The procedure known as trepanation, in which a hole is scraped or drilled in the skull, is an ancient form of neurosurgery that has been performed since the late Stone Age. Exactly why ancient peoples performed trepanation has remained a matter of debate: some researchers argue that it was performed for medical reasons, as it is today, while others believe it was done for magical or religious reasons.
A new study by two American anthropologists now provides evidence that the Incas performed trepanation to treat head injuries; that the procedure was far more common than was previously thought; and that the Incan practitioners of trepanation were highly skilled surgeons with a detailed knowledge of the anatomy of the skull.
Note that early registration is suggested, as the reserved hotel block is likely to fill quickly.
The 2008 conference will feature presentations by:
George Ainslie, Michael L. Anderson, Louise Antony, Peter Carruthers, Louis Charland, Anjan Chatterjee, David Danks, Felipe De Brigard, Michael Devitt
Marthah Farah, Evelina Fedorenko, Owen Flanagan, Jerry Fodor, Kenneth R. Foster, Lila R. Gleitman (President of SPP), George Graham, Bryce Huebner, Bertram F. Malle, Barbara Malt, Christopher Meacham, Dominic P. Murphy
Thomas Nadelhoffer, Kenneth Norman, Mike Oaksford, Erik Parens, Nancy Petry, Jeffrey Poland, Zenon Pylyshyn, Sarah Robins, Paul Rozin, Laurie R. Santos (the 2008 Stanton Prize winner), Michael Strevens, Justin Sytsma, Kelly Trogdon, Charles Wallis, Deena Weisberg, Daniel Weiskopf, Fei Xu, Carlos Zednik...among many others
On topics including:
-Addiction and Responsibility
-Concepts and Categorization
-Consciousness
-Bayesian Inference and Rationality
-Foundational Issues in the Philosophy of Cognitive Science
-Language & Mental Representation
-Moral Psychology
-Neuroethics
-Theory of Mind
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 the history of the brain.
The 45-minute programme, which can be downloaded as a RealPlayer file from the link above, focuses on how perceptions of the brain have changed over the past 2,500 years, beginning with the first brain dissections, which were performed by Herophilus and Erasistratus in Alexandria, apparently on live criminals!
The Beeb's researchers provide references for further reading, including some excellent books, most notably Clarke and O'Malley's The Human Brain and Spinal Cord, which is the classic book about the history of neuroscience. They also link to my post Exorcizing animal spirits, which I originally wrote in November 2006, and reposted here back in July last year.
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. They have a planar structure with a highly elaborate dendritic tree which forms hundreds of thousands of synapses with the parallel fibres of cerebellar granule cells, and a single axon which projects down into the deep cerebellar nuclei.
The image comes from a collection inspired by the UCL Neuroscience website, which has just been launched. UCL has a long history of outstanding neuroscience research, and today boasts a large community of world-class neuroscience researchers. The new website brings together their work, in the fields of molecular, developmental, cellular, systems, cognitive, computational and clinical neuroscience, and also includes a list of excellent seminars and events.
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 that I've found recently:
In the New York Times Magazine, Gary Marcus discusses the possibility of memory chips - future generations of neural implants which use algorithms inspired by Google to augment the retrieval of information.
Also in the NY Times, an article by Sandra Blakeslee about the increased artistic creativity seen in some patients with frontotemporal dementia, a neurodegenerative disorder which is often misdiagnosed as Alzheimer's Disease.
In a recent edition of the Point of Enquiry podcast, biologist and evolutionary psychologist Marc Hauser discusses his theory that the human moral sense is innate, and is encoded in a morality module in the brain.
The Economist has an article on the science of religion, which includes details of recent neuroimaging studies that seek to understand the brain activity underlying religious experiences.
The latest edition of Encephalon, at Cognitive Daily, includes many more good neuroscience and psychology blog posts. The one before that, which I forgot to link to, is at GNIF Brain Blogger.
Also:
In The Guardian, prominent Arab writers discuss the state of Arab literature and recommend some of their favourite books.
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 learning and memory in the sea slug Aplysia californica.
Kandel is one of the authors of Principles of Neural Science, the standard textbook for neuroscience at the undergraduate and postgraduate level. His autobiography, In Search of Memory, which was published in 2006 (and which I reviewed at the time), won the LA Times Book Award for Science and Technology in that year.
Among the topics Kandel discusses in the interview are the differences between biological and digital memory, neurogenesis in the hippocampus, free will and consciousness, drug development and the use and abuse of drugs by children, and the state of science in the U.S. and Europe.
The Wellcome Trust is inviting postgraduates in science, engineering or technology to tell the world about their research, through an annual essay competition run in partnership with New Scientist.
Prizes this year for outstanding essays include a two-week, expenses-paid media placement with 'New Scientist', £1000 spending money and publication of the winning essay in 'New Scientist'.
As well as communicating their science, researchers are encouraged to explore the possible implications of their work for society. The judges look for interesting, creative and fresh approaches, in a style that would appeal to readers of 'New Scientist'.
Winning essays to date have included Angela Smith's 2007 'Just in time?' and Nora Lydia Schultz's ' How to fold a fish: What cells do during neurulation', the 2006 winner.
Docstoc is a useful tool for sharing PDFs, PowerPoint presentations and Word and Excel documents. It can also be used to embed files of these formats into a blog post in a customizable document viewer.
I've just set up an account, and have uploaded two papers by Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley, in which they describe their classic experiments on the giant axon of the squid. With these experiments, which were performed in the early 1950s, Hodgkin and Huxley elucidated the mechanism of the action potential, and were subsequently awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine.
The papers (which I found at the Society for Neuroscience website) can be downloaded from Docstoc, or viewed directly from this page. Clicking the button at the top right of the document viewer produces a drop-down menu, which includes options to zoom in on the document and to view in full screen.
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 which the therapeutic effects of derivatives of ergot alkaloids - chemicals produced by a fungus - were being investigated.
In his autobiography, LSD: My Problem Child, Hofmann explains how he accidentally ingested the drug while synthesizing it in the laboratory:
It seemed to have resulted from some external toxic influence; I surmised a connection with the substance I had been working with at the time, lysergic acid diethylamide tartrate. But this led to another question: how had I managed to absorb this material? Because of the known toxicity of ergot substances, I always maintained meticulously neat work habits. Possibly a bit of the LSD solution had contacted my fingertips during crystallization, and a trace of the substance was absorbed through the skin. If LSD-25 had indeed been the cause of this bizarre experience, then it must be a substance of extraordinary potency. There seemed to be only one way of getting to the bottom of this. I decided on a self-experiment.
the standard textbook for neuroscience at the undergraduate and postgraduate level. His autobiography, 
