January 30, 2008
Category: Neuroscience
Canadian surgeons have made a serendipitous discovery. While using deep brain stimulation to try suppressing the appetite of a morbidly obese patient, they inadvertently evoked in the patient vivid autobiographical memories of an event that had taken place more...
Posted by Mo at 4:05 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 28, 2008
Category: Neuroscience
In my second coursework essay, I discuss a number of recent studies which demonstrate that synaptic strengthening in different regions of the mammalian brain requires the incorporation of Ca2+-permeable GluR1-lacking AMPA receptors into the postsynaptic membrane of active or newly-potentiated...
Posted by Mo at 5:17 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 27, 2008
Category: Neuroscience
Last Tuesday's episode of Horizon, called Total Isolation, is available for viewing and download at the BBC iPlayer website for the next 2 days. In the 50-minute documentary, Professor Ian Robbins, a trauma psychologist at the University of Surrey...
Posted by Mo at 4:25 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 24, 2008
Category: Blogging
Today's issue of Nature contains a short review of Open Lab 2007, and the article includes a brief mention of my contribution to the book:The editor of this second anthology of the best scientific communiqu's from the blogosphere thinks blogs...
Posted by Mo at 5:14 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Art
The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) had a life filled with pain. At the age of 6, she contracted polio, and this caused a paralysis of the right leg from which Kahlo took one year to recover. Then, in...
Posted by Mo at 4:48 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Anthropology
The operation of Trepan, from Illustrations of the Great Operations of Surgery: Trepan, Hernia, Amputation, Aneurism and Lithotomy, by Charles Bell, 1815. (John Martin Rare Book Room at the University of Iowa's Hardin Library for the Health Sciences.) Trepanation,...
Posted by Mo at 9:53 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 22, 2008
Category: Pseudoscience
Among the one third of Americans who believe in ghosts are high-ranking officials in the intelligence agencies and military.In the 1970s and 80s, the CIA funded research into "remote viewing", so that they could train clairvoyants to locate, among other...
Posted by Mo at 2:37 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 20, 2008
Category: Neuroscience
The Canadian Globe and Mail reports on the remarkable case of Stacey Gayle, a 25-year-old woman from Edmonton who has just had neurosurgery to treat intractable epilepsy.Gayle (right) was suffering from musicogenic epilepsy, a rare form of the condition in...
Posted by Mo at 2:43 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 19, 2008
Category: Neuroscience
This diagram of the retina, drawn by Santiago Ramon y Cajal in 1892, comes from Web Vision, a comprehensive overview of the organization of the mammalian retina and visual system compiled by Drs. Helga Kolb, Eduardo Fernandez and Ralph...
Posted by Mo at 1:39 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
January 17, 2008
Category: Neuroscience
This film clip describes how neuroscientists have controlled the movements of a humanoid robot using a brain-computer interface (BCI) embedded in the motor cortex of a monkey. I've written about BCIs before, so I won't go into details here....
Posted by Mo at 4:26 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
