So You Want to Be a Neuroimager?
Then listen to this set of lectures from the 2007 Advanced Neuroimaging Summer School at UCLA....Posted on May 4, 2008 1:41 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Mixing Memory
An entrée of Cognitive Science with an occasional side of whatever the hell else I want to talk about.
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April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.
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Cognitive Neuroscience:
This Is Your Brain On Free Choice
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...Posted on April 17, 2008 5:40 PM • 23 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Neuroscientific Evidence for the Influence of Language on Color Perception
You know, just the other day, on this very blog, I swore I would never read another (cognitive) imaging paper again, but between then and now, I've read 5 of 6, so apparently my oath didn't take. It's sort of...Posted on March 20, 2008 4:03 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Stereotype Threat Happens in the Brain
That's it! I'm never reading another imaging paper again, ever. OK, I might read one or two, and I might even post about them, but for now I'm telling myself, for my own sanity, that I'm never, ever, under any...Posted on March 16, 2008 9:43 AM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Liberal and Conservative Anterior Cingulate Cortices
Reading an article in the LA Times today, I learned something exciting: political differences in thought happen in the brain. At least that's what a new study published in Nature Neuroscience(1) purports to show, though I hear that the next...Posted on September 10, 2007 8:58 AM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Do Sweet Smells Make Pain More Tolerable?
Apparently so. Recent research has shown that pleasant smells can increase pain tolerance, and a recent paper by Prescott and Wilkie(1) suggests that it is specifically sweet smells that do so. I'll just skip to the experiment, and spare you...Posted on July 2, 2007 9:05 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Color Opponency in Synaesthesia
All of you are probably familiar with color opponency, but just in case, I'll give you a quick refresher. I'll even start with the history. In the 19th century, there were two competing theories of color vision. The first was...Posted on June 22, 2007 4:12 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Brain Makes It Better
About a year ago, there was an article in Seed Magazine titled "Seduced by the Flickering Lights of the Brain," in which Paul Bloom argued that people are too easily seduced by neuroscience, believing that it made for good science,...Posted on June 8, 2007 9:05 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Emotion, Reason, and Moral Judgment
Research on the role of emotion/intuition in moral judgments is really heating up. For decades (millennia, even), moral judgment was thought to be a conscious, principle-based process, but over the last few years, researchers have been showing that emotion and...Posted on March 27, 2007 8:47 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Simulation Theory of Aesthetics
With a paper by Freedberg and Gallese, to be published in Trends in Cognitive Sciences, mirror neurons have made their way into neuroaesthetics (at some point, someone like Gallese will publish a paper arguing that mirror neurons explain everything, and...Posted on March 18, 2007 10:24 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Gender Differences In Planning?
We all know that there are gender differences in neuroanatomy, as well as in some cognitive tasks (females tend to do better on memory and verbal tasks, men on spatial tasks) and both cognitive and emotional development, though it's not...Posted on November 22, 2006 9:33 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Cognitive Neuroscience of Religion
Over at The Neurocritic, there's a great post on an imaging study that contrasted singing and speaking in tongues in five religious women. That reminded me of a paper I had read a couple months ago by one of the...Posted on November 5, 2006 10:10 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Music Is Visual Pattern Recognition and Language To the Brain
Well, not exactly, but I'll get to that in a minute. I read this paper last night, and afterwards, when I was looking around one of the author's pages, I came across a neuroimaging study designed to look for "pre-existing...Posted on November 3, 2006 2:14 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Color Memory Changes Color Perception
One of the things that I love the most about cognitive science is that it's always challenging our intuitions about the world and how we perceive it. Think, for example, of all the classic Gestalt illusions, such as my all...Posted on October 29, 2006 12:39 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Enhanced Vision in the Deaf
Everyone's heard that losing a particular sensory modality causes the sensitivity of the other modalities to be heightened. Blind people are supposed to hear and smell really, really well, for example. While this is something that's been talked about for...Posted on October 25, 2006 3:45 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Is That My Hand Or Yours? Mirror Neurons and the Sense of Self and Other
One of the top ten coolest experiments ever has to be Botvinick and Cohen's "rubber hand" experiment1. I'm going to let them describe the manipulation: Each of ten subjects was seated with their left arm resting upon a small table....Posted on September 30, 2006 7:10 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
All Mirror Neurons, All the Time
The last couple weeks have seen a flurry of papers on mirror neurons, with three in last week's issue of Current Biology, and the paper on mirror neurons and sexual orientation in press at NeuroImage (is it just me, or...Posted on September 29, 2006 11:46 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Mirror Neurons, Language, and Meaning (Oh, My!)
There are a few topics in cognitive science that are like fingernails on a chalkboard to me. I find the very mention of them irritating, and the irritation can stick in my craw for days. At or near the top...Posted on July 23, 2006 1:43 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Cognitive Science of Art: Beauty and the Brain
[First published on 2/4/05 at the old blog.] If you've read my two previous posts on Ramachandran's principles of art (here and here), you've probably got a good idea of what Ramachandran's concept of beauty is. While his 10 principles...Posted on July 19, 2006 8:29 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Cognitive Science of Art: Ramachandran's 10 Principles of Art, Principles 4-10
[First published on 1/22/05 at the old blog.] Recall V.S. Ramachandran's 10 principles of art. Peak shift Perceptual Grouping and Binding Contrast Isolation Perceptual problem solving Symmetry Abhorrence of coincidence/generic viewpoint Repetition, rhythm and orderliness Balance Metaphor In the last...Posted on July 17, 2006 9:21 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Cognitive Science of Art: Ramachandran's 10 Principles of Art, Principles 1-3
[First published on 1/20/05 at the old blog.] As a starting point for the attempt to discover universals in art based on our knowledge of neuroscience, and visual neuroscience in particular, V.S. Ramachandran has proposed ten principles of art (eight...Posted on July 15, 2006 8:34 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Cognitive Science of Art: Goals and Motivations of Neuroaesthetics
[First posted on 1/20/05 at the old blog] With all the controversy surrounding the issues in my last few posts, I thought it would be refreshing to talk about something completely uncontroversial: the existence of universals in art based on...Posted on July 13, 2006 10:00 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
The Neuroscience of Playing Chicken
Theory of mind, or how we think about what's going on in other people's heads, continues to be one of the hottest topics in cognitive science today. A debate continues to rage over whether we reason about other people's thoughts...Posted on July 11, 2006 7:47 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
An Example of How Not to Use Imaging Data: Participants' Prejudice or Researchers'?
Back in May, a study by Mitchell, Macrae, and Banaji (of Implicit Association Test fame) was published in Neuron that made the following claim (from the abstract): We observed a double dissociation such that mentalizing about a similar other engaged...Posted on July 3, 2006 10:00 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
A Lot of People in White Coats
Dave over at Cognitive Daily beat me to this (curse you, Dave!), but I wanted to point everyone to an article in Seed Magazine by Paul Bloom, titled "Seduced by the Flickering Lights of the Brain." If you can't tell...Posted on June 27, 2006 6:29 PM • 6 Comments • 2 TrackBacks
Was it Real or Did I Imagine It? Source Monitoring, Schizophrenia, and Our Grip On Reality
In the past, I've often wondered how journalists pick which studies to write about. The obvious answer is that they pick studies that will get readers or viewers, but given how little their stories correspond with the research they're writing...Posted on June 27, 2006 8:07 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Neural Adaptation for Gender
In yesterday's post on afterimages and aftereffects, I mentioned that demonstrations of neural adaptation for a particular feature (in the post, I used the examples of color and motion) is generally taken as evidence of the existence of specific neurons...Posted on June 18, 2006 5:18 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Chocolate on the Brain: Is Chocolate an Antidepressant?
Anyone who's ever taken a bite of a Reese's Peanut butter Eggs that are only sold during the Easter season knows that chocolate is a mood enhancer, but in case you thought it might just be the wonderful taste, there...Posted on June 10, 2006 10:10 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
