Now on ScienceBlogs: The Laboratory at Harvard
February 24, 2009
Category: Developmental Biology
Alzheimer's Disease is the most common form of dementia, affecting more than 400,000 people in the U.K. and some 5.5 million in the U.S. The disease has a characteristic pathology, which often appears first in the hippocampus, and then spreads...
Posted by Mo at 10:34 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 21, 2009
Category: Vintage Illustrations
These gorgeous stipple-engraved plates come from The Anatomy of the Brain, Explained in a Series of Engravings, by Sir Charles Bell. The book was first published in 1802 and contained 12 plates, 11 of which were printed in colour; these...
Posted by Mo at 8:40 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 19, 2009
Category: Neuroscience
Researchers from Vanderbilt University have demonstrated that the contents of visual working memory can be accurately predicted by decoding neural activity in the visual cortex
Posted by Mo at 7:30 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 10, 2009
Category: Palaeontology
Bones have been big news recently, following the publication of two papers which document remarkable fossil finds. First, a group of palaeontologists led by Phil Gingerich of the University of Michigan described Maiacetus inuus, a primitive whale which lived in...
Posted by Mo at 10:15 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 9, 2009
Category: Memory
Most of us have experienced the vague feeling of knowing something without having any memory of learning it. This phenomenon is commonly known as a "gut feeling" or "intuition"; more accurately though, it is described as implicit or unconscious recognition...
Posted by Mo at 2:43 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 8, 2009
Category: Technology
I have finally jumped on the bandwagon and started to use Twitter. I had avoided it because I couldn't understand why anyone would want to share the mundane details of their life with others, but am now beginning to see...
Posted by Mo at 3:25 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 5, 2009
Category: Neuroscience
When Sir Francis Galton first described the "peculiar habit of mind" we now call synaesthesia, he noted that it often runs in families. Modern techniques have confirmed that the condition does indeed have a strong genetic component - more than...
Posted by Mo at 8:45 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 2, 2009
Category: Neuroscience
During the first half of the twentieth century, the American psychologist Karl Lashley conducted a series experiments in an attempt to identify the part of the brain in which memories are stored. In his now famous investigations, Lashley trained rats...
Posted by Mo at 8:46 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
