthesia is where numbers or letters appear to those...
It never fails. During particularly stressful times, I tend to have nightmares. (In fact, sometimes I don't even really know how stressed I am until I start having recurring nightmares.) They were especially prevalent during my third-year review year, during...
by Philip H. DISCLAIMER - The opinions expressed in this blog post are those of the author alone. They do NOT represent the official opinion, policy, or action of any governmental agency the author may work for or have ever...
Global Warming is happening too slowly. Or so says Dan Gilbert, psycholgist and author of the book "Stumbling on Happiness". Watch this video for a psychologist's explanation of why we are failing to act in the face of the global...
A few neuroscience blogs I've come across recently, most of them new: V1Dr. ShockFrontal BlogotomyNeuronismNeuroTechnicaNeuroWhoa!Persistent Activity...
There are 69 new articles in PLoS ONE this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you...
Novel Kind Of Learning Gene Discovered: Scientists at the Freie Universität Berlin have come one step closer to unraveling the molecular basis of learning. A team led by neurobiologist Björn Brembs has discovered the first gene for operant conditioning in...
Synaesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory pathway evokes sensations in another sensory modality. This may occur because of abnormal connections between the brain's sensory systems, or because the flow of information between those systems is...
I chose three articles from this month's edition of Archives of General Psychiatry, upon which to comment. For those not familiar with it, Arch Gen Psychiatry is an AMA journal, like JAMA, but for psychiatrists. It's an influential journal....
The 51st edition of Encephalon is online now at The Mouse Trap. This time, host Sandeep has interspersed the entries with haikus about the mind and brain....
Robert Krulwich had a really lovely piece on Weekend Edition discussing Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway, split-brain patients and the emergent self. Much of the piece was drawn from my chapter on Woolf in Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Here is how...
[Originally posted in May, 2007] "I just didn't see him" is a claim that's repeated over and over in accident reports. Drivers earnestly claim that they simply didn't notice the bicycle/pedestrian/motorcycle they crashed into. The claim is made so frequently...
Last month, I travelled to Bristol to meet 37-year-old Heather Perry, one of a very small number of people to have voluntarily undergone trepanation for non-medical reasons. As we ate a pub lunch, I asked Heather about her experience. Below...
Social organization is not peculiar to men. Other societies, such as those constituted by bees and ants, have also arisen out of the advantage of cooperation in the struggle for existence; and their resemblances to, and their differences from,...
The Power Of Peter Piper: How Alliteration Enhances Poetry, Prose, And Memory: From nursery rhymes to Shakespearian sonnets, alliterations have always been an important aspect of poetry whether as an interesting aesthetic touch or just as something fun to read....
"...a fire was started on the porch of a faculty member's home. Injuries were sustained as the faculty member and his wife and children escaped the residence." Attack comes after pamphlets were found threatening faculty claimed to use animals in...
A team of researchers from Harvard and Columbia University Medical Center have reprogrammed skin cells from an 82-year-old woman suffering from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis to generate first stem cells and then motor neurons. This is a significant advance which could...
How do I try to beat jet-lag: - book an overnight flight that lands at the destination in the morning, if possible. This really helps. - start gradually shifting my daily schedule of meals, activities, sleep, a few days in...
Tonight marked another motherhood rite of passage. I'd been dreading this one, but it was truly time for it to happen. I threw out the remainder of the breast milk in the freezer. It had been there five months and...
Brain Tweak Lets Sleep-deprived Flies Stay Sharp: Staying awake slows down our brains, scientists have long recognized. Mental performance is at its peak after sleep but inevitably trends downward throughout the day, and sleep deprivation only worsens these effects. Aging...
Benny and his buddy Andy (no relation) are going camping this weekend. Benny sent this adorable video postcard to Andy to get him jazzed up about the festivities! See below the fold......
Do you remember this study (also see it here, here, here) we did a few years ago? Well, I just got my hands on some pictures from the time we did it - just individual animals, not pairs as they...
I really enjoyed Sheril's post last week about scientifically inaccurate movies. As I went to check out the list that she linked to, I found myself nodding constantly. But of course, that's hardly an exhaustive list. Let me tell you...
[This post was originally published in March 2007] Earlier today I posted a poll [and I republished that poll yesterday] challenging Cognitive Daily readers to show me that they understand error bars -- those little I-shaped indicators of statistical power...
Sorry for the light blogging everyone. It has been a busy, busy week. Some of you may have caught Janet Hyde's latest paper looking at data from the No Child Left Behind Act and math performance in the US. Under...
A mule is a biological hybrid, an offspring of a male donkey and a female horse. According to a new paper, all of this cross-pollination has real benefits: mules are significantly smarter than either of their parents. No regression to...
One of the lessons of my article on insight (based largely on this research) is that mind wandering isn't necessarily a bad thing, at least if you want to tap into the obscure associations prevalent in the right hemisphere: Schooler's...
Searching For Shut Eye: Possible 'Sleep Gene' Identified: While scientists and physicians know what happens if you don't get six to eight hours of shut-eye a night, investigators have long been puzzled about what controls the actual need for sleep....
Read an article about Glass at NY Times. It seems to have coalesced some scattered thoughts between my ears (the word coagulated probably fits too, you decide). Some weeks back I was looking through the window at the sky. An...
The devious slogan for the New York State lottery is "All you need is a dollar and a dream." Such state lotteries are a regressive form of taxation, since the vast majority of lottery consumers are low-income. As David Brooks...
Ed Yong has an excellent summary of a new experiment simulating the natural evolution of an artificial language as it's passed from one person to another. Every time we use a language we are subtly bending the rules and words...
There are 62 new articles in PLoS ONE this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about the papers. Here are my own picks for the week - you...
Sheena Iyengar has done some very cool studies on the debilitating effects of excessive choice. In one experiment, she ushered some undergraduates into a room with a variety of Godiva chocolates on a table. The students were then given vivid...
For August, the theme is Natural and Synthetic Vision: Neuronal Mechanisms for Vision, Network Properties and Modeling, and Visual Psychophysics and Perception....
Science Communicators of North Carolina: Thursday, August 7 7 p.m. The Beautiful Mind: Making Memories Dr. Kelly Giovanello of the UNC-CH Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Lab. Part of the Morehead Planetarium Current Science Forum. 250 E. Franklin St., Chapel Hill,...
One of the key components of "normal" child development is social competence. We expect kids to become gradually better at behaving respectfully towards peers, to comply with requests made by others, to understand the thoughts of others, to play together...
Diversity In Primary Schools Promotes Harmony, Study Finds: For the first time, children as young as 5 have been shown to understand issues regarding integration and separation. The research confirms that the ethnic composition of primary schools has a direct...
Today's Daily Telegraph contains a fascinating extract from Norman Doidge's new book The Brain That Changes Itself, about a woman who feels that she is constantly falling because she has lost her sense of balance as a result of damage...
An interesting idea from Mark Changizi from RPI: can one design pictures which, when interpreted by your vision, perform a computation? Press release here (note to RPI public relations department: you should probably make it so that the webpage address...
The latest report on home sales is bleak: Sales of new homes fell in June for the seventh time in the past eight months, more proof that the worst housing slump in decades is getting deeper. The Commerce Department reported...
I'm very puzzled. Now, I know that my being puzzled isn't particularly unusual. I'm frequently puzzled. I can't figure out how, for example, anyone with the slightest bit of reasoning ability can do anything other than laugh when informed what...
This quote comes from Recollections of My Life, by Santiago Ramon y Cajal: Like the entomologist in search of colorful butterflies, my attention has chased in the gardens of the grey matter cells with delicate and elegant shapes, the mysterious...
Several recent large-scale studies have confirmed a curious finding: Asians are much more likely to have "perfect pitch" than non-Asians. Perfect pitch, more properly called "Absolute pitch," is an extremely rare phenomenon, but it's several times more likely to occur...
A recently published study seems to indicate that adult brain volume is reduced in individuals with significant lead exposure during childhood. While this study may lead to important findings linking lead to reduced cognitive function, it is important to note that observed effect is very...
Depression is a common neuropsychiatric disorder which affects at least 1 in 7 adults. The condition can have a major effect on patients' quality of life, and is a major cause of both disability and suicide.Many patients with depression can...
A new paper in one of my favorite journals, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, tries to reverse-engineer the tricks of magicians to learn about the blind spots of the brain. Wired Science explains: Magic tricks may look simple, but they exploit...
Over at Mind Matters, the expert blog I curate at Scientific American, we're currently featuring a really interesting article by On Amir on the cognitive cost of making decisions: For instance, it's long been recognized that strenuous cognitive tasks--such as...
Look up charming in a dictionary and I'm pretty sure you'll see this video: Because we like to link everything to the brain over here at the Frontal Cortex, it's worth mentioning that the number four also represents the outer...
90 Billion Tons Of Microbial Organisms Live In Deep Marine Subsurface: More Archaea Than Bacteria: Biogeoscientists show evidence of 90 billion tons of microbial organisms--expressed in terms of carbon mass--living in the deep biosphere, in a research article published online...
This kid is a poster child for deliberate practice: Marc Yu, a 9-year-old piano prodigy from Pasadena, Calif., recently played at a benefit for victims of the earthquake in Sichuan, China. And he didn't play "Row, Row, Row Your Boat."...
I've got an article in the latest New Yorker (not online) on the neuroscience of insight. I begin the article with the harrowing story of Wag Dodge and the Mann Gulch fire, before describing the research of Mark Jung Beeman,...
Social Behavior In Ants Influenced By Small Number Of Genes: Understanding how interactions between genes and the environment influence social behavior is a fundamental research goal. In a new study, researchers at the University of Lausanne and the University of...
A number of studies have found that older adults aren't as good at certain visual tasks compared to younger adults. Mental rotation, for example, is both slower and less accurate. But other studies have found that for certain types of...
David Carr, a media columnist for the New York Times, was addicted to crack for several years in the late 1980's. In the Times Magazine (and in his new book) he tells the story of his own investigation into his...
This morning I attended a talk about the research behind, and clinical applications of, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). I've written about BCIs many times in the past; they monitor the electrical activity of the brain, either invasively by means of implanted...
The 50th edition of Encephalon is now online at SharpBrains. It includes entries about the path planning by hippocampal place cells, the role of calcium ion homeostasis in Alzheimer's Disease and the potential applications of transcranial magnetic stimulation....
Wow. Just... wow. This is not the best superhero film I have seen. This is perhaps the best film I have seen for over a decade. It is replete with moral problems, Greek tragedy, farce, some serious character development,...
Carl Zimmer: How Your Brain Can Control Time: For 40 years, psychologists thought that humans and animals kept time with a biological version of a stopwatch. Somewhere in the brain, a regular series of pulses was being generated. When...
The keynote Speaker for the Human Mind and Behaviour theme is Pierre Magistretti of the Brain-Mind Institute at Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne in Switzerland. Title: Looking Inside Your Brain Abstract: Prof. Magistretti will outline current brain-imaging technology and explore...
Whenever I happen to watch some talking heads on a cable news channel - usually while stuck in an airport - I'm always impressed by how mistaken the basic premise of the conversation is. The pundits will waste lots of...
www.davidsheff.comYou've likely seen copies of David Sheff's memoir Beautiful Boy at Starbucks, your local bookstore, the library and reviewed in your paper. It is becoming a bit of a phenomenon. I picked up a copy of this a couple of...
When we're in a crowded space, making visual judgments becomes more difficult. But it doesn't take much to trigger a crowding effect. Clicking on the picture below will take you to a quick movie (QuickTime required) that should demonstrate the...
One way to understand the collapse of the real estate bubble (and our current financial mess) is as a massive case of bad decision-making. The mistakes, of course, were made by many different people and organizations: the investment banks who...
In the January 4th, 1961 episode of One Step Beyond, director and presenter John Newland ingests psilocybin under laboratory conditions, to investigate whether or not the hallucinogenic mushroom can enhance his abilities of extra-sensory perception.The programme was apparently inspired by...
It is well established that certain types of memory are consolidated during sleep. Now Nature News reports on findings presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies Forum in Geneva last weekend, which suggest that sleep loss can lead to...
A functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging luminary has accused two previous scientific trainees of dubious academic shenanigans if not outright scientific misconduct. Nikos Logothetis discussed his complaints in a news focus published in Nature. Specifically, he: charged that two of his...
Steven Levitt writes about the difficulty of judging wine: On Tuesday afternoons we had wine tastings. I asked if I could be allowed the opportunity to conduct one of these wine tastings "blind" to see what we could learn from...
Temporal discounting is our tendency to want things now rather than later. In order to encourage us to save money, banks have to offer us a reward in the form of an interest rate. In order to delay gratification, we...
This three-dimensional reconstruction of an amyloid fibril (found at Discover) was created by Nikolaus Grigorieff and his colleagues at Brandeis University, by computer processing of a transmission electron cryomicroscopy image. It is the most detailed image yet of the abnormally...
Two Extinct Flying Reptiles Compared: One Was A Glider, The Other A Parachutist: Archaeopteryx is famous as the world's oldest bird, but reptiles were flying about some 50 million years earlier than that (225 million years ago), even before large...
To enhance any system, one first needs to identify its capacity-limiting factor(s). Human cognition is a highly complex and multiply constrained system, consisting of both independent and interdependent capacity-limitations. These "bottlenecks" in cognition are reviewed below as a coherent framework...
Imagine yourself in a room surrounded by eleven objects arranged in a circle. You memorize the position of the objects, then you close your eyes, and rotate a third of the way around (120°). Keeping your eyes closed, can you...
Restless Legs Syndrome has been more in the public eye lately. I understand this is because of aggressive direct-to-consumer advertising. I'm not much of a consumer, so I haven't seen the ads, but people tell me about them. Whatever...
Understanding Hearing, Molecule By Molecule: Berkeley Lab scientists have for the first time pieced together the three-dimensional structure of one of nature's most exquisite pieces of machinery, a gossamer-like filament of proteins in the inner ear that enables the sense...
Back in January, the Daily Mail reported on "the helmet that could turn back the symptoms of Alzheimer's." The device is pictured above, held by its inventor, a British GP called Gordon Dougal. It consists of 700 light-emitting diodes...
As I mentioned last month, the British Psychological Society (BPS) recently commissioned a report into the implications of memory research for the legal profession. The report, written by the Memory and Law Working Party, a research board established by the...
Most readers of this blog are probably familiar with "unilateral neglect," one of several behavioral manifestations of brain damage to the parietal lobe. Perhaps fewer readers are aware of other findings from unilateral neglect patients which are often omitted from...
I loved WALL-E. In my opinion, it's the best Pixar movie yet, and I was a huge fan of Ratatouille. While the movie has an obvious environmental subtext - we are destroying the earth with our love of disposable things...
Who Dares Sings, And Who Sings Wins: Bold Birds Get The Girl: Humans often choose partners based on behavioural keys that are displayed during social interactions. The way we behave in different social contexts can reflect personality traits or temperament...
In the July issue of the magazine Literary Review, Philip Davis discusses the effect of William Shakespeare's use of language on cognitive function.Davis, a professor of English at the University of Liverpool, and editor of The Reader is working with...
Children Are Naturally Prone To Be Empathic And Moral: Children between the ages of seven and 12 appear to be naturally inclined to feel empathy for others in pain, according to researchers at the University of Chicago, who used functional...
When does a person's religious beliefs constrain someone who is not religious? What sorts of redress can a religious person expect in a secular society? These questions arise from the recent to-do about PZ Myers defense of the stealing...
Why do the bad boyz seem to always get the girl? This newly published paper provides an interesting hypothesis for this behavior and suggests that this is an evolutionarily sound strategy
The latest Seed has a very interesting article on the complicated geometry underlying Western music, and the intuitive mathematical understanding demonstrated by composers: The shapes of the space of chords we have described also reveal deep connections between a wide...
Later on today, I'll be travelling to Bristol to meet Heather Perry and interview her about the self-trepanation she performed. If you have a question for Ms. Perry, submit it here. The first migraine-plagued caveman who countered his aching cranium...
Well, I can't answer that question. But in a related matter, Koelsch et al. ask, in a new paper published in PLoS ONE, Why Musicians Make Us Weep and Computers Don't? ... obviously, they have not met my computer. The study investigates the somatic effects...
Nature has a really interesting article on the sheer difficulty (impossibility?) of finding the genetic underpinnings of mental illness: Finding genes involved in psychiatric conditions is proving to be particularly intractable because it is still unclear whether the various diagnoses...
From the new experimental philosophy reader, edited by Joshua Knobe and Shaun Nichols: It used to be commonplace that the discipline of philosophy was deeply concerned with questions about the human condition. Philosophers thought about human beings and how their...
In 2005, E. Ashby Plant and B. Michelle Peruche tested 48 Florida police officers and found that they were initially more likely to shoot unarmed Black "suspects" in a crime-fighting simulation than White people holding similar objects. Interestingly, however, as...
A new study, published today in the open access journal PLoS One, provides evidence that remaining mentally active throughout life reduces the rate of age-related neurodegeneration and may therefore stave off Alzheimer's Disease and other forms of dementia....
One of the biggest misconceptions of natural selection is that it mandates nastiness, that the pressure to survive and multiply requires a ruthless sort of amorality. In other words, we are all Hobbesian brutes, driven to survive by selfish genes....
Recreational use and abuse of prescription narcotics has received much attention in recent years, from the 2003 revelation that Rush Limbaugh was abusing OxyContin to the multi-drug overdose of Heath Ledger. If you do a little searching you will no...
I've been meaning to post about this set of studies for a while, but because it's relevant to Chapter 4 of Lakoff's The Political Mind, I figured I'd better get around to it before I write the review of that...
How would an ideal behavioral method for cognitive enhancement actually affect the brain? Perhaps cognitive enhancement would be accompanied by more activity in the prefrontal cortex, indicating more successful engagement of control - or perhaps by less, indicating more efficient...
I have this friend from New York who, most of the time, speaks in a normal (that is to say, southern) accent that she's acquired as a result of being surrounded for so long by people who speak the King's...
Some new evidence suggesting that children aren't such bundles of joy: Sociologists are discovering that children may not make parents happier and that childless adults, contrary to popular stereotypes, may often be more contented than people with kids. Parents "definitely...
Adam Gopnik has a great New Yorker article (not online) on the genius and wickedness of G.K. Chesterton. Although he wrote some masterful books - my favorites are The Man Who Was Thursday and the Father Brown detective stories -...
Last year we discussed a great deal of research about the gender disparity in math and science. Even while women are more successful overall in school than men, in certain fields there is a very large deficit in the number...
Training high-level cognition or "executive function" is not always successful. Interestingly, some of the least robust training effects come from one of psychology's most robust paradigms - the Stroop task....
I often rant about bad coverage of the psychology of sex differences, so it is always satisfying to see an article that really has their facts straight. Amanda Schaffer and Emily Bazelon, writing in Slate, have an excellent article reviewing...
Human beings use stereotyped facial expressions to identify the feelings of others. We can tell what another person is feeling in part because of how their face looks. However, this says very little about why the particular changes in facial...
Functional imaging approaches such as fMRI that indirectly detect changes in correlates of neuronal activity in volumetrically defined brain locations are extremely popular right now. Investigators put animals or human subjects in an imaging rig, and then have the subject...
Over the last two months, Nature has published a series of essays about the latest scientific research into music, and now that the series is complete, it has been made available as a free PDF.Among the authors of the essays...
There is an interesting and thought-provoking essay at The Oil Drum. It was written by Nathan Hagens, a student at the Gund Institute, University of Vermont. He makes some errors in the science, and engages in some armchair hypothesizing...
The 49th edition of Encephalon, which is online now at Neuroscientifically Challenged, includes entries on the limitations of the use of gene therapy for psychiatric disorders, the sensationalization of neuroimaging data by the mass media, and how the relationship between...
Circadian Phase Resetting via Single and Multiple Control Targets: The robust timing, or phase, of the circadian clock is critical in directing and synchronizing molecular, cellular, and organismal behaviors. The clock's failure to maintain precision and adaption is associated with...
I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on the new science of depression: Prozac is one of the most successful drugs of all time. Since its introduction as an antidepressant more than 20 years ago, Prozac has...
Researchers have witnessed how cleaner fish calm their subjects, often dangerous predators, by touching them gently with their fins while they're cleaning them. A new study in the journal Behavior Ecology, however, is showing how this calming effect not only prevents the cleaner fish from becoming meals, but other prey fish in the general vicinity as well.
It seems that vegetarians are screwed on multiple levels, they get called hippies by me AND they might be at an increased risk of dementia in old age. The study recently published in the journal Dementias and Geriatric Cognitive Disorders...
You know what makes me proud to be an American? The fact that the black presidential candidate with the funny African-Muslim name is leading in the polls against the white aviator war hero married to a beer heiress. And I'm...
Foreign accent syndrome (FAS) is a neurological condition that is acquired following a stroke or some other form of brain injury. It occurs as a result of damage to the brain's speech motor centres, so that syllables are mispronounced, making...
Hollywood actress Sharon Stone hit the headlines recently, following her remarks that the massive earthquake which struck south-west China on May 12th could have occurred as a result of "bad karma" produced by Beijing's policy towards Tibet.Now, according to LA...
Have you ever seen Singin' in the Rain? One of the movie's most hilarious moments is when the beautiful silent movie star Lina Lamont is asked to start making "talking pictures." As soon as this gorgeous screen siren opens her...
Hitachi recently announced that they would be producing a 5 TB drive in the near future (2010?). This is totally unexciting to me but what Hitchachi's Yoshiro Shiroishi said was. According to Techradar: As for what can be stored...
Zadie Smith, writing in The Believer, offers future novelists some advice: When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second -...
The latest Seed Salon features highlights from an interesting discussion between Tom Wolfe and Michael Gazzaniga, one of the founders of cognitive neuroscience, who is best known for the work he carried out with Roger Sperry on split brain patients....
Klaus Oberauer has a fascinating paper from 2006 which seems to have been ignored by the cognitive training community. Oberaurer demonstrates how improper counterbalancing, ignorance of the power-law of practice, and confounds in the design of memory load tasks can...
Chapter 2 of Lakoff's new book is titled "The Political Unconscious, and it's absolutely terrible. It's also the first chapter likely to really piss off conservatives, or really anyone who might approach the chapter critically. Oh, and it has plenty...
Malagasy Chameleon Spends Most Of Its Short Life In An Egg: There is a newly discovered life history among the 28,300 species of known tetrapods, or four-legged animals with backbones. A chameleon from arid southwestern Madagascar spends up to three-quarters...
During a cerebrovascular accident (or stroke), the blood supply to part of the brain is interrupted. This is often caused by a blood clot which blocks an artery that carries blood to the brain. Consequently, neurons in the affected region...
The thrill I get from watching Michael Phelps swim is the same thrill I get from watching Tiger Woods put for birdie on the 18th hole or from reading 1930's Auden: the impossible isn't just made possible: these guys make...
Self-selection refers to the fact that certain kinds of people may be drawn to certain kinds of lifestyles or practices (including participation in human research). When the effects of those lifestyles/practices are observed scientifically, they are confounded with myriad other...
That's the title of my latest Science Progress column....even though the column itself is not entirely about sheep. Rather, it's a recounting of the Mooney-Nisbet science communication "boot camp" at Caltech....but, well, sheep came up, and believe it or...
Publishing in Science, Gormley et al. compared the benefits of Oklahoma's TPS pre-K program to Head Start. Conclusion: preschool matters in cognitive development. Early childhood education programs in the United States face enormous challenges. The overwhelming majority of Head Start...
New Map IDs The Core Of The Human Brain: An international team of researchers has created the first complete high-resolution map of how millions of neural fibers in the human cerebral cortex -- the outer layer of the brain responsible...
In a very cool paper published yesterday in the open access journal PLoS Biology, an international team of researchers report that they have produced the most detailed and comprehensive map yet of the connections in the human cerebral cortex.The cerebral...
The first thing to say about Chapter 1 is that it's much better written than the Introduction. In fact, if you buy the book, I recommend skipping the introduction, and starting with Chapter 1. Chapter 1 is, in fact, the...
A paper by Griffiths and colleagues has just appeared in the OnlineFirst archive of the Journal of Psychopharmacology. It describes a 14 month followup to their original paper on the spiritual and other effects of psilocybin consumption in humans. The...
Came to my e-mail inbox: The Harvard Summer School is pleased to announce the addition of a three-day special seminar for teachers in the sciences. Based on the well-known "Chautauqua Seminars" model, there is no cost to participants other than...
Another day, another sinking stock market. The Dow has officially entered bear territory, which is defined by a drop of 20 percent or more. Many variables are responsible for the financial malaise, from rising gas prices to a weakening job...
What happens when you split your brain in the middle? By splitting I mean the surgical kind where the corpus callosum (the connecting neural tissue between right and left hemispheres) is severed. Why would anyone do that, I hear you...
How does meditation experience functionally change the brain, and what effects does this have on distractibility? These are the questions addressed in a 2006 PNAS article from Brefczynski-Lewis et al, who compare expert meditators (between 10,000 and 54,000 hours of...
As always on Monday night, there are new articles published in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine. Here are some of the highlights: Shedding Light on Animal Cryptochromes: Anyone who's neglected a houseplant for any length of time knows that...
Mammalian Clock Protein Responds Directly To Light: We all know that light effects the growth and development of plants, but what effect does light have on humans and animals? A new paper by Nathalie Hoang et al., published in...
Greg and Steve (not Adam and Eve) both blogged a recent paper by Degenhardt and (20 other) colleagues in PLoS Medicine. Steve: According to a new survey the USA has highest level of illegal cocaine and cannabis use in the...
According to a new survey the USA has highest level of illegal cocaine and cannabis use in the world. Thank goodness the War for Drugs is working so well! Ohh... wait... that's the war ON drugs and it's supposed to...
We are being constantly bombarded with news stories containing pretty pictures of the brain, with headings such as "Brain's adventure centre located". Journalists now seem to refer routinely to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as "mind reading", and exaggerated claims...
A lot of people have read The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki. In the book, he gives an example of a group of people forced to estimate the weight of a cow. (This was actually an experiment that geneticist...
In our discussions of violence associated with video game play, we've frequently noted that there appear to be different effects depending on the type of video game. Some games are more violent than others, and some games reward violence while...
Attention training through meditation can reduce the duration of the "attentional blink" - in which detection of a first rare target causes people to be unaware of a second target presented soon after the first - according to research by...
There's an interesting short paper by Paul Bloom and Susan Gelman in the July issue of Trends in Cognitive Science with that title. Unfortunately, it's not yet available without a subscription (though Bloom tends to put his papers on his...
I'm back on bloggingheads.tv, talking this week with Paul Ehrlich about everything from climate change to Polynesian canoe oars to the origins of human culture to why cars are best for teenagers to make out in. Check it out....
Readers may know I have a passing interest in the works of Terry Pratchett. Oh, okay then, I'm a fanboy. Have been for well over fifteen years, since a coworker shoved Good Omens into my hands and mind. So...
I just read an interesting new paper, Genetic Variation in Political Participation: The decision to vote has puzzled scholars for decades...The results show that a significant proportion of the variation in voting turnout can be accounted for by genes. We...
There is a must-read paper in Nature about the limits of functional MRI as an experimental tool by one of its pioneers, Nikos Logothetis. (Also discussed by Jonah and Vaughan.) This paper is pretty technical, but Logothetis hits the important...
As discussed earlier this week, meditation may be an alternative form of brain training - or "brain untraining" - that shows transfer to tasks requiring cognitive control. There have been a few updates to this fascinating line of research, not...
Language is the stuff of thought. I'm reminded of this truism every time I sip a glass of wine and some pretentious snob (usually me) insists on saying something about the Chianti Classico smelling like cherries, or how the New...
Marc Dingman is touching on my own favorite topic: It's All About Timing: Circadian Rhythms and Behavior And SciCurios goes only millimeters below the suprachiasmatic nucleus: Diabetes Insipidus as a Sequel to a Gunshot Wound of the Head Both posts...
Huge Genome-scale Phylogenetic Study Of Birds Rewrites Evolutionary Tree-of-life: The largest ever study of bird genetics has not only shaken up but completely redrawn the avian evolutionary tree. The study challenges current classifications, alters our understanding of avian evolution, and...
My high school buddy James Grimmelmann unleashes on Newsweek: Tony Dokoupil manages to write 1,200 words in Newsweek about professional psychics without once telling his readers the single most relevant fact: Psychic powers don’t exist. Would Newsweek run an interview with the Easter Bunny? Would it let Jane Bryant Quinn suggest investing in perpetual motion machine startups? Would it print travel tips for hitching a ride on a flying saucer to Neptune? But here it is, an article whose sum and substance is that hiring a psychic could do wonders for your business. This article is professional malpractice. No competent...
In this post: the large version of the Medicine & Health, Brain & Behavior and Technology channel photos, comments from readers, and the best posts of the week.
My high school experience, like that of nearly everyone who attended my school, was a perplexing one. It seemed there were only a few "popular" people -- those that everyone knew and liked -- and wanted to be like. Everyone...
Nature News has an interesting article by Philip Ball about a dancing cockatoo named Snowball: Aniruddh Patel of the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, California, and his colleagues say that Snowball's ability to shake his stuff is much more than...
Believe it or not, this appears to have something to do with their circadian rhythms! Back in the 1960s and early 1970s, there was quite a lot of research published on the circadian rhythms in earthworms, mostly by Miriam Bennett....
In a fascinating review of the cognitive neuroscience of attention, authors Raz and Buhle note that most research on attention focuses on defining situations in which it is no longer required to perform a task - in other words, the...
This is seriously the worst press release I've ever read. It doesn't say how the research was done, it doesn't have the results from the research, it is poorly written (run on sentences?!), and it is pointless. Why was this...
There was a very sad article in the NYTimes about the regular practice in some long-term care facilities of treating demented patients with anti-psychotic medications like Risperdal, Seroquel and Zyprexa: The use of antipsychotic drugs to tamp down the agitation,...
Researchers from the Computational Neuroimaging Laboratory at New York University recently carried out a study of the effects of films on viewers' brains.Hasson et al scanned the brains of 45 participants whilst they watched scenes from a number of films...
If William James were alive today, I'm pretty sure that he'd be an experimental philosopher. (He'd also be a cognitive psychologist, a public intellectual in the mold of Richard Rorty and a damn fine essayist, filling the back pages of...
The forthcoming issue of The New Yorker contains a fantastic article by surgeon and writer Atul Gawande about the neurobiology of itching. The article begins with the extraordinary case of a patient known as M., whose itch, which occurred following...
As in popperfont.com Last week, I opened up a free wordpress blog, with the hopes of collecting my writings in one place, as well, as trying to categorize the silly "true or false" questions I use in many of my...
General anaesthetics activate a heat-sensitive protein found in pain pathways and may exacerbate post-operative pain, according to a new study published online yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....
I was on the Takeaway last week talking about this study: We examined the role of serotonin transporter (5-HTT) and oxytocin receptor (OXTR) genes in explaining differences in sensitive parenting in a community sample of 159 Caucasian, middle-class mothers with...
In a recent issue of Nature, Nikos Logothetis, director of the Max Plank Institute for Biological Cybernetics, wrote some surprisingly harsh sentences about the experimental limitations of fMRI. The piece is especially noteworthy because Logothetis has probably done more than...
I guess most of us missed a bizarre poster at the Evolution 2008 meetings tonight. It was basically a paper titled The Evidently Imminent Phyletic Transition of Homo sapiens into Homo militarensis (the military hominid), by Richard H. Lambertsen....
Oh look, a blog that hasn't been updated in almost a month. Heh. When it comes to suicide, you've got a fairly standard list of methods to work with: firing a bullet into your head, consuming copious amounts of highly...
Here are some more new members of the ever-growing online neuroscience community: The Brain and the Sky Illusion Sciences N-Cog-Neato! Neurophilia Neurotonics...
2Figure 15b: Advanced emphysema in a relatively young (36-year-old) woman with a history of heavy cocaine abuse and unrelated mitral valve disease. Chest CT scan reveals diffuse advanced emphysema. The latest news in the celebrity drug-abuse world is that Amy...
UPDATE: I've messed with some of the images below the fold, which will hopefully make it easier for people to see the illusion without having to move all round the room. Last year, Rob Jenkins published a seriously spooky-looking illusion...
Do you multitask? I'm not talking about literally doing two things at once, like emailing while talking on the phone, or playing the trombone while washing the dishes. I'm talking about the more common phenomenon of starting one project before...
There are a few writers who manage to trigger a contradictory mixture of feelings in me: the joy of reading their prose is fused with the mild anguish of not having written their prose. It's one part status anxiety, a...
PsyBlog is soliciting your favorite psychobabble. Head over there to give your favorite instance of the complete misinterpretation of psychology in pop culture. My favorite is number one on their list of examples: "Their brains lit up in the scanner."...
In recent years, researchers have found that a wide variety of animal species, many of the cognitive skills that were once thought to be unique to humans. These findings show that we have grossly underestimated the intelligence of other animals,...
That smart guy, Carl Zimmer, has written an article on those smart molluscs, the octopus. I like that his conclusion is that we can't really judge their intelligence, because it is different than our own. That's the same answer I...
At the Neuroanthropology blog, Daniel rounds up the usual suspects of neuroscience and psychology bloggers for the 48th edition of Encephalon.This time, the carnival includes entries on everything from visual illusions and the neurobiology of language evolution, to the ethnography...
Sometimes I see news about upcoming drugs, and hope that it works out. Sometimes, I don't see the point. Rarely, I actively hope that it does not work out. Staccato® alprazolam is one that I hope does not work out....
I've just discovered that the book Eye, Vision and Brain, by Nobel Prize winner David Hubel, is available online in its entirety.Hubel is a neurophysiologist who performed some classic experiments with Torsten Wiesel, beginning in the late 1950s, on the...
I've been pretty quiet on the blog while I've been off visiting grandparents in other states this past week. But in the meantime, Slate has published a piece I wrote for them on the beguiling mystery of octopus brains. I...
There's a review of George Lakoff's new book, The Political Mind, in today's New York Times. You can read the review here. Some key excerpts: Neuroscience shows that pure facts are a myth and that self-interest is a conservative idea....
The Smithsonian Institution's new Flickr photostream contains nearly 900 photographs, including a large set of portraits of scientists and inventors, among them Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein and Marie Curie and Walther Nernst (above). Nernst was a German physical chemist who...
At this stage of the game, I almost feel sorry for David Kirby. Think about it. He's made his name and what little fame he has (which isn't much outside of the tinhat crowd that thinks the guv'mint is intentionally...
One of the things that motivated Nora and me to conduct the Casual Friday nuts study was our intense ambivalence toward the Brazil nut. It's so much bigger than the other nuts that it tends to dominate any mixture, even...
Birds Migrate Earlier, But Some May Be Left Behind As The Climate Warms Rapidly: Many birds are arriving earlier each spring as temperatures warm along the East Coast of the United States. However, the farther those birds journey, the...
The 19th century histologists who discovered the neuron also found that the nervous system contains another type of cell. They assumed that the role of these other cells was to provide structural support for neurons, and so named them glia...
Last week we asked our readers what their favorite types of mixed nuts were. Does the mixture that comes in the can actually approximate real-world preferences, or are the nut-packagers just giving us the cheapest nuts, with no allowances for...
Blood flow in the brain is linked to neuronal activity. Therefore, various 'brain scanning' techniques can be used to observe neuronal activity in the brain. This has led to an astonishing revolution in knowledge of how the brain works. Of course, you knew that already....
Modern day living is now a highly competitive sport. The field events are well established: catching a bus driven by a cynical driver, getting a promotion at job, getting good grades in college, getting a grant for research, getting your...
It's Friday - and time for new articles in PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens and PLoS Genetics: An Evolutionarily Conserved Sexual Signature in the Primate Brain: The contribution of genetics versus environment to behavioral differences between the sexes is a...
Great Apes Think Ahead: Conclusive Evidence Of Advanced Planning Capacities: Apes can plan for their future needs just as we humans can - by using self-control and imagining future events. Mathias and Helena Osvath's research, from Lunds University Cognitive Science...
Right or wrong, the word "dopamine" always conjures up images in my head of rats pushing levers over and over again, working desperately hard to send shots of dopamine into...
Our closest extant relatives have received a fair bit of attention in the past few days, with the publication of two new studies which have been picked up by numerous news outlets. First came the study by Fraser et al,...
We already know that mirror neurons are responsible for social interaction (except when they're not), meaning, art, religion, sports, dinosaurs, sun spots, Marxism, post-it notes, freeze-dried fruit, Harleys, and and Firefox 3.0, so it's not at all surprising that we're...
One of the first steps to learning a language is figuring out where one word ends and the next one begins. Since fluent speakers don't generally pause between words, it can be a daunting task. We've discussed one of the...
This cartoon, found at Paleo-Future, accompanied a short article from the August 28th, 1949 edition of the San Antonio Light: CHICAGO, Aug. 27 - (AP) - Some day composers won't write music, and musicians won't play it - yet...
Seriously.... wow.....I'd totally forgotten about the brain from the cartoons. and.... Ohh... Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. How I used to love thee. I actually watched the most recent movie a few weeks ago. Do they really suck that much? I...
Sexual Reorientation: The gay culture war is about to turn chemical: If the idea of chemically suppressing homosexuality in the womb horrifies you, I have bad news: You won't be in the room when it happens. Parents control medical decisions,...
The idea that memory is reconstructive and not reproductive - which dates back at least to the 1930s, when Frederic Bartlett published his classic book Remembering - has profound implications for the criminal justice system, as it raises questions about...
From Rachel Herz's quite interesting The Scent of Desire: In one study that contrasted the trauma of being blinded or becoming anosmic [losing you sense of smell] after an accident, it was found that those who were blinded initially felt...
The Boston Globe has an infographic containing tips on how to nap effectively. But why would you want to run the risk of being thought of as lazy by sleeping during the day? Recent research shows that power napping...
Amongst all the obtaining of Programmatic scoop from the NIDA Director and assorted Program Officers, schmoozing with the senior scientists, rallying the junior scientist troops, reconnecting with old pals, taking care of committee business and whatnot... There is occasionally time...
First Successful Reverse Vasectomy On Endangered Species Performed At The National Zoo: Veterinarians at the Smithsonian's National Zoo performed the first successful reverse vasectomy on a Przewalski's horse (E. ferus przewalskii; E. caballus przewalskii--classification debated), pronounced zshah-VAL-skeez. Przewalksi's horses are...
Can scientists actually SEE the beginnings of speciation in action? This paper explores the use of family pedigrees to identifying the mechanisms of speciation.
What makes something look glossy? At first, it doesn't seem like a difficult question -- it's something smooth and reflective. But if you were to attempt to draw something that looked glossy, how would you to it? Now, the problem...
Photo: Edmund E. Kasaitis. Tomorrow night's full moon will be very low in the sky, and will give a strong illusion of being far bigger than it actually is. Exactly why we experience this phenomenon is unclear; NASA provides...
Kevin at IQ's Corner has blogged about a new paper in PNAS showing that "working memory" training can improve measures of fluid intelligence - a capacity long thought to be relatively insensitive to experience, and intricately tied to the most...
Like so many golf fans, I'd never even thought about watching golf on television until Tiger Woods. I don't play the game and the images of all those manicured greens and hushed crowds always struck me as incredibly boring. Why...
Lots of people get mad behind the wheel, but who are the people likely to try and kill you at the intersection? A CSU psychologist found that road rage correlates with large numbers of bumper stickers: Szlemko and his colleagues...
The winners of the first Kavli Prize were announced a couple of weeks ago. One of the three recipients of the prize for neuroscience was Pasko Rakic, a professor of neurobiology and neurology at the Yale School of Medicine.Rakic has...
Humor Shown To Be Fundamental To Our Success As A Species: First universal theory of humour answers how and why we find things funny. Published June 12, The Pattern Recognition Theory of Humour by Alastair Clarke answers the centuries old...
Creationists and Darwinian skeptics often claim that natural selection could not produce the sort of improbability (often, for reasons that nobody is quite sure of, below 1 in 10 to the 500th power) that we see around us. So...
Genetic and Environmental Effects on Same-sex Sexual Behavior: A Population Study of Twins in Sweden: There is still uncertainty about the relative importance of genes and environments on human sexual orientation. One reason is that previous studies employed self-selected, opportunistic,...
Listen to this short audio clip: The clip plays two notes that are two full octaves apart. That's a greater range than many people can produce vocally. It should be easy for anyone to tell the difference between these two...
One of the most interesting aspects of human behavior is our nearly infinite capacity to arrange and coordinate symbols. Think of the symbols that permeate our existence. Paper money has no value in and of itself. A wedding ring is...
M. Night Shyamalan, the director of the vaguely anti-evolution (and thoroughly mediocre) film The Happening, uses the brain to discuss the limits of science: There's so much unexplained stuff. I don't quite understand the scientific explanation of the placebo effect....
In a recent issue of Science, Dahlin et al report the results of an executive function training paradigm focused on the process of mental updating. "Updating" is thought to be one of the core executive functions (as determined through confirmatory...
As previously mentioned, I'm attending a meeting of an academic society focused on drug abuse science, The College on Problems of Drug Dependence. I'm not planning to blog live or anything like that but I may have a comment or...
Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome Linked To Irregular Menstrual Cycles, Premenstrual Symptoms In Women: Women with delayed sleep phase syndrome are more likely to report irregular menstrual cycles and premenstrual symptoms, according to a research abstract that will be presented on...
We believe that memory provides us with a faithful record of past events. But in fact, it is well established that memory is reconstructive, and not reproductive, in nature. In retrieval, a memory is pieced together from fragments, but during...
Mysterious Mountain Dinosaur May Be New Species: A partial dinosaur skeleton unearthed in 1971 from a remote British Columbia site is the first ever found in Canadian mountains and may represent a new species, according to a recent examination...
Last weekend Nora and I went on a hike in the Smoky Mountains. Whenever we go hiking, we make trail mix -- usually just cashews and raisins. This time, however, we had some mixed nuts left over from a party...
It happens to me every time: I tell myself that it's just a game, that these overpaid basketball superstars don't really have any loyalty to a particular team, place, city, etc., that I really shouldn't care about the outcome of...
Children can be notoriously constrained to the present, but a fascinating article in JEP:HPP by Vallesi & Shallice shows exactly how strong that constraint can be: in a study with 4-11 year-olds, they show that only children older than about...
Each week we post a new picture and a choice comment from each of our nine channels here at ScienceBlogs on our channel homepages. Now, we're bringing you the best of the week in daily postings that will highlight individual...
The article is here, but it is too long for me and my attention span to read through. I got a snippet, though: But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the...
I am in blood Stepp'd in so far, that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o'er. Strange things I have in head that will to hand, Which must be acted ere they may be scann'd....
Two of my SciBlings have recently covered papers that my readers should find interesting: Joseph: Bright Light and Melatonin Treatment Improves Dementia: A study published in JAMA indicates that treatment with bright light alone (1,000 lux), or bright light combined...
A reader sent me a link to this report on today's NPR Morning Edition, about the potential benefits of voluntary work for patients with Alzheimer's Disease.The program describes the work of Peter Whitehouse, who founded a school in Cleveland, Ohio...
At first glance, it's hard to think of a more frivolous form of culture than the daily soap opera. It's pure and delicious escapism. And yet, at least in Brazil, soap operas have powerfully influenced family planning, according to a...
Bookslut has a really interesting interview with Jeff Warren, author of The Head Trip: Q: It turns out sleep is more interesting than we usually expect -- and that it even has a history! What are some key misconceptions about...
Woolly Mammoth Gene Study Changes Extinction Theory: A large genetic study of the extinct woolly mammoth has revealed that the species was not one large homogenous group, as scientists previously had assumed, and that it did not have much genetic...
The bi-monthly American magazine Psychology Today has launched a network of blogs covering a wide variety of topics, including addiction, cognitive science, sports psychology and psychotherapy. The network contains more than 80 blogs, many of which are written by researchers who...
Boundary extension -- misremembering the boundaries of a scene as wider than they really are -- has been observed in adults as old as 84 and children as young as 6. But for kids much younger than 6, the phenomenon...
Could something be perceived if there is no sensory system which is dedicated to it? For everyone except parapsychologists, the obvious answer is no - but this raises questions about the ability to perceive short temporal intervals, for which there...
Here is an interesting article showing the cross-over between neuropharmacology and decision making. Crockett et al. show that if you use acute tryptophan depletion to lower the levels of serotonin in subjects, they are more likely to reject unfair offers...
A study published in JAMA indicates that treatment with bright light alone (1,000 lux), or bright light combined with melatonin, can improve symptoms in patients with dementia. Melatonin alone appeared to have a slight adverse effect. This already has been...
When it comes to human brain evolution, it is often said that size matters. The human cerebral cortex is much larger than that of other primates, and therefore its expansion must have been a vital feature of human evolution. Researchers...
"They only care about themselves," "They're out of touch with reality," "They don't become academics." These are just some of the answers people yelled at me yesterday when I read out loud the title of a paper in the...
Take a look at these three pictures. Can you tell which is a human, which is a cat, and which is a pigeon? How about these three pictures? A little easier? It would be even easier, of course, if the...
Several years ago, the mad scientists at DARPA (the research and development wing of the Pentagon) conceived of a pair of binoculars that would enhance soldiers' ability to detect enemies. Danger Room informs us that DARPA has just awarded...
In the latest Atlantic, John Staddon, a professor of psychology at Duke, has an article on the dangers of road signs and speed limits: The American system of traffic control, with its many signs and stops, and with its specific...
A few weeks ago, I wrote an article on various explanations for home field advantage. One of the more interesting tidbits I learned was this: Professional teams, however, seem to be better adjusted to life on the road. (The chartered...
The Journal of Visualized Experiments (JoVE) is a pioneering open access online journal devoted to the publication of peer-reviewed biological research in video format. The JoVE website was launched in December 2006, and now has about 200 films, which are...
A group of Dutch researchers report that a 115-year-old who remained mentally alert throughout her whole life had a healthy brain that showed no signs of Alzheimer's Disease or other forms of dementia.den Dunnen et al had the...
A reader recently emailed to ask us if there's been any research about whether poor working conditions such as a noisy or overheated office affect motivation and efficiency. Wouldn't it be great if you could document to your employer that...
This week's issue of Time has a cover story called America's Medicated Army, about the increasing use of antidepressant and anti-anxiety drugs among U.S. troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.The article quotes figures from a recent report by the Army's...
At Channel N, Sandra has compiled a fantastic 47th edition of Encephalon. There are, as usual, many blog posts about a wide variety of topics neuroscience and psychology. This edition also includes no less than 7 film clips, including one...
David Brooks' column today is filled with some depressing financial facts: Between 1989 and 2001, credit-card debt nearly tripled, soaring from $238 billion to $692 billion. By last year, it was up to $937 billion, the report said. State governments...
Circadian Math: 1 Plus 1 Doesn't Always Equal 2: Like a wristwatch that needs to be wound daily for accurate time-telling, the human circadian system -- the biological cycles that repeat approximately every 24 hours -- requires daily light exposure...
Encephalon 47 is up at Channel N. Thanks Sandra! The best of it is a video describing equipment for measuring the flight of tethered fruit flies. You can train them do to all manner of things but changing the visual...
A Roadmap for Migrating Neurons: Politicians, pundits, and even your best friends occasionally do things that make you wonder how their brains are wired. The next time you have that thought, consider consulting a developmental neuroscientist: they work every day...
Sheep's Sex Determined By Diet Prior To Pregnancy: Maternal diet influences the chances of having male or female offspring. New research has demonstrated that ewes fed a diet enriched with polyunsaturated fats for one month prior to conception have a...
I love afterimages and aftereffects, so I was excited to see that the 2008 winner for Best Illusion of the Year is a new afterimage illusion. To see the illusion for your self, watch this sequence of images for about...
Working memory - the ability to hold information "in mind" in the face of environmental interference - has traditionally been associated with the prefrontal cortices (PFC), based primarily on data from monkeys. High resolution functional imaging (such as fMRI) have...
Given the weather on the Eastern seaboard - it's one of those hot, sultry days where you wait for a thunderstorm to purge the humidity from the air - I decided to do a quick literature search for the effects...
An absolute lion, perhaps even the dean, of exogenous cannabinoid pharmacology has passed away. The obituary from the Richmond (VA) Times-Dispatch is here. MARTIN, Dr. Billy Ray, 65, of Richmond, died Sunday, June 8, 2008. He was Chairman of the...
Neuroscience, like all other branches of science, is fraught with dogmatic ideas about its subject matter. A number of principles have emerged, principles that have been regarded as fundamental to our understanding of brain function. But the human brain is...
Will Wilkinson and Jon Haidt just did a bloggingheads.tv. I've blogged Haidt's ideas before (Chris is skeptical). During this bloggingheads.tv interview Haidt lays out the difference between college age liberals and other societies with a scenario where a beloved dog...
According to the Mayo Clinic website, Three out of four people with Alzheimer's will wander at some point during the course of the disease. Wanderers who get lost outdoors may become injured or even die of exposure. This risk...
Here's another great quote about the brain, from Ian McEwan's novel Saturday: He's looking down at a portion of [the] brain...with its low hills and enfolded valleys of the sulci, each with a name and imputed function...Just to the left...
Dave Munger has a great post on how fMRI images bias the brain. The researchers asked 156 students at Colorado State University to evaluate three different summaries of brain research. As you can probably guess (especially if you're familiar with...
Keeping Beer Fresher: Scientists in Venezuela are reporting an advance in the centuries-old effort to preserve the fresh taste that beer drinkers value more than any other characteristic of that popular beverage. Futuristic Linkage Of Animals And Electronics: The same...
Our feathered friends provide us with some beautiful examples of the link between brain and behaviour. In some bird species, groups of cells involved in seasonal behaviours die after they have performed their function, but are regenerated by neurogenesis as and when they are needed.
A variety of new cognitive neuroscience shows how our ability to ignore distractions - to "perceptually filter", in a sense - is based on a ventral attentional network, is related to working memory, and may be involved in putative inhibitory...
Humans are exquisitely social animals, and yet we're vulnerable to some pretty stunning flaws in social cognition. Unfortunately, most of these flaws are on full display during a presidential campaign. Consider the false rumor, which can influence our beliefs even...
A couple weeks ago I spoke at Downstate Medical Center in New York about some of my articles in the New York Times that revolve around how the mind evolved. We can learn from bacteria, fruit flies, hyenas, and our...
Some old, some new: The Reflection of Light Psychedelic Research Brain Stimulant Brain Mind & Society NeuroScene Neurodisorder Neurotonics The Neuroprotective Lifestyle Giovanna Di Sauro The Cortical Column Neurology Minutiae...
It's been recognized for a few years that drinking diet sodas can actually cause weight gain, since the phony sweetness of artificial sweeteners disrupts the "predictive relationship" between a sweet taste and caloric satisfaction. In other words, people drink a...
This article was originally posted on March 27, 2007 When we see a familiar face, or even a photo of a favorite car or pet, we're often flooded with memories from our past. Sometimes just seeing a person or object...
This morning, while I was riding the bus to campus, I checked my email on my phone (man, I love that thing), and had a cognitive psychology topic alert from ScienceDirect. There were only three papers in the alert, but...
Researchers report today that human stem cells can rescue mice from an otherwise fatal neurological condition caused by the brain's inability to conduct nervous impulses. The findings, published in the journal Cell Stem Cell, raise the possibility of cell transplantation...
dmAgent: "So, Postdoc B, what'd BigCheez have to say to you today" PdB: "Huh. Now that you mention it this is the first time BigCheez has ever directly smiled at me..." I don't really get the phenotype myself. My type...
Not long ago we discussed work led by Deena Skolnick Weisberg showing that most people are more impressed by neuroscience explanations of psychological phenomena than plain-old psychology explanations. Talking about brains, it seems, is more convincing than simply talking about...
Related to the question of why there is a gap between the genders in math and the sciences is whether there are possible means of remedy. With respect to possible remedies it is often a good idea to look internationally...
This is funny - I start reading interesting stuff, really stuff that I find catchy regardless of where I work....and it's all from PLoS ONE! We rock! The journal that some people regard as a repository for "boring, incremental stuff"...
A new study aimed at confirming the region of the brain that is important in detecting sarcasm may open the door for new diagnostic tools in detecting mental illness, according to an article in The New York Times....
Over at Neurophilosophy, Mo has an excellent summary of a drug in Phase II clinical trials that tries to treat depression by up-regulating neurogenesis. In other words, it wants to ease your sadness by giving you more new brain cells....
Imagine listening to a piece of music, and perceiving a rattle of pots and pans instead of the harmony of the combined component sounds; or developing an insatiable desire to play the piano after being struck by lightning; or...
A caterpillar's life is not an easy one. The plants that it eats make toxins to make it sick. Birds swoop in to pluck it away and feed it to their chicks. But the most horrific threat comes from wasps...
There are 56 new articles published in PLoS ONE a few minutes ago. Please comment, rate and send trackbacks. Here are some of my personal favourites of the week: East Learns from West: Asiatic Honeybees Can Understand Dance Language of...
MIT Tech Review reports that a San Diego-based pharmaceuticals company BrainCells Inc. is carrying out a phase II clinical trial to test the efficacy of a neurogenesis-stimulating compound as a treatment for depression.It has been known, for about 20 years,...
Thank you Vaughan at Mind Hacks for saving me another long-winded rant about this subject. Vaughan takes an article in the NYTimes to task for suggesting that sarcasm "resides" in particular areas of the brain: Finally, to say that sarcasm...
Take a look at the short movie I've linked below (Click on the picture to play. QuickTime required). The movie shows a virtual gripping device (two red balls) lifting rectangular objects and placing them on a conveyor belt. Do you...
""The Great Wall of China's attractive, but he's too thick - my husband is sexier." So says Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, whose surname translates to English as "Berlin Wall." The Telegraph resurrected Frau Berliner-Mauer's fascinating case of objectum-sexual in a news of...
Is your right parahippocampal gyrus feeling a little tired? Then maybe you should stop being such a sarcastic smart ass. It turns out that this obscure brain area, tucked deep inside the right hemisphere, is largely responsible for the detection...
This month's issue of IEEE Spectrum Online magazine contains an excellent special report on the singularity, the hypothetical point in time at which technology will be sufficiently advanced so as to enable the human race to transcend their biology and...
This is actually pretty much the most useful and accurate infographic I've ever seen in my entire life. Thank goodness this appears on an article highlighting the brain region responsible for decoding sarcasm. Now that you've seen this amazing...
Evolution Of An Imprinted Domain In Mammals: The normal human genome contains 46 chromosomes: 23 from the mother and 23 from the father. Thus, you have two copies of every gene (excluding some irregularity in the pair of sex chromosomes)....
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the headquarters of the Stasi (the East German secret police) were found to contain a large room in which many thousands of "smell jars" were stored. Each jar contained an odour...
Look at the following image. Look in particular at squares A and B. A appears to be dark grey, B appears to be white or whitish. But in fact, they are the same exact color. Don' t believe it? Me neither! Or at least, I...
The link below will take you to a short movie (QuickTime Required). You'll see a series of seven easy addition problems, which will flash by at the rate of one every two seconds. Your job is to solve the problems...
What psychological phenomenon do you believe in but cannot prove? I'd have to go with birth order. Having grown up with three siblings, I can't help but be convinced that my birth order (I'm the second oldest) has had a...
Here is an interesting approach to fighting Alzheimer's disease: use adjuvants to activate microglia in the nasal cavity. Frenkel et al. publishing the Annals of Neurology show that the administration of an adjuvant called Protollin into the nasal cavity of...
I've got an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on a phenomenon that's always fascinated me: the tip-of-the-tongue moment. Late in 1988, a 41-year-old Italian hardware clerk arrived in his doctor's office with a bizarre complaint. Although he could...
This email from the owner of the website explains: Gliocast is a set of software tools for visualizing fiber tracts. The emphasis is on the 3D display technologies. Gliocast includes a rudimentary model for tumor growth, but more physically...
According to the Daily Telegraph, the new chief executive of the Independent Schools Commission, a former Rear Admiral called Chris Parry, believes that "children will learn by downloading information directly into their brains within 30 years."The article continues that Parry...
News from SCONC (Science Communicators of North Carolina): On Thursday, June 5 at 7 p.m. in the Banquet Hall of the Morehead Planetarium in Chapel Hill, NC: Public Lecture: The Beautiful Mind: Breakthroughs and Breakdowns of the Brain, with Dr....
Why Are Computational Neuroscience and Systems Biology So Separate?: Despite similar computational approaches, there is surprisingly little interaction between the computational neuroscience and the systems biology research communities. In this review I reconstruct the history of the two disciplines and...
SciCurious has written an interesting post about Sigmund Freud's experiments with cocaine. Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, was also a pioneer of psychopharmacology; as well as being one of the first to scientifically investigate the properties and effects of cocaine,...
Encephalon 46 is now online at The Neurocritic's blog, and contains lots of fantastic neuroscience blogging, including posts on Senator Ted Kennedy's brain tumour, phantom supernumery limbs, and anti-drug vaccines.The previous edition, at PodBlack Blog, also contains plenty of good...
A few weeks ago, Greta got a new iPod. I was, naturally, interested to see how it worked since it was supposed to be the latest technology, but Greta would hardly let me touch it: "It's mine, and I want...
I never quite understood the whole NCAA pool thing, or fantasy leagues for that matter. In a non-professional gambling environment the chances of you winning are pretty much chance. You've all heard about the girl picking her teams based...
Every science goes through several distinct phases. First, there is the dissection phase. The subject is broken apart into its simplest possible elements. (As Plato put it, "nature is cut at the joints, like a good butcher.") For neuroscience, this...
I had the privilege of seeing Hamlet last night at Shakespeare in the Park. I say the privilege because the production was as usual excellent. For those of you who don't know, it is a New York tradition for the...
Today in PLoS Genetics: a nice review of some interest to my readers: When Clocks Go Bad: Neurobehavioural Consequences of Disrupted Circadian Timing by Alun R. Barnard and Patrick M. Nolan: Progress in unravelling the cellular and molecular basis of...
In the Journal of Circadian Rhythms: A new approach to understanding the impact of circadian disruption on human health (pdf): Background Light and dark patterns are the major synchronizer of circadian rhythms to the 24-hour solar day. Disruption of circadian...
I have been wondering. Do all religious explanations of Creation of the world necessarily involve narcissism and incest? If everything comes from god, Creation is an act of incest beginning with god's own self. Is that why Thomas Aquinas and...
Let's be morbid, shall we? Van de Putte D, Ceelen W, Gillardin JM, Pattyn P, de Hemptinne B. Attempted Suicide by Auto-Injection of Polyurethane (PU) Foam: Report of a Case. J Trauma. 2007 Jun 1; [Epub ahead of print] No...
Neuroscientists at the University of Pittsburgh report that they have successfully trained monkeys to feed themselves using a robotic arm controlled by a brain-computer interface (BCI). The study has been covered extensively in the media, and I've written quite...
Gestalt theory hit the psychology world by storm in the 1920s, and the Gestalt school's unquestioned leader (though probably not the originator of the concept) was Max Wertheimer. While many people have an intuitive understanding of the concept of "gestalt" as the essence or overall meaning of something, they may not be as aware of the Gestalt school's principles, which were laid down by Wertheimer and others in very specific and concrete ways.
Today we consider the work of Millicent Washburn Shinn, one of the first women admitted to the University of California, Berkeley (in 1874), and the first to earn a Ph.D. there. In 1890, her niece Ruth was born, and Shinn spent hours carefully observing the child's every behavior. This "large mass of data" became the basis for a book that was welcomed by the scholars of the day, The Biography of a Baby, which, while not the first of its kind, certainly was one of the most thorough scientific accounts of a baby's cognitive and physical development in its time.
Just as we learn of favorable studies about rTMS (see yesterday's post on this blog), studies that suggest that ECT could be surpassed, the ECT camp fires again. A new study by Sackeim indicates that a new form of ECT...
New research shows that a protein found in green algae can partially restore visual function when delivered into the retina of blind mice. The work brings us one step closer to a genetic therapy for various conditions in which the...
Encephalon #46 is up at the Neurocritic. My favorite: if you haven't read Chris's post how on hyperbolic discounting reflects distorted time perception, you need to. It is genius....
Inspired by this post, we've decided to devote a week to the analysis of studies from the history of psychology. Today's post discusses a small fraction of the work done by Hermann Ebbinghaus, a pioneer in the study of memory....
In this poster, Bastos, Mullen and colleagues show that they can analyze electrical oscillations on the scalp of human subjects and predict how quickly they will respond in a simple target detection task. They do this by an interesting method...
The body control on this guy is utterly insane: While there have been some interesting studies of dance and the brain, most of this research focuses on the learning of motor movements. (Not surprisingly, expert dancers exhibit increased activity in...
Last Sunday, I had an article in the Boston Globe Ideas section on the underlying causes of home field advantage. The Celtics are an extreme example of a sporting phenomenon known as home-field advantage: teams playing on their home field,...
Jonah posted an interesting video of Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) on The Frontal Cortex. That got me to wondering if there was anything new. In January 2007, the US FDA concluded that rTMS was safe, but they were unconvinced of...
A couple of days have passed and I had a lot of work-related stuff to catch up with, but I thought I better write a recap now while the iron is still hot and I remember it all. Here we...
This clever 2-minute film was produced by the Korean electronics firm Samsung, as part of their promotion for a new product called the SOUL mobile phone....
Here's a beautiful quote by the great neurophysiologist Sir Charles Sherrington (1857-1952), from his 1941 book Man on His Nature:Swiftly the brain becomes an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though...
You know, I keep trying to get away from this topic for a while. But, as Michael Corleone said in The Godfather, Part III, "Just when I thought I was out... they pull me back in." I suppose it is...
Good intentions, but poor judgment. But, now really: jail for contributing to the delinquency of minors? This zero-tolerance business has really gone too far.
Quick, solve this problem 3 + 5 * 7 = ? If you still recall high school algebra, you'll remember that you should be doing the multiplication problem first. So the answer would be 35 + 3, or 38. But...
Negative stereotypes about Blacks in the U.S. have declined dramatically since the 1930s -- practically no White person to will say that Blacks are lazy, or superstitious, or many other stereotypes, when these views were common 80 years ago. Yet...
Gene Mutations In Mice Mimic Human-like Sleep Disorder: Mutations in two genes that control electrical excitability in a portion of the brain involved in sleep create a human-like insomnia disorder in mice, UT Southwestern Medical Center researchers have found. The...
One of my two favourite ethicists has just got tenure. Now she can say what she really thinks. [I don't know who started the canard that ethicists are unethical. The two I know are very ethical indeed. Probably a...
The organization of the human prefrontal cortex (PFC) is a lasting mystery in cognitive neuroscience, but not for lack of answers - the issue is deciding among them, since all seem to characterize prefrontal function in very different but apparently...
I am going to start a category for the random, stupid things people believe you can get addicted to. Here is a good one: internet dating. A researcher at Queensland University of Technology in Australia argues that perceived popularity in...
Just a few quick notes about Michael Frese's talk, "Learning from Errors by Individuals and Organizations." Frese gives a rule: "You make about 3-4 errors per hour no matter what you're doing." If errors are so ubiquitous, maybe it makes...
This morning I attended a session on the Science of Learning, and heard a bunch of great talks. I was especially impressed by "There's Nothing so Practical as a Good Theory," by Robert Seigler. Siegler discussed his work with children's...
No matter how cutesy the acronim SAD is. Joseph reports on a study that links SAD to serotonin. But serotonin itself may not be necessary to understand how SAD works, though an intimate link between serotonin and melatonin (the former...
I like my Folder of Woo. Besides providing me endless fodder for this little weekly feature, my Folder of Woo also provides me nearly endless amusement. Sometimes, I'll just peruse it, looking at woo old and new, woo that's been...
Check it out: Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing...
Via Street Anatomy comes this recent case report from Acta Neurochirurgica, of a man who had a paintbrush stuck into his brain - bristly end first - during a fight, but didn't realize until 6 hours later, when he...
As I write this, Greta and I are on the plane to Chicago, to attend this year's Association for Psychological Science convention. We'll be participating in a symposium on Sunday, talking about Cognitive Daily and ResearchBlogging.org, but until then, we'll...
If you are one of the few of my readers who actually slogged through my Clock Tutorials, especially the difficult series on Entrainment and Phase Response Curves, you got to appreciate the usefulness of the oscillator theory from physics in...
"It has attained a certain mystique in the physical and biological sciences because it manages to be both rare and ubiquitous. Examples [...] are found in quasar luminosity, tide and river height, traffic flow, and human heartbeat..." (Gilden & Hannock)...
I have to admit, I retain some skepticism about the concept of Seasonal Affective Disorder. Research such as the topic of this post helps, though, to lend some credibility to the concept. It is true that exposure to bright...
The WBUR/NPR programme On Point has a very interesting interview with Jill Price (right), a 42-year-old woman from Los Angeles who has a "non-stop, uncontrollable and automatic" episodic memory.Known in the scientific literature as A.J., Price is the first documented...
(First posted on February 5, 2007) Last week I asked if you would be interested in my take on this paper, since it is in Serbian (and one commenter said Yes, so here it is - I am easy...
New research from Wharton and the Carlson School shows that a methodologically-appealing measure of impulsivity - hyperbolic discounting rate - may actually reflect a systematic "skew" in the way people perceive time. Previous work has shown that people tend to...
Cognitive Daily is a reflection of my teaching. In fact, one of the ways I pick articles for Dave to discuss on the blog is to pass along articles I've used in class. It has occurred to us that our...
Joan Acocella has an interesting article on the science of hangovers: Hangovers also have an emotional component. Kingsley Amis, who was, in his own words, one of the foremost drunks of his time, and who wrote three books on drinking,...
Iceland, apparently, is the happiest country on earth: Highest birth rate in Europe + highest divorce rate + highest percentage of women working outside the home = the best country in the world in which to live. There has to...
Hi folks. Before you all fall out of your chairs that I am, yes, in fact, blogging, just check out this gem of a story that lured me from the bowels of the UM medical complex. Apparently an African...
Ernst Mach is one of the more interesting of the nineteenth century polymaths. A physicist, he also kicked off positivism, and (I did not previously know) was an evolutionary epistemologist: Mach is part of the empiricist tradition, but he...
There are 61 articles published in PLoS ONE this week. Here are some of the highlights, look around for more and please comment, rate, and send trackbacks: Adaptive Evolution and Functional Redesign of Core Metabolic Proteins in Snakes: Adaptive evolutionary...
I got several e-mails yesterday about a new study about the molecular mechanism underlying circadian rhythms in mammals ("You gotta blog about this!"), so, thanks to Abel, I got the paper (PDF), printed it out, and, after coming back from...
Four representations of Phineas Gage, from Macmillan, M. (2006). Restoring Phineas Gage: A 150th Retrospective. J. Hist. Neurosci. 9: 46-66. [Abstract] Here's some more neurohistory from the Beeb: following on from last week's episode of In Our Time, which...
There's something a little scary to me about TMS. (I should note, though, that my fear is irrational: the technology is now extremely safe. Seizures are a very, very rare side-effect of TMS. Unless, that is, you already have a...
More antivaccinationist nuts get a voice in the Winona Daily News. The least they could do is to write a coherent sentence that's grammatically correct.
How do you raise "good kids"? It's one of the questions that plagues parents even before their kids are born. Although everyone's child can't be above average, we all want our kids to be nice to others, to "get along"...
This gallery is sweet! The Online gallery of modern and vintage psychiatric drug advertising has a large selection of some pretty scary old drug advertisements and packaging. Like these: I wonder what the people of the future are going to...
Actually, I'll let you read the press release first and then we'll decide if 'religious leaders' and the damn hippies know something we don't ;) Religious leaders have contended for millennia that burning incense is good for the soul....
Daniel Drezner links to two articles with alternative interpretations to the gender gap in science. Both are looking at a female exodus from hard sciences, but explain it in different ways. First, Lisa Belkin in the NYTimes takes the angle...
Johann Hari decides to take Provigil (aka viagra for the brain) and reports back on the results: I sat down and took one 200mg tablet with a glass of water. Then I pottered about the flat for an hour, listening...
If scientists working in biology or a related field like psychology want to get attention, they will say something like this: Darwin was wrong, or made a mistake, or is insufficient to explain X, where X is whatever they...
Got your attention, right? That's the title of a paper by Penn, Holyoak, and Povinelli in April's Behavioral and Brain Sciences. Well, the full title is "Darwin's mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds." Here's the abstract: Over...
boingboing gadgets has uncovered the most brilliant brain game ever. Not only does this enhance your cognitive abilities with use, it can enhance your emotional intelligence! wow! Through mindless manipulation of pretty colors and funny shapes you too can be...
Really?! Come on... Molecular and statistical genetic studies in 15 Finnish families have shown that there is a substantial genetic component in musical aptitude. Musical aptitude was determined using three tests: a test for auditory structuring ability (Karma Music test),...
Hacker and writer Joshua Klein is fascinated by crows. (Notice the gleam of intelligence in their little black eyes?) After a long amateur study of corvid behavior, he's come up with an elegant machine that may form a new bond between animal (repost)...
Earlier this year, during the National Sleep Awareness Week, I wrote a series of posts about the changes in sleep schedules in adolescents. Over the next 3-4 hours, I will repost them all, starting with this one from March 26,...
Whilst preparing for the comprehension exam - which I sat yesterday, and which went well - I referred to this piece I wrote in March last year, about a genetic method which employs a modified rabies virus for labelling all...
'Mitochondrial Eve' Research: Humanity Was Genetically Divided For 100,000 Years: The human race was divided into two separate groups within Africa for as much as half of its existence, says a Tel Aviv University mathematician. Climate change, reduction in...
This kind of ignorant bleating makes me froth at the mouth every time - I guess it is because this is my own blogging "turf". One of the recurring themes of my blog is the disdain I have for people...
Greta and I have very different approaches to technology. I like to read all the latest technology news and learn about new products; she just buys the products she needs. That's not to say she doesn't like technology: she has...
Monarch Butterflies Help Explain Why Parasites Harm Hosts: It's a paradox that has confounded evolutionary biologists since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859: Since parasites depend on their hosts for survival, why do they harm them?...
My regular readers are probably aware that the topic of adolescent sleep and the issue of starting times of schools are some of my favourite subjects for a variety of reasons: I am a chronobiologist, I am an extreme "owl"...
So what's the story with the big O? Scientific American has the full story. Here's the main points to get you warmed up though: Principles of Pleasure * Sexual desire and orgasm are subject to various influences on the...
Well I'm finally done with VSS it was long and stressful... but mostly fun. Here's a couple pictures... After all this fun I had to get my game face on and do a talk. I've given a lot of...
Four years ago this week, leading neuroscientists and psychologists convened at Columbia University for the Brain and Mind Symposium, "to discuss the accomplishments and limitations of reductionist and holistic approaches to examining the nervous system and mental functions". Speakers included...
The secret to winning in the NBA playoffs this year is to play on your own court: teams at home are 20-1. At first glance, this makes little sense. It's much easier to understand why football teams (the noise can...
D.T. Max has an absolutely fascinating article in a recent New Yorker on the molecular gastronomist and chef Grant Achatz and his battle with tongue cancer. While Achatz's doctors initially insisted that he get his tongue surgically removed, the chef...
Do you live in Brooklyn? Or a subway ride from SUNY Downstate Medical Center? Are you free Tuesday May 20 at 4 pm? Then swing over for a lecture I'll be giving on the evolution of mind. Here's a copy...
This morning I went into the darkest room in our house (the kids' bathroom), closed the door, and turned off the lights for 5 minutes. There was enough light coming in through the crack in the door that after a...
To sleep or not to sleep: the ecology of sleep in artificial organisms: We systematically varied input parameters related to the number of food and sleep sites, the degree to which food and sleep sites overlap, and the rate at...
Many people are talking about David Brooks' new column, The Neural Buddhists. First, I think much respect should be given to Brooks for introducing science into his column; too much punditry today is informed by seat of the pants introspection...
In 2001, Yamamoto and Kitazawa showed that the perception of temporal order can be reversed when subjects cross their hands. Subjects closed their eyes and had their hands mechanically touched in quick succession (with stimuli separated in time by a...
One of the delicious ironies of memory is that, even when our recollections are utterly false, they still feel true. Consider this wonderful tale from the upcoming season of This American Life (I've loved the first two episodes, by the...
I admire David Brooks for trying to expand the list of topics written about by Times columnists. (To be honest, I'm a little tired of reading about presidential politics.) His latest column, on "The Neural Buddhists," tries to interject modern...
Well that is reassuring: A new University of Alberta study of almost 600 of its graduates (ages 20-29 years old) tracked mental health symptoms in participants for seven years post-graduation and looked at how key events like leaving home and...
The origin and early evolution of circadian clocks are far from clear. It is now widely believed that the clocks in cyanobacteria and the clocks in Eukarya evolved independently from each other. It is also possible that some Archaea possess...
There are 57 articles this week in PLoS ONE - look around for yourself, these are my own picks: The Secret World of Shrimps: Polarisation Vision at Its Best: Animal vision spans a great range of complexity, with systems evolving...
College Student Sleep Patterns Could Be Detrimental: A Central Michigan University study has determined that many college students have sleep patterns that could have detrimental effects on their daily performance. When Following The Leader Can Lead Into The Jaws...
Announcing the 34th annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology June 26-29, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA Registration is now open; deadline Thursday, June 5 -- 12:00pm EST Note that early registration is suggested, as the reserved...
Tempt Fate, and Take a Risk Superstition Obstacle Course Opens Friday, June 13th Are You Scared? June 13 - September 1, 2008 For many people, Friday the 13th suggests bad luck -- but is it really tempting fate or...
David Brooks has a fairly goofy column in today's New York Times. Apparently “hard-core materialism” is on its way out: Over the past several years, the momentum has shifted away from hard-core materialism. The brain seems less like a cold...
There is an interesting and important follow up related to a TED Talk that a lot of readers of this blog found interesting (Sherwin Nuland: A history of electroshock therapy) at The Corpus Callosum: Grappling With Stigma: Influence of Social Media A while back, Gred...
Jim was an early, confident walker. Greta likes to say that he didn't learn to walk, he went straight to running. By the time he was about 16 months old, he could already outrun his already-pregnant mother. Nora, on the...
One of the latest additions (just two days ago, I think) to the Directory of Open Access Journals is a journal that will be of interest to some of my readers - The Open Sleep Journal. The first volume has...
Your ability to control thought and behavior relative to your peers - a set of capacities known as "executive functions" - is almost entirely genetic in origin, according to a newly in-press paper from Friedman et al. Over 560 twins...
Much of the biological research is done in a handful of model organisms. Important studies in organisms that can help us better understand the evolutionary relationships on a large scale tend to be hidden far away from the limelight of...
Michael L. Anderson emailed to inform me about this forthcoming event: Announcing the 34th annual meeting of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology June 26-29, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA Registration is now open; deadline Thursday, June 5 -- 12:00pm...
The intoxicated brain knows no fear. Apparently, that's why people loosen-up when drunk and will happily talk to fearsome strangers. That's funny, 'coz someone I know will go completely quiet when drunk and will simply stare at you like you...
We're pretty good at remembering objects in a complex scene. We can even remember those objects when we move to a different location. However, the research so far has found that memory for the original view is a little better...
The tragedies are so vast they are incomprehensible: thousands are dead after a powerful earthquake in China while up to half a million people in Myanmar may die as a result of post-cyclone epidemics. How does the mind grapple with...
Time pervades our understanding of the world - we use it to coordinate our movements, to perceive motion, to plan our behaviors, and perhaps even to understand causality. But it is an under-appreciated factor in cognition. Even in the domain...
Right now I'm about to, or already am, standing at a podium to give a talk at the Vision Sciences Society annual meeting (better known as VSS) in Naples Florida. Wish me luck! Here's the exciting abstract: Popping in and...
A while back, Gred Laden and Dr. Shock independently linked to a remarkable video. In it, a famous author-surgeon-professor reveals that he had had an episode of severe depression. Moreover, he underwent treatment with electroconvulsive therapy. It worked, he got...
In Thursday's episode of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time, presenter Melvyn Bragg was joined by Vivian Nutton, Jonathan Sawday and Marina Wallace (professors of the history of medicine, English and art, respectively) for a fascinating discussion about...
Last week we asked our readers who their most important mentors were. We didn't mention it at the time, but the survey was inspired by the headlines that week about Barack Obama's pastor's seemingly unpatriotic sermons, and how those sermons reflected on Obama. Do pastors really have a huge influence on people's lives? Can we actually evaluate a presidential candidate based on something his pastor says?
Young People Are Intentionally Drinking And Taking Drugs For Better Sex, European Survey Finds: Teenagers and young adults across Europe drink and take drugs as part of deliberate sexual strategies. New findings reveal that a third of 16-35 year...
Who says religion and science can't go together well? I just read an interesting paper by Kinzler et al.(1), published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with apparent Biblical inspiration (OK, maybe not), as it...
Language Log has a fascinating article about creole languages and birdsongs: Zebra finches are among the songbirds who learn their songs by imitating adults, just as human children learn their language by interaction with those who already know it. Male...
We have known for some time that there is a double dissociation (I will define that term in a minute) between location and identification in the visual system. Neuroscientists speak of a "where" pathway that goes from the primary visual...
Our ability to suppress unwanted thoughts and behaviors is thought to be related to a process known as "inhibition," whereby ventrolateral regions of prefrontal cortex (vlPFC) actively suppress inappropriate representations. A 2001 study by Sakagami et al. recorded firing data...
... is a blogger on the paranormal and skeptical stuff. She has some nice posts on Women and superstition (parts one and two) and Skeptical Books for Children (parts one, two, three and four). Go check them and her...
Anton races home at speeds well in excess of the speed limit. He's rushing to beat his parents home so that he can hide their anniversary present so it will be a surprise. Suddenly, he hits a slick patch and...
Does the resolution or precision of human memory change with its available capacity? In other words, can you remember fewer items with greater precision than you can remember more items? Contradicting intuition, a new paper from yesterday's issue of Nature...
Why Face Symmetry Is Sexy Across Cultures And Species: In humans, faces are an important source of social information. One property of faces that is rapidly noticed is attractiveness. Research has highlighted symmetry and sexual dimorphism (how masculine or...
Your brain ... to explore the nature of the conscious mind. You are the teacher, and you've got a classroom full of reasonably well behaved students. Tell them: "I want you to close your eyes, and I'm going to ask you a question. ......
Ask almost anyone whether willfully deceiving another person -- lying -- is wrong, and they'll say it is. But probe a little deeper and most people will say there are some instances where lying is okay: lying to prevent a...
Complex cognition can be predicted by remarkably simple tasks. For example, the speed with which you choose one of two possible responses can reliably predict IQ. Some theories propose that this relationship is due to differences in something called "processing...
Over at Mind Matters, my other site, we just posted a rather interesting article on the ways in which ordinary cell phones can alter your patterns of brain activity, and even interfere with sleep. Here's Doug Fields: Hospitals and airplanes...
There are 56 new articles published in PLoS ONE this week and it was hard to make the picks as this seems to be a very, very good week with lots of cool papers. Here are some of the highlights...
In tomorrow's New York Times, I take a look at the evolution of intelligence. Or rather, I look at its flip side. Scientists and the rest of us are obsessed with intelligence--not just the intelligence of our own species, but...
In a piece reported on in New Scientist, Maurice Bloch has proposed another basis for religion: imagination. Because we can project ourselves and imagine the "transcendental" relation in social and personal relationships, we can imagine that there are agents...
If you've had a lot of musical training, you can probably tell the difference between a major and minor key. If you haven't had much training, even after having the difference explained to you, you're still not likely to be...
The Times recently had an article on the booming business of brain fitness: Decaying brains, or the fear thereof, have inspired a mini-industry of brain health products -- not just supplements like coenzyme Q10, ginseng and bacopa, but computer-based fitter-brain...
Last week's post on perceptual restoration in toddlers brought a lot of speculation from commenters. To answer some of the questions, I thought I'd elaborate a bit here on the phenomenon and how I created the demo. First, here's the...
It is, perhaps, the most nightmarish of neurological conditions: when the brain stem is selectively injured, a person can be perfectly self-aware and yet completely paralyzed, so that they lose control of virtually all voluntary muscles. The technical name of...
When teaching human or animal physiology, it is very easy to come up with examples of ubiqutous negative feedback loops. On the other hand, there are very few physiological processes that can serve as examples of positive feedback. These include...
This beautiful two-photon microscopy image, by Alanna Watt and Michael Hausser, shows a network of Purkinje cells in the cerebellar cortex. Named after the Czech anatomist who discovered them, Purkinje cells are the largest cells in the mammalian brain....
Only Americans, and, because this Clinton campaign stop was in a rural corner of the state, only small-town Americans, can be trusted to do what's right.
This April 09, 2006 post places another paper of ours (Reference #17) within a broader context of physiology, behavior, ecology and evolution. The paper was a result of a "communal" experiment in the lab, i.e., it was not included in...
This week's Casual Friday is about mentors. We're curious who constitutes the most important influence on our readers, and whether we can identify any patterns in the results. So we've created a brief study that we hope will answer our...
Delusions are the strangest things... Once, back in the day, when I was interning in Ted Kennedy's press office we got a call from a woman (this was a pretty usual occurrence) demanding to know why the CIA, et....
Salvia divinorum smoking is apparently popular with the kids these days. Drug Law Blog had a recent note on progress of a California Assembly bill AB 259 which: Provides that any person who sells, dispenses, distributes, furnishes, administers, gives, or...
If you're a pied babbler (Turdoides bicolor), you've got a bit to worry about while foraging. It's hard to keep watch for predators and eat your fill simultaneously, and trying to do both yourself would mean that you're either...
As bloggers and blog readers, we spend lots of time behind a computer. And while I don't recognize many of the cameos in this video, there are enough to convince me I should get out more. This is Episode 1....
I love antique anatomical drawings of the brain. I even have a couple in my office that I should probably take a picture of to show off to you guys. These illustrations from Japan are particularly interesting. According to Pink...
One of the amazing things about learning language is that children rarely hear language sounds in ideal acoustic environments. Maybe other people are talking in the background, or the dishwasher is running, or the TV is on. Yet somehow children...
Now that the boomers are entering their sixties, the problem of age-related cognitive decline is going to become a serious mental health issue. The aged brain often suffers from a bevy of symptoms, from memory loss to problems with concentration....
You probably realize by now that my expertise is in clocks and calendars of birds, but blogging audience forces me to occasionally look into human clocks from a medical perspective. Reprinted below the fold are three old Circadiana posts about...
Albert Hofmann, the chemist who synthesized lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) in 1938 died of a heart attack on April 29, 2008 at the age of 102. Hofmann (Wikipedia entry) also discovered the hallucinogenic properties of LSD because of an accidental...
The man behind the amazing Contrast Asynchrony illusion has started a blog! Arthur Shapiro tells me he has a backlog of literally thousands of illusions. He promises to offer a new illusion every week, along with an explanation of the...
Microarrays have been used in the study of circadian expression of mammalian genes since 2002 and the consensus was built from those studies that approximately 15% of all the genes expressed in a cell are expressed in a circadian manner....
For some reason many people are in denial about cannabis dependence and wish to assert that there is no such thing, or if there is, it is somehow of lesser importance than is dependence on other substances of abuse. There...
Humans are exceptionally good at recognizing faces they've seen before. It doesn't take much study to accurately recall whether or not you've seen a particular face. However, this pattern breaks down when faces come from unfamiliar races. A white person...
My exams begin on Friday, so things are going to be pretty quite around here until around mid-May. I will post various bits and pieces over the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime, here are some interesting links...
A soon to be released book, The Thinkers Of The Jungle, by Gerd Schuster, Willie Smits and Jay Ullal, contains this first-ever image of an orangutan attempting to hunt fish with a spear. The picture was taken in Borneo on Kaja, an island where rescued apes are rehabilitated.
The Times has an interesting review of two new books that discuss the oft cited link between mental illness and artistic creativity. It's all too easy to indulge in cliched overgeneralizations about the thin line separating madness and genius, but...
This is going to be a challenging post to write for several reasons. How do I explain that a paper that does not show too much new stuff is actually a seminal paper? How do I condense a 12-page Cell...
It is no secret (although a much ignored fact) that journals will have a certain "type" of article that they are looking for that has little to do with objective scientific quality. Certain topics are "hot" while others that are...
(First posted on July 21, 2006) Some plants do not want to get eaten. They may grow in places difficult to approach, they may look unappetizing, or they may evolve vile smells. Some have a fuzzy, hairy or sticky surface,...
This is pretty funny. Check out Dr. Mezmer's Dictionary of Bad Psychology. Some of my favorites: Evolutionary Psychology: A branch of psychology, unwittingly inspired by Charles Darwin and Rudyard Kipling, that describes how we behave through made up stores that...
Thank you for "choosing" to read Encephalon #44 here at Cognitive Daily. Every two weeks, Encephalon "selects" the best psychology and neuroscience blog posts from around the blogosphere, giving readers the chance to "decide" which ones they'd like to investigate...
You probably thought this post was going to be about how Meredith Grey (or perhaps McDreamy?) is a neuroscientist, or how Shonda Rhimes (the creator of Grey's Anatomy) anticipated some surprising discovery of modern neuroscience. Alas, I have no such...
Chad wrote a neat history of (or should we say 'evolution of') clocks, as in "timekeeping instruments". He points out the biological clocks are "...sort of messy application, from the standpoint of physics..." and he is right - for...
I see so much in Minnow that reminds me of myself as a child. She's enthralled by books and loves to put things into containers in a very particular (mysterious) order often stopping to take things out and then put...
In the thread on the recent debate between Winston and Dennett, I said that I thought the greatest threat to scientific progress and rationality was antimodernism, which was not always religious. Here, I'm going to elaborate on that cryptic...
CogDaily will be hosting Encephalon tomorrow. There's still time to make your submissions -- just send an email to encephalon.host -- @ -- gmail -- . -- com (remove dashes). We should be able to include any submissions received before...
Considering I've been writing textbook-like tutorials on chronobiology for quite a while now, trying always to write as simply and clearly as possible, and even wrote a Basic Concepts And Terms post, I am surprised that I never actually defined...
There's a fun little test over at the BBC: Spot the fake smile (via Green Ideas). Try to spot the difference between fake smiles and real smiles! I got 17 out of 20. It helps to understand the research about...
Last week's Casual Friday study was all about money. The basic question was simply what it means to be rich -- how much income and net worth does it take before you consider someone to be wealthy? We received over...
Life is complex. The way a living system works can be described in a series of increasingly refined models, each fleshing out details of the previous model. Typically, description at one level raises questions about what is happening at the finer level. These questions induce...
Razib calls my attention to this new Nature study on the genetic variation underlying the stress response. The researchers focused on neuropeptide Y, an endogenous anxiolytic (it's like an anti-anxiety drug naturally produced by the brain) which is released in...
Given the amount of time I've spent writing about academic issues this week, it's only fitting that the science story getting the most play is about math education. Ed Yong provides a detailed explanation, and Kenneth Chang summarizes the work...
This post (written on August 13, 2005) describes the basic theory behind photoperiodism and some experimental protocols developed to test the theory....
Genetic variation in human NPY expression affects stress response and emotion: Understanding inter-individual differences in stress response requires the explanation of genetic influences at multiple phenotypic levels, including complex behaviours and the metabolic responses of brain regions to emotional stimuli....
Nurture Over Nature: Certain Genes Are Turned On Or Off By Geography And Lifestyle, Study Suggests: Score one for the nurture side of the nature vs. nurture debate, as North Carolina State University geneticists have shown that environmental factors such...
Although not all games are equal, there's plenty of evidence that playing some violent video games can cause aggressive real-world behavior. Sites like addictinggames.com offer popular games whose sole point is to play the role of a hit-man or even...
This post (click on the icon) was originally written on May 07, 2005, introducing the topic of neuroendocrine control of seasonal changes in physiology and behavior....
ScienceBlogs.de, our German counterpart, is featuring an English-language interview with Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel: Pertinent to Tuesday's post, he discusses free will, and also drug treatment for behavior disorders, the unification of the sciences, and Sigmund Freud....
(I have been meaning to post this for about two weeks, so if it is a bit dated forgive me.) Dyslexia is a learning disability characterized by slower reading skills acquisition, and it is associated with certain structural abnormalities in...
This is the sixth post in a series about mechanism of entrainment, running all day today on this blog. In order to understand the content of this post, you need to read the previous five installments. The original of this...
The NYTimes has a great interview with Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert: What we've been seeing in my lab, over and over again, is that people have an inability to predict what will make us happy -- or unhappy. If you...
Do we have free will? While some may see the question as trivial, it's a challenging topic that has been actively debated for centuries. Whether or not you believe a god is involved, a case can be made that free...
Crazy stuff, courtesy of John Tierney: The natural impulse to stop holding your breath (typically within 30 seconds or a minute) is not because of an oxygen shortage but because of the painful buildup of carbon dioxide. Mr. Blaine said...
The fact that there is a real name associated with this blog, and that you can Google me to your heart's content does not mean that you know me any better than if I signed all my blog posts with some preposterous Internet pseudonym.
This is a summary of my 1999 paper, following in the footsteps of the work I described here two days ago. The work described in that earlier post was done surprisingly quickly - in about a year - so I...
Our German counterparts at ScienceBlogs.de have produced this 21-minute video of an interview they did with neuroscientist Eric Kandel, who won the 2000 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of...
Speaking of the senses, it's always fascinating what happens when that sensory spigot is turned off, so that the cortex is suddenly filled with silence. Jad Abumrad, the co-host of Radio Lab (download their new season!), recently spent some time...
In honor of National Poetry Month, which always struck me as a very bizarre month (is poetry less essential in the other eleven months of the year? And why April?), I thought I'd post a selection of some poetry on...
A while back, a guy named Lyle Rossiter wrote a book, The Liberal Mind: The Psychological Causes of Political Madness. I haven't read the book, so this is one of those posts that is less than fully authoritative. Perhaps...
One of the important questions in the study of circadian organization is the way multiple clocks in the body communicate with each other in order to produce unified rhythmic output....
Mighty Microbes: Bacteria Filaments Can Bundle Together And Move Objects 100,000 Times Bacterium's Body Weight: Researchers from The University of Arizona and Columbia University have discovered that tiny filaments on bacteria can bundle together and pull with forces far stronger...
The third post in the series on entrainment, first written on April 10, 2005, starts slowly to get into the meat of things...As always, clicking on the spider-clock icon will take you to the site of the original post....
Currents carried by sodium and potassium ions through the membrane of the giant axon of Loligo. Get more documents Docstoc is a useful tool for sharing PDFs, PowerPoint presentations and Word and Excel documents. It can also be used...
One of the assumptions in the study of circadian organization is that, at the level of molecules and cells, all vertebrate (and perhaps all animal) clocks work in roughly the same way. The diversity of circadian properties is understood to...
Here is a different approach to measuring brain activity in humans. Researchers in Japan are placing a sheet of electrodes inside the skull but on top of the cortex. Researchers at Osaka University are stepping up efforts to develop robotic...
After spending all last weekend preparing our income tax return, I must have money on my mind. So this week's Casual Fridays study is about money. I don't want to tell you much more about it before you participate in...
Going into more and more detail, here is a February 11, 2005 post about the current knowledge about the circadian organization in my favourite animal - the Japanese quail....
Yesterday evening our three year old niece was playing with our four month old daughter Nidhi. She (niece) would leap towards Nidhi and shout. At first, Nidhi seemed slightly fearful of this leaping figure. At around the third try, Nidhi...
Last month, a paper was published in Nature, in which Kay et al(1) were able to guess which of their stimuli a person was seeing by looking at their fMRI scans. The model looked something like this (from Kay et...
If you saw a headline like this one in your local newspaper, you might first think it's some type of info-tisement sponsored by the floral industry. You'd probably be right, too. So what is this headline doing in Cognitive Daily?...
Nicholas Kristof has an excellent column on rationalizing, partisan affiliation and the Clinton/Obama race: If you're a Democrat, your candidate won in Wednesday night's presidential debate -- that was obvious, and most neutral observers would recognize that. But the other...
As traveling is not conducive to vigorous blogging (apart from posting travelogue pictures), I have asked a couple of friends to write guest posts here. The first to step up to the plate is Anne Marie who put together her...
This week's fax from the Center for Substance Abuse Research at the University of Maryland touches on an issue of continual interest, namely the determination of "how addictive" different drugs of abuse may be. As I have mentioned a time...
The 43rd Encephalon is available over at GNIF Brain Blogger. It's a fantastic collection of the best psychology and neuroscience blogging from the past two weeks. The next Encephalon will be hosted right here at Cognitive Daily on April 28....
Antioxidant Users Don't Live Longer, Analysis Of Studies Concludes: The vitamin industry has long touted antioxidants as a way to improve health by filling in gaps in diet, but a new review of studies found no evidence that the nutrition...
Nature News is reporting on a paper that just came out in PNAS. The paper, Coates and Herbert, correlates the daily profits and trading volatility of traders in London. They argue that changes in these hormone may be responsible for...
For more than 30 years, it has been a truism of social science that, once our basic needs are met, money doesn't buy happiness, or even upgrade despair. In one well-known survey, people on the Forbes 100 list of the...
On this day in 1943, Albert Hofmann (right), a chemist working for the Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz, discovered the psychedelic properties of LSD. Hofmann had actually first synthesized the drug 5 years earlier, as part of a research program in...
“Doctors think, ‘Well, of course she’s depressed — she’s dying of breast cancer,’” he said. I do see that kind of response sometimes, not just with regard to terminally ill patients. The physician does not think the depression should be...
Clicking on the link below will bring up an image in a new window (you may need to disable pop-up blockers to do this). The picture contains five rows of asterisks. Your job is to count them as quickly as...
Back to taking on the science literacy gender disparity... Correct answers to scientific literacy questions, by sex: 2006 (by percent) The continents have been moving their location for millions of years and will continue to move. (True) Male 85 Female...
Do you have an extra brain sitting around you want to donate? Do you want to trade brains with someone else but they are too far away to do it in person? Is your brain malfunctioning and you need to...
Over at Freakonomics, they invited several prominent thinkers to weigh in on a rather lofty question: How much progress have psychology and psychiatry really made? The answers are mostly interesting, with nearly everyone agreeing that the sciences of the mind...
Greg Mankiw linked to this article in the Washington Post by experimental philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah. Appiah points out that whether you think a tax system is equitable is determined partly by whether it is framed as a loss or...
This post from February 03, 2005 covers the basic concepts and terms on entrainment. This is also the only blog post to date that I am aware of that was cited in a scientific paper....
I've just got the feedback on my final piece of coursework, and it's better than I expected: A well written description of TrpM8 function in cold sensation. It is written clearly and in the context of experimental evidence. Some additional...
Zombies have invaded the philosophy blogosphere, and Brandon of Siris, in providing links to all the other stuff, made some pretty strong claims that I was hoping he'd expand upon. And fortunately he has, in a follow up post that's...
How often do you take time to reflect on the things you're grateful for? Once a month? Once a week, at church, perhaps? Maybe you say "grace" at mealtime every day. But even prayers that do express gratefulness, such as...
Raymond Tallis recently launched a broadside against the nascent field of neuroaesthetics, especially as applied to literature: A generation of academic literary critics has now arisen who invoke "neuroscience" to assist them in their work of explication, interpretation and appreciation....
I wrote this post back on February 02, 2005 in order to drive home the point that the circadian clock is not a single organ, but an organ system comprised of all cells in the body linked in a...
Sexing chicks is a very difficult task for naive people. Expert chick sexers are over 98% successful while the naive sexers can only do it with slightly above chance performance. Are you sufficiently confused/pissed yet? Ok ok... here's what's really...
Insects Evolved Radically Different Strategy To Smell: Darwin's tree of life represents the path and estimates the time evolution took to get to the current diversity of life. Now, new findings suggest that this tree, an icon of evolution, may...
Daniel Holz at Cosmic Variance has a beautifully written obit for John Wheeler. We are grateful for the time the great thinkers spend on us students. Wired has an article on the updating of the classic experiments by Benjamin...
Since everyone is posting about spiders this week, I though I'd republish a sweet old post of mine, which ran on April 19, 2006 under the title "Happy Bicycle Day!" I hope you like this little post as much...
Shift Work Linked To Organ Disease, Study Suggests: Disruption of an individual's natural sleep-wake cycle has been determined to be a contributing factor in the development of organ disease. The findings of U of T researchers were recently published in...
Today on bloggingheads, I talk to Gary Marcus, NYU psychologist and author of the new book Kluge, about all the telling ways in which our minds let us down, and what those shortcomings tell us about how it evolved....
". . .you got marijuana in my lead." Two great tastes that do not go great together. A major international alert to recreational users of marijuana/cannabis.
This post is a modification from two papers written for two different classes in History of Science, back in 1995 and 1998. It is a part of a four-post series on Darwin and clocks. I first posted it here...
A few months ago I blogged a paper, Individual differences in allocation of funds in the dictator game associated with length of the arginine vasopressin 1a receptor RS3 promoter region and correlation between RS3 length and hippocampal mRNA. Now these...
Meritage, America's brand of Bordeaux, makes a strong showing in notes from Erleichda's periodic wine-dinner tastings. So why didn't I do my postdoc with this guy???
This post about the origin, evolution and adaptive fucntion of biological clocks originated as a paper for a class, in 1999 I believe. I reprinted it here in December 2004, as a third part of a four-part post. Later, I...
Massive Study Of Madagascar Wildlife Leads To New Conservation Roadmap: An international team of researchers has developed a remarkable new roadmap for finding and protecting the best remaining holdouts for thousands of rare species that live only in Madagascar, considered...
Neuroscientist and inventor Christopher deCharms demos an amazing new way to use fMRI to show brain activity while it is happening -- emotion, body movement, pain. (In other words, you can literally see how you feel.) The applications for real-time fMRIs start with chronic pain...
Peter Hankins has written an excellent commentary criticizing the "positive comparisons" I make after contrasting brains with computers. Peter says: "... the concept of processing speed has no useful application in the brain rather than that it isn't fixed." While...
From the Harvard Division of Sleep Medicine: To honor the distinguished career of Professor Richard Kronauer, we will again award the Richard E Kronauer Prize for Excellence in Biomathematical Modeling. This is presented to a graduate student or post-doctoral fellow...
I saw this news story in Nature a couple days ago about finding a gene for "ruthlessness." I realized that I always say the same thing about these behavioral genetics stories -- stories where they claim to find a gene...
Thanks to two readers, the infamous Mike Witherspoon and the illustrious Tanya Poon, we have been alerted to two mega-sweet articles in the New York Times.
A great comment by Joel Kahn, who argues that we need a new science of human interaction, able to study what Durkheim referred to as "the conscience collective": Durkheim was obviously not the first to advance a notion of mind...
Something to think about next time those vanity pangs hit (Mac-users, I'm looking at you): new research published in the April 2nd Journal of Neuroscience reports that botulium (the toxin in the popular cosmetic Botox injections) can reach the...
This is the third in the series of posts designed to provide the basics of the field of Chronobiology. This post is interesting due to its analysis of history and sociology of the discipline, as well as a look...
In our little college town, one of the most popular fitness trends over the past few years has been yoga. Friends and acquaintances often suggest we join them in their favorite class, claiming not only that we'll get stronger and...
Did the Monte Hall problem, trip up a huge number of psychologists? So claims this New York Times article. For a good detailed explanation see here. For even more detail see the actual paper....
This is the second in the series of posts designed to provide the basics of the field of Chronobiology. See the first part: ClockTutorial #1 - What Is Chronobiology and check out the rest of them here - they...
Could it be that all this talk about how best to frame argument is pointless? It would if our capacity to change our minds in the face of new information was genetically determined....
Bats Play A Major Role In Plant Protection: If you get a chance to sip some shade-grown Mexican organic coffee, please pause a moment to thank the bats that helped make it possible. At Mexican organic coffee plantations, where...
A 58-year-old man from Cumbria has had electrodes implanted his brain in order to treat his compulsive gambling.Raymond Mandale (right), who suffers from Parkinson's, claims that his gambling habit was caused by a prescribed drug he had been taking to...
This post is perhaps not my best post, but is, by far, my most popular ever. Sick and tired of politics after the 2004 election I decided to start a science-only blog - Circadiana. After a couple of days...
The fact that infants are able to learn language without any help from adults can sometimes seem almost miraculous. Not only do children learn to speak and understand language completely on their own, active teaching of language skills seems to...
This is clearly false advertising. I don't see any pinging going on. This seems more like Pigeons playing pong. BF Skinner trains two pigeons to perform a chain of behaviors for the classroom demonstration. As a result, pigeons engage...
A number of people have noticed that after getting transplants their personality changes - and not only that- their personality changes to reflect the donors personality. ...though she was born and raised in Tucson, she never liked Mexican food. She...
I wasn't sure whether to put the quotes around "Ruthlessness Gene," or "Discovered." I suppose I could have just left them out entirely, but I have this urge to spice things up a bit with punctuation marks. Don't blame me...it's...
This is the first in a series of posts from Circadiana designed as ClockTutorials, covering the basics of the field of Chronobiology. It was first written on January 12, 2005:...
I'm going to be teaching Psych 100 next year and 200 or so lucky kids are going to luck out with me as an instructor. I'm just going to read them previously written blog posts all semester. Maybe I'll...
It looks like one the (if not the) most famous psych hospital in the world is going to be turned into a luxury hotel. The Bellevue Psych Hospital will go under construction some time in 2009. I know The...
What with the current debate about the use of "smart" drugs by academics, I thought it pertinent to republish this old piece from January of last year, about a bacterial toxin which has been shown to enhance fear conditioning and...
Go at it! These are sooooo....bloggable ;-) Computer Taught To Recognize Attractiveness In Women: "Beauty," goes the old saying, "is in the eye of the beholder." But does the beholder have to be human? Not necessarily, say scientists at Tel...
Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and...
Do you recognize this man? If so, you're not alone: over three-quarters of our readers were able to spot Richard Dawkins as he flashed by in a QuickTime video. So does this mean that the gatekeepers at Expelled who ejected...
My newest "Dissection" column is up at Wired.com. This time around, I take a look at how our brains relay signals. They turn out to do a terrible job. What's impressive is how they clean up their own mess. Check...
This is interesting because it illustrates nicely how psychopharmacology can be confusing. In this post, I try to show some of the ways in which this confusion can occur.
"Outing" gays and lesbians has always been a controversial practice, especially when done without the outed person's consent. But even when an individual outs him or herself, some people argue that outing is inappropriate because of the negative stereotypes that...
Good Sexual Intercourse Lasts Minutes, Not Hours, Therapists Say: Satisfactory sexual intercourse for couples lasts from 3 to 13 minutes, contrary to popular fantasy about the need for hours of sexual activity, according to a survey of U.S. and Canadian...
It now seems clear that we have grossly underestimated the cognitive abilities of other animals. In recent years, research has shown, for example, that African cichlids use simple logic to infer their social status, and that rodents can think abstractly...
Bora Zivkovic is coming to London on Wednesday April 9th, and several events have been organized for his visit, which I'll be going to. First, there'll be a behind-the-scenes tour of the Natural History Museum, starting at 4.30pm, followed...
How do neurons in your brain encode the diversity of stimuli present in the world? This is one of the questions that neuroscientists have to answers about how the brain works. The world holds an infinite array of things to...
New research has revealed some stunning courtship rituals of octopuses including flirting, hand holding, lover guarding, and even stalking the Myspace pages of potential mates.
There's no shortage of books on neurological patients with brain injuries, but Head Cases, the new book by Michael Paul Mason, is one of my recent favorites. (See here for the Times review.) Mason brings a unique perspective to the...
There are 47 articles published in PLoS ONE this week. Here are some of the coolest titles - you go and find your own. Ultrasonic Vocalizations Induced by Sex and Amphetamine in M2, M4, M5 Muscarinic and D2 Dopamine Receptor...
My broadband connection was down for the whole day yesterday, so I was unable to link to the latest edition of Encephalon, which is now up at Of Two Minds and is, apparently, hosted by none other than Paris Hilton.As...
Imagine yourself walking on a treadmill that starts at a reasonable pace: say, two and a half miles per hour. Every two minutes, the treadmill increases its speed by 0.2 mph: 2.7 mph, 2.9 mph, 3.1 mph, and so on....
There have recently been several articles in the media about brain enhancers, so-called Nootropics, or "smart drugs". They have been abused by college students for many years now, but they are now seeping into other places where long periods of...
While we're on the topic of animals that act like humans, consider this very sad, very famous case: Nim Chimpsky. Raised to be a human boy, when the funds ran out and Nim got to the age equivalent of...
Welcome to the most recent installation of the neuroscience blog carnival, Encephelon, here at Of Two Minds! Steve and I thought we would mix things up a little bit and let a guest blogger summarize the best brain blogging (submitted...
Researchers have known for some time that people are surprisingly accurate at visually judging distances to objects as far as 25 meters away. If you're allowed to briefly look at an object up to that distance away, then blindfolded, you'll...
Go read this post at Language Log. It is about race as a confound in interpreting psychological differences between the sexes: On the other hand, the samples used in sex-differences research are often quite small, and are not in general...
Farris et al. have a paper coming out in Psychological Science about how men tend to misperceive sexual interest in women. I get the sense that this is a big problem for many women. Any woman who has spent more...
This is from The Paris Review Interviews, Volume 1: Q: I would like to ask about your having said that you were very timid about beginning to write stories. Borges: Yes, I was very timid because when I was young...
Someone should really tell the NCAA tournament television commentators that "the hot hand" doesn't exist. I've gotten pretty tired of hearing these tired cliches about Texas going cold, or Stephen Curry catching fire yet again. Never has a cognitive illusion...
Watch the video under the fold, from Chang Mai in Thailand. There's a moment where you realise what the elephant is representing, and a shock that comes when you see that it is representing something. I don't know if...
American West Heating Nearly Twice As Fast As Rest Of World, New Analysis Shows: The American West is heating up more rapidly than the rest of the world, according to a new analysis of the most recent federal government...
At my other weblog a long post on religion: On the most recent bloggingheads.tv you can watch Paul Bloom explaining why he thinks the propensity for theism is an innate bias of our species. Several years back Bloom wrote a...
Cooperative Classrooms Lead To Better Friendships, Higher Achievement In Young Adolescents: Students competing for resources in the classroom while discounting each others' success are less likely to earn top grades than students who work together toward goals and share their...
After a week that left Scienceblogs reeling, a much needed reminder that we all ought to stop taking everything so seriously and laugh at ourselves too now and then.
There are some things I consider news, and some things I just consider "well, duh." File this study, which reported that high school students don't care that loud music damages their hearing, under the second category. Kids These Days...
Catherine Brahic reports on some interesting new research in an online article at New Scientist:""There are certain limits on swimming speed that are imposed irrespective of power," explains Iosilevskii. One of these is the frequency at which the swimmers can...
Shelley and I are hosting the new issue of Encephalon coming out this Monday morning (March 31st). We have some great contributions so far but we would love to get some more! So shoot an email to encephalon.host@gmail.com with...
Everyone and their mother (especially their mothers) have sent me a link to this brain lamp. I think I'm required to post it now. So here it is: According to Lervik Design: MYBrain. The table lamp A replica of the...
Being a (very) recent convert to the World of Mac, it is with great interest that I read a provocative report by Mindset Media comparing the behavior of Mac-owners vs. PC-owners--specifically, who was snobbier? Mindset surveyed 7500 Mac and...
Jennifer Ouellette reports from a month-long program on the anatomy, development and evolution of the brain, at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, with a fantastic post called Tools of the brain trade.Inspired by a talk given by Winifred Denk,...
[This post was originally published in November of 2006] Do you recognize the person depicted in this video? (QuickTime required; the movie is below the fold)...
My friend and colleague Neil Levy has inaugurated the first edition of a journal devoted to a new field, Neuroethics, the first edition of which is available to all for free here. Neil has a convincing introductory editorial, arguing...
Traditionally, the use of tools was believed to be restricted to humans and several other primate species, and, like language, was argued to be a major driving force behind the evolution of the human brain. However, this view is now...
Scientists at the Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) at Wood's Hole are attempting to train fish to do the stupidest thing possible, catch themselves in nets when beckoned by fishermen.
I was raised in a kosher household, which meant that I grew up convinced that bacon, lobster, pepperoni pizza and cheeseburgers were the promised land of food. (I assumed the banning of trafe was part of God's punishment for Eve...
We have TV psychics here in America that seem to do pretty darn well considering they are complete and utter frauds. In India they have a tantrik (black magician) who claims to be able to do things like cause a...
As noted in the sidebar here, I'm at the University of Michigan, involved in hearing research. So, I was so thrilled when it was brought to my attention that research from our institute, on the topic of cochlear implants,...
While I don't think there is such a thing as Internet Addiction, doing this quick test is fun: "Your Internet usage is causing significant problems in your life. You should evaluate the impact of the Internet on your life and...
Bunch of new, cool stuff in PLoS ONE today - here are the titles that piqued my curiosity (and you know the spiel: rate, note, comment, trackback): Australia's Oldest Marsupial Fossils and their Biogeographical Implications: We describe new cranial and...
A comparative neuroimaging study performed by researchers from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Oxford, provides clues to how human language evolved.In the past, it was believed that the increase in brain size...
I had no idea this many Americans were nocturnal: Twenty percent of American workers are night-shift workers, and the number is growing by about 3% per year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While the rest of society sleeps,...
Do you recognize the faces in this picture? Sure you do -- you could recognize the authors of this blog anywhere, even upside-down. It might take you just a bit longer to realize that something isn't quite right with the...
It would be a horrible cliché to begin a post about the reconstructive nature of autobiographical memory with a Proust quote, so instead I'll begin with something only slightly less cliché: beginning something about memory by talking about my own...
Circadian Remodeling of Neuronal Circuits Involved in Rhythmic Behavior: Circadian systems evolved as a mechanism that allows organisms to adapt to the environmental changes in light and dark which occur as a consequence of the rotation of Earth. Because of...
If you're into art, science and the brain, or enjoyed the recent MoMA show on design, then be sure to check out this Seed/MoMA/Parsons event on April 4th. The guest list is pretty fantastic, and includes everyone from Benoit Mandelbrot...
This coming Friday I'll be at the NISO Discovery Tools Forum in Chapel Hill, NC, to talk about ResearchBlogging.org, along with fellow ResearchBlogger and librarian Eric Schnell. Here's the abstract for our presentation: ResearchBlogging.org began simply as a way for...
GrrlScientist wrote a post last month about a potential genetic test for bipolar disorder. Read that first to get some background. Now, it turns out that a company is selling a testing kit that you can use yourself, in the...
This item just appeared on the news tubes, and I thought I'd pass it along. Distinguishing signs of early dementia from depression is tricky Mar 24, 2008, 3:07 GMT Berlin - It's often difficult to differentiate between early stages...
spending money on your friends and strangers? According to new research published in Science, spending money on other people has a more positive impact on happiness than spending money on oneself. This may come to a surprise to some, but...
A docudrama by Piet Hoenderdos on Douglas Hofstadter, philosopher and author of one of the greatest books ever published, Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid. [HT: Mental Floss]...
Giant Panda Mating Season At National Zoo: The 2008 giant panda mating season began Tuesday, March 18, at the Smithsonian's National Zoo. Female Mei Xiang (may-SHONG) and male Tian Tian (tee-YEN tee-YEN) attempted to mate throughout the day Tuesday....
Now this is some pretty interesting research. Here's the punch-line: Lap dancers earn more when they are fertile. Because ScienceBlogs readers may be unfamiliar with the gentlemen's club sub-culture, some background may be necessary to understand why this is an...
Recently, I saw a famous learning theorist -- perhaps one of the two most influential learning theorists in the last 40 or so years; if ΔV = αβ(λ - ΣV) means anything to you, you'll have narrowed it down to...
Everyone on ScienceBlogs seems to be talking about the latest Intelligent Design debacle. Apparently the extremely famous blogger PZ Myers attempted to attend a free screening of Expelled, a Ben Stein screed against "Darwinists." The security folks at the screening...
What Gets A Female's Attention, At Least A Songbird's: Male songbirds produce a subtly different tune when they are courting a female than when they are singing on their own. Now, new research offers a window into the effect this...
You know, just the other day, on this very blog, I swore I would never read another (cognitive) imaging paper again, but between then and now, I've read 5 of 6, so apparently my oath didn't take. It's sort of...
Over at Mind Matters, the expert blog I curate at Scientific American, we've had some really good posts lately. The most recent post, by Maryanne Wolf (author of that other Proust book on neuroscience, Proust and the Squid), Mirit Barzillai...
Point-light displays are an amazing demonstration of how the visual system creates order out of what initially seems to be a random pattern. Take a look at this short movie (QuickTime required). Just looking at the first frame, it might...
CNN has a story about a Navy neurologist who tried using mirrors to help soldiers from Iraq with phantom pain. Phantom pain is pain in amputees that is perceived to originate in the amputated limb. What causes it is not...
Mind Hacks discusses an editorial in the American Journal of Psychiatry that argues that the DSM-IV -- the diagnostic manual that psychiatrists use to diagnose mental disorders -- should include internet addiction. Vaughan is quite legitimately skeptical: Rather curiously, the...
A reader pointed me to this article, by Miriam Axel-Lute, about the Nonsensical Gyrations that Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield (of New Jersey) is going through to try to avoid paying for health care: What’s Healthy? If you were an...
First, watch this: Then read the poem it inspired, which was written by one of my favorite poets, Wislawa Szymborska: The Experiment As a short subject before the main feature - in which the actors did their best to make...
Image: Phisick Antique Medical CollectionThis highly detailed papier mache model of the human brain, which can be pulled apart to reveal labelled and numbered structures within, was created by the French physician Louis Thomas Jerome Auzoux (1797-1880).In the early...
I guess I should make it clear that, contrary to the title of my talk, Kanye West isn't really a neuroscientist. (Conveying irony via the internet isn't easy. Although it's still amusing to imagine him, in full rapper regalia, doing...
A couple of new carnivals for your reading pleasure - have a look at: Encephalon #41, the brain-blogging neuroscience carnival at Pure Pedantry Oekologie #15, the ecology carnival at one of my favourite blogs, The Other 95%....
My first introduction to psychology was in a required social science class in college over 20 years ago, reading Sigmund Freud's Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. The experience made me think I'd better be careful if I ever had kids: I...
OK, so where did this myth that feminists not only believe that there are no differences, across the population, between men and women, but also actively suppress scientific research that inevitably discovers such differences, come from? I mean, has anyone...
Last year, in a paper published in the journal Current Biology, Jill Pruetz and Paco Bertolani reported on their observation of ten different chimpanzees thrusting wooden "spears" into holes in trees 22 times over the course of more than a...
Kennedy Fraser had an illuminating profile of the novelist Pat Barker in a recent New Yorker (not online): Barker grew up with silent, wounded men. "And with talkative women, spinning stories," she said. "Stories with bits missing." She is a...
I once had a conversation with a doctor about Gulf War Syndrome (GWS). They said,"Its frustrating to treat something that you can't describe and that has no definite cause." However, the numbers of affected soldiers, coming back to the...
SciBarCamp is a gathering of scientists and others, in an effort to create connections across diverse interests, and, wherever possible, annoy the heck out of Larry Moran....
Encephalon has a particularly good crop of brainy goodness this issue, so let's get started. Mind Hacks looks at a fascinating case of a man with unstoppable hiccups because he has Parkinson's disease. Neuroscientifically Challenged looks at the possibility of...
The Sunday Times has an incredible story about Henry Marsh, a consultant neurosurgeon at St. George's Hospital in South London, who travels to a hospital in Kiev twice a year in his spare time to perform free operations using only...
There is a growing body of evidence that very young children -- too young even to talk -- still know plenty of words. When our kids were very young, it was quite clear that they knew the meanings of many...
A few weeks ago, John Lanchester wrote a thoughtful meditation on the intertwined nature of perception, smell and taste: A taste or a smell can pass you by, unremarked or nearly so, in large part because you don't have a...
What do you expect when you read of the "four most powerful and profound scientific theories" since the 17th century, but come across no mention of evolution by natural selection?
Well it's St. Patrick's Day and what better way to celebrate than taking pause to consider the science of BEER! According to History.com, Americans annually consume 21.6 gallons per capita. Today, you might be able to imbibe green-dyed beer at...
Early Bird Doesn't Always Get The Worm: Competing against older brothers and sisters can be tough work, as any youngest child will tell you. But new research from a biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill...
I'm about to head home from the conference; so I don't have much time to do one of my usual posts. However, there is a brief bit that irritated me regarding the Hannah Poling case, and it comes from Dr....
That's it! I'm never reading another imaging paper again, ever. OK, I might read one or two, and I might even post about them, but for now I'm telling myself, for my own sanity, that I'm never, ever, under any...
I really do love illusions of all sorts, in large part because they fit nicely into my narrative about the fallibility of human thought, but illusions are also great as windows into the ordinary working of our brains. For example,...
Music has been associated with drug use for decades -- from the flower children smoking weed at Woodstock to jazz great Charlie Parker getting hooked on heroin, it seems that every type of music has a drug that we associate...
Science writer Edmund Blair Bolles is in Barcelona at the Evolution of Language conference, and he's live-blogging like crazy. Fascinating stuff well worth checking out. [Link fixed-cz]...
Readers who have followed my little Friday bit of fun every week have probably, like me, at times sat in front of their computer screens, jaw drooping, a little bit of spittle starting to drip out of the corners of...
We here at Of Two Minds would like to announce a brand new training program that will help you improve your memory through the method of Long Term Potentiation. Because we use this fancy brain term you can be assured that the training is working.
Snakes Vault Past Toxic Newts In Evolutionary Arms Race: Snakes don't eat fugu, the seafood delicacy prepared from blowfish meat and famed for its poisonous potential. However, should a common garter snake wander into a sushi restaurant, it could fearlessly...
He was here last Tuesday for filming of a scientific documentary for PBS: He was doing important work on an upcoming PBS special "The Human Spark", a three-part documentary about what makes us human, due to air next year. Alda,...
There is an intersesting study being reported (at the annual Society for Research on Educational Effectiveness meetings in D.C.) on elementary school achievement gap dynamics. The study indicates that the usual "racial/ethnic" gaps are seen in early years, but that a lot of gap-closing happens...
Blowflies. They are nearly impossible to swat dead, because they are so good at getting out of the way, and they are very very fast. For this reason, the blowfly, while an annoying creature, is an excelent model for research into rapid sensory information processing....
Best-selling fantasy writer Terry Pratchett, who announced in December that he has a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's, has pledged $1million for research into the disease.In a speech given ealier today at the Alzheimer's Research Trust Netowrk Conference in...
Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding -- she studied and...
Psychologists often complain that neuroscientists get a disproportionate share of the glory when the mainstream media reports on their studies. It seems to some that an important new psychology study is often neglected or ignored entirely, while neuroscience studies of...
Remember high school? Social pressure and teen angst amid discovering sexuality and a changing physique... perhaps finding your first love while drunk on a cocktail of emotions that defy explanation? Heck, at 27, I'm still confused now and then. But...
Everyone and their mother is getting into the brain training game - researchers, the health care industry, video game companies, you name it! But... Every single one of them is a huckster trying to rip the elderly off (whether they...
Insect's Sensory Data Tells A New Story About Neural Networks: A group of researchers has developed a novel way to view the world through the eyes of a common fly and partially decode the insect's reactions to changes in the...
(AP Photo/Greek Culture Ministry, HO)This skeleton, exacavated recently in the town of Veria, some 75km west of Thessalonika, provides evidence that the ancient Greeks performed sophisticated neurosurgery. The remains, dated to the 3rd century A.D., belong to a woman...
Thanks to Natasha Dantzig for drawing my attention to this talk from last month's TED Conference in Monterey, California: Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a...
Aptly named by whoever started this viral email... Hmmm...what's that moose up to? The images below the fold are morally reprehensible, even by moose standards....
Evolutionary psychologist David Barash excuses the behavior of Eliot Spitzer on the grounds that monogamy is unnatural, an artificial construct of bourgeois civilization: One of the most important insights of modern evolutionary biology has been an enhanced understanding of male-female...
Like every kid who went on family outings to the NJ shore, I ended up coming home with any number of hermit crabs over the years. I'd make sure the sponge was wet, that they had food, that they were...
A few weeks ago I picked up a slew of old anthropology books, many of which were at least minimally concerned with figuring out what makes our species human (or what defines "Man," to put things in their historical context)....
A Christmas present, maybe? Maybe not. A "neurotheology" researcher called Dr Michael Persinger has developed something called the "God Helmet" lined with magnets to help you in your quest: it sounds like typical bad science fodder, but it's much more...
In pondering these things I ran across this fascinating New York Times >article from 2004, "Did Antidepressants Depress Japan," about the introduction of the concept of depression in Japan beginning in the late 1990s. Before then, the article asserts, Japanese culture concerned itself little with depression outside of professional psychiatry and medicine. But when drug companies started pushing antidepressants beginning in 1999, a cultural awareness of depression grew -- and with it, the number of people who considered themselves depressed.
It is well accepted that there are a few components to Alzheimer's risk: age (risk increases in old age), environment (severe head trauma, high cholesterol, obesity, or some drugs may increase risk), and genetics. A recent study published in...
A mother and baby pygmy sperm whale in New Zealand appeared disoriented this week, repeatedly stranding themselves on a sandbar off of Mahia Beach. After repeated attempts by the locals to guide the whales back to sea failed, the human rescuers were starting to get worried. All of a sudden, a well known, local dolphin named Moko appeared and seemed to communicate with the whales. Before long, Moko was guiding the whales back to sea!
XP13512 is an experimental new drug currently in phase III trials for the treatment of restless legs syndrome. I was reminded about this after seeing a post at sleepdoctor, and following the link to Sleep Expert, and browsing from there....
POSTDOCTORAL FELLOWSHIP OPPORTUNITY in SLEEP MEDICINE Charles A. Czeisler, Steven W. Lockley, Christopher P. Landrigan, Laura K. Barger Harvard Work Hours, Health and Safety Group Division of Sleep Medicine, Brigham & Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School The Harvard Work Hours...
There are 48 new articles published in PLoS ONE this week. Rate, comment, send trackbacks.... The Phylogeny of the Four Pan-American MtDNA Haplogroups: Implications for Evolutionary and Disease Studies: Only a limited number of complete mitochondrial genome sequences belonging to...
UCSD-TV, the local television station broadcast by the University of California at San Diego, has a series called Grey Matters, which is devoted to neuroscience.To date, fifteen full-length presentations have been produced for the series, all of which are availabe...
The association between sleep and memory performance has been relatively well-documented. Studies in animals and humans have shown memory deficits in both declarative and procedural memory associated with sleep deprivation. (The subject is slightly complicated because whether sleep deprivation affects...
It shouldn't take you long to notice what's wrong with this picture: Obviously Nora is defying gravity in this shot -- you can't help but notice it. But in your first glance at the photo, how quickly do you notice...
I've always been morbidly fascinated by examples of choking. It doesn't matter if it's Jean Van de Velde in the 1999 British Open, or Shaq at the free-throw line, there's something unbelievably poignant and nightmarish about watching a world-class performer...
It's not very far off. From MIT TR: Scientists can accurately predict which of a thousand pictures a person is looking at by analyzing brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The approach should shed light on how the...
This whole Spitzer affair got me thinking about the psychology of power. When you look around the world, it's clear that so many of our problems are due, at least in part, to abuses of power. From Mugabe to Putin,...
Over the past few days, it has been possible to catch the two "framing science" perpetrators jogging along San Francisco Bay under the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge. We haven't hung out in a while, so we had...
In today's issue of The New Yorker, John Lancaster reviews a new book called Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez.Olfaction (the sense of smell) is, as Lancaster notes, "a profound mystery". Why is it, for example, that...
I am hosting Encephalon next week on Monday (March 17th). If you would like to submit a neuroscience-related post to this carnival, email it to encephalon [dot] host {at} gmail [dot] com. I will be writing it on Sunday night,...
What makes children so cute? Is it their adorably soft skin? Their innocently mischievous smiles? Their oversized eyes and tiny little mouths? Why is it that some kids are singled out for TV commercials and child beauty pageants, while others...
This is crazy stuff: A new study finds that moths can remember things they learned when they were caterpillars -- even though the process of metamorphosis essentially turns their brains and bodies to soup. The implications of the PLOS study...
Cognitive Daily has a typically great review of some recent research connecting blood glucose levels and self-control: Matthew Gailliot, along with Baumeister and six other researchers, asked 103 psychology students to fast for three hours before watching a video [the...
This is photoshopped right?! Gosh I hope so! I'd be too embarrassed to take this little bugger for a walk! You need a cute dog to pick up girls at the park. -via funnyjunk.com-...
My fellow M.Sc. student Maria informs me that Brain Awareness Week is about to begin: [This annual event]...is an international effort organized by the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives to advance public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain...
Welcome to a new weekly feature here at Of Two Minds, the Sunday Morning Funny Pages - well more like the Sunday morning single comic. Shelley or I will have an exciting new comic here every Sunday morning that should,...
Sea cucumbers are marine invertebrates which live on the sea floor and feed on debris that drift down. When threatened, they can harden their skin within seconds, so that they are less likely to be devoured by the approaching predator.This...
So I hate daylight savings time. It doesn't save energy, I doubt it helps farmers like it supposedly did, and I always forget to set my clocks back. How many of you have a clock that is only correct half...
A couple weeks back we discussed a study examining stereotypes about music fans and how they related to actual fans' real preferences. Unfortunately, the researchers couldn't test one of the most intriguing stereotypes about music fans: the types of drugs...
It's a new pilot program in a few dozen New York City schools: students are given cash rewards in exchange for higher test scores. Jennifer Medina reports: The fourth graders squirmed in their seats, waiting for their prizes. In a...
Here's the first 10 minutes of the recent episode of Horizon about sensory deprivation, which I discussed about 6 weeks ago. The entire program has been uploaded to YouTube: here are parts 2, 3, 4 and 5....
The LA Times has a story about the author's own struggle with panic disorder and agoraphobia. For a Paxil-free life, she'll take the long route It takes some time, but this student learns there's no quick fix for panic...
The Internet Is Changing the Scientific Method | Wired Science from Wired.com If all other fields can go 2.0, incorporating collaboration and social networking, it's about time that science does too. In the bellwether journal Science this week, a...
News from SCONC: On Thursday, March 27 at 4 p.m., the Zoology Department at NCSU will host a seminar from Patricia Brennan of Yale University entitled "The Biology of Avian Genitalia: Form and Function." Brennan's work on the genital anatomy...
I swear I'm not being paid... but it does follow the theme of our blog. Check out their merchandise as well :) Ok.. who is going to buy me one of these shirts? HT: Sandra!...
'Power Napping' In Pigeons: In humans, as in all mammals, sleep consists of two phases: deep, dreamless slow-wave-sleep (SWS) alternates with dream phases, called Rapid Eye Movement (REM)-sleep. Although several studies suggest that information is processed and memories are consolidated...
When I write an article for Cognitive Daily, I follow a similar pattern nearly every time. First I carefully read the journal article I'll be discussing. Next I take a break and work on something else. Then I get myself...
Zooillogix posted this video of an elephant that paints "realistic paintings of other elephants:" It's a fluff piece, granted, but it gestures towards credibility by bringing in an "art expert" (and, I'm guessing, cutting 98% of her comments). The genial...
With so much written here about placebos lately (see posts on Kirsch study below), I would not want to leave out this remarkable study: Placebo effect is stronger, apparently, if you pay more for the placebo.
This is a fascinating study described in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association. A crudely shortened version: Some researchers at MIT (none of them Bill Murray, as far as I can tell) gave light shocks to volunteers, then gave them some placebos that were costly and some that were cheap. The costly ones worked better.
It sounds like a bit of a stunt, but as Respectful Insolence points out in a nice write-up, the finding is perfectly consistent with what we know about placebos. It would seem to have unsettling implications for lowering health-care costs.
An excerpt is below; study is here, but behind a pay firewall.
The NY Times group blog on Migraines just posted a really fantastic article by Jeff Tweedy, leader of Wilco (one of my favorite bands), on his chronic migraine condition: There are a lot of different ways migraines have affected my...
Radio Lab delves into the mystery: Yang and her colleagues put all 49 people, both the liars and the non-liars, into a magnetic resonant imaging scanner and took pictures of their prefrontal cortex. They chose to focus on this area...
Ahhh... The Onion. It's so made for dorky scientists. This one is especially relevant to me. DURHAM, NC--According to a study published Tuesday in the Journal Of Neuroscience, snapping three times in rapid succession is the most effective method for...
It has been almost three years since I promised to write a post detailing the photoperiodic response in mammals. (Birds are more complicated). Now Shelley gives a good example - the snowshoe hare which changes color annually: it is dark...
In 1986, 22-year-old Boston Celtics forward Len Bias died of a cocaine overdose. This week, DrugMonkey argued that Bias' death--as opposed to educational programs like DARE--was the major reason why self-reported rates of cocaine use by 20-year-olds dropped from 20%...
Warming Climate May Cause Arctic Tundra To Burn: Research from ancient sediment cores indicates that a warming climate could make the world's arctic tundra far more susceptible to fires than previously thought. The findings are important given the potential for...
One of the most frequent questions I get when speaking about my book is the MSG question. My talk is about L-glutamate, the taste of umami and veal stock (it makes a little more sense if you've read the book)...
Any serious wine drinker will tell you she can distinguish between inexpensive, low-quality wine and the fancy premium-priced stuff. She may also claim the ability to discern the difference between wine made from different grapes, or produced in different regions...
My article on the Blue Brain project is now online*: It took less than two years for the Blue Brain supercomputer to accurately simulate a neocortical column, which is a tiny slice of brain containing approximately 10,000 neurons, with about...
Ok... for reals... this is what Therapists actually do. Recognize the young Gregory House? It's always a little weird hearing a British accent coming out of his mouth. HT: Mitch Harden...
Russian special police units resorted to using an incapacitating gas based on the drug fentanyl to end the crisis. All of the Chechen militants were killed, and most of the civilian captives survived. But while the operation was largely a success, at least 117 of the hostages died from the effects of the gas.
I'm a poor excuse for a psychologist. I have no idea, zero, ziltch, what clinical psychologists actually do on a day to day basis. I study vision - what do I need to know about the human psyche? I've never...
Over at 3.14, The Seed Overlords Official Blog(tm), Ginny (The overlord herself - is there a feminine version of that? The overlady? meh... doesn't have as good of a ring) wants to know whether teenagers can be scared away from...
Almost everyone tries to lose weight at some point, but we are remarkably bad at it; most people quickly return to their original weight after cessation of exercise or resumption of a normal diet. A review article by Patterson &...
I know I just wrote an article on the power of expectations, but this is ridiculous: In a series of studies in the 1970s and '80s, psychologists at the University of Washington put more than 300 students into a study...
Take a look at this amazing video (via slashdot) showing how traffic jams can occur even when all the drivers are attempting to drive the identical speed. As you can see, at first everything works fine -- the drivers have...
A very shy guy goes into a bar and sees a beautiful woman sitting at the bar. After an hour of gathering up his courage, he finally goes over to her and asks, tentatively, "Um, would you mind if I...
The NYTimes has a slide show of "migraine" art provided by Oliver Sacks from his book Migraine. They attempt to illustrate what a migraine aura looks like. Neat. I would put one up on my wall if I didn't feel...
If you have kids you might have seen them make some very funny errors early in their lives. They do things like try to sit on miniature chairs, try to climb into small houses, or drive toy cars. Why in...
News from SCONC: Linda Buck is the Nobel-Prize winner that may live farthest from NC (but still in the U.S.). She will give a seminar Monday, March 10 at 4 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom of the Talley Center at...
When I was about 12 or 13 years old, I was fascinated by dreams. My father had a book on dreams (Interpreting Dreams, or some such title) that was pure psycho-babble but I didn't know that. Even a bad book...
[Introduction|Part 2|Part 3]The study by McKemy et al is of great significance, as it led to the identification and characterization of the first cold receptor. This study also suggests that TRP channels have a general role in thermosensation, as all...
Here are a number of new neuroscience blogs that I've come across recently: Neuropathology Blog - by Brian E. Moore, an assistant professor in the Department of Pathology at Southern Illinois University's School of Medicine. This is a welcome addition...
You might expect someone's cultural background to influence their speech, their appearance, their musical tastes, and the foods they like. You'd probably also expect culture to have an impact on values and beliefs, on stories and traditions. But what about...
I'm following up on some blogging resulting from a recent post of mine on the effect Len Bias' death (apparently) had on population level perception of the riskiness of trying cocaine. This will verge on the type of link-vomitus that...
Of Two Minds, the much-anticipated merger of Steve Higgins' Omni Brain and Shelley Batts' Retrospectacle, makes its debut today. Not Exactly Rocket Science is also up and running here on ScienceBlogs.com. If you haven't had a chance to take a...
Conventional wisdom + bigger microphone = excellent journalism! High fives all-around for Charlotte Allen who repackages conventional wisdom about sex differences to a degree rarely attained by print journalists. My favorite part: Depressing as it is, several of the supposed...
The Times has an interesting profile of Johan Santana, perhaps the most effective pitcher in baseball. What's interesting about Santana is that his secret isn't a 98 mph fastball or some wicked new breaking ball. Rather, he strikes out batters...
Hoisted from the comments: I find it particularly alarming that children are prescribed some of these drugs. How much is truly known about how various psychiatric drugs affect the development of the brain? If a fifteen-year-old is put on a...
So how does Superman do it! He can see through buildings and clothing (he checks out Lois Lane's underwear in Superman 1 - more on this later). Many have attempted to answer this question of the ages yet few...
Retrospectacle has been a wonderful hobby and outlet for my writing for almost three years. I started writing at Blogspot for a few reasons- to critically report science news, to convert the tomes of science to layperson-speak, to attempt to...
(Image: Kymmy Lorrain/BrainCells, Inc.) The two winners of GE Healthcare's 2007 IN Cell Image Competition will be going on display on the NBC screen in New York City's Times Square at 7pm on Friday, March 7th and Saturday, March...
Gazzaniga is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California in Santa Barbara, and director of the Law and Neuroscience Project.In the 66-minute interview, he discusses, among other things, the use and misuse of neuroimaging data in...
When one of the founders of cognitive neuroscience is helping you plumb the mysteries of consciousness, the self, free will, and the two minds that coexist in our skulls, it helps every now and then to touch your nose. To...
Hellloooooo Of Two Minds. On Monday morning Shelley of Retrospectacle and I will be opening up the brand spankin' new blog over in a slightly new location. So come on over and check us out first thing in the morning, a couple hours later, a couple hours after that, and...
Posted on February 29, 2008 4:16 PM • 1 Comments •
[I've been sick the past couple days, so I'm not going to be able to post a new Casual Friday today. But here's an old one that many of our readers probably haven't seen.] Last week's Casual Friday survey asked...
[Introduction|Part 2] Takashima et al (2007) carried out one of the first investigations of the distribution of TRPM8-positive sensory nerve terminals in various peripheral structures, using transgenic mice which express enhanced green fluorescent protein under the control of the TRPM8...
Jim Holt has a great article on the strange neural anatomy of mathematics in the new New Yorker: One morning in September, 1989, a forme sales representative in his mid-fortie entered an examination room with Stanisla Dehaene, a young neuroscientist...
Posted on February 29, 2008 8:10 AM • 4 Comments •
Book excerpt in today's Wall Street Journal: Chapter 6: Wired: It is likely that insomnia will increase with the expansion of the 24-hour economy into more and more lives, and more of each life, because wakefulness and the wired world...
Posted on February 29, 2008 7:02 AM • 0 Comments •
We have all heard about the runner's high, and a great many of us have felt it. When you are running a marathon, about an hour or two in you feel a feeling of euphoria right like you could run...
A cool new PNAS paper from the Koch lab: In their experiment, the researchers presented six volunteers with four types of ambiguous stimuli. The volunteers viewed or listened to the stimuli and pressed a key on a keyboard when a...
Posted on February 28, 2008 12:47 PM • 2 Comments •
The Kirsch study I wrote about a couple days ago, which found that antidepressants seem to have no more effect than placebo, has generated a wide variety of reactions in the blogosphere and press. Several things of note here: 1) In a pattern I've noticed repeatedly of late about other types of stories about things in the U.S., this story got much more attention in the British press than it did here in the U.S. (The authors were from the UK, but the paper was published in a U.S.-based journal, and antidepressant use is a huge issue in the U.S.) 2) The responses -- some by bloggers, writers, and other critics, some by doctors -- are a fascinating mix of hard-line rhetoric (from both sides) and more nuanced points about the difficulties of drawing definite conclusions from meta-analyses that are...
Posted on February 28, 2008 12:04 PM • 0 Comments •
Ronald Bailey looks at the data and concludes that having children doesn't make us happy: "Economists have modeled the impact of many variables on people's overall happiness and have consistently found that children have only a small impact. A small...
Posted on February 28, 2008 10:16 AM • 21 Comments •
Judith Warner has some insightful essays in the NYT column, pertaining to the long-raging question about whether psychiatric patients are overmedicated or undermedicated. One of the essays addresses the question directly: Overselling Overmedication Judith Warner February 14, 2008 ...In the...
This fun article by Christina Laun at BootStrapper explains 100 weird, wacky, and interesting facts about the human body. Here are a few of my favorites: 1. The largest cell in the human body is the female egg and...
Posted on February 28, 2008 9:07 AM • 11 Comments •
One shouldn't really need an excuse to embed this fantastic performance by Thelonious Monk, but now there is one: NIDCD researchers believe that they have identified the cognitive neural substrate of jazz improvisation. For the study, which is published...
Posted on February 28, 2008 8:40 AM • 11 Comments •
Okay, so the man I'm going to quote her isn't really an expert psychologist. Actually, he's not a psychologist at all, but a persistent Christopathic blogging agent who produces post after plaintive post about the usual immoral Gang of Four...
In this open access publication in PLoS it is ...suggest that, compared with placebo, the new-generation antidepressants do not produce clinically significant improvements in depression in patients who initially have moderate or even very severe depression, but show significant effects only in the most severely...
Posted on February 27, 2008 2:17 PM • 3 Comments •
Lots of attention has been paid to the latest review/meta-analysis demonstrating that popular antidepressant medications don't seem to be that much more effective than placebos. While this certainly isn't the first time someone has demonstrated that Prozac is only mildly...
Posted on February 27, 2008 12:59 PM • 5 Comments •
[Introduction] McKemy et al (2002) used whole-cell patch clamping and calcium imaging to record the responses of cultured rat trigeminal ganglion neurons to cold temperatures and various cooling compounds. They found that the cells respond to menthol and cold with...
It has been a big month for talking about the demographic transition here at Pure Pedantry. (See here and here.) Ronald Bailey at Reason had this interesting article speculating why people choose to have less children: children don't make you...
A few days ago, I briefly discussed the article by Oliver Sacks about geometric hallucinations in migraine aura. I thought that it was published in the print edition of the New York Times, but it turns out that this is...
Posted on February 27, 2008 5:56 AM • 0 Comments •
There are 48 new articles published this week in PLoS ONE. It's hard to choose just a couple to highlight, so look around for what interests you (avian flu, the Plague?). How about these titles that piqued my interest: Neural...
Posted on February 26, 2008 10:12 PM • 0 Comments •
It's hard to resist flirting with babies. Even if a baby has been screaming her head off for hours on end in the seat behind you on a transatlantic flight, if she giggles and smiles when you're deplaning, you'll probably...
Religion Colors Americans' Views Of Nanotechnology: Is nanotechnology morally acceptable? For a significant percentage of Americans, the answer is no, according to a recent survey of Americans' attitudes about the science of the very small. Male Fertility May Be Harmed...
Posted on February 26, 2008 5:57 PM • 0 Comments •
Below is the introduction to my third and final piece of coursework, an essay entitled Multiple roles for Transient Receptor Potential Melastatin 8 (TRPM8) in cold thermosensation. This time, I discuss three recent studies which have contributed significantly to the...
Doctors at the University of Navarra have implanted an auditory brainstem implant (ABI) in the youngest patient ever attempted -- a 13 month-old girl: A team of ear, nose and throat specialists and neurosurgeons at the University Hospital of Navarra,...
Jonah Lehrer has a piece up on The Frontal Cortex pointing to an entry from n+1 on the diversion of prescription Adderall® for non-treatment purposes in college students. There's also an older piece on Slate which can only be described...
Molly Young has a really interesting article on the rampant abuse of Adderall in elite universities in n+1. Essentially, Adderall is a composite of several different amphetamines, which are digested by the brain at different rates. So many kids are...
Posted on February 26, 2008 10:58 AM • 6 Comments •
I had an article in the Sunday Boston Globe Ideas section on the way our expectations of reality often trump reality itself: Expectations have long been a topic of psychological research, and it's well known that they affect how we...
Posted on February 26, 2008 9:52 AM • 5 Comments •
[This is a revised, expanded version of the original heads-up I put up last night.] A large new meta-analysis of SSRI antidepressant trials concludes that the drugs have essentially no therapeutic effect at all. The study, in PLOS Medicine today, comes on the heels of another study published a few weeks ago (I blogged on it here) showing that SSRIs have little therapeutic effect if you include the (unflattering) clinical trials the industry had previously hidden. The PLOS study is a meta-analysis of 47 clinical trials that account for almost all full data on clinical trials of SSRIs such as Prozac and Paxil. It showed that "compared with placebo, the new-generation antidepressants do not produce clinically significant improvements in depression in patients who initially have moderate or even very severe depression" -- and that (as the editors write) "the researchers...
When adults are asked if they remember pictures of faces, they're more accurate when the faces are the same race as they are. It makes some sense -- people are likely to spend more time with and have more same-race...
As a brief update on my posts on the clinical use of MDMA (Part 1, Part 2) I'll note that the MAPS folks are trumpeting the initiation of yet another clinical trial with extra oomph because it is at dear...
Shelley Batts and I are of the same "generation", meaning that we became SciBlings on the same day. You need to hurry up and check out her blog Retrospectacle before she moves to a new blog in a few days....
Posted on February 25, 2008 11:58 AM • 2 Comments •
How does the human brain construct intelligent behavior? Computational models have proposed several mechanisms to accomplish this: the most well known is "Hebbian learning," a process mathematically similar to both principal components analysis and Bayesian statistics. But other neural learning...
The Lobotomist, a PBS documentary about Walter Freeman which I mentioned recently, is now available online as a series of short clips that require either QuickTime or Windows Media Player for viewing.The program charts how the lobotomy came to be...
Posted on February 25, 2008 7:30 AM • 0 Comments •
In the midst of World War I, Wolfgang Köhler conducted a famous series of experiments to investigate problem solving ability in chimpanzees. The lasting impression of these experiments, reinforced by just about every introductory Psychology text, was Köhler's assertion that...
I haven't been blogging lately because Shelley and I have been getting the new blog ready to go public on March 1st. However... I read this crap on CNN and got so irritated that I had to post it. Evidently CNN feels that people who measure peoples facial features and...
Posted on February 24, 2008 9:59 AM • 18 Comments •
(Cartoon by Greg Williams, from Wikipedia) The term hyperthymestic syndrome was proposed by James L. McGaugh, a neurobiologist at the University of California, Irvine, and his colleagues, following their case study of the woman known as A.J. (The study...
In an article called Patterns, published in the NY Times earlier this month, neurologist and author Oliver Sacks discusses the geometric visual hallucinations which occur during the migraine auras that he has experienced since early childhood.Sacks explains that the hallucinations...
Posted on February 22, 2008 6:15 PM • 3 Comments •
Last week we asked readers how they used their calendars: we were curious if the way people used their calendars said anything about how busy their lives were. We found out an awful lot about how readers use calendars, but...
At Casa Free-Ride, the price for choosing a television program your parent does not care for is engaging in some critical thinking about its subject matter.
In an article from last Saturday's Guardian, Rick Hemsley describes his experience of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, the neurological condition in which the perception of one's body is distorted: Floors either curved or dipped, and when I tried walking on...
A fascinating, if macabre, interview with a man who intentionally cut off his hand: BME: We've touched on it, but I guess now the big question -- "why"? I'm one of those body-integrity-disorder (BIID) dudes. As long as I can...
Posted on February 21, 2008 10:15 AM • 5 Comments •
If you watch prime time tv, music videos, or walk past a magazine stand, it would appear that the average adolescent male has sex on the brain. I never gave it much thought, although regular readers know by now I'm...
I remember when I was studying for Step I of the medical Boards. Step I is the first of three very large tests that you have to take to become a doctor. This first test comprises everything you learn in...
Following the second terrorist action against UCLA's Dr Edie London and her other research colleagues, and the outcries of support that ensued, the institution is taking bold and well-justified action. This just in from Americans for Medical Progress: UCLA is...
Posted on February 20, 2008 5:22 PM • 6 Comments •
One of the most common "icebreaker" conversation topics is music preferences. We ask friends what they're listening to on their iPods, bloggers post playlists on their sidebars, and one of the most popular websites on the planet (MySpace) is built...
Michel Foucault wouldn't be surprised to learn that yes, even comedy is defined by power-relations. Here's Ellen Horne of Radio Lab: Tyler Stillman, a psychologist at Florida State University, did a series of studies showing that laughter isn't always about...
Posted on February 20, 2008 12:41 PM • 7 Comments •
Take a look at this amazing illusion created by Arthur Shapiro (you'll need the latest version of Flash Player to see it): You're looking at two donut-shaped figures whose "holes" are gradually changing color from black to white and back...
Here's some fascinating footage from 1942, showing Drs. James Watts and Walter Freeman performing a prefrontal leucotomy. The footage accompanies a short article called Lobotomy Revisited, and, like last week's trepanation film clip, is not for the squeamish.)The procedure shown...
Posted on February 19, 2008 1:26 PM • 4 Comments •
As I mentioned recently, Alvaro has taken over as organiser of Encephalon, and he's just posted the latest edition of the carnival, which has two dozen entries on a wide of variety of neuroscience topics. I especially like this one...
Posted on February 19, 2008 12:41 PM • 2 Comments •
We've all heard that goldfish only have a three second memory and thus it's ok to eat them, live, while your inebriated and in Pittsburgh. Well, a 15-year old student in Southern Australia has turned that assumption on its head...
Exciting news! I'm the new curator of the Scientific American expert blog seminar Mind Matters. (Thanks, David!) For those of you who are unfamiliar with the site, it features commentary by real scientists on recent scientific papers. This week's blog...
Posted on February 19, 2008 9:59 AM • 6 Comments •
For years, fellow scienceblogger PZ Myers has taught us all well why we ought to adore squid, octopuses, and other cephalopods. But I came to a new degree of appreciation when I traveled up to Woods Hole to spend some...
Posted on February 18, 2008 9:29 PM • 1 Comments •
Science Cafe on Teenage Brains : Teenagers sometimes act as though they were from a different planet. On Tuesday February 19, the Museum of Natural Sciences will host a science cafe entitled "Altered States: Inside the Teenage Brain" at Tir...
Posted on February 18, 2008 6:36 PM • 0 Comments •
Via slashdot, I learn that a couple of colleagues of mine have achieved nerd fame with an art project in which a robot acts out dreams. "Is there video?" you ask. Silly reader! Of course there's video!...
Fascinating BBC footage of geckos coaxing leafhoppers to feed them honeydew. The lizards tap their feet or bob their heads, and the insect dutifully tosses them a bead of delicious tree sap. This definitely qualifies as bizarre zoology....
Posted on February 18, 2008 11:12 AM • 4 Comments •
Over the past decade those who are curious about the mind have gotten off their asses and have actually started to perform some really amazing experiments. And as usual, the world operates by rules that are quite different from what we previously thought.
Dung Happens And Helps Scientists: Scoop On Poop And Climate Change: When scientists around the world think of dung, they think of Jim Mead. Mead, a researcher at Northern Arizona University, is one of the world's foremost authorities on animal...
Posted on February 16, 2008 11:08 PM • 0 Comments •
The great filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock had a profound insight into the workings of the human mind. "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it," he once said, and the shower scene from Psycho, demonstrates...
Posted on February 16, 2008 3:37 PM • 8 Comments •
This just in tonight from the NIH National Institute on Drug Abuse for those looking for a Ph.D.-level position outside of the laboratory: NIDA seeks Molecular Biologist to Direct NIDA Program in Molecular Neurobiology: Under Represented Minorities Are Encouraged to...
Posted on February 15, 2008 9:04 PM • 0 Comments •
What if human consciousness isn't the end-all and be-all of Darwinism? What if we are all just pawns in corn's clever strategy game, the ultimate prize of which is world domination? Author Michael Pollan asks us to see things from a plant's-eye view -- to...
Evolution: The Mind's Big Bang I've known Shea for years ... since before grad school. Going out drinking with this guy was a little dangerous. Almost as dangerous as going out drinking with me....
Posted on February 15, 2008 5:48 PM • 2 Comments •
Enjoy! In the hospital the relatives gathered in the waiting room, where their family member lay gravely ill. Finally, the doctor came in looking tired and somber. "I'm afraid I'm the bearer of bad news," he said as he surveyed the worried faces. "The only hope left for your loved...
Posted on February 15, 2008 3:26 PM • 6 Comments •
Just a few months ago, I finally convinced Greta to convert her old paper appointment calendar to an electronic version. Now instead of writing her appointments down in a little book, she enters it in her computer or her PDA....
Posted on February 15, 2008 8:30 AM • 12 Comments •
Are you excited?! A new blog! Coming soon! Watch out! Of Two Minds is going live on March 1st. Shelley and I are hard at work behind the scenes getting the blog ready to launch. More info coming in the next couple weeks....
I don't need words to think about the shape of a car, or how to throw a football, or the taste of a chocolate chip cookie. In fact, things like that are probably easier to think about without using language....
Let science calculate, postulate, and hypothesize, Offer theories for feelings we can't rationalize, Value a dopamine uptake equation. Even so, love requires no explanation. And with that I'm off to Beantown this Valentine's Day for AAAS......
Posted on February 14, 2008 1:46 PM • 3 Comments •
Well, it's not quite as erotic as it sounds, but they could break the ice on more than a few Valentine's dates. Hayward's new article in Brain Research Bulletin describes all known tactile illusions. Some can be tried easily at...
The 3-minute film clip below is definitely not for the squeamish. It comes from a documentary called A Hole in the Head, made in 1998, and shows a Kisi medicine man performing the "operation of the skulls"....
A friend who happens to be not only a cardiologist and a distance runner but a muckraker sent me a link to a story about a writer who has dropped from 296 pounds three years ago to 129 today. Beginning...
Woody Allen was a prescient man. Dr. Stuart Meloy has created a device that seems to help women with sexual problems regain their ability to have an orgasm: The experimental implant -- now trademarked by Meloy as the Orgasmatron after...
Posted on February 13, 2008 12:55 PM • 11 Comments •
Which of these two pictures is more memorable? The shot on the left is interesting primarily because Nora's in it -- if it was just a picture of a muddy trail, it wouldn't be notable at all to most people....
The Times Magazine had an interesting article on whether or not "preterm infants" can experience pain. "Experience" is the key word in that sentence: In a series of clinical trials, he [Kanwaljeet Anand] demonstrated that operations performed under minimal or...
Posted on February 13, 2008 10:33 AM • 10 Comments •
OK, here's a quiz for you. You have a tube that is fixed in space. You cannot move it. It is too small for you to get your hands into it, and there is a peanut in the bottom. You want the peanut. How do...
I guess it's only appropriate that the week of Darwin's birthday is seeing a bunch of new reports about evolutionary transitions. On Monday there was news about how ancient whales with teeth turned into whales with baleen--thanks to the...
After a brief winter break, the lovely neuroscience carnival Encephalon is back under the new management. Submit your posts and volunteer to host. I just hosted one recently and am too busy right now, but if you can, contact Alvaro...
Posted on February 13, 2008 7:21 AM • 0 Comments •
The pot legalization folks are at least as organized as the MDMA advocates in attacking any and all science findings which might counter their firmly held beliefs. In fact one might assume that holding one's fundraiser at the Playboy Mansion...
Cognitive Daily readers know that we generally shy away from political issues on our blog. The goal of this blog is to show readers what science is all about, through the example of the fantastic research being done cognitive psychology....
It's so easy to take our cultural forms for granted. We get so used to their particulars that we forget there is nothing inviolate about them. Movies can have sad endings, classical music can turn atonal and novelists can get...
Posted on February 12, 2008 2:28 PM • 9 Comments •
Remember a few years ago, when there were all these books that tried to explain the history of everything in terms of some seemingly minor subject, like "Cod" or "Salt"? I think it's time to apply this publishing trope to...
Posted on February 12, 2008 11:31 AM • 4 Comments •
Ok, ok, I know I'm supposed to be on hiatus here. But how could I resist posting this adorable plush neuron? Waaaaay better than a teddy bear, in my opinion. I must resist the urge to make cuddly neural nets...
Posted on February 11, 2008 5:04 PM • 8 Comments •
Take a look at this short video clip (QuickTime required). It's called an RSVP (rapid serial visual presentation), meaning that it's a quick sequence of still images. In this case, it's a random sequence of letters. Your job is to...
In behavioral neuroscience, we use a lot of animal models. We assume that these animal models have features that are the same or similar to features of humans. However, it is always reassuring when someone gets around to proving that...
Minnow and I are really good at the breast-feeding thing. It makes her happy and gives her nutrition. It makes me happy and gives me cuddle time. We like breast-feeding and don't intend to wean anytime soon. BUT... Minnow has...
There was something particularly infuriating about Mitt Romney's concession speech. He's clearly a smart guy - once upon a time, he was a socially moderate, pragmatic Republican - and yet the address was filled with utter nonsense like this: Europe...
Posted on February 11, 2008 9:59 AM • 7 Comments •
I noticed while writing this, that the word numb, if modified by adding the suffix -er, becomes an entirely different word. Number does not convey the meaning of more numb. According to Answers.com, number is a adjective, with the root...
I recently had the pleasure of getting interviewed by Natasha Mitchell, host of All in the Mind. To be honest, I can't bear to listen to the interview - the sound of my own voice grates against my ears, like...
Posted on February 10, 2008 9:48 AM • 14 Comments •
To reduce the severity of his seizures, Joe had the bridge between his left and right cerebral hemispheres (the corpus callosum) severed. As a result, his left and right brains no longer communicate through that pathway. Here's what happens as a result:...
Posted on February 9, 2008 11:01 AM • 2 Comments •
Here's a fun experiment you can perform to test your coordination and, if you're like a lot of people, experience the precise moment when your brain and muscles go off to la-la land. First, stand up and extend your arms...
Last week's Casual Fridays study elicited quite a few confused reactions. Listeners heard short music clips and then were asked to indicate which color they associated with each piece from a list of 13 colors. So were we able to...
Last night, the Campus Atheists, Skeptics and Humanists club (C.A.S.H.) presented a debate between PZ Myers and Loyal Rue on the question: Can religion and science co-exist? I witnessed this event and would like to tell you what happened....
Innate social aptitudes of man is a controversial paper. As noted in the biographical introduction to it William D. Hamilton states that his friend Robert Trivers referred to it as the "fascist paper" (see Natural Selection and Social Theory for...
You're trapped inside a rectangular room with four doors, one in each corner. You try the first door. It's locked. You try the second and the third door -- locked again. Finally the fourth door opens. You make a point...
Why do we kiss? It's one of the most intimate expressions between two people, inspiring all forms of art from music to painting to literature. It's arguably shaped history and legend.
Posted on February 7, 2008 10:50 AM • 19 Comments •
We spend so much time fixating on our genetic differences that we tend to overlook the places where the human genome has converged over time. In a study published yesterday in Nature Genetics, geneticists from France's Pasteur Institute compared DNA...
Posted on February 7, 2008 10:24 AM • 5 Comments •
Zyprexa Adhera is a new formulation of Eli LIlly's antipsychotic medication, olanzapine. It contains the same active ingredient as the pills, but it is a long-acting injection. It is supposed to last two to four weeks. There is not a...
As a follow to my prior comments pointing out that the press reports on Heath Ledger's death were unnecessarily devoid of neuropharmacological perspective, I'll note that the report on the drugs found in Heath Ledger's body after his death is...
Scientists in Malaysia have strapped high tech back packs onto flying lemurs (humans' closest cousins, by the way) to help understand the aerodynamics of how these nifty little creatures glide through the air.
Vanessa Woods is a researcher with the Hominoid Psychology Research Group which recently moved to Duke University - just in time for her to be able to attend the Science Blogging Conference two weeks ago. Vanessa is the author of...
Posted on February 6, 2008 11:54 AM • 1 Comments •
"Common sense and a sense of humor are the same thing, moving at different speeds. A sense of humor is just common sense, dancing." - William James, American psychologist and philosopher (1842 - 1910) -via Neatorama-...
Posted on February 6, 2008 11:50 AM • 5 Comments •
Deprive the mind of sensory stimuli, and what does the mind do? It starts to hallucinate. It invents perceptions amid the emptiness, filling in the void with make-believe. This is known as Charles Bonnet syndrome, and it affects approximately 10...
Posted on February 6, 2008 10:29 AM • 7 Comments •
Sound can have very powerful effects on people, but can it really get you high? Thats what makers of the application I-Doser would have you believe---or specifically, that different 'biaural beats' can mimic the effects of alcohol, cocaine, heroin and...
Posted on February 6, 2008 8:54 AM • 11 Comments •
The New York Times and Washington Post have stories on the appearance of a mysterious neurological illness in workers at a pig slaughterhouse in the southeastern Minnesota town of Austin. The condition has been named progressive inflammatory neuropathy (PIN), and...
A particular source of dread for politicians is how to respond to negative campaigning or other information impugning their character. By responding, they might only bring attention to an issue that voters hadn't even recognized: "Contrary to my opponent's claims,...
I'm morbidly fascinated by the massive losses recently incurred by the French Bank Societe Generale. My fascination is partly rooted in the sheer scale of the disaster, a scale that's essentially incomprehensible. (I have no idea what a $7,000,000,000 loss...
Posted on February 5, 2008 12:13 PM • 4 Comments •
We often assume that true understanding is conveyed through spoken speech rather than gesture, but new research shows that "talking with your hands" can not only reveal different information than spoken language, it can be both more correct and yield...
Dave Munger is part of the numerous North Carolinian contingent here at Scienceblogs.com. He writes the Cognitive Daily blog and runs the ResearchBlogging.org blog aggregator. At the Science Blogging Conference two weeks ago, Dave led a session on Building interactivity...
Posted on February 5, 2008 11:50 AM • 1 Comments •
Anna's Hummingbird Chirps With Its Tail During Display Dives: The beeps, chirps and whistles made by some hummingbirds and thought to be vocal are actually created by the birds' tail feathers, according to a study by two students at the...
One of the criticisms of most false memory research is that it lacks ecological validity. For example, in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm, a common method for inducing false memories in the lab, involves giving participants a bunch of words (e.g.,...
Technology blogger Robert Scoble attended the World Economic Forum at Davos, and made quite a few video recordings of the conversations he had with various people while he was there, which he has uploaded to Qik. In this film,...
We've heard from a few teachers who use Cognitive Daily in class, and we know several class web sites link to CogDaily. So we were wondering: if you're a teacher, instructor, or professor, how do you use Cognitive Daily in...
[Introduction|Part 2]It is well established that synaptic strengthening involves the recruitment of AMPARs to the postsynaptic membrane. However, the subunit composition of the receptors has not been investigated closely, so the studies discussed here allow for refinement of this basic...
How is tool use encoded in the brain? Most movements involving tools involve the complex manipulation of objects in space, and it is possible that they could represented in the brain in this way -- i.e. as objects in space....
When do we learn to imagine the future, and how is that capacity based on imagining the past? How does this kind of "mental time travel" develop? Lagatutta's recent article in Child Development tracks the development of this impressive feat,...
I did not watch Eli Stone last Thursday. I didn't really need to, given that prerelease descriptions made it clear that the show's pilot episode was nothing more than a load of antivaccination propaganda. Indeed, it was so bad that...
Daytime Nap Can Benefit A Person's Memory Performance: A brief bout of non-REM sleep (45 minutes) obtained during a daytime nap clearly benefits a person's declarative memory performance, according to a new study. People Had More Intense Dreams After Sept....
John Pezaris emailed me yesterday to say: Last spring, you were kind enough to write an article for your Neurophilosophy blog covering my research into restoring sight to the blind, following the publication of our scientific paper in the Proceedings...
Just how well-wired are your brain and muscles? Co-ordination and drummers is a common theme here at the refuge, but it's time for something you can try at home with just your bare little fingers. We're in the midst of...
A while back we did a little non-scientific study on whether people experience different colors based on their emotions, and indeed found a very small effect. For this week's study, we thought we'd see if we could extend those results...
Posted on February 1, 2008 3:46 PM • 16 Comments •
Following on from the introduction, I now discuss a number of recent studies which demonstrate that synaptic strengthening in different regions of the mammalian brain requires the incorporation of Ca2+-permeable GluR2-lacking AMPA receptors into the postsynaptic membrane of active or...
This prank reminds me of that Stanley Milgram experiment where people stopped on busy New York City sidewalks and looked up. When only one person was stopped, about 4 percent of pedestrians joined the man and looked at whatever he...
Posted on February 1, 2008 11:28 AM • 4 Comments •
Here's a wonderful spoof of .. well... I'm not really sure what. Perhaps an old Documentary focusing on the diseases of the mind? In any case it's terribly entertaining....
Check out the newest events at the Exploratorium. They Sound Great! Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow/Optimal Experience Researcher) Among Renowned Speakers To Appear Mind Lecture Series Continues February 2, 9, and 23, 2008 "Flow" (Optimal Experience) researcher Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (February 9) is among the renowned speakers featured in the Exploratorium's...
We had a prior discussion on cognitive performance doping led by the BM on the old site. This was sparked by a Nature commentary which followed a prior editorial. Nature now has a web poll going asking you to opine...
Friday February 1st is the final day for you to submit your wonderful ideas for the name of the news ScienceBlogs super blog started by Shelley of Retrospectacle and Steve Higgins of Omni Brain (me!). So get out those thinking caps and submit some great ideas right here. Here's some...
When we watch a movie, we're usually not conscious of the cuts made by the editor. The camera angle may change dozens of times during a scene, and we follow along as if the flashing from one viewpoint to another...
Baudelaire famously described his memory as "a tomb, a corpse filled Potter's field/a pyramid where the dead lie down by scores/I am a graveyard that the moon abhors." Well, the neural reality of the brain suggests that his poetic metaphors...
Posted on January 31, 2008 11:16 AM • 8 Comments •
The following is a guest post by Joshua Hartshorne at the Cognition and Language Lab. The first scientific paper I wrote states, in the second paragraph, that "language depends on two mental capacities with distinct neurocognitive underpinnings": vocabulary and grammar....
Recruiting the body's immune system in the fight against drug abuse is a hot topic. A recent piece highlights progress on cocaine vaccines: The vaccine works by getting the body's immune system to recognize the drug as foreign and attack...
So concludes a paper by Drs Andrew Oswald and David Blanchflower in a paper to appear in the journal, Social Science and Medicine. (full text not yet available). From the UK Telegraph story, the University of Warwick's Oswald explains: "The...
Three and a half months after Kevin Leitch announced that he was shutting down his most excellent blog, Left Brain/Right Brain, it appears that, thankfully, he's changed his mind. Appearing yesterday on the archives of his blog, Kev announced that...
Posted on January 31, 2008 12:00 AM • 8 Comments •
Andrea Gawrylewski from "The Scientist" has written a nice blog post describing new research that addresses whether adult brains learn by neurogenesis (the birth of new neurons). In the blog she writes: While researchers agree that the birth of...
Posted on January 30, 2008 11:06 PM • 6 Comments •
For a long time, I thought that animals were pretty much as Descartes thought - largely unreasoning organic machines. This morning, my teacher on animal communications died. Her name was Chesh, and she was 17 and a half. She...
Posted on January 30, 2008 6:23 PM • 21 Comments •
Canadian surgeons have made a serendipitous discovery. While using deep brain stimulation to try suppressing the appetite of a morbidly obese patient, they inadvertently evoked in the patient vivid autobiographical memories of an event that had taken place more...
I'm already so excited to read and review this! Irene Pepperberg's memoir, tentatively titled "Alex and Me," covers her 30 years with the parrot that could count to six, identify colors and even express frustration with repetitive scientific trials. It...
Posted on January 30, 2008 12:09 PM • 2 Comments •
I've got a new article on the psychology of back pain in the February issue of Best Life (the one with Jeff Gordon on the cover): I've put the entire article below the fold:...
Last week, I did one of my inimitable rants about an ABC television show set to air on Thursday called Eli Stone, in which a lawyer sues a pharmaceutical company for "mercuritol" (an obvious allusion to thimerosal) in vaccines and...
Posted on January 29, 2008 4:00 PM • 20 Comments •
Two facts are true about young children: they sleep a lot more than adults, and they learn language at an astonishing rate. How can they learn so much when they're sleeping so much of the time? Perhaps sleep itself enhances...
A new study, heralded in National Geographic, reports that chameleons developed their color-changing ways as a means of communicating with one another.
The other day I mentioned the now-infamous magic Alzheimer's helmet, a device being hyped to the press by a group of scientists on the basis of very little data. Believe it or not, of all organizations, ABC News has published...
Yesterday's post offered a simple poll question: # How Many People Will Select The Same Option As You? 0% 1-25% 26-50% 51-75% 76-99% 100% I didn't think this poll would attract as much interest as it did because in one...
The NYTimes has an article today about the "science" of online match-making. I put that in quotes because there really isn't any clear evidence about whether it works either way....
In my second coursework essay, I discuss a number of recent studies which demonstrate that synaptic strengthening in different regions of the mammalian brain requires the incorporation of Ca2+-permeable GluR1-lacking AMPA receptors into the postsynaptic membrane of active or newly-potentiated...
If you'll forgive another chess post, the annual grandmaster chess tournament in Wijk aan Zee in the Netherlands is now complete. It was the first major tournament of the year, and it had a pleasingly unexpected outcome. Young phenoms Levon...
Slashdot's poll of the moment is just fantastic, combining psychology and reasoning in a very cool way. Here's the question: # How Many People Will Select The Same Option As You? 0% 1-25% 26-50% 51-75% 76-99% 100% Just CowboyNeal [this...
Several readers have e-mailed me this story. It's about a device developed in the U.K.. Based on near infrared light (NIR), the device, it is claimed by its creator, will be a major step forward for the treatment of Alzheimer's...
Posted on January 28, 2008 2:00 PM • 13 Comments •
Keystone sleep/circadian meeting. Jay Dunlap, Emmanuel Mignot and Amita Seghal are organizing a Keystone meeting on Genetics and Biochemistry of Sleep in Lake Tahoe, March 7-12 (click here to see large):...
Shelley and Steve were getting a little lonely (just intellectually, of course, don't get any weird ideas!), so, not much to tell, one thing led to another and....they will be fusing their two excellent and successful blogs into a new...
Posted on January 27, 2008 11:25 PM • 6 Comments •
I started Omni Brain over two years ago on Blogger and eventually gained a number of co-bloggers that have come and gone, most notably Sandra. About a year ago we were invited to blog at ScienceBlogs which is really the ideal place to be for a science blogger. I've had...
Posted on January 27, 2008 10:56 PM • 46 Comments •
Last Tuesday's episode of Horizon, called Total Isolation, is available for viewing and download at the BBC iPlayer website for the next 2 days. In the 50-minute documentary, Professor Ian Robbins, a trauma psychologist at the University of Surrey...
Several days ago, I saw an article about some research on the relationship between the price of wine, the subjective experience of taste, and the effect of wine on brain function as assessed by fMRI. The research is part...
In an exclusive preview of his new book, The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker looks at language, and the way it expresses the workings of our minds. By analyzing common sentences and words, he shows us how, in what we say and how we say...
I'll give Don Imus credit for one thing. He's predictable and consistent. He never fails to deliver the stupid when it comes to vaccines and autism. True, his wife may take the stupid to hysterically malignant levels when she decides...
EDGE Amphibians: World's Weirdest Creatures Just Got Weirder: A gigantic, ancient relative of the newt, a drawing-pin sized frog, a limbless, tentacled amphibian and a blind see-through salamander have all made it onto a list of the world's weirdest and...
Via Modern Mechanix: Reading Thoughts by Radio Can thoughts be read by radio? "Madam Radora" seems to prove that they can. Madam is not a human being, but a life-size automaton shown at the Permanent Radio Fair in New York. Her "thoughts" and movements are controlled entirely by wireless; no...
If I only had a brain: According to this highly intelligible comment from YouTube this song was featured on Beavis and Butthead - surprise surprise! DaDrizzL31214 (2 weeks ago) On Beavis and Butthead, they were waatching this vid and Beavis started going with the tune for the whole song. He...
Last week we asked readers how often they eat at buffet-style restaurants, where diners serve themselves unlimited portions of food from heated serving tables. The question was inspired by a post by ScienceBlogs editor Virginia Hughes, which was inspired by...
As a follow to the prior post on MDMA clinical trials, I wanted to delve down into the MDMA dosing specifics. One major problem I have with the MAPS efforts to pursue clinical trials is the expansion of dosing as...
Nicholas Carr has an insightful post that points to a fascinating study of online user behavior while they are looking for information and researching some subject, done by British Library (the research study, 35 pages PDF, well organized and well...
Posted on January 25, 2008 11:03 AM • 2 Comments •
A bath-time conversation: Younger offspring: The water is pretty warm. Dr. Free-Ride: Is it too hot? I could add some more cold water. Younger offspring: No, it's good. I'm just going to ooze in, like a snail oozing into its...
Usually I cringe when I see yet another newspaper article about suicide. But I always read them. This time, I did cringe, but needlessly. The article turned out to be OK. F.D.A. Requiring Suicide Studies in Drug Trials By GARDINER...
An amazing example of a parasite that causes its host to resemble a luscious red berry -- all so the parasite's eggs are passed onto birds, the next step in the parasite's life cycle.
The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) had a life filled with pain. At the age of 6, she contracted polio, and this caused a paralysis of the right leg from which Kahlo took one year to recover. Then, in...
My latest Science Progress column is now up. It's about, well...big stuff. Science, the humanities, their failure to intersect, how to save the world.... All I can say is that it starts like this: Nearly ten years ago, to...
Posted on January 24, 2008 2:55 PM • 19 Comments •
When you know something, is that different from remembering? Both types of thoughts are clearly part of the memory system, but is there really any difference between the two concepts? We often use the two terms nearly interchangeably: I might...
The death of 28-yr old actor Heath Ledger is in the news, provoking a cynical "What, another celebrity drug overdose? Big deal!" response in some corners. Ledger fans, OTOH, are no doubt right there with the media reports which are...
This review by Luiz Pessoa in Nature Neuroscience Reviews has to be the most intelligent things I have read in a long time. He argues that the notion that cognition and emotion are separable modules -- a notion that permeates...
The operation of Trepan, from Illustrations of the Great Operations of Surgery: Trepan, Hernia, Amputation, Aneurism and Lithotomy, by Charles Bell, 1815. (John Martin Rare Book Room at the University of Iowa's Hardin Library for the Health Sciences.) Trepanation,...
Pure Pedantry is a great blog. Jake writes some cool neuroscience stuff, and an occasional political post I disagree with (but not enough to start a blogwar). Kara Contreary has recently retired (though we'll see how long that lasts!)...
If you haven't checked out the DANA Foundation, well, you should. The DANA Foundation and DANA Alliance for Brain Initiatives are dedicated to providing up-to-date scientific information to the public, as well as supporting research and the arts. And they...
Posted on January 23, 2008 12:23 PM • 0 Comments •
This paper was covered by CNN last week, and I didn't have a chance to talk about it then. It is a case study by Tobinick and Gross in the Journal of Neuroinflammation where a patient with Alzheimer's disease (AD)...
It's times like these that I wish the Hollywood writers' strike had really and truly shut down production of new dramas completely. A new series on ABC set to premiere on January 31 looks as though it's going to dish...
There is a lot of new stuff published this week in PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases and PLoS ONE. Molecular Studies in Treponema pallidum Evolution: Toward Clarity? is an Expert Commentary on last week's (widely reported) study...
Variation in neural V1aR predicts sexual fidelity and space use among male prairie voles in semi-natural settings: Although prairie voles (Microtus ochrogaster) are socially monogamous, males vary in both sexual and spatial fidelity. Most males form pairbonds, cohabit with one...
When we first moved to the small suburban town we still live in, we quickly realized we needed to buy a second car. Nora and Jim were just one and two and a half years old, only barely beginning to...
Among the one third of Americans who believe in ghosts are high-ranking officials in the intelligence agencies and military.In the 1970s and 80s, the CIA funded research into "remote viewing", so that they could train clairvoyants to locate, among other...
Posted on January 22, 2008 2:37 PM • 11 Comments •
A lot of people on ScienceBlogs are talking about this paper, Hockings et al., which shows that male chimps will trade food for sex. The food in this case is papayas stolen from nearby farms; foraged food is apparently not...
Interesting stuff: The research team led by Tania Singer, at UCL, asked volunteers to play a game with employees of the lab, secretly instructing the employees to play either fairly or unfairly. Afterward, the scientists measured brain activity in the...
Posted on January 22, 2008 10:25 AM • 10 Comments •
Sleeping & Dreaming exhibit hosted by Wellcome Trust will be open until 9 March 2008: Why are scientists still perplexed by sleep? What do the insights that our dreams bring us mean? And is a life without sleep conceivable? Sleeping...
Last week, David Brooks had a smart column on the essential "irrationality" of voters. (I'm defining irrationality here as any mental process that's not rational/deliberate/System 2. I have no idea if our democracy would be better off if voters imitated...
A paper published back in September - Chimpanzees Share Forbidden Fruit by Hockings et al. is getting renewed attention these days. Rebecca Walton has compiled links to the recent media and blog coverage of the paper (including those by my...
Is chimpanzee food sharing an example of food for sex? One of the most important transitions in human evolution may have been the incorporation of regular food sharing into the day to day ecology of our species or our ancestors. Although this has been recognized...
I had an op-ed in the LA Times on Sunday. It's about reductionism and the brain: The reductionist method, although undeniably successful, has very real limitations. Not everything benefits from being broken down into tiny pieces. Look, for example, at...
Posted on January 21, 2008 9:54 AM • 13 Comments •
For all of you Illusion Junkies out there: **** THE FOURTH ANNUAL BEST VISUAL ILLUSION OF THE YEAR CONTEST**** http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com *** We are happy to announce the world's 4th Annual Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest!!*** The deadline for illusion submissions is February 15th, 2008! The 2008 contest will...
The Canadian Globe and Mail reports on the remarkable case of Stacey Gayle, a 25-year-old woman from Edmonton who has just had neurosurgery to treat intractable epilepsy.Gayle (right) was suffering from musicogenic epilepsy, a rare form of the condition in...
I'm sure it's a rough life being a clown, you know... driving a clown car with 18 other passengers in the driver seat alone, walking and tripping around with those really big shoes, and hours of makeup application. But their job is about to get a lot harder, a new...
Posted on January 19, 2008 2:01 PM • 10 Comments •
This diagram of the retina, drawn by Santiago Ramon y Cajal in 1892, comes from Web Vision, a comprehensive overview of the organization of the mammalian retina and visual system compiled by Drs. Helga Kolb, Eduardo Fernandez and Ralph...
Former World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer has died of kidney failure at the age of 64. The New York Times has an informative article here. For chess fans Bobby Fischer was the classic example of the need to separate the...
I'm at the North Carolina Science Blogging Conference this weekend, and I wasn't planning on doing a Casual Friday this week. But Virginia Hughes gave me an idea for a really quick one. What state boasts the most-frequent buffet-style restaurant...
Posted on January 18, 2008 4:23 PM • 11 Comments •
My wine co-blogger and dear scientific colleague, Erleichda, and I had hoped to bring you an account of the wines enjoyed at our recent meetup. Erleichda and I have recently had the good fortune of regaining support for our scientific...
Just a short note via Sports Illustrated: Georgia football legend Herschel Walker is expected to reveal in an upcoming book that he has multiple personalities -- a revelation that surprises the man who coached the 1982 Heisman Trophy winner. ... "Breaking Free" will chronicle Walker's life with multiple personality disorder,...
According to Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago: "Biological reproduction is not a very efficient way to alleviate one's loneliness, but you can make up people when you're motivated to do so," said Nicholas Epley, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business....
Don't play any of the embedded videos if you've ever had a seizure. Now that we're done with the warning... We've all heard of the Pokemon incident in Japan where nearly 700 school aged children were admitted to the hospital with "convulsions, vomiting, irritated eyes and other symptoms" common to...
That, at least, is the consensus of a new paper in Neuropharmacology: There is a general consensus that the effects of cannabinoid agonists on anxiety seem to be biphasic, with low doses being anxiolytic and high doses ineffective or possibly...
Posted on January 18, 2008 10:24 AM • 8 Comments •
Two hundred pound robot lumbering along on tread mill, doing the bidding of a monkey several thousand miles away.An international and interdisciplinary team of scientists have developed a robot that will carry out physical activities in imitation of the activities of a monkey. The monkey...
This film clip describes how neuroscientists have controlled the movements of a humanoid robot using a brain-computer interface (BCI) embedded in the motor cortex of a monkey. I've written about BCIs before, so I won't go into details here....
Take a look at this slideshow (QuickTime required). You'll first see a photo in perfect focus. Then 12 more pictures will flash by, each of them blurred using Photoshop. Finally, the original photo will appear again. Is it the same...
In neuroscience, we spend a lot of time studying the normal function of the nervous system, and we spend a lot of time studying disease processes that can impair this function. What we don't typically do is study how functional...
I'm definitely ready for the writer's strike to be over. I actually watched two hours of American Idol last night. I haven't watched many of these pre-competition shows before, when Paula, Randy and Simon sit through the auditions of strangers...
Why men and women find longer legs more attractive: While all of the people were the same height, the length of their legs was altered to make them equal to the Polish average or longer by 5%, 10% or 15%....
People from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks, MIT researchers and colleagues report in the first brain imaging study of its kind. This is not that surprising, but it is very interesting research. We already knew, for instance,...
I was talking to a neuroscientist the other day and he started complaining about fMRI studies. They are too easy, unreliable, etc. (This is a surprisingly common complaint among neuroscientists who rely on the techniques of molecular biology.) But then...
Posted on January 16, 2008 11:48 AM • 18 Comments •
"Have trouble concentrating on your studies? Try the German learning egg." Those Germans! Always coming up with great feats of engineering. -Via Modern Mechanix- Or course you could always get a pair of 0.50$ ear plugs, but hey if you've got the money ;)...
Posted on January 16, 2008 10:45 AM • 1 Comments •
Are you too poor to afford an exotic beach vacation in the dead of this frigid winter? Now, with the "Noisy Instrument" (pictured below) you can bring the sounds of the ocean to your sad, depressed little ear canals while...
A forthcoming PBS documentary called The Lobotomist examines the career of psychiatrist Walter J. Freeman, who performed nearly 3,000 "ice pick" lobotomies during the late 1930s and 1940s.The hour-long program, which is partly based on Jack El-Hai's book of the...
At least once or twice a week at dinnertime, our family has what we call a "harmony meal." Jim and Nora are good eaters with broad tastes, but they both (along with me and Greta) also have some foods they...
Big Weddings Bring Afghans Joy, and Debt: In Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world, bridegrooms are expected to pay not only for their weddings, but also all the related expenses, including several huge prewedding parties and money...
I've written about our wine biases before, but now we have anatomical evidence of why, exactly, expensive wine seems to taste better. The experiment, led by researchers at Cal-Tech and Stanford, was simple. [A free version of the study is...
Posted on January 15, 2008 10:47 AM • 10 Comments •
Hydrocephalus, sometimes called "water on the brain," is a condition where cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) accumulates in the ventricles of the brain. This causes the expansion of the ventricles which displaces the brain, sometimes causing brain damage due to the intracranial...
Memantine is the most recent weapon in the fight against Alzheimer's. There's been a lot of hype surrounding the drug because.... The first-generation of compounds aimed to boost the brain's acetylcholine levels led to the development of drugs such as...
Posted on January 14, 2008 11:52 PM • 1 Comments •
I returned to UCL today, after spending the first week of the new term writing my second piece of coursework for the M.Sc., a 2,000-word essay about AMPA receptor recomposition in synaptic plasticity, which I'll post on here soon.The third...
I was a little surprised by an offhand observation Thomas Schubert made in a recent research report. He claimed that while men will commonly make a fist to celebrate a goal in a soccer match or a home run in...
It took a few centuries, but it looks as though psychology and neuroscience are finally moving beyond the dualisms of Descartes. Here is the always interesting Boston Globe Ideas section: The brain is often envisioned as something like a computer,...
Posted on January 14, 2008 10:47 AM • 8 Comments •
Sounds too good to be true. Perhaps it is. For one, there is only one published case. For another, it has to be injected near the spine in order to have this effect. The arthritis medication, etanercept (Enbrel®) has been...
I came across a Russian blog purporting to have photo evidence of an abandoned Soviet-era neuroscience lab outside Moscow, left in a real hurry for unknown reasons. I thought it might be a hoax or exaggeration, but after looking at...
I just couldn't resist posting this, silly as it is. Intruders smashed the front window of Pet Palace in Leominster, about 45 miles west of Boston, and as they entered the store the bird began to shout, said store...
It's rare that an article combines my two interests - in biological clocks and politics. This one does: Circadian rhythms differ for the king and the president: One is a night owl who likes to do business after midnight. The...
Posted on January 14, 2008 12:09 AM • 2 Comments •
Culture Influences Brain Function, Study Shows: People from different cultures use their brains differently to solve the same visual perceptual tasks, MIT researchers and colleagues report in the first brain imaging study of its kind. Aroma Of Chocolate Chip Cookies...
In the comments to a previous post, "rebel scientist" Louis Savain made the following statements: I have made a falsifiable prediction about the human cerebellum based on my interpretation of certain Biblical metaphors. If you can falsify it, do...
Posted on January 13, 2008 8:13 PM • 21 Comments •
The memory-evaluation study, headed by Dr. Franklin McCarroll of New York University's School of Psychology, revealed that approximately 47 percent of Jenkins' hippocampus is dedicated to storing notable video-game victories and frustrating last-minute defeats, while 32 percent of his amygdala contains embedded neurological scripts pertaining to game strategies, character back...
Posted on January 12, 2008 10:50 AM • 4 Comments •
Last week we asked our readers about New Years' resolutions. We said we wanted to know whether resolutions made on New Years' Day were any more effective than commitments made at other times of the year. We are interested in...
In an earlier post, I looked at a research study by Nelson et al. [1] on how the cognitive development of young abandoned children in Romania was affected by being raised in institutional versus foster care conditions. Specifically, I examined...
One of the bottlenecks in human memory capacity is its "filtering efficiency" - irrelevant information in memory only detracts from an already-constrained memory span. New work by McNab & Klingberg images the neural structure directly responsible for such filtering, and...
Josh Hartshorne, coauthor of a the Hartshorne & Ullman study I've discussed before, has a new blog that's already filled with interesting posts. What is to blame for psychology's awful PR? Does workforce diversity improve productivity? Why languages can't be...
Posted on January 11, 2008 12:51 PM • 1 Comments •
This is a good collection of illusions, some of which I haven't seen before. I'm not so sure why they had to include a stupidtramp sound track though. Here's another collection with some overlap and a techno soundtrack:...
Author Robert Wright explains "non-zero-sumness," a game-theory term describing how players with linked fortunes tend to cooperate for mutual benefit. This dynamic has guided our biological and cultural evolution, he says -- but our unwillingness to understand one another, as in the clash between the...
A new educational system called "Tools of the Mind" teaches not facts and figures, but rather focuses on cognitive skills in structured play. In the largest and most compelling study yet, exposure to this curriculum in the classroom drastically improves...
Turns out that Jamie Lynn Spears' baby daddy is expressing paternity skepticism. He might check out the paper How Well Does Paternity Confidence Match Actual Paternity? Evidence from Worldwide Nonpaternity Rates: This survey of published estimates of nonpaternity suggests that...
There was a lot of buzz online a couple months back when an article entitled "Moniker Maladies" made what seemed to many to be a startling claim: Baseball players strike out more often when their names start with "K"; Students...
How universal are our first impressions of people? Test yourself against this piece of video art: Do you agree with most of the descriptions? The art is surprisingly riveting, no? Via kottke...
Posted on January 10, 2008 11:53 AM • 12 Comments •
A reader pointed out to me that Schultze's 1978 study did not find a bias to hear a fast tempo as speeding up and slow tempo as slowing down. In fact, Schultze found that we were remarkably accurate at detecting...
The New England Journal of Medicine published a study yesterday showing that small changes in the DNA in the long arm of chromosome 16 are associated with autism. I met...
Members of the Rodriguez lab and the Otero lab, both of Instituto de Neurociencias de Alicante (CSIC-Universidad Miguel Hernandez. Spain) have just posted their first Journal Club commentary on the PLoS ONE article High-Pass Filtering of Input Signals by the...
Why do some creatures forgo their own reproduction to help their relatives survive and reproduce? While we all might like to believe that naked mole rats really do care and are thus willing to sacrifice their creepy little lives for the good of the colony, the true answer probably has more to do with gene frequency across generations and evolution.
Yesterday's demonstration about perception of tempo simply didn't work. If we had successfully replicated Schultze's Vos et al.'s study, we would have seen a systematic bias in the results. I'd like to give this one more shot (I promise this...
Thanks to John Wilkins, I want to point you to an excellent review on the current state of research (both scientific and philosophical) in Animal Cognition....
This video is one of the most amazing things I've ever seen on YouTube. It shows the oh-so-careful surgical removal of an egg-sized cyst (intact) from a person's brain. The cyst is a hydatid cyst, which is the result of...
The panel discussion from the 'Waking Up To Sleep' (February 9th and 10th, 2007) conference has been filmed and the video is now online. A very interesting discussion on the evolution and adaptive function of sleep. Watch it here. More...
Unsurprisingly the James Randi Educational Foundation has had a problem giving away their million dollar prize to someone who could demonstrate scientifically under controlled circumstances that they could perform some sort of paranormal ability. They aren't even that specific on what kind of paranormal ability it has to be. It...
Listen to the following three short audio samples. Your job is to say whether the tempo (the rate at which the notes are played) is speeding up or slowing down. Even if it sounds like it's maintaining the same tempo,...
Mick Grierson has created a real-time EEG-based brain-computer interface for music synthesis. You can watch a video here. We've been designing experiments to test how classic ERPs (P300/600, N400, etc) may emerge from user interactions with this system, given previous...
When I was a kid, my father was notorious for two sayings, both of which came out when one of us kids wanted something we were told we couldn't have. The first saying was "life ain't fair," and I guess...
I had no time to read this in detail and write a really decent overview here, perhaps I will do it later, but for now, here are the links and key excerpts from a pair of exciting new papers in...
I think I might have been quoted in today's Chronicle of Higher Education journal, except I can't find out since it requires a subscription (which U of M doesn't have.) Well humbug. From what I could tell from the title,...
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis -- stated in its strongest form -- claims that language determines thoughts: if a language doesn't have a means of expressing a particular idea, then people speaking that language can't even conceive of that idea. This strong...
A continuing challenge in cognitive neuroscience is determining which neural structures are actually responsible for certain thoughts and behaviors. For example, fMRI and other neuroimaging techniques cannot tell us if a certain region of visual cortex is necessary for perceiving...
True to form, OmniBrain has posted an informative video about the "ice cream headache" also known as "Iceberger's syndrome." This is the nominally painful headache one experiences after eating too much of something extremely cold. While no "silent killer," as...
Posted on January 7, 2008 12:01 PM • 11 Comments •
One of the practical issues in doing neuroscience in humans is that you have a problem determining causation. Say I do an imaging study with a neurological disease and find that the activity in a certain brain region is consistently...
Sometimes, I feel like the only journalist/blogger in New Hampshire who isn't writing about politics. My street is littered with campaign signs, from Kucinich to Huckabee, that have been stuck haphazardly into the snow. My recycling bin is full of...
Posted on January 7, 2008 10:15 AM • 12 Comments •
Etter JF. Addiction to the nicotine gum in never smokers. BMC Public Health. 2007 Jul 17;7:159. What, got tired of chewing regular gum? Nothing like paying more for nicotine-laced candy that you have to buy at a drug store and...
There. Now I've contributed to the clogging of the internet with another pointless youtube video. Don't I feel special. But I thought that readers of this blog might enjoy seeing Minnow's newfound ability to walk. She was starting to...
It's a new year, bringing new changes. I've decided to quit Omni Brain and move on to less important things, like creating baffling and somewhat offensive art and writing more books that I won't want anyone to read. It's been fun to be here, though. I'm grateful to Steve...
Trepanation is a procedure where a hole is drilled into the skull, exposing the dura mater and brain for either medical (releif of pressure) or mystical (supposed heightened consciousness)purposes. It is likely the oldest procedure in neurosurgery and has been...
The e-ink wasn't even dry last night on my Friday Fermentable post about the Flying Dog Open Source Beer project before I received a comment from Josh Mishell, Creative Manager for the brewery: Thanks for writing about our Open Source...
This year Greta and I rang in the new year with a couple of good friends, some good wine, and not a lot of fuss or formality. We quietly noted when the clock struck midnight and went on with whatever...
A downright amazing post on cognitive dissonance at Mind Hacks. Gesturing unlocks children's math skills. An entertaining review of new work on inner speech. A new case of simultagnosia (the inability to see more than one object at a time)....
Some scientists seem to think so. Check out this comparison between a sagittal section of a brain and this piece of art: Pretty striking similarity isn't there? Partly as a joke to entertain sceptical colleagues, he and the team went on a brain trawl, and found many other examples. The...
A new book, Shock Therapy, has recently been published, which offers a contrarian take on the history of electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT. I haven't read the book, but Barron Lerner reviews it in Slate: The authors believe that electroconvulsive therapy...
The mind is a complicated and a still very much unknown entity. The earliest conceptions of the mind didn't even have it placed in the brain, instead it was very much separate from the body. This is of course all very silly, the only possibility is that the mind wholly...
A new scientific paper has shown a strange, deceptive adaptation in the Maculinea butterflies of North Western Europe--an adaptation that has caused a genetic race between the butterflies and many different species of ants.
During my brief tenure as a high school teacher, one common suggestion I got from supportive colleagues was to "make your tests teaching tools." "That's often the only time you've really got your students' attention," they suggested, "so don't neglect...
I don't often get into the autism/vaccination wars but this great article in Harvard Magazine discusses the realistic challenges in researching spectrum disorders, particularly in identifying the genetic changes in the culprit genes.
Phantom limb syndrome has always been intertwined with war. It was first discovered by Silas Weir Mitchell after the Battle of Gettysburg, when the hospitals of Philadelphia were overwhelmed by soldiers with amputated limbs. Many of these soldiers said that...
What looks like a bevy of medieval torture tools is actually a early 19th century set of German neurosurgical tools. I think I would be terrified if a doctor walked into my room and opened that innocuous-looking velvet-lined case...
Posted on January 3, 2008 11:19 AM • 10 Comments •
On December 30, the New York Times Magazine ran a feature about the most important obituaries of 2007. It was gratifying, yet still sad, to see that a joint obituatry for Alex the parrot and Washoe the chimp was included...
Play is more often simply observed than studied scientifically - play behaviors occur unpredictably and, when they do occur, are highly chaotic, making it very difficult to study them in the laboratory. Despite these challenges, new work is beginning to...
After reading well over 400 blog submissions for the second edition of the "Open Laboratory" the judges have finally whittled the list to the best 51 to be included in the book. Surprisingly, one of the Omni Brain posts has made it into the anthology - I think perhaps one...
Lisa Diamond, a psychologist at the University of Utah, deserves credit for bringing a controversial idea to the academic surface. Here's the Boston Globe Ideas section: In this country, we tell a certain story about homosexuality: We believe that people...
Posted on January 2, 2008 10:53 AM • 14 Comments •
You might think humans are equally good at estimating distances no matter which direction they're looking. After all, we use the same visual tools to make those estimates -- binocular disparity (the different views we see from each eye), occlusion...
Originally posted on 12/16 2006: The term "executive function" is frequently used but infrequently defined. In attempting to experimentally define executive functions in terms of their relationship to age, reasoning and perceptual speed, Timothy Salthouse reviewed the variety of verbal...
[Originally posted on November 7, 2005] What does it mean to have a gut feeling that you remember something? You see someone you recognize in a coffee shop. Do you remember her from high school? Or maybe you saw her...
Here in central New Hampshire, we got another 10-12 inches of snow last night. It's been a winter of heavy precipitation, with sleet giving way to wet snow which turns into powder which eventually freezes into rock solid ice. This...
Posted on December 31, 2007 9:55 AM • 4 Comments •
Adult Male Chimpanzees Don't Stray Far From The Home: When it comes to choosing a place to live, male chimpanzees in the wild don't stray far from home, according to a new report. The researchers found that adult male chimps...
Posted on December 31, 2007 1:05 AM • 0 Comments •
I've just found this Encyclopaedia of Computational Neuroscience on Scholarpedia. Each entry is written by an expert in the field, and is very comprehensive.The project seems to have been started only recently, as many of the entries I've looked at...
Posted on December 30, 2007 10:27 AM • 0 Comments •
This cartoon was written before intranasal orexin was developed, but the same idea applies: Provigil (modafinil) is thought to act on the orexin system to promote wakefulness. Indeed, it has attracted some attention due to its potential to increase productivity....
This is one odd video. This French Orangina TV ad has furries wearing kinky lingerie and an octopus giving a lap dance to a bear. Check it out: I guess I shouldn't be surprised after this previous post about a French set of ads on safe sex practices. -Via BoingBoing-...
Posted on December 28, 2007 10:24 AM • 1 Comments •
Brain Candy, a film by Toronto's sketch comedy troupe Kids in the Hall, is a satirical take on drug development. A scientist creates an antidepressant (Gleemonex) that evokes the happiest memory of the consumer, recreating that joy in the present. Gleemonex becomes a big success, until it all goes horribly...
Posted on December 28, 2007 8:00 AM • 1 Comments •
In this wonderful passage from King Solomon's Ring, Konrad Lorenz, who, together with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch founded the science of ethology, describes some of the behaviours of his pet capuchin monkey Gloria: She occupied a large, roomy...
Posted on December 28, 2007 7:10 AM • 0 Comments •
So I'm browsing the juice section at my local supermarket, trying to figure out if I like pulpy bits in my orange juice, when I notice that Minute Maid has a new line of "enhanced juices". I couldn't help but...
Posted on December 27, 2007 3:39 PM • 14 Comments •
Lots of good stuff in PLoS Biology this week: Cognitive Dimensions of Predator Responses to Imperfect Mimicry: Many palatable animals, for example hoverflies, deter predators by mimicking well-defended insects such as wasps. However, for human observers, these flies often seem...
Posted on December 27, 2007 1:10 PM • 0 Comments •
Title: Brain Juice. Year: 1996-1997 Summary: A Brain comes to life and tries to take over the world through cable access TV. There are even cameos by Beavis and Butthead and the cast of the Wizard of Oz. And obviously made in Canada ;) Weird eh?!...
Posted on December 27, 2007 9:52 AM • 1 Comments •
Earlier this week we discussed the relationship between life satisfaction and other measures of well-being, finding that for measures such as relative income, the happiest people weren't always the best-off. For relationships, however, the happiest individuals also seem to do...
It has been suspected for some time that taking fish oil may reduce the risk of developing age-related Alzheimers disease. Fatty fish, like salmon, are rich in oils which contain omega-3 acids. Omega-3's cannot be manufactued by the body and...
Posted on December 26, 2007 4:52 PM • 19 Comments •
[Originally posted on February 20, 2006] Here's a picture of our daughter Nora at about 3 months of age. She looks like she's fairly aware of the events going on around her (arguably more aware than she sometimes appears now,...
Happiness is associated with a lot of good things in life. People who are happier tend to get better job ratings, make more money, be more likely to get married, and be more satisfied with their marriages than people who...
"Why do those holiday tunes get stuck in your head so much?" I was invited to pose this question to Dr. Robert Zatorre, Co-Director of the BRAMS: Brain Music and Sound lab at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University. Dr. Zatorre is a leading expert in neuroscience research...
Roche Molecular Diagnostics offers a test that can determine which type of genes a person has for enzymes that metabolize antidepressant medication. The test costs $ 300 to $400, and can be ordered by healthcare professionals, or by consumers. The...
I've entitled this illusion 'The Purple Nurple' Exciting eh? I haven't actually seen this particular one before today so I thought I'd throw it up.... so here it is: I've finally figured out where the heck this illusion has come from! It is actually called "Sea Sickness" and is by...
Posted on December 23, 2007 8:05 AM • 19 Comments •
Whales Descended From Tiny Deer-like Ancestors: Hans Thewissen, Ph.D., Professor of the Department of Anatomy, Northeastern Ohio Universities Colleges of Medicine and Pharmacy (NEOUCOM), has announced the discovery of the missing link between whales and their four-footed ancestors. Medical Myths...
Posted on December 21, 2007 9:30 PM • 0 Comments •
A multilocus model with a dominant gene for magic might exist, controlled epistatically by one or more loci, possibly recessive in nature. Magical enhancers regulating gene expressionmay be involved, combined with mutations at specific genes implicated in speech and hair colour such as FOXP2 and...
Humour appears to develop from aggression caused by male hormones, according to a study published in this week's Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal.... Makes total sense to me. And if you think I'm kidding, you can stuff it....
I just finished reading Jonah Lehrer's book Proust was a Neuroscientist. Quick review: good book, very fun read, and I'm happy to recommend it to almost everyone. I just have one small quibble. For the quibble to make any sense,...
This is another one of those "parrot struts his stuff" videos because, in this streaming video, Stewie, a male Eclectus parrot, shows off his rollerskating abilities.
Since you've all been clamouring to see it, here's my new tattoo, and a video clip of the work in progress. It's an intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cell, my favourite type of neuron. The artist was Gordon at Brain Drops, highly recommended. :) Enjoy your holidays!...
Posted on December 21, 2007 8:00 AM • 2 Comments •
Does Time Slow In Crisis? No, Say Researchers: In The Matrix, hero Neo wins his battles when time slows in the simulated world. In the real world, accident victims often report a similar slowing as they slide unavoidably into disaster....
Posted on December 20, 2007 10:07 PM • 0 Comments •
This is a brain MRI animation, showing sequential slices of the brain, from top to bottom. It was a featured image at Wikipedia. This was created by a Wikipedia user, Fastfission. The explanation follows: Made from an fMRI scan...
Posted on December 20, 2007 6:50 PM • 2 Comments •
Since it's supposed to be the season of charity, that time of year when we remember those who are less fortunate than we are, I thought I'd post on altruism and the brain, since there have recently been a few...
Posted on December 20, 2007 12:40 PM • 9 Comments •
Last year, a friend of Greta's died tragically young. He was a pillar of the community, and Greta was honored to learn that he wanted her to play the oboe at his memorial service, which would be attended by hundreds...
Fortune has announced the year's 101 Dumbest Moments in Business, including Prozac for dogs. "Thank God. We've been so worried since Lucky dyed his hair jet black and started listening to the Smiths." "Eli Lilly wins FDA approval to put Prozac into chewable, beef-flavored pills to treat separation anxiety...
Posted on December 20, 2007 8:00 AM • 9 Comments •
Janet and Shelley have opened up the question of whether students and others should use drugs to enhance their cognitive performance. Janet thinks one shouldn't, and Shelley thinks that, in the absence of bad side effects, one might as...
Do smells have an impact on how we judge people? Certainly if someone smells bad, we may have a negative impression of the person. But what if the smell is so subtle we don't consciously notice it? Research results have...
As I believe I've said before, if anything good has come from the Larry Summers debacle of a few years ago, it's that it inspired some really interesting research on gender differences in math. If you've been reading this blog...
Barbary Macaques (an adult male and an infant). Via Wikipedia. Part of the experience of living in an apartment involves occasionally being subjected to the sounds of members of our own species mating. While the torrid love affairs of...
In the 20/27 December 2007 issue of Nature, there's a fascinating commentary by Cambridge University neuroscientists Barbara Sahakian and Sharon Morein-Zamir. Entitled "Professor's little helper," this commentary explores, among other things, how "cognitive-enhancing drugs" are starting to find their way...
Vision is the process by which the brain converts the light stimuli into a mental world filled with abstract visual objects. If you stop to think about it, this is an incredible feat. There is nothing in the photons coming...
A pod of Orcas surrounds a seal on an ice sheet and creates waves to try and knock it off. This reminds me of when you buy a candy bar and it gets stuck by the wrapper and you have...
Posted on December 19, 2007 11:25 AM • 13 Comments •
Amuse yourself for a few minutes: The Neural Correlate Society has compiled its list of ten finalists for the year's best optical illusions. My favorite is the Bouncing Brains....
Posted on December 19, 2007 9:50 AM • 1 Comments •
In which we're reminded that database searches are experiments, too. One of the trickiest things with bioinformatics experiments is repeating them. This challenge isn't related to the validity of the...
So The Superficial is reporting that Jamie Lynn Spears is pregnant by her boyfriend Casey Aldridge. Jamie Lynn is Britney Spears' younger sister, and at 16 she will be a "teen mother," but not a stereotypical one. Jamie Lynn Spears...
Light-response in cyanobacteria; population structure in dogs; a good genome of Pinot Noir; chemoreceptors in a beetle; visual feedback in learning....
Posted on December 18, 2007 11:46 PM • 0 Comments •
The Onion shares news of a drug designed to alleviate distrust of drug manufacturers. "Out of a test group of 180, 172 study participants reported a dramatic rise in their passion for pharmaceutical companies," said Pfizer director of clinical research Suzanne Frost. "And 167 asked their doctors about a...
Posted on December 18, 2007 9:18 PM • 3 Comments •
Ed Yong has posted the 38th edition of Encephalon at Not Exactly Rocket Science. The carnival will return in a month, and the next host will be announced in due course....
Posted on December 18, 2007 5:43 PM • 3 Comments •
Family Ties That Bind: Maternal Grandparents Are More Involved In The Lives Of Their Grandchildren: For grandparents living within 19.5 miles (30 km) of their grandchildren, over 30% of the maternal grandmothers had contact daily or a few times a...
Are teenagers too rational? That, at least, is the conclusion of a recent study showing that teens overestimate the riskiness of things like unprotected sex and drunk driving, yet choose to do them anyways: A study by researchers at the...
Posted on December 18, 2007 2:19 PM • 28 Comments •
How do you go about researching a genetic disease? This multi-part series explores how digital resources can be used to learn about Huntingtin's disease. Reposted and updated from the original...
So asks the copyranter over this latest example of human stupidity: What's even funnier than the absurd notion that a "Hearts on Fire" diamond will buy you monogamy (or that diamond purchases aren't so frequently given in penitence for the...
Posted on December 18, 2007 7:00 AM • 28 Comments •
Basic Math in Monkeys and College Students: Adult humans possess mathematical abilities that are unmatched by any other member of the animal kingdom. Yet, there is increasing evidence that the ability to enumerate sets of objects nonverbally is a capacity...
Posted on December 18, 2007 1:00 AM • 0 Comments •
Photograph courtesy of the Exploratorium Jonah Lehrer* points out an exhibition of Paul Ekman's photographs at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Ekman is a psychologist at UCSF who has spent time in Papua New Guinea studying the facial expressions...
Posted on December 17, 2007 4:44 PM • 3 Comments •
This past weekend, I went to two different holiday parties. While many of the people at the parties were friends, I was also introduced to a couple dozen new people -- out of town guests of the hosts, friends of...
For a wonderful example of Oliver Sacks' "romantic scientific method" at work - a method he borrowed, at least in part, from the great Russian neurologist A.R. Luria - listen to this NPR piece, by Robert Krulwich. It's a beautiful...
Posted on December 17, 2007 1:11 PM • 4 Comments •
There are many brain fitness software products available these days so when I was offered a copy of Core Learning's program Mind Builder, I agreed to check it out. It offers a series of test questions similar to America's SAT, while Mind Builder Pro is a fuller package that...
Posted on December 17, 2007 8:00 AM • 6 Comments •
No, that is not a really nasty guy who hypnotizes people. It is a technical term used to describe the feeling of falling one sometimes experiences at the moment one drifts into sleep. It often makes the person wake up...
Posted on December 16, 2007 4:37 PM • 1 Comments •
I always joke around that I would make the worst therapist since my 'therapy' would consist of something like this: Surprisingly (well maybe not that surprisingly since the internet appeared) this method seems to be practiced somewhere seriously. The Kadir-Buxton Method involves: making a fist of both hands, and striking...
Posted on December 16, 2007 11:55 AM • 8 Comments •
Remote viewing is a form of "psychoenergetic perception" (i.e. clairvoyance) developed as part of a long-term $20 million research program initiated by U.S. intelligence agencies in the early 1970s. Now known by the codename Stargate, the program was initiated largely...
Over at Pharyngula, Mark Antimony posted this: A friend of mine, who's name won't be mentioned, blacked out in class the other day. Since then, he's been on a seizure drug. The drug is giving a very weird side effect....
Posted on December 15, 2007 4:32 PM • 11 Comments •
A friend of mine, who's name won't be mentioned, blacked out in class the other day. Since then, he's been on a seizure drug. The drug is giving a very weird side effect. It must be affecting his auditory cortex,...
Posted on December 15, 2007 1:21 PM • 43 Comments •
From a UC Santa Cruz Press Release: The infamous Indian Ocean tsunami that struck on December 26, 2004, caused tragically high mortality--from 10 to 90 percent of the population at various locations. Yet in 1930 a tsunami of similar size, generated by an earthquake near...
There was a very astute comment left in response to my post on evolution and psychopaths: Normal people (however you define that term) can be desensitized to the suffering of others. Soldiers fighting in a war - those who don't...
Posted on December 14, 2007 2:23 PM • 11 Comments •
A few weeks ago, I was excited to learn that a project I'm working on got written up on NPR's News Blog. However, I was less excited when I saw the way my own status was described: Dave Munger, a...
There are 36 days until the Science Blogging Conference. The wiki is looking good, the Program is shaping up nicely, and there is more and more blog and media coverage already. The anthology should be published in time for...
Posted on December 14, 2007 9:26 AM • 0 Comments •
In a parody of Make Magazine projects, Austrian group Monochrom demonstrate how to create a brain computer interface, a.k.a. braicin, using household materials like duct tape, old ice skates, a vintage calculator, and onions in alcohol ("preferably Romanian"). Via Boing Boing TV. Link to extended director's uncut version (shown here)....
Merged series of phase contrast micrographs showing neurite outgrowth in rat dorsal root ganglion cells grown on an acetylcholine biopolymer. (Christiane Gumera) Last year, Yadong Wang and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology reported that they had...
Posted on December 13, 2007 7:00 PM • 1 Comments •
The latest issue of Nature has a thought-provoking article on new research trying to understand the psychopathic brain. On most psychological tests, psychopaths appear perfectly normal. Their working memory isn't impaired, they use language normally, and they don't have reduced...
Posted on December 13, 2007 5:16 PM • 10 Comments •
The word "wOOt" - spelt with zeros instead of the letter 'o' - has just been voted as Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary's Word of the Year. Coined by internet users, and defined as an interjection "expressing joy", it's quite apt today,...
Posted on December 13, 2007 3:07 PM • 6 Comments •
The human perceptual system is able to enforce a large array of illusions on our conscious experience. Most importantly, we hold the illusion of a complete and vivid picture of our surroundings, while in fact we selectively ignore nearly everything...
Fearless Mouse In this undated photo released by Tokyo University's Department of Biophysics and Biochemistry Graduate School of Science, a genetically modified mouse stays near a cat in Tokyo. Using genetic engineering, scientists at Tokyo University say they have successfully switched off the rodents' instinct...
Posted on December 13, 2007 1:54 PM • 3 Comments •
If you encounter a difficult situation, you may be extra careful afterwards, even in a different or unrelated situation. This intuitive statement has recently been confirmed in a laboratory task, and extended to show that such carry-over "conflict adaptation" effects...
I get a lot of random questions from friends and relatives. It is an occupational hazard. This one just came down the grapevine: Do you know how sometimes when you're lying in bed, starting to fall asleep and all of...
Home sales are plummeting. In the Times, David Leonhardt focuses on Paramount, CA, site of the most precipitous drop in home sales in the country: Just south of Los Angeles, there is a small city called Paramount where houses have...
Posted on December 13, 2007 10:24 AM • 12 Comments •
December 13 is my birthday! Yippee, you say, how old am I? Old enough to not say... I will shamelessly mention the Amazon wish list linked from my contact page, and remind you that Omni Brain has a tip jar in the sidebar (shared with Steve). But I'm not...
Posted on December 13, 2007 8:00 AM • 1 Comments •
Massive Dinosaur Discovered In Antarctica Sheds Light On Life, Distribution Of Sauropodomorphs: A new genus and species of dinosaur from the Early Jurassic has been discovered in Antarctica. The massive plant-eating primitive sauropodomorph is called Glacialisaurus hammeri and lived...
Posted on December 13, 2007 12:11 AM • 1 Comments •
Terry Pratchett just announced that he's been diagnosed with a rare form of early-onset Alzheimer's. He's at least somewhat upbeat, though: PS I would just like to draw attention to everyone reading the above that this should be interpreted...
Posted on December 12, 2007 9:24 PM • 0 Comments •
Paul Ekman, the eminent UCSF psychologist, has a new exhibit of his photography on display at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. The photographs are primarily of the South Fore people, an isolated group living in the New Guinea highlands. Ekman...
Posted on December 12, 2007 9:59 AM • 2 Comments •
I haven't gotten back to the "selection of antidepressants" series. Mostly that is because, alphabetically, the next one is supposed to be citalopram. While citalopram (Celexa™) is a perfectly fine antidepressant, it is kind of boring. So to spice...
There are 30 new articles published in PLoS ONE today. My personal picks: Genetic Impact of a Severe El Nino Event on Galápagos Marine Iguanas (Amblyrhynchus cristatus): El Nino is an ocean-atmosphere phenomenon occurring in the Pacific Basin which is...
Posted on December 11, 2007 11:12 PM • 0 Comments •
Here's an article about a sophisticated type of advertising which uses hypersonic sound: New Yorker Alison Wilson was walking down Prince Street in SoHo last week when she heard a woman's voice right in her ear asking, "Who's there? Who's...
Posted on December 11, 2007 6:46 PM • 11 Comments •
How people respond to the U.S. government's attempts to censor some war-related images comes down to whether or not they are supporters of President Bush, a new study suggests. Researchers at Ohio State University surveyed 600 people and asked them if they were interested in...
Posted on December 11, 2007 6:11 PM • 1 Comments •
Sega is to develop toys controlled by thought, in collaboration with NeuroSky, a Silicon Valley-based start-up company that interfaces biological feedback (such as brain waves) to consumer electronics. The toys will be based on NeuroSky's ThinkGear, a brain-computer interface (BCI)...
You'll remember that some time ago (ten, eleven minutes?) I reposted (from gregladen.com) an interesting story about a study of how the mind works. I did that because I knew that the researchers involved in this study have a new survey up on their web...
Posted on December 11, 2007 5:31 PM • 0 Comments •
Archaeologists know that a "Roncofact" is an artifact that you find, and realize (or speculate) that it had multiple functions. "It slices, it dices, it makes Julian Fries...." A recent study claims that humans, in fact, shun Roncofacts. But wait, there's more.....
Listen to this short recording: It's a sequence that repeats every sixth beat. But when we're listening to music, we usually prefer to divide rhythm into two- or three-beat patterns (duple or triple rhythm). In this case, the sequence doesn't...
Check this out: A Photographic Exhibition from Pioneering Psychologist Paul Ekman The Search for Universals in Human Emotion Ekman is One of the Most Influential Psychologists of the 20th Century At the Exploratorium January 22-April 27, 2008 The Exploratorium presents a photographic exhibition, The Search for Universals in Human Emotion,...
Posted on December 11, 2007 2:15 PM • 1 Comments •
There seems to be some interesting things going on with the recently reported study of rates of evolution in humans. We are getting reports of a wide range of rather startling conclusions being touted by the researchers who wrote this paper. These conclusions typically come...
Shakespeare bent language in peculiar ways. He had a habit of violating our conventional grammatical categories, so that nouns became verbs and adjectives were turned into nouns. (This is known as a functional shift.) Here's Phillip Davis: Thus in "Lear"...
Posted on December 11, 2007 10:15 AM • 8 Comments •
So does anyone want to lay odds on how long it will be before "discovery of the gay gene" gets spread like a crazed rhinovirus through the popular media? A recent press release announces the discovery that male fruit flies...
Yesterday's Sunday Feature on BBC Radio 3 was program about the evolution of music, by Ivan Hewitt. It isn't available online yet, but should be uploaded onto the Sunday Feature page soon, and will remain there for a week.The progam...
Posted on December 10, 2007 5:07 PM • 0 Comments •
If there has been at least one good side-effect of Dr. Watson making a jack-ass of himself, it is that it has given scientists the opportunity to set the record straight about heredity, race, and IQ. (He has since recanted,...
Is there a basic "computational unit" of the neocortex? In contrast to subcortical regions, neocortical architecture seems fairly regular and matrix-like - leading to it's other name, "isocortex." While there are many contenders for the title of the "canonical circuit"...
There's been a lot of discussion online lately about the relative importance of the position of an author name. Is it more impressive to be a first author on a report? If so, how much? John Lynch made a graph...
Yeah you heard me right... there is no good reason why Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, or any of the other tabloid celebs are so paid attention to. They contribute nothing to society - and they aren't even that attractive. Dr Torkel Klingberg and Fiona McNab have come up with...
Posted on December 10, 2007 10:23 AM • 12 Comments •
This will probably never be made into an anti-drug ad campaign, but I can't imagine a stronger deterrent. Angel's Trumpet is a flower that contains scopolamine and other alkaloids. It's known as a "biogenic drug" and presumed by naive recreational drug users to be harmless because it's a plant....
Posted on December 10, 2007 10:00 AM • 7 Comments •
Stunning vector art by Brazilian illustrator Guilherme Marconi. Marconi is a fabulously talented designer who has created a number of unique works related to thought and brain. Check out this contribution to the Vector Magazine calendar in a pdf, and view more of his portfolio (including an Absolut Vodka...
Posted on December 10, 2007 8:00 AM • 5 Comments •
Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, discusses race and IQ, arguing that the differences in the IQ scores of blacks and whites are due largely to environmental factors. Nisbett begins his article by mentioning James...
Courtesy of Brian Leiter's blog comes a link to an article by Kwame Anthony Appiah in the New York Times about X-phi, or as it's better known, Experimental Philosophy. This is an approach to thought experiments that tries to...
Wow, it's been a little while since I last blogged. I've been busy trying to stain the eyes of my zebra fish, but still with little luck. My goal is to dye the retinas and their resulting optic nerves and...
About 2 years ago, researchers reported the discovery of the so-called "Halle Berry cell" in the human brain. This, and similar cells which respond selectively to other well-known celebrities, famous landmarks or categories of objects are located on the medial...
Jennifer writes to point out a documentary about neuroplasticity which is being aired on PBS this month. Follow the link for a 3-minute preview, which features Michael Merzenich....
My son is working on a paper for school and he picked the topic of video games and how they affect behavior. He primed himself by playing Assassin's Creed for a couple of days, so he could aggressively look for...
This case was written up in the NEJM, and made freely accessible. The image on the top left shows a brain scan taken three years earlier than the one on the top right. The other images show the cells...
Humans Appear Hardwired To Learn By 'Over-Imitation': Children learn by imitating adults--so much so that they will rethink how an object works if they observe an adult taking unnecessary steps when using that object, according to a new Yale...
Posted on December 7, 2007 11:41 PM • 0 Comments •
A few weeks ago, Martin over at Aardvarchaelogy, Steve Novella, and I speculated about how alternative medicine modalities might evolve and what the selection pressures on them might be. We all agreed that, to some degree, there is definite selection...
This week's Casual Fridays study is just a quick reading comprehension test. Is that all it is? I can't tell you. Why not just try it and find out for yourself? Click here to participate As usual, the survey is...
That headline was so bad I made myself a little sick. Anyway, as reported by WCBS in New York, Simba the tiger cub was thought to have a tumor or brain infection and was scheduled for routine euthanization. Ok so...
Not so much walking as rocking and rolling, a brain moves along a desk in a supremely pointless amateur video. Watch the shadow on the wall behind the brain......
Hmm, I did not know this - apparently the left hemisphere of the human brain falls asleep first, and the right one a little bit later in most people. I wonder if that has any connection with the reason we...
Scientists studying Amazon river dolphins have discovered that males use gifts to woo potential mates. Not only that, but the male dolphins appear to give better gifts to more prized females, and the dolphins who bring the most gifts seem...
When we are trying to understand what someone is saying, we rely a lot on the movement of their face. We pay attention to how their faces move, and that informs our understanding of what is said. The classic example...
I'm going to be out most of the day as I'm going to attend a lecture in New York on how useful (or not) living primates are in reconstructing the lifeways of extinct hominins (with a new copy of Peter...
Posted on December 6, 2007 11:55 AM • 0 Comments •
The data is hard to believe: It has long been known that dyslexics are drawn to running their own businesses, where they can get around their weaknesses in reading and writing and play on their strengths. But a new study...
Posted on December 6, 2007 10:28 AM • 11 Comments •
Recently, several social psychologists have posited a "Whodunit" system in the brain that's always looking to assign authorship -- either our own or somebody else's -- to actions. Most of the time, it's pretty easy to tell when we've done...
The Neurocritic highlighted a recent study in which sildenafil (brand name Viagra) and related drug rolipram (they're both phosphodiesterase inhibitors) improved cognitive performance in monkeys. Both drugs were equally effective in improving the monkeys' ability to correctly reach a food treat in a transparent box with one open side, which...
I love a good academic stoush, so long as I'm just watching and not involved either as an antagonist or as collateral damage. Recently, Steven Pinker published a book, The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human...
Posted on December 5, 2007 10:55 PM • 4 Comments •
In other news about brain-shaped toys, here's the Walking Brain. Wind it up and, yes, it walks. The really stupid thing, though, is that someone's created a 15 second video of it waddling across a blank screen that they think people will pay to download (you can watch it...
From an article in the Washington Post: Afterward, she stayed strong. She wasn't going to make the classic victim's mistake of blaming herself for provoking the attack. Mo, writing at Neurophilosophy, commented at length upon an article about the use...
A reader asks: I've been reading Cog Daily for about 4 months now and have always found that I am particularly fascinated with entries dealing with developmental psychology, such as the latest one regarding the logarithmic-like representation of numbers in...
Science and Conflicts of Interest in the Lay Press; Modeling the Evolution of Resistance; Exposure to Media Violence; Time Processing in Huntington's Disease; How Birds Acquire and Transmit Avian Polyomavirus; Oxygen Reperfusion Damage in an Insect; Dynamic Perceptual Changes in Audiovisual Simultaneity....
An article in the NY Times discusses the work of Michael Marmor, a professor of ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine who has created a computer simulation of how eye diseases such as macular degeneration and cataracts have affected...
NEW YORK - Girls swept a prestigious high school science competition for the first time Monday, winning top prizes of $100,000 scholarships for their work on potential tuberculosis cures and bone growth in zebrafish. It was the first time girls had ever won the grand...
Get this 'Magical Thinking Hat' from the Anatomical Chart Company. Colorful, anatomically correct brain on the cap - flip up the brim and expose the words,"Think, Think, Think..." when you need extra brainpower. 100% cotton. One size fits all....
One of our readers emailed us asking if there has ever been research on whether kids' understanding of numbers -- especially large numbers -- differs from adults. Greta did a little poking around and found a fascinating study on second-...
A Blue Tit (Cyanistes caeruleus). Via Wikipedia. In 1921, people who had milk delivered to their door in Swaythling, England had a mystery on their hands; someone was drinking all the cream out of their milk bottles. Local youths...
As I note in my book, the most famous impressionists all suffered from serious medical problems: Monet became blind (but didn't stop painting the bridges of Giverny). Vincent Van Gogh, drinker of kerosene, turpentine, and absinthe, probably thought the coronas...
Posted on December 4, 2007 10:49 AM • 1 Comments •
A recent paper in PLoS Biology examines the role of the so called "language gene" in neural development related to vocalization. It was previously found that FOXP2 gene is up-regulated in a certain area of the brain that is important for neural plasticity related to...
Sex differences in certain abilities, which have persisted for decades in various psychological tests, are now widely believed to be the result of conditioning that is in turn shaped by cultural factors. This applies to math abilities, spatial skills, and a range of other activities....
Humans are now one large step closer to producing armies of undead, zombie hordes who live only to feast on the brains of the living and reproduce by infecting non-zombies with their "zombie virus" through their saliva or other bodily...
The 37th edition of Encephalon, hosted by Bora at A Blog Around the Clock, includes posts from students in PZ's neurobiology class, as well as the first piece of coursework for my M.Sc., an essay on axon guidance which I...
Finally an invention Zooillogix can get behind! Inventor, Jo Lapidge from Canberra, Australia has unveiled a kit called the Litter Kwitter, designed to train cats to use the toilet rather than the unruly and unsanitary litter box. Inspired by the...
Your IQ can be reliably predicted by simple reaction time tasks - perhaps even more reliably than with much more complex cognitive tasks. This surprising psychometric fact has led to the belief in human "processing speed." In the same way...
Pediatrics Grand Rounds is up at Hope for Pandora, complete with its first-ever Cognitive Daily selection. Encephalon is up at A Blog Around the Clock, featuring all manner of brainy goodness, including a CogDaily post as well....
Posted on December 3, 2007 12:02 PM • 0 Comments •
Spence et al. wanted to test the use of fMRI for lie detection. In order to do so, they found a subject who had been convicted for child molestation because she has Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. There are two important...
The other day, Kate wrote an interesting post about inter-species relationships, in particular the cases of inter-species adoption and parenting. In her post, she mentioned a paper that immediately drew my attention - Influence of various early human-foal interferences on...
Posted on December 3, 2007 10:59 AM • 9 Comments •
It's been a long time since I last hosted a carnival, but who could resist Mo when he asked so nicely if I would be interested in hosting Encephalon? Of course I will! And here it is and I hope...
I've reviewed Sandra and Matthew Blakeslee's recent book The Body Has a Mind of Its Own over at The Quarterly Conversation. So, is this the science book that should have made the New York Times' Notable Books list? (Several ScienceBloggers...
The Washington Post has an interesting article, 'A Soldier's Officer', about an officer in Iraq who attempted suicide and endangered other personnel. The military is considering putting her on trial for "assault on a superior commissioned officer, aggravated assault, kidnapping,...
All-Nighters Equal Lower Grades: With end-of-semester finals looming, here's an exam question: Will pulling an all-nighter actually help you score well? To the dismay of college students everywhere, the correct answer is "no." Morning Jolt Of Caffeine Might Mask Serious...
Using sophisticated techniques to silence or activate specific neurons, researchers from Stanford University have established that a simple behaviour used by fruit fly larvae to evade attack from parasitic wasps is triggered by a type of sensory neuron that...
PZ attacks religious beliefs with his usual angry panache: Religion is a bad thing. It encourages people to believe in things that are not true. It really is as simple as that; we'd be better off if people valued truth...
Posted on December 1, 2007 11:25 AM • 39 Comments •
This brain map comes from The Book of Life: The Spiritual and Physical Constitution of Man (1912), by the obscure mystical philosopher Alesha Sivartha, who is sometimes referred to as a "grandfather of the new-age movement".The map is of particular...
Posted on November 30, 2007 8:40 PM • 0 Comments •
Two weeks ago, we challenged our readers to see if they could discern the difference between MP3 recordings at different sampling data rates. Nearly 700 completed our study. So does a very high data rate result in a noticeable difference?...
Kate describes an unusual reproductive system in topi antelopes in which the fertile females are extremely promiscuous (but choosy) and aggressive. Not what you learned in school under the "mate choice" and "male-male competition" topics in your Animal Behavior classes.......
Posted on November 30, 2007 2:28 PM • 0 Comments •
A lot of good brain blogging lately; some beautiful drawings from the era of phrenology, some crazy kids high on scopolamine, James Flynn's current thoughts on intelligence, and more......
I've been busy as hell, so I haven't had much time or energy to post anything lately. But I had an idea today that I thought I'd try out. There are a bunch of experiments that I really like for...
Shift Work May Be Cancer Risk: In an announcement to be published Saturday in the journal Lancet Oncology, the International Agency for Research on Cancer, part of the World Health Organization, will label shift work as a "probable cause" of...
Posted on November 30, 2007 9:18 AM • 3 Comments •
A great deal of evidence has accumulated that there is a problem with regulation of cortisol levels in persons with posttraumatic stress disorder. Several years ago, it was demonstrated that adult offspring of persons with PTSD had lower circulating cortisol...
The world wide web can be understood as a giant matrix of associations (links) between various nodes (web pages). At an abstract level, this is similar to human memory, consisting of a matrix of associations (learned relationships, or neuronal connections)...
The ability to actively maintain more information in memory, known as "working memory," seems to benefit performance in a variety of tasks. One idea is that these tasks require controlled attention, allowing for better control over behavior. But there's a...
The image on the right is a supercomputer simulation of the microcircuitry found within a column from the neocortex of the rat brain. The simulation is a tour de force of computational neuroscience: a single column is a highly complex...
Posted on November 29, 2007 9:06 AM • 5 Comments •
Gene Study Supports Single Main Migration Across Bering Strait: Did a relatively small number of people from Siberia who trekked across a Bering Strait land bridge some 12,000 years ago give rise to the native peoples of North and...
Posted on November 28, 2007 11:35 PM • 0 Comments •
It is said that the camera never lies, but according to new research published in the journal Applied Cognitive Psychology, the camera not only lies, but those lies can lead to the creation of false memories. In the study,...
Posted on November 28, 2007 8:40 PM • 19 Comments •
According to Jennifer Argo it is possible to get a guy to want to watch a so called 'chick flick', all you need to do is tell him its fictional. According to the press release: "We looked at fact and fiction stories and found that if people have high empathy...
Posted on November 28, 2007 4:46 PM • 6 Comments •
I've just finished reading fellow ScienceBlogger Chris Mooney's new book Storm World, and I highly recommend it -- not only to people interested in hurricanes and global climate change, but also to fans of cognitive psychology. Why psychology? Because the...
Watching this clip of a kid who has spent way too much time on Guitar Hero 2 reminded me of the classic study of the somatosensory cortex in string players: Magnetic source imaging revealed that the cortical representation of the...
Posted on November 28, 2007 2:57 PM • 9 Comments •
...rapid judgments of competence based solely on the facial appearance of candidates predicted the outcomes of gubernatorial elections, the most important elections in the United States next to the presidential elections. In all experiments, participants were presented with the faces of the winner and...
As promised, I want to take a look at this article (discussed also at Corpus Callosum). I'm not a psychologist, so I won't have much to say about what causes might underlie the phenomenon of do-gooders doing bad. However, I...
Neurologist and neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran is giving a talk at the Royal Society in London tonight. Entitled Nature and nurture in brain function: clues from synesthesia and phantom limbs, the talk begins at 6.30pm GMT. The lecture is free...
Posted on November 28, 2007 12:02 PM • 4 Comments •
It may be nothing more than slinging shit, but when you run out of shit: Wild gorillas have been seen using "weapons" for the first time, giving a new insight into how early man learned to use sticks and stones for fighting and hunting millions...
Posted on November 28, 2007 11:17 AM • 0 Comments •
This image of the brainstem of a Brainbow mouse, by Jean Livet of Harvard University, has just been awarded 1st prize in the 2007 Olympus Bioscapes International Digital Imaging Competition....
Posted on November 27, 2007 8:32 PM • 4 Comments •
Bear Hunting Altered Genetics More Than Ice Age Isolation: It was not the isolation of the Ice Age that determined the genetic distribution of bears, as has long been thought. This is shown by an international research team led...
Posted on November 27, 2007 8:29 PM • 0 Comments •
In a response to a "What are You Thankful For" request by ABC4.com, a rare and interesting neurological case study was described: penetration of the brain by a deer antler. CNN.com also has a video describing the event and the...
Posted on November 27, 2007 6:06 PM • 15 Comments •
Check out this Discussion led by Charlie Rose with guests Eric Kandel, Aaron Beck, Steven Roose & Peter Fonagy: Here are some interesting home videos of the Freud family as well....
Posted on November 27, 2007 5:07 PM • 1 Comments •
Genes determine basic behavior, like the behavior associated with being a predator. Or avoiding being eaten by a predator. This we know to be true because millions, zillions, of years of evolution must have shaped genes ... especially in mammals with with their whopping big...
Do people ever tell you to "just smile, you'll feel better"? If you're like our daughter Nora, you hear it a lot, and you get annoyed every time you hear it. Telling a teenager to smile is probably one of...
A lengthy article in last weekend's Washington Post Magazine discusses the work of Michael Mithoefer, a psychiatrist at the Medical University of South Carolina (MUSC) who has almost completed the first phase of a clinical study into the use of...
Whenever I meet someone new and I tell them I'm studying psychology I inevitably get asked the ever annoying question "Are you analyzing me right now?" which of course always leads to the same response from me, "I'm as qualified to analyze or give therapy as an engineering student." Which...
Posted on November 27, 2007 11:57 AM • 12 Comments •
The Scientist has a fastastic illustrated feature on the workings of cochlear hair cells in their current online issue. In addition to pointing out the different cell types in the inner ear, there are a few informative blurbs about mechanotransduction...
Posted on November 27, 2007 11:07 AM • 2 Comments •
I like this just-so story. Here's Natalie Angier: Art, she [Ellen Dissanayake] and others have proposed, did not arise to spotlight the few, but rather to summon the many to come join the parade -- a proposal not surprisingly shared...
Posted on November 27, 2007 9:58 AM • 9 Comments •
From Brad DeLong: If inherited genetically-based IQ were the source of the extra edge that the children of the rich get in our society, than we would expect a parent with 4 times average lifetime full-time earnings--say $200,000 a year--to...
Posted on November 27, 2007 9:21 AM • 25 Comments •
I was originally planning to do a real science post today. Indeed, there are at least two or three interesting studies that have been released in the last month or two that I've been meaning to write up, you...
..that is adolescence. And the research on what adolescents find attractive. For a few years. Until they gain the gift of speech and hearing, look up, and find beauty in the mind. Unfortunately, some never do....
Posted on November 26, 2007 9:25 PM • 3 Comments •
A new study addresses the link betwen omega-3 acidss and brain function, in this case in gerbils. These studies show that oral supplementation with DHA, an omega-3 fatty acid, increases dendritic spine density in adult gerbil hippocampus...). This effect of DHA is approximately doubled when...
Yup, it's Monday evening: Light Activates Output from Evening Neurons and Inhibits Output from Morning Neurons in the Drosophila Circadian Clock: Living organisms have evolved circadian clocks that anticipate daily changes in their environment. Their clockwork is fully endogenous, but...
Posted on November 26, 2007 7:42 PM • 0 Comments •
What do most parents want for their kids as they grow into adults? Successful careers? Happy family lives? Or do they simply want their children to be good people? They probably want all of these things -- and a little...
You look away from a field for two seconds, and they get all crazy on you... I used to do only molecular biology focusing primarily on neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's. Since I moved to a lab that studies behavior, I...
Life is getting tough for the running backs of the NFL. First comes the news that becoming a star rusher doesn't require a Heisman Trophy or even a high-profile start in NCAA Division I-A: The debate has simmered for a...
Posted on November 26, 2007 10:09 AM • 5 Comments •
Well I arrived back in Michigan after a deep-fried Thanksgiving in Florida, hope you all had an as opulently greasy and delicious a meal as I did. I have to share a funny anecdote from my drive to the airport...
Posted on November 26, 2007 8:21 AM • 4 Comments •
Using my new Firefox search box to search ScienceBlogs, I learned that Fetal Alcohol Syndrome (FAS) retards neural growth, screws up the circadian clock, is the subject of moralistic cartoons, and that it cannot be cured. True enough, it...
According to a story in the last issue of Psychological Science: ... for most women, high sex drive is associated with increased sexual attraction to both men and women. For men, however, high sex drive is associated with increased sexual attraction to only one sex...
Agomelatine is a new chemical entity that is nearing approval for treatment of depression. It was developed by Servier Laboratories; they have entered into an agreement with Novartis for commercialization of the product (Valdoxan®). This represents a new approach to...
Bioclocks Work By Controlling Chromosome Coiling: There is a new twist on the question of how biological clocks work. In recent years, scientists have discovered that biological clocks help organize a dizzying array of biochemical processes in the body. Despite...
Posted on November 24, 2007 10:58 PM • 0 Comments •
Yesterday I noted how many of the Hominidae pass the "mirror test"; orangutans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans all are able to recognize themselves in a mirror. Gorillas, however, fail the test. Why should this be? The following video might give...
Posted on November 24, 2007 9:09 PM • 4 Comments •
This Friday is a holiday (in America, at least) and what's better on a holiday than a rerun? Yay for reruns. So, I've written about the Amygdaloids before, but here's an introduction video in case you didn't see it (or want to enjoy it again). Also, this band of rockin'...
Posted on November 23, 2007 10:03 PM • 1 Comments •
When I look in the mirror to shave every few mornings or so, I know I'm looking at a reflection of myself and not another human who happens to be doing just the same thing that I'm doing at the...
Posted on November 23, 2007 8:24 PM • 2 Comments •
I have had this experience. I've traveled literally hundreds of kilometers by foot together with Efe (Pygmy) hunters in the Ituri Forest. We see very few animals. The few we do see are attacked, killed, and eaten. Well, a lot of them actually get away,...
I know, I know. Picking on Jenny McCarthy over her now frequent idiotic statements about autism and her parroting of the myth that vaccines cause autism is like shooting fish in a barrel, boxing a one-armed opponent, playing tennis with...
[Introduction|Part 2|Part 3] The three studies discussed here make important contributions to our understanding of axon guidance. Lopez-Bendito et al describe a novel guidance mechanism involving tangentially migrating GABAergic interneurons. These cells migrate ventrally from the LGE to form a...
This is the fourth of a series: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 Wilson and Wilson (W&W) then continue on to employ some recent work on individuals as groups, and the "major transitions" literature....
Some observations on working with zebrafish: Their vision isn't as reliable as I thought. They would try like there's no tomorrow to swim through the Plexiglas wall when there's a hold only a few inches over. If I want to...
Posted on November 21, 2007 9:34 PM • 8 Comments •
The male and female human brains are different. Some of the better documented differences are similar to differences seen in other mammals. They are hard to find, very small, and may or may not be of great significance. Obviously, some are very important because they probably relate to such things as the ability ... or lack thereof ... to bear offspring. ...
[Introduction|Part 2|Discussion] Tojima et al (2007) find that the growth cone's response to attractive guidance cues requires asymmetrical vesicle transport and exocytosis. They cultured dorsal root ganglion (DRG) cells from embryonic chicks, and produced localized elevations in calcium ion concentration...
There are 34 articles published in PLoS ONE this week. As always, look around, read, rate, comment, annotate.... Here are my picks for the week (no need to repeat the dinosaur paper here, of course): A Viscoelastic Deadly Fluid in...
Posted on November 20, 2007 9:53 PM • 0 Comments •
Sexual dimorphism in organisms is nothing new; it has long been known that in certain species one sex is often larger, flashier, or somehow markedly different than the other. In some species like the Indian Peafowl (Pavo cristatus), the mail...
Nothing brings out conflict an academic department like a hiring decision. Adding a new faculty member is complicated by dozens of factors: What field should the new hire be in? Is it more important to hire someone in precisely the...
I don't know how I missed this, but Science Daily has an interesting summary of research appearing in Current Biology. The Current Biology article is subscription only so I haven't read it. The research concerns the ability of elephants to...
[Introduction|Part 3|Part 4]Lopez-Bendito et al (2006) show that pathfinding of thalamocortical axons (TCAs) requires the formation of a permissive corridor through non-permissive territory, and that this corridor is generated by cells which undergo a tangential migration from the lateral ganglionic...
Suppose you're playing a game where the goal is to accumulate as many points as possible. Now suppose your decisions -- and only your decisions -- control not only how many points you get, but also how many points the...
This fluorescence microscopy image off a growth cone, by Dylan T. Burnette of New Haven, Connecticut, received honorable mention in the 2004 Nikon Small World Photomicrography Competition. The remarkable specificity of neuronal connectivity depends on accurate axon pathfinding during development....
Geoff Hinton has a new TiCS paper describing recent advances in algorithms used to train multilayered neural networks. First, a little background: neural networks of a sufficient size can calculate any mathematical function (an infamous proof among neural network modelers)....
Posted on November 19, 2007 11:49 AM • 0 Comments •
Didn't go to the Society for Neuroscience conference, but still want to know what happened (and in an English accent, no less)? Then check out this new NeuroPod podcast from Nature, where Kerri Smith talks about the highlights from SFN....
Posted on November 19, 2007 8:49 AM • 0 Comments •
I couldn't wait for Multimedia Friday to post this video, it's just too funny. I Am the Very Model of a Psychopharmacologist is set to Gilbert and Sullivan's classic song with animation. Created by Stephen M Stahl, MD, PhD, of the Neurosciences Education Institute, Adjunct Professor of Psychiatry at the...
Posted on November 19, 2007 8:00 AM • 14 Comments •
A repost on a hallucinogenic herb combination and the protection of religious freedom, plus an interesting twist on the well-worn MAO inhibition story.
Hormone Of Darkness: Melatonin Could Hurt Memory Formation At Night: What do you do when a naturally occurring hormone in your body turns against you? What do you do when that same hormone - melatonin - is a popular supplement...
Posted on November 18, 2007 5:24 PM • 1 Comments •
It's not often I get to comment on as-yet-unpublished work, but I have been sent a copy of a forthcoming essay by David Sloan Wilson and Edward O. Wilson, two giants of the theoretical evolutionary field, defending and redefining...
Simon N. Young, PhD, the Editor-in-chief of the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, has written an editorial: How To Increase Serotonin In The Human Brain Without Drugs. In is published in this month's edition of the Journal of Psychiatry and Neuroscience....
Synaesthesia is a condition in which stimuli of one type evoke sensations in another sensory modality. For example, hearing particular sounds might evoke strong sensations of colour or (more rarely) words might evoke strong tastes in the mouth.In The Hidden...
Posted on November 16, 2007 2:38 PM • 3 Comments •
There's a lot of debate online about whether people can really tell the difference between the various audio formats -- AAC, MP3, you name it. Does it really make a difference? Recently I saw a blog post suggesting that the...
Posted on November 16, 2007 1:39 PM • 30 Comments •
Neuroesthetics seeks to identify the neural basis of aesthetic experience - how does the brain give rise to the perception of beauty? A new paper in Network indicates that artists consistently create works which contain the same statistical properties as...
I wrote before about how there has been a bit of a debate about whether the hippocampus is involved in encoding spatial maps or is involved more generally in relational memory. Well, the argument for general relational memory just got...
At the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego last week, a group of researchers presented data on a speech prosthesis which they say could soon enable a paralyzed man to talk again.The device, which consists of 3 gold recording...
Posted on November 15, 2007 8:39 PM • 2 Comments •
Earlier this week we asked readers which CogDaily posts we should submit to the Open Laboratory anthology. We didn't get many suggestions, and commenter Keely had a guess as to why: Perhaps what would be more helpful is to post...
Abel got a badly worded email which made him worried that Alzheimer's may be caused by sexually transmitted diseases. Turns out he's not completely off the mark.
Posted on November 15, 2007 11:48 AM • 7 Comments •
No..it's a false alarm. [***or not - see note added at end of post] But I had to do a double-take last night when reading my e-mail notification of the new HealthCentral newsletter with the subject line: Celebrate Alzheimer's Awareness...
By Dr. Sonja Pyott Department of Biology and Marine Biology University of North Carolina, Wilmington Wilmington, NC, USA Specimen: Cochlea and Hair Cells Technique: Confocal This confocal microscopy image of the organ of Corti is just stunning. Judges at...
Posted on November 14, 2007 5:54 PM • 1 Comments •
An individual ant is quite insignificant, but a large group of ants can do quite remarkable things. Likewise, neurons evolved to communicate with each other, and are quite useless except when connected to a network of other neurons.I've always...
Posted on November 14, 2007 4:28 PM • 3 Comments •
Both Greta and I are big wine fans. Despite Jonah's recent extremely popular post, I, at least, believe that I can tell the difference between good and bad wines. I'm still convinced that a good wine is more than just...
As always on Monday nights, there are new articles published in PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine. My picks: Professional Uncertainty and Disempowerment Responding to Ethnic Diversity in Health Care: A Qualitative Study In a qualitative study published this week in...
Posted on November 13, 2007 1:50 PM • 0 Comments •
Yesterday we discussed several experiments offering converging evidence that exposure to the color red, even for brief periods before taking a test, can result in lower achievement. It's startling research, but as my daughter suggested at breakfast this morning, maybe...
Not much blogging this week--I'm heading out to California to receive the National Academies prize I wrote about a while back. In the meantime, let me direct your attention to my lead article in this week's Science Times section of...
Posted on November 13, 2007 9:16 AM • 13 Comments •
Just about every election cycle and Superbowl Marco Iacoboni and his lab do some sort of neuroimaging study to determine what people are actually thinking about the political candidates or their teams. Every time these studies come out you can hear the popular press cheering and smiling while you can...
Sorry about the radio silence - it's been a hectic few days on tour. But I've had a really great time talking about science and art with everybody. If you're a citizen of Seattle, I'll be at Town Hall tonight......
Posted on November 13, 2007 8:26 AM • 14 Comments •
I blogged about this way back in 2003 when I had a blog on LiveJournal (yeah, I know), but I want to share it with my (now larger) readership. It’s my favorite scientific paper ever: On 5 June 1995...
Posted on November 12, 2007 5:58 PM • 13 Comments •
Bora Zivkovic is finishing up his nominations for Open Laboratory 2007, a collection of the best Science Blogging in 2007. I'd like to nominate a couple Cognitive Daily posts (this post made it into the 2006 collection), but I thought...
Posted on November 12, 2007 5:00 PM • 3 Comments •
Today's Independent contains an extract from Taking the Proverbial, a book about the psychology of proverbs by Geoff Rolls.The extract includes sections from the book which discuss the proverbs "An elephant never forgets" and "Practice makes perfect". The section about...
Posted on November 12, 2007 11:40 AM • 2 Comments •
A particular FOXP2 allele is shared by modern humans and Neanderthals, suggesting that both had the capacity for language. While it is probably true that N's and H's shared this capacitiy, this gene probably has very little, if anything, to do with it.
One of the things I was taught in English graduate school was never to grade papers using red ink. Students don't respond well to the color red, I was told -- it's intimidating. I always thought this was a little...
How Well Do Dogs See At Night?: A lot better than we do, says Paul Miller, clinical professor of comparative ophthalmology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. Why Quitting Smoking Is So Difficult: New findings clarify the brain mechanisms that explain...
Posted on November 10, 2007 9:07 PM • 0 Comments •
The Los Angeles Times reports on "Robo-moth", a cleverly designed contraption, built from cheap off-the-shelf parts, which was presented at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego earlier this week.Robo-moth is a 6-inch-tall wheeled robot to which attached...
A brief clip of a Siamang (Symphalangus syndactylus) vocalizing. Some mornings in the forests of Indonesia, a male and female gibbon will perform a musical duet. The pair will call out, staking their claim in the forest, often answered...
Last week's Casual Friday study focused on messes around the home. We identified eight common household messes, and then asked readers how annoying they were, and who cleaned up. An interesting thing happened: for the first time ever, we had...
The cover of the current issue of Neuron features this brainland map, by Sam Brown, a cartographer based in New Zealand. Printed A3, A2 and A1 sized copies of the map can be purchased from Unit Seven. ...created from...
The Onion News Network brings us In The Know: Is The Government Spying On Paranoid Schizophrenics Enough? Satire of a talk show with pundits who promote more and better spying on people diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Note: It's "people diagnosed with" (or just "people with") and not "schizophrenics" as people...
How the brain works ... what it does, how it does it, and how well it does it ... is a matter of how neurons are arranged in relation to each other, in circuits. But that is only part of the story. These neurons also...
There are 72 days until the Science Blogging Conference. The wiki is looking good, the Program is shaping up nicely, and there is more and more blog and media coverage already. There are already 119 registered participants and if you...
A depiction of delusional parasitosis in Dave Kellett's webcomic Sheldon. DP, a fixed delusion in which one believes s/he is infested with bugs despite no evidence, was famously described in Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly. Superblogger and psychologist Vaughan Bell wrote a nice article on the subject, check...
The whole of natural history fascinates me, but everyone has their own favorite topics, and one of the most intriguing subject areas (to me, at least) is predator/prey interactions. Herbivores are interesting in their own right, surely, but for...
What's that you say Dave? Dogs may be able to think about what their owners are thinking? Sounds like interesting research, Dave. If someone could actually find the real research and not just this science by press release, I...
Posted on November 7, 2007 4:58 PM • 11 Comments •
If you had control of the crowd behind a free throw shooter at a basketball game and you wanted him to miss what would you do? Here's one highly entertaining way: Help us come up with some others!...
The introductory chapter of Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, by Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison, provides an excellent description of how Emil Kraepelin first classified manic depression (or bipolar disorder) and related conditions in the late...
Children follow a consistent pattern when they acquire language. Instead of learning the most common words first, they start by learning a disproportionate number of nouns. In the youngest talkers nouns form up to 60 percent of their vocabulary, compared...
[Reposted without revision from gregladen.com] This is obviously true, and i've been saying this for a long time. And I'm not talking about the butt-slaps and sharing chewing tobacco and stuff. To a certain extent, digit ratios seem to be a reasonable indicator of the...
Posted on November 7, 2007 10:41 AM • 7 Comments •
Turing's Toddlers: As far as I know, no computer has ever consistently fooled an adult human into thinking it is sentient. But it apparently the case that toddlers can be tricked into accepting a small, cute machine as a fellow toddler: Computers might not be...
Posted on November 7, 2007 10:10 AM • 2 Comments •
Speech recognition remains a daunting challenge for computer programmers partly because the continuous speech stream is highly under-determined. For example take coarticulation, which refers to the fact that the auditory frequencies corresponding to a given letter are strongly influenced by...
[A repost from gregladen.com, unmodified] There is a ceremonial burial in Britain .. ceremonial because it has some red stuff smeared on bone ... that has now bee dated to a few thousand years earlier than previously thought (to ca 25,000 years old). Age of...
You may have noticed Science Blogs runs a regular Ask A Science Blogger question referenced on Frontpage where different Sciblings provide interesting perspectives. Well twice now, Sparticus Maximus the Great has taken over The Intersection with his own expert bird...
The saying that "man is a wolf to man" comes from a saying of Erasmus of Rotterdam, but it is incomplete. The Latin is Homo homini aut deus aut lupus or "Man is either a god or a wolf...
The conference has been astounding, but today, day four, I'm officially getting brain fatigue. (Notice how these posts are getting shorter?) Nevertheless, researchers continue to present fascinating work. Today's noteworthy event was a session on neurogenesis. A number of researchers...
Oxytocin makes you generous, cocaine makes you high, hearing without listening, remembering smells when your brain is fried, when water breaks, early human migrations, green tea is good for you, fragmentation is bad for trout, chemicals are bad for head lice, and rains drown mosquitoes.
A team of researchers from the St Vincent's Campus in Sydney have identified a protein called MIC-1 that appears to control the extreme weight loss common in late stage cancer (sometimes called cancer anorexia), which often speeds death. MIC-1, which...
Yet another gene for IQ is discovered, this time one that interacts with nursing. Naturally, the argument is framed in terms of "Nature" vs. "Nurture."
The researchers did fMRI of brains of persons with Borderline Personality Disorder, before and after psychotherapy. This was a small study, using a design that would be difficult to use routinely, but it is provisionally interesting. Difficult, because the patients...
Today's festivities featured a great talk on neuroethics. Actually, it was one of the first truly good talks I've heard about neuroethics. The speaker was Martha Farah, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for Cognitive Neuroscience. She skipped the...
Circadian Disorders And Adjusting To The Night Shift: Guide For Professionals: Practice parameters are a guide to the appropriate assessment and treatment of circadian rhythm sleep disorders (CRSDs). The standards will have a positive impact on professional behavior, patient...
What with Hollywood archetypes of "animal rights activists" coming out of the woodwork lately, Ryan Gregory and Larry Moran pose the following question: And so I ask, on what basis do you draw the sharp moral line between "humans"...
Imagine that, over the course of a conversation with a friend from work, she makes the following two statements: It's possible that my brother will be coming into town tomorrow It's possible that our boss knows about the affair you...
Aging is associated with some slow but measurable forms of cognitive decline, but there is debate over the type of cognitive changes taking place. A recent study by Rush, Barch & Braver uses a series of interesting tasks to clarify...
Neuropalooza, day two. Some fascinating presentations this afternoon on corollary discharge. Corollary discharge is the brain's mechanism for distinguishing between self-generated and external stimuli. It helps the brain disregard sensations that are generated by our bodies own movements. For instance,...
A first-hand report of caloric vestibular stimulation - to treat Body Integrity Identity Disorder, in which patients often desire to have large parts of their bodies amputated. Ambien, a sleep drug recently discovered to awaken some people from comas is...
Posted on November 4, 2007 11:21 AM • 1 Comments •
I was fantastically busy this past week, so I failed to alert you to new articles published in PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens, PLoS Genetics and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. I have posted my picks from the latter one. This...
Posted on November 3, 2007 11:15 PM • 2 Comments •
Today, 30,000 scientists descended upon San Diego for Neuroscience 2007, the Society for Neuroscience's annual scientific meeting. With more than 16,000 presentations over just five days, the conference is more than any one reporter could possibly cover. But I'm going...
James Fung, a musician and computer engineer at the University of Toronto, has developed a program that can convert EEG recordings into music. Fung is involved in the Regenerative Brain Wave Music Project, which "explores new physiological interfaces for musical...
The annual Society for Neuroscience (SfN) conference kicks off today in San Diego. Seed associate editor Emily Anthes, one of SfN's 30,000 attendees, has graciously offered to do live blogging on Page 3.14 this weekend direct from the conference....
I'll fess up: I leave coffee grounds on the kitchen counter when I make coffee. It bugs Greta, but it doesn't bother me. Meanwhile, it bothers me when Greta leaves her shoes next to the stools in the kitchen, and...
Posted on November 2, 2007 1:43 PM • 10 Comments •
Trueswell & Kim's paper in the Journal of Memory and Language describes a phenomenon known as "fast priming," in which a reading task is momentarily interrupted by a brief presentation of a "prime" word, usually lasting around 30 to 40...
Posted on November 2, 2007 11:01 AM • 0 Comments •
Check out this sweet sweet purse made to resemble a brain: I think it's an obvious idea since brains combined with anything is sweet, but you might wonder about who the heck came up with this idea: Known for stretching the fashion limits with his avant garde design for the...
The ability to attend to multiple moving objects simultaneously is fundamental to many of the tasks we perform regularly, such as driving, or taking part in team sports.Numerous studies in which participants are asked to track dots moving around on...
When one object passes in front of another we know that the occluded object has not vanished, and yet representations in our visual cortex have been assumed not to reflect this information. Instead, such "object permanence" information has been thought...
This article was originally posted on May 10, 2006 Recent research suggests that one of the reasons that as many as 97 percent of women and 68 percent of men experience food cravings is because of visual representations of food....
Its been a bad year for animal communication. First Alex the Grey Parrot suddenly dies, now the famous sign-language-using chimp Washoe has also died Tuesday night of the flu. Washoe, who first learned a bit of American Sign Language in...
Tomorrow's Casual Fridays study will be about messes: who makes messes, and who cleans them up. In order to do this right I'm going to need a little help from you. What I need to know are the typical sorts...
Posted on November 1, 2007 8:34 AM • 21 Comments •
Researchers from Harvard University have developed a remarkable genetic technique that enabled them to visualize complete neuronal circuits in unprecedented detail, by using multiple distinct colours to label individual neurons.The technique, called Brainbow, works in much the same way...
Fear, that most primitive of emotions, is good, at least when it is kept under control. It is essential for survival, allowing an organism to detect a potential threat to its life. Too much fear, however, can lead to pathological...
Does this ever happen to you? You're preparing green beans to be cooked, putting the stems in the trash and the beans in a bowl. Suddenly you realize you've started putting the stems in the bowl. The dinner guests will...
Cookin' babies and their brains: How to Make a Bleeding Zombie Brain: Brains! Build your own goopy bloody gray-matter: Ohh my god! like... How-To Eat Halloween Brains! Beverly Hills style......
Several high-profile studies have shown that bilingual children outperform their monolingual peers in terms of several cognitive abilities - including tests of verbal and nonverbal problem-solving, selective attention, flexibility (e.g., task-switching) and others. These studies have captured the public imagination...
Over at Mind Hacks, Vaughan has generously allowed me to answer a few of his excellent questions. Check it out. Q: You seem to mostly focus on past artists but jokingly mentioned in a recent interview that maybe your next...
An article about Oliver Sacks, from the current issue of Seed magazine, has just just been made available online.Author Jonah Lehrer, who met with Sacks to research the article, provides interesting biographical details about the neurologist, including how he started...
Last week's PLoS ONE paper, Analysis of the Trajectory of Drosophila melanogaster in a Circular Open Field Arena, is the subject of the newest Journal Club. It is an interesting methods paper, showing the way a camera and some math...
Synaesthesia involves the inappropriate binding of one perception to another - for example, color-grapheme synaesthetes might perceive the letter "h" to be noticeably red, and are actually slower to identify the letter "h" when it is green than when it...
Bertalan has found the Virtual Labs Series, a fantastic educational resource produced for science teachers and students by researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The series includes the Transgenic Fly Virtual Lab, the Bacterial Identification Lab, the Cardiology...
World's Hottest Chile Pepper Discovered: Researchers at New Mexico State University recently discovered the world's hottest chile pepper. Bhut Jolokia, a variety of chile pepper originating in Assam, India, has earned Guiness World Records' recognition as the world's hottest chile...
A new paper about the reproductive behaviour of the spiny anteater, to be published in the December issue of American Naturalist, makes for fascinating - if slightly disturbing - reading.The spiny anteater (Tachyglossuss aculeatus) is a primitive mammal with an...
The Guardian reports that the Ministry of Defence has just started a major study into traumatic brain injury (TBI) in British troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. In an accompanying article, the behavioural, cognitive, emotional and physical symptoms of this...
Physicist Chad Orzel, who knows a lot more than I do about the mysterious world of quantum mechanics, criticizes the new model of quantum consciousness proposed by Efstratios Manousakis, which I described recently....
The new issue of Current Biology has a freely available primer on the amygdala by Joseph LeDoux of the Center for Neural Science at New York University. The amgdala is a small, almond shaped structure found on the medial surface...
Who would have thought that the wandering albatross flew around the earth randomly with absolutely no plan? Apparently the person who named it. According to some fishermen, albatrosses look "wicked baked." Scientists used to believe that albatrosses followed a strange...
Hello again, it's been a while so I thought I'd drop in a comment or two about what I've found recently in the news about neurobio. I've lately been reading about neurotransmitters and how they bind to sites in specific...
Posted on October 26, 2007 3:25 PM • 28 Comments •
Here are a few neat optical illusions. 1. Multi-colored X? (via Grand Illusions) It appears that the X is two different colors, but it's actually made using just one shade of pink. (more below)...
Ewan made a generous donation to one of the projects in my challenge and wrote me the following: The concept of a sprog-illustrated nerdy poem was especially appealing... Could I please request a topic of 'brain' (ideally, hippocampus, but that...
Dave Kellet jokes about a visual illusion the visual pop-out phenomenon, in his webcomic Sheldon. Click the cropped image to see the full comic strip. Thanks Dave! [Thanks, T.N. for the correction. Two blog posts about it here and here.]...
Over at Neurophilosophy, Mo links to an article by a physicist, posted on the arxiv, that claims to explain visual perceptions using quantum mechanics: A theory of the process of perception is presented based on von Neumann's quantum theory of...
Take a look at these schematic faces: Just a few simple changes to the mouth and eyebrows can create faces depicting a wide array of emotions. Face 1, for example, is clearly quite happy, and face 12 is sad. Face...
An intriguing new hypothesis that seeks to explain all of the diverse psychological symptoms associated with autism. Here's the abstract: While significant advances have been made in identifying the neuronal structures and cells affected, a unifying theory that could explain...
Posted on October 25, 2007 5:06 AM • 11 Comments •
Being out of town and all, I missed it, but NYTimes published a whole lot of articles about sleep yesterday. Of course, as I enjoy poking around bird brains, the article by Carl Zimmer - In Study of Human Patterns,...
Posted on October 24, 2007 10:11 PM • 2 Comments •
I am sure I have ranted about the negative effects of DST here and back on Circadiana, but the latest study - The Human Circadian Clock's Seasonal Adjustment Is Disrupted by Daylight Saving Time (pdf) (press releases: ScienceDaily, EurekAlert) by...
Posted on October 24, 2007 9:45 PM • 31 Comments •
The way subliminal advertising is portrayed in movies and hyped in some media outlets, briefly and imperceptibly flashing a brand name during a TV show can turn people into mindless cyborgs who can't resist the urge to shop at a...
I have heard a lot of stories about the aggressive behavior of people on angel dust, but this video is the first time that I have seen just how dramatic it can be. The guy is completely naked and smashes...
Much to do about the sexual inclinations of a fictional character in the most successful (and I still think, despite the lack of editorial control, one of the classic) children's stories. PZ Mungle has this to say: I really,...
Posted on October 23, 2007 10:58 PM • 8 Comments •
As reported in the AP, six Asiatic wild elephants were electrocuted after drinking alcohol in northeast India and going berserk. Apparently the animals have developed a taste for rice beer, fermented by farmers in plastic drums, and come looking for...
Posted on October 23, 2007 6:09 PM • 13 Comments •
One of the more recent offerings in the pernicious practice of direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising from Big Pharma is a tortoise and a hare hawking a smoking cessation med: Chantix. The drug, varenicline tartrate, has a dual action in that it...
Ever wonder what would happen if mendacious fake "psychic" Sylvia Browne ever met The Amazing Randi? Now you know. Sylvia just has to watch out for science....
Can the federal government actually penalize universities that are not actively working to overcome subtle and unconscious gender bias by invoking Title IX of the Civil Rights Act?
Posted on October 23, 2007 12:35 PM • 12 Comments •
You're seeing other ScienceBlogs readers donate, now join the love train*. A rare serious post from Steve explains The Real Mozart Effect and why we should support music education with DonorsChoose. Playing an instrument has cognitive and developmental benefits. That reason formed an episode of The Simpsons, too: Lisa's Sax....
One thing I want to dispel immediately is that this is about normal "handedness". No, this has more to do with skills that are shared unevenly across the body (or even directionally on a side).
In the past couple of weeks I've been performing a little experiment on myself. I'd like to invite other Sciblings and readers to consider joining in with their own self-experimenting and report back their initial findings and then again weeks or months down the road. This could be interesting.
You don't see this every day: Jake at Pure Pedantry draws due attention to an incredible case report in the American Journal of Psychiatry showing that a lesion in a patient's brain cured the patient's drug addiction, apparently by knocking out the reward circuit that made the addiction pleasurable. (It also made the man badly depressed.) A stroke that destroyed parts of a drug addict's globus pallidus (pale areas) left him depressed but ended his addiction. Neither drugs nor (alas) wine gave him pleasure any longer. The article, unfortunately, is pay-per-view, but Jake's summary is compelling on its own. To whit: A 34-year old long-time drug-user is taken to the ER after he starts acting freaky at a party. He has a bunch of methadone (an opiate like heroin) with him that he downs on the way in to avoid...
edited by John Brockman, publisher of Edge. This is an interesting little paperback that is filled with thought-provoking essays written by the scientists, journalists and other scholars.
If I like what I see, I'll receive 5 more issues (6 in all) for just $19.95. If I'm not completely satisfied, I'll simply write "cancel" on the invoice and owe nothing. The free issue is mine to keep.
Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, and the New York Times and is a contributor to Radiolab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.
