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...
Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, the Boston Globe and is a contributor to Radio Lab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide.
