Neurobiology
Pharyngula
Category archives for Neurobiology
The sexist brain
Posted by PZ Myers on September 7, 2010 It looks like I have to add another book to my currently neglected reading list. In an interview, Cordelia Fine, author of a new book, Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), has a few provocative things to say about gender stereotypes and the flimsy neuroscience used to justify them. So…
Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain
Posted by PZ Myers on August 17, 2010 There he goes again, making up nonsense and making ridiculous claims that have no relationship to reality. Ray Kurzweil must be able to spin out a good line of bafflegab, because he seems to have the tech media convinced that he’s a genius, when he’s actually just another Deepak Chopra for the computer science cognoscenti.…
The secret life of babies
Posted by PZ Myers on May 9, 2010 Years ago, when the Trophy Wife™ was a psychology grad student, she participated in research on what babies think. It was interesting stuff because it was methodologically tricky — they can’t talk, they barely respond in comprehensible way to the world, but as it turns out you can get surprisingly consistent, robust results from techniques…
But there’s so much more to neurodevelopment!
Posted by PZ Myers on February 23, 2010 It’s a little disturbing to see an entire vast field of science reduced to a one-page cartoon, but it did win an award for science visualization, and we’ve got to get people hooked on the cool stuff somehow.
The Ubiquity of Exaptation
Posted by PZ Myers on December 5, 2009 On Thursday, I gave a talk at the University of Minnesota at the request of the CASH group on a rather broad subject: evolution and development of the nervous system. That’s a rather big umbrella, and I had to narrow it down a lot. I say, a lot. The details of this subject are voluminous…
Get your geek on for Thursday
Posted by PZ Myers on November 30, 2009 I’m going to be opening my mouth again on Thursday in Minneapolis — I’ll be giving a talk in MCB 3-120 on the Minneapolis campus at 7:30 on Thursday, 3 December. This will be open to the public, and it will also be an all-science talk, geared for a general audience. I’d say they were…
Where do people get those crazy ideas about religion and the supernatural?
Posted by PZ Myers on October 29, 2009 Here’s part of an explanation I’ve liked for a long time: they’re a product of developing cognitive processes that bias the brain to model the world with supernatural shortcuts. (Moved below the fold because the silly video defaults to autoplay.)
Martin Chalfie: GFP and After
Posted by PZ Myers on July 2, 2009 Chalfie is interested in sensory mechanotransduction—how are mechanical deformations of cells converted into chemical and electrical signals. Examples are touch, hearing, balance, and proprioception, and (hooray!) he references development: sidedness in mammals is defined by mechanical forces in early development. He studies this problem in C. elegans, in which 6 of 302 nerve cells detect…
Irwin Neher: Chemistry helps neuroscience: the use of caged compounds and indicator dyes for the study of neurotransmitter release
Posted by PZ Myers on June 30, 2009 Ah, a solid science talk. It wasn’t bad, except that it was very basic—maybe if I were a real journalist instead of a fake journalist I would have appreciated it more, but as it was, it was a nice overview of some common ideas in neuroscience, with some discussion of pretty new tools on top.…
Reading this will affect your brain
Posted by PZ Myers on May 16, 2009 Baroness Susan Greenfield has been spouting off some bad neuroscience, I’m afraid. She’s on an anti-social-networking-software, anti-computer-games, anti-computer crusade that sounds a bit familiar — it’s just like the anti-TV tirades I’ve heard for 40-some years — and a little bit new — computers are bad because they are “changing the workings of the brain“.…