Now on ScienceBlogs: Oxytocin: Starting with the basics
Jake Young is a MD/PhD student at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in NYC getting a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience. He holds a BS and MS in Biological Sciences from Stanford University. If a volcano were to erupt Pompei-style in Central Park, his body would be preserved in a scoliotic posture over his lab desk. Archeaologists would later conclude that he spent most of his day training rats to perform tricks, until he went blind building electrical equipment by hand using a dissecting microscope. But, still, he died happy...because science is cool.
Pure Pedantry is a blog about science -- social sciences and otherwise -- as well as academic and scientific culture. No one can live on science alone, so I also like to dwell on pop culture, periodically explore the humanities, and indulge in other types of geeky goodness.
DISCLAIMERS: 1) Jake Young is not a licensed physician (yet). He is merely a medical student. The information published on this site is not intended for use in medical decision-making. Please seek advice from a licensed, medical professional before making any health decisions. 2) The opinions expressed are my own. They do not represent the views of SEED magazine or the educational establishments I currently attend or attended in the past.
Category: Perception
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...
Posted by NotoriousLTP at 6:21 PM • 1 Comments •
Category: Perception
Caught this bad description of an otherwise very interesting study at Science Daily: Neuroscientists at Georgetown University Medical Center have, for the first time, shown what brain activity looks like when someone anticipates an action or sensory input which soon...
Posted by NotoriousLTP at 8:43 AM • 0 Comments •
Category: Neuroeconomics
I caught this neuroscience question over at a new blog I like, Think Markets. Sandy Ikeda comments on a section of Daniel Gilbert's book Stumbling on Happiness: I've been thinking about the following from Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness: Experiments...
Posted by NotoriousLTP at 7:21 AM • 1 Comments •
Category: Sex
Farris et al. have a paper coming out in Psychological Science about how men tend to misperceive sexual interest in women. I get the sense that this is a big problem for many women. Any woman who has spent more...
Posted by NotoriousLTP at 1:53 PM • 20 Comments •
Category: Perception
Vision is the process by which the brain converts the light stimuli into a mental world filled with abstract visual objects. If you stop to think about it, this is an incredible feat. There is nothing in the photons coming...
Posted by NotoriousLTP at 12:39 PM • 2 Comments •
Category: Perception
Functional MRI (fMRI) is a very useful technique, but it lacks in resolution making some systems difficult to study. Adams et al. show in a study of ocular dominance columns in humans why good old staining is still useful when...
Posted by NotoriousLTP at 11:04 AM • 2 Comments •
Category: Perception
This is the best advertisement for a video game ever. The researchers compared people who played Unreal Tournament for 30 hours with people who played Tetris. They found that the Unreal Tournament players had an increase in visual processing speed:...
Posted by NotoriousLTP at 10:49 AM • 7 Comments •
Category: Perception
The binding problem is one of the great mysteries of modern neuroscience. Briefly, we know from a variety of studies in humans and primates that the specific features of the sensory world -- particularly the visual world -- are broken...
Posted by NotoriousLTP at 11:22 AM • 3 Comments •
PZ Myers 11.08.2009
PZ Myers 11.08.2009
Orac 11.06.2009
Tim Lambert 11.08.2009
Orac 11.08.2009
