Welcome to the 5th edition of The Synapse, ScienceBlog's home-grown carnival on all things Neuro! Glad to see this carnival, much like a precocious child or bad hair day, is growing up and gaining a life of its own. Thanks to all that submitted, we've got a smorgasbord of neural delights for your reading pleasure. Come on people, engage in long term potentiation in the brain, for the brain, about (you guessed it) the brain!
First, Jake at Pure Pedantry tackles a controversial topic, debunking the myth of a significant gender disparity in science, and in cognition.
OmniBrain provides a fascinating tidbit on a specialized "system" to help you forget your ex!
Mind Hacks presents an interview with journalist Liz Spikol who has experienced psychiatric hospitals firsthand, and uses this inside knowledge to give a different perspective on both mental states and reporting.
Chris Chatham at Developing Intelligence has two great articles: making an argument for multiplexed synchrony and describing selection efficiency in updating working memory.
Size matters, but what are the size of those pupils indicating?Joe at Interesting Thing of the Day discusses the science of "eye language."
Think you might have a sleep disorder? Aleksandr Kavokin, MD, PhD describes different types of sleep disorders and their symptoms.
Yeah, its true Americans have short attention spans. Avant News tackles this topic. Its your tax dollars at work!
Sandeep Gautam at The Mouse Trap tells us what moral dilemmas mean for moral development.
Neurontic wonders what's the fuss over Area 25 and the Neurocritic explores whether a childhood in poverty impacts neurocognitive development. Does socioeconomic status affect brain function?
The neurophilosopher informs on a rapidly changing gene that might be involved in the evolution of the human brain, and multipotent progenitor cells which have been isolated during surgery on epileptics.
Also, does the use of transcendental meditation to reduce the brain's response to pain?
Light cycles dictate out biological clocks, find out more about chronobiology!. Coturnix at Blog Around the Clock, who has had "all clocks all the time" this past week, contributes two excellent articles: one is a review on circadian rhythms in his namesake (the quail!), and one on phase response curves and t-cycles.
And finally, I'll pimp you two topics from Retrospectacle:
Find out about the similarities of language acquisition and bird song, in a recent Friday Grey Matters series: the neuroscience of birdsong. London cabbies have superior spatial skills, along with an enlarged hippocampus.
Enjoy!
The next Synapse will be hosted at The Mouse Trap on September 3rd, 2006. Submit by 9pm the day before to be included. More guidelines, here.
Comments
Great round-up of interesting stuff, most of which I missed last week.
[Links to OmniBrain and Mouse Trap need to be fixed - the latter only needs an 'l' in html]
Posted by: coturnix | August 20, 2006 7:16 PM
Links fixed, thanks!
Posted by: Shelley Batts | August 20, 2006 8:03 PM
Hooray for The Synapse!
The Neurocritic, however, is not the same blog (or person) as Neurontic ... a case of mistaken identity, and it's easy to see why. In fact, The Neurocritic has even written about area 25 (aka "sad cingulate"), so I wondered who might have submitted this post on my behalf...
Posted by: The Neurocritic | August 20, 2006 9:25 PM
Do Aleksandr Kavokin's site and Avant News qualify as blogs? I think not.
Posted by: The neurophilospher | August 21, 2006 2:14 AM
Visiting from Pharyngula - interesting stuff.
Link to "multiplexed synchrony" needs to be fixed - lacks "ml" in html.
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson | August 21, 2006 5:05 AM
Thanks! All the links I received from the automated submission system were truncated like that, not sure why that was. Hope I fixed them all.....
Posted by: Shelley Batts | August 21, 2006 3:34 PM