Neuroscience:
We have known for some time that there is a double dissociation (I will define that term in a minute) between location and identification in the visual system. Neuroscientists speak of a "where" pathway that goes from the primary visual...
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Posted on May 9, 2008 1:09 PM • 1 Comments •
How do neurons in your brain encode the diversity of stimuli present in the world? This is one of the questions that neuroscientists have to answers about how the brain works. The world holds an infinite array of things to...
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Posted on April 2, 2008 2:00 PM • 6 Comments •
A Christmas present, maybe? Maybe not. A "neurotheology" researcher called Dr Michael Persinger has developed something called the "God Helmet" lined with magnets to help you in your quest: it sounds like typical bad science fodder, but it's much more...
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Posted on March 12, 2008 9:52 AM • 3 Comments •
We have all heard about the runner's high, and a great many of us have felt it. When you are running a marathon, about an hour or two in you feel a feeling of euphoria right like you could run...
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Posted on February 28, 2008 12:59 PM • 3 Comments •
How is tool use encoded in the brain? Most movements involving tools involve the complex manipulation of objects in space, and it is possible that they could represented in the brain in this way -- i.e. as objects in space....
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Posted on February 4, 2008 11:39 AM • 3 Comments •
This review by Luiz Pessoa in Nature Neuroscience Reviews has to be the most intelligent things I have read in a long time. He argues that the notion that cognition and emotion are separable modules -- a notion that permeates...
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Posted on January 24, 2008 1:39 PM • 14 Comments •
In neuroscience, we spend a lot of time studying the normal function of the nervous system, and we spend a lot of time studying disease processes that can impair this function. What we don't typically do is study how functional...
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Posted on January 17, 2008 9:51 AM • 0 Comments •
Spence et al. wanted to test the use of fMRI for lie detection. In order to do so, they found a subject who had been convicted for child molestation because she has Munchausen's syndrome by proxy. There are two important...
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Posted on December 3, 2007 11:35 AM • 4 Comments •
I wrote before about how there has been a bit of a debate about whether the hippocampus is involved in encoding spatial maps or is involved more generally in relational memory. Well, the argument for general relational memory just got...
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Posted on November 16, 2007 12:06 PM • 1 Comments •
The most elaborate imaging technique ever involves two-photon fluorescent microscopy and a mouse on a floating styrofoam ball.
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Posted on November 2, 2007 4:02 PM • 6 Comments •
This has got to be the dumbest article I have ever read. The headline reads: Brain blood flow helps treat depression. Well, yeah. Try having a brain without blood flow, and you will be pretty depressed too. It gets better....
Posted on August 14, 2007 7:43 AM • 2 Comments •
The SciAm blog has a great discussion on current research into the neuroscience of morals. Two cool observations. First, while people tend to agree with the calculus of utilitarian moral judgments, they tend to reject them. Would you kill one...
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Posted on August 7, 2007 10:06 AM • 10 Comments •
How the brain codes numbers is a challenging problem. We know that certain parts of the brain must code numbers because they are involved in numerical calculation. Some of them -- such as the prefrontal cortex (PFC) -- are also...
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Posted on June 5, 2007 11:58 AM • 3 Comments •
Memory for computers is getting pretty large, but it is still based on basically the same system that it was several years ago. They have just gotten better a fabricating them. It is an interesting question to ask whether we...
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Posted on May 30, 2007 9:59 AM • 3 Comments •
Ronald Bailey at Reason reviews an interesting article in the American Journal of Bioethics by Martha Farah and Andrea Heberlein and the responses to it. Farah and Heberlein argue that while an innate system for the detection of personhood exists...
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Posted on April 27, 2007 10:43 AM • 6 Comments •
Thank you, Germany: Passively listening to Mozart -- or indeed any other music you enjoy -- does not make you smarter. But more studies should be done to find out whether music lessons could raise your child's IQ in the...
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Posted on April 16, 2007 11:50 AM • 4 Comments •
If you are like me, you spend a lot of time not thinking about anything in particular. You read a couple papers, get a little work done, and then you stare off into space for a period of pleasant mindlessness....
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Posted on March 27, 2007 1:08 PM • 3 Comments •
Jeffrey Rosen has an excellent piece in the NYTimes magazine about the increasing use of neurological arguments in the courts: One important question raised by the Roper case was the question of where to draw the line in considering neuroscience...
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Posted on March 12, 2007 10:41 AM • 2 Comments •
I posted a couple months ago about neuron to glia (in this case oligodendrocyte) synapses in the hippocampus, and how researchers had shown that these synapses were capable of LTP. This was an example of two themes 1) the brain...
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Posted on March 6, 2007 11:43 AM • 1 Comments •
Encephalon 16 is up at Mind Hacks....
Posted on February 12, 2007 11:43 AM • 0 Comments •
The Stanford Prison experiment was a very famous -- now infamous -- experiment in social psychology that was conducted in 1971 by Dr. Phillip Zimbardo, Stanford psychology professor. You probably remember him if you took a high school or college...
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Posted on January 16, 2007 12:12 PM • 5 Comments •
Daniel Kahneman and Johnathan Renshon, writing in Foreign Policy, put forward a fascinating thesis that because of the way human beings are organized psychologically we are prone to be more hawkish. Basically the thrust of their argument is that social...
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Posted on January 8, 2007 11:27 AM • 4 Comments •
Mind Hacks covers an article in the Financial Times about delusions and how brain damage affects cognition: Some researchers have argued that this is the basis of a similarly curious syndrome, known as Capgras delusion, where someone believes that their...
Posted on November 27, 2006 11:31 PM • 0 Comments •
If you remember back from when I was at the Society for Neuroscience, I saw a talk by Bruce Appel where he showed videos of oligodendrocytes migrating and myelinating in the zebrafish. Oligodendrocytes are the myelin forming cell in the...
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Posted on November 24, 2006 10:51 AM • 2 Comments •
Women are more susceptible to Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) even when the type of the stressful event is controlled for: Males experience more traumatic events on average than do females, yet females are more likely to meet diagnostic criteria for...
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Posted on November 20, 2006 10:47 AM • 6 Comments •
I see that Simon Baron-Cohen has a piece in Seed about his theory of autism. I am really skeptical of many of his arguments related to autism, so I thought I would discuss a couple of them. Here is his...
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Posted on November 13, 2006 9:38 AM • 5 Comments •
I meant to post this early, but the Neurophilosopher has an excellent history of Alois Alzheimer, for whom the disease is named: On November 25th, 1901, a 51-year-old woman named Auguste Deter (below right) was admitted to the hospital, and...
Posted on November 8, 2006 10:48 AM • 0 Comments •
I hadn't actually known this, but the creator of the Dilbert cartoons, Scott Adams, was diagnosed about two years ago with a rare disease called spasmodic dysphonia. Apparently he just recovered -- in spite of overwhelming odds against that happening....
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Posted on October 26, 2006 9:48 AM • 26 Comments •
So I am sititng in a movie theater the other day, and some teenagers sitting behind me are talking. Of course, they are talking. They are ALWAYS talking behind me. And what particularly irks me is that it is a...
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Posted on September 26, 2006 10:36 AM • 3 Comments •
GNIF Brain Blogger has a good article describing the DSM -- Diagnostic and Statistcal Manual of Mental Disorders -- that is used by psychiatrists to diagnose mental health issues of all types. Drawbacks and benefits are discussed. In spite of...
Posted on September 12, 2006 10:44 AM • 0 Comments •
I talked earlier this year about a patient who recovered from a coma after 20 years. In that post, I discussed how -- with respect to the diagnostic criteria -- the difference between a persistent vegetative state and a minimally...
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Posted on September 11, 2006 9:07 AM • 3 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
I wrote earlier this week about evidence from electrode arrays that LTP occurs in vivo in behaving rats ("Rats, you behave!"). The paper showed that if you use an avoidance learning paradigm you can detect LTP in the hippocampus after...
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Posted on September 6, 2006 11:11 AM • 0 Comments •
My suspicion is that the people who know about neuroscience read the title of this and said: "Wow, Jake, there's a shocker. Tell us something we didn't know." Everyone else probably said: "Guh?" Therefore, I should probably explain why I...
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Posted on September 5, 2006 10:06 AM • 1 Comments •
The Neurophilosopher has a fabulous long post on the discovery of the neuron as the fundamental unit of the nervous system. I would note when you get to the part about Ramon y Cajal that his picture of the neurons...
Posted on August 29, 2006 10:38 AM • 0 Comments •
I have talked before about evidence that there is no new neurogenesis in the adult cortex, but that paper used stereological techniques. A new paper in PNAS shows a more direct method to demonstrate that there are no newly created...
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Posted on August 27, 2006 10:24 PM • 1 Comments •
Before, I talk about a mouse model that is resistant to depression, I think I had better talk about mouse models of depression so that everyone is on the same page. If you ask a nonscientist whether they think there...
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Posted on August 22, 2006 9:58 PM • 9 Comments •
Babies smarter than average high school student: In a discovery that could shed light on the development of the human brain, University of Oregon researchers determined that infants as young as six months old can recognize simple arithmetic errors. The...
Posted on August 21, 2006 2:02 AM • 1 Comments •
LTP activated genes are clustered on chromosomes -- or so says some work by Park et al in JBC. LTP -- or long-term potentiation -- is a process by which synaptic strength -- the ability of one neuron to talk...
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Posted on August 18, 2006 1:37 AM • 0 Comments •
This is rather clever. Houle et al at Case Western show in the Journal of Neuroscience that you can use a bacterial enzyme called chondroitinase to degrade scars in spinal cord lesions and enable regeneration of axons. Just for background,...
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Posted on August 18, 2006 12:45 AM • 3 Comments •
Encephalon #4 is up at the Neurocritic....
Posted on August 14, 2006 2:36 PM • •
Keeping to my week long theme of gender differences in cognition (here and here), here is an article by Diane Halpern in eSkeptic. It not only summarizes a lot of what is known about gender differences (even though it is...
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Posted on August 11, 2006 1:24 AM • 0 Comments •
Neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson's, were for many years regarded as exclusively diseases of molecular crud. You would look at brains of patients with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's patients and notice that there were all these aggregates of protein crud forming in...
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Posted on August 3, 2006 1:22 PM • 0 Comments •
...depression. This is related to something they make medical students memorize. When someone comes in with hypertension, it is always good to check whether the person has renal artery stenosis because this is one of the few causes of hypertension...
Posted on July 26, 2006 5:34 PM • 0 Comments •
Now I study oligodendrocyte development, and if you ask me they are a truly unappreciated cell type. Here is yet one more piece of evidence: synapses have been detected between neurons and oligodendrocytes in CA1 of the hippocampus AND these...
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Posted on July 19, 2006 1:00 PM • 5 Comments •
Evil Monkey from Neurotopia posts on face blindness or prosopagnosia, and how they have found a gene that results in a heritable form. They have not, to my knowledge, found a gene for why I can't remember the girl who...
Posted on July 17, 2006 12:02 AM • 0 Comments •
The most recent issue of Nature has a paper by the Donoghue lab at Brown about their project implanting an ensemble of electrodes into the motor cortex of a paraplegic. Signals from the electrodes were decoded and used to run...
Posted on July 13, 2006 2:03 AM • 1 Comments •
What is the deal with the stories showing brain lesions that end addiction? First, there was this one. Then, today in Nature there was another one: Strokes often change a person's character, depending on where the damage hits. Some may...
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Posted on July 12, 2006 8:59 PM • 1 Comments •
Parents can rest easy. If your child is a late-talker, it is because your kid is a late-talker, not because you didn't show them enough baby Einstein videos: New research findings from the world's largest study predicting children's late language...
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Posted on July 12, 2006 3:04 PM • 2 Comments •
There has been a big debate over the last couple years about whether the adult human brain is capable of generating new neurons. A new study in Neuroscience by Larsen et al. provides some relevant new evidence to that debate....
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Posted on July 10, 2006 11:55 PM • 1 Comments •
Misha at Mind Hacks has a great update on brain-computer interface advances....
Posted on July 10, 2006 11:42 PM • 0 Comments •
I haven't had time to read it all yet (it is sort of long and technical), but a new model by Grossberg and Seidman purports to explain how normal cognitive processes go wrong in autism -- a pretty tall order...
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Posted on July 10, 2006 11:18 PM • 0 Comments •
Jonah at The Frontal Cortex posted a great article exposing the limits of genetic determinism. Sometimes a genetic explanation seems so obvious, but further study shows that environment also plays a prominent role. Definitely read the whole thing....
Posted on July 10, 2006 12:10 AM • 0 Comments •
The American Journal of Psychiatry has this very interesting case, but first you should know some background. There is a pathway in the brain that is commonly referred to as the reward pathway. It is referred to as the reward...
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Posted on July 9, 2006 11:37 PM • 2 Comments •
The Synapse #2 is up at A Blog Around the Clock. The next Synapse is to be hosted by The Neurophilosopher's Blog on July 23rd. Submission guidelines are here....
Posted on July 9, 2006 1:31 AM • 0 Comments •
Prosopagnosia is a rare disorder that can result from strokes where the individual is unable to recognize faces but maintains the ability to recognize other non-face objects. Disorders like prosopagnosia suggest to neuroscientists that the machinery for processing faces in...
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Posted on July 7, 2006 4:52 PM • 2 Comments •
What does a scanner see? Into the head? Into the heart? Does it see into me? Clearly? Or darkly? Think about it this way. Everything that you have ever been or ever will be, everything you have loved, every preference,...
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Posted on July 7, 2006 2:21 AM • 6 Comments •
When a man wakes up after a 20 year coma, you know that people are going to pay attention. Particularly after the Terry Schiavo business, I think it is important to add some facts to this debate as early as...
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Posted on July 4, 2006 7:41 PM • 2 Comments •
What is wrong with this picture?...
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Posted on July 3, 2006 12:52 AM • 1 Comments •
Popular Science has a great article on the recent advances in prosthetics. They hit on one of the topics that I think has been really under-researched: neural to machine interfaces. What you would really like to do with a prosthetic...
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Posted on July 3, 2006 12:31 AM • 1 Comments •
This article in The Scientist describes a paper where the authors claim to have found empathy in mice. The problem is that what you define as empathy may be more a matter of semantics than of science:...
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Posted on June 30, 2006 4:43 PM • 2 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
How does cooperation evolve? It is in an organism's best interest to screw its competitors in order to best convey its genes to the next generation, yet we see a variety of human and animals examples of cooperation. The answer...
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Posted on June 29, 2006 8:48 PM • 4 Comments •
Are there neurobiological correlates of economic behavior such as utility seeking? The answer is yes, as demonstrated by some very elegant work by Berns et al in Science....
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Posted on June 28, 2006 11:50 AM • 2 Comments •
I must admit that in general I like David Brooks. He seems to lack the stridency of many pundits, and I don't generally like people who shout. He also tends -- like Walter Bagehot -- not to think that people...
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Posted on June 22, 2006 1:51 AM • 4 Comments •
For some reason I have been seeing lots of neuroeconomics articles lately. Maybe it is because people enjoy using that prefix. This article caught my eye because I have been reading off the reservation -- a history of economics by...
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Posted on June 21, 2006 10:35 PM • 1 Comments •
As promised I have a response to this article in the New York Times (I had to spend a couple days marshalling my evidence). I thought I would summarize some evidence about what we know from behavioral genetics so you...
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Posted on June 18, 2006 12:10 PM • 10 Comments •
I was totally incensed by this article in the New York Times, largely because the science quoted -- what little there was in between the anecdotes -- was truly attrocious, ignorant of alternative views, and completely missing the point. When...
Posted on June 15, 2006 3:10 PM • 1 Comments •
I love science. New Scientist reports a study looking at brain activation during the female orgasm. The results are let us say interesting. His team recruited 13 healthy heterosexual women and their partners. The women were asked to lie with...
Posted on June 15, 2006 11:00 AM • 6 Comments •
Baboons show handedness in communicative gestures, tending to be right-handed. This paper analyzed the handedness of baboons to see if they were more likely to use their right or their left hands for communication....
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Posted on June 14, 2006 2:48 PM • 0 Comments •
This paper shows that leptin injections into the hippocampus improves memory in a T-maze footshock avoidance and step down inhibitory avoidance tasks. It caught my eye because I just finished a course in behavioral neuroscience, but I have never for...
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Posted on June 13, 2006 10:22 PM • 0 Comments •
Here is a interesting idea about how to treat pain without addicting people to pain killers. There is some back story to this business that you should know before we discuss why this is a cool idea, though. Opioid drugs...
Posted on June 9, 2006 4:18 PM • 3 Comments •
This article in Science News is really interesting as it goes into the causes of disruptive behavior in children. I don't have much time to review it now as I have the last test of my graduate school life in...
Posted on June 9, 2006 1:17 PM • 0 Comments •
Jake Young is a MD/PhD student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine focusing in Neuroscience. He is due to graduate in 2032. He received a BS and a MS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University -- where he spent most of his time drinking heavily and building vegetable catapults instead of learning information that would now be eminently useful. When he is not failing terrifically to perform his sworn duties, he enjoys watching bad movies, ethnic food, and running.
