Pure Pedantry
The Last Post
Posted by NotoriousLTP on May 19, 2009 Hi everyone, I apologize for my long hiatus from blogging. Things have just been crazy at work lately. All the same it has given me some time to think about what I want from blogging, and where I see myself in the next several years. For those of you who don’t know I am an…
Razib and I on Bloggingheads.tv
Posted by NotoriousLTP on April 27, 2009 Razib and I have a discussion up at Bloggingheads.tv about genetics and behavior as well as a brief discussion of neuroeconomics. Check it out below the fold:
Intact Visual Navigation in a Blindsighted Patient
Posted by NotoriousLTP on April 16, 2009 There is a fascinating case study in Current Biology. de Gelder et al. discuss a patient — referred to as TN to protect his privacy — who had two sequential strokes that damaged his brain. The parts of the brain that were damaged included the primary visual cortex in both hemispheres — rendering the patient…
Neuroscience of Envy and Schadenfreude
Posted by NotoriousLTP on April 14, 2009 I don’t think I am alone in saying that I often feel a little envy and schadenfreude towards my peers. Science is a particularly competitive business with few remunerative rewards, so a lot of my self-worth is tied to comparisons with my peer’s successes and failures. I won’t deny being envious when someone gets a…
Children ruin everything
Posted by NotoriousLTP on April 9, 2009 A study discussed over at Live Science confirms what I have always suspected: An eight-year study of 218 couples found 90 percent experienced a decrease in marital satisfaction once the first child was born. “Couples who do not have children also show diminished marital quality over time,” says Scott Stanley, research professor of psychology at…
Technically Difficult: fMRIs on the young
Posted by NotoriousLTP on April 9, 2009 The title of this pre-publication paper is, “Evidence on the emergence of the brain’s default network from 2-week-old to 2-year-old healthy pediatric subjects.” The authors put kids in functional MRIs to measure resting state activity and detect the emergence of the default network. While I am certain that it is very interesting research, I have…
Parkinson’s patients are bad liars, here may be why
Posted by NotoriousLTP on April 8, 2009 Neurological diseases can be strange in that they often have additional personality effects. If someone gets a cold, they sneeze a bunch but are basically the same person they were before the cold. In contrast, meningitis can include mental status and personality changes in its early stages — including irritability and sleepiness. When a disease…
The Ethics of Diagnosing a Stranger
Posted by NotoriousLTP on March 31, 2009 Nature Clinical Practice Neurology has a salient article on ethics and medicine. The article asks the question: is it ethical to confront an individual with whom you do not have an official doctor-patient relationship, if you think they have a medical problem? Should you or should you not tell them if you see a medical…
Watch HIV Cell-to-Cell Transfer, Live!
Posted by NotoriousLTP on March 29, 2009 It’s amazing what the kids are up to these days. This one comes live from Mount Sinai (my present educational residence). Hubner et al., publishing in Science, use an infectious, fluorescent strain of HIV to watch the virus move from one cell to another. Their results are fascinating and may help us develop better ways…
Sex and Attention
Posted by NotoriousLTP on March 27, 2009 What you think about during sex matters. A guy who doesn’t want to, ahem, proceed too quickly will think of baseball or something non-sex related. A girl who wants to proceed more quickly might focus on surrounding milieu of a loving environment. These are stereotypes, I know, but the fact that we have them does…