neurophilosophy
Posts by this author
February 6, 2008
(Photo from National Geographic)
A young victim of Kenya's post-election violence waits at a hospital in Nakuru to have an arrow removed from the back of his skull. The ethnic conflicts have claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people, and the country now faces a humanitarian crisis, with about…
February 5, 2008
The New York Times and Washington Post have stories on the appearance of a mysterious neurological illness in workers at a pig slaughterhouse in the southeastern Minnesota town of Austin.
The condition has been named progressive inflammatory neuropathy (PIN), and has so far been reported in 6 men…
February 4, 2008
Technology blogger Robert Scoble attended the World Economic Forum at Davos, and made quite a few video recordings of the conversations he had with various people while he was there, which he has uploaded to Qik.
In this film, Scoble talks to the Brazilian neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis,…
February 4, 2008
[Introduction|Part 2]
It is well established that synaptic strengthening involves the recruitment of AMPARs to the postsynaptic membrane. However, the subunit composition of the receptors has not been investigated closely, so the studies discussed here allow for refinement of this basic model,…
February 2, 2008
John Pezaris emailed me yesterday to say:
Last spring, you were kind enough to write an article for your Neurophilosophy blog covering my research into restoring sight to the blind, following the publication of our scientific paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Your…
February 1, 2008
Following on from the introduction, I now discuss a number of recent studies which demonstrate that synaptic strengthening in different regions of the mammalian brain requires the incorporation of Ca2+-permeable GluR2-lacking AMPA receptors into the postsynaptic membrane of active or newly-…
January 30, 2008
Canadian surgeons have made a serendipitous discovery. While using deep brain stimulation to try suppressing the appetite of a morbidly obese patient, they inadvertently evoked in the patient vivid autobiographical memories of an event that had taken place more than 30 years previously. They…
January 28, 2008
In my second coursework essay, I discuss a number of recent studies which demonstrate that synaptic strengthening in different regions of the mammalian brain requires the incorporation of Ca2+-permeable GluR1-lacking AMPA receptors into the postsynaptic membrane of active or newly-potentiated…
January 27, 2008
Last Tuesday's episode of Horizon, called Total Isolation, is available for viewing and download at the BBC iPlayer website for the next 2 days. In the 50-minute documentary, Professor Ian Robbins, a trauma psychologist at the University of Surrey who specializes in supporting torture victims,…
January 24, 2008
Today's issue of Nature contains a short review of Open Lab 2007, and the article includes a brief mention of my contribution to the book:
The editor of this second anthology of the best scientific communiqu's from the blogosphere thinks blogs offer new ways to discuss science. The Open Laboratory…
January 24, 2008
The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) had a life filled with pain. At the age of 6, she contracted polio, and this caused a paralysis of the right leg from which Kahlo took one year to recover. Then, in 1925, Kahlo was involved in a horrific traffic accident: the school bus she was…
January 24, 2008
The operation of Trepan, from Illustrations of the Great Operations of Surgery: Trepan, Hernia, Amputation, Aneurism and Lithotomy, by Charles Bell, 1815. (John Martin Rare Book Room at the University of Iowa's Hardin Library for the Health Sciences.)Trepanation, or trephination (both derived from…
January 22, 2008
Among the one third of Americans who believe in ghosts are high-ranking officials in the intelligence agencies and military.
In the 1970s and 80s, the CIA funded research into "remote viewing", so that they could train clairvoyants to locate, among other things, Colonel Gaddafi and the U.S. marines…
January 20, 2008
The Canadian Globe and Mail reports on the remarkable case of Stacey Gayle, a 25-year-old woman from Edmonton who has just had neurosurgery to treat intractable epilepsy.
Gayle (right) was suffering from musicogenic epilepsy, a rare form of the condition in which seizures are triggered by music. In…
January 19, 2008
This diagram of the retina, drawn by Santiago Ramon y Cajal in 1892, comes from Web Vision, a comprehensive overview of the organization of the mammalian retina and visual system compiled by Drs. Helga Kolb, Eduardo Fernandez and Ralph Nelson of the John Moran Eye Center at the University of…
January 17, 2008
This film clip describes how neuroscientists have controlled the movements of a humanoid robot using a brain-computer interface (BCI) embedded in the motor cortex of a monkey.
I've written about BCIs before, so I won't go into details here. For more information about how they work, follow the…
January 15, 2008
A forthcoming PBS documentary called The Lobotomist examines the career of psychiatrist Walter J. Freeman, who performed nearly 3,000 "ice pick" lobotomies during the late 1930s and 1940s.
The hour-long program, which is partly based on Jack El-Hai's book of the same name, contains old footage of…
January 14, 2008
I returned to UCL today, after spending the first week of the new term writing my second piece of coursework for the M.Sc., a 2,000-word essay about AMPA receptor recomposition in synaptic plasticity, which I'll post on here soon.
The third block began today with a lecture on nociception (pain),…
January 12, 2008
Over the past few days, the number of subscribers to my RSS feed has increased to over 1,000, even though the blog hasn't been updated since January 3rd.
I can, therefore, only attribute this to the news that one of my posts is to be featured in the forthcoming OpenLab 2007. Whatever the reason,…
January 2, 2008
At A Blog Around the Clock, Bora has announced the posts that will be published in Open Lab 2007, the forthcoming second annual anthology of the best science blogging of last year.
Of the 486 submitted entries, just 50 have made it into the book, and I'm pleased to say that one of them is written…
December 30, 2007
A Product of Evolution is an online store which "provide[s] intelligent designs for free thinking truth seekers." The products, which include mens and women's T-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, and mugs, are "inspired by...the natural beauty of evolution, science, truth and free inquiry."
On the…
December 30, 2007
I've just found this Encyclopaedia of Computational Neuroscience on Scholarpedia. Each entry is written by an expert in the field, and is very comprehensive.
The project seems to have been started only recently, as many of the entries I've looked at are still empty. Although still incomplete, this…
December 29, 2007
The mosque of Muhammed Ali, with its slender and elegant twin minarets, is one of Cairo's most prominent landmarks. It is visible in the two photographs of Cairo that I've already posted.
Muhammed Ali was appointed as the Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt in 1805, by the Sublime Porte. He commissioned this…
December 29, 2007
The editors of the journal Neuron are now publishing readers' comments on the journal's website. Comments can be made online for any paper published in the journal, including all of those in the online back archive.
Neuron is owned by Elsevier, and the decision to publish online readers' comments…
December 28, 2007
Professor Colin Blakemore (right), a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford who was formerly chief executive of the Medical Research Council (MRC), has been denied a knighthood "because of his outspoken support for animal research."
This is not the first time Blakemore has been overlooked in…
December 28, 2007
In this wonderful passage from King Solomon's Ring, Konrad Lorenz, who, together with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch founded the science of ethology, describes some of the behaviours of his pet capuchin monkey Gloria:
She occupied a large, roomy cage in my study. When I was at home and able…
December 18, 2007
God's Eye View, which depicts four biblical events as if captured by Google Earth, is the work of The Glue Society, a collective of writers, designers and art/ film directors based in Sydney, Australia.
Says Glue Society member James Dive:
We like to disorientate audiences a little with all our…
December 18, 2007
Ed Yong has posted the 38th edition of Encephalon at Not Exactly Rocket Science. The carnival will return in a month, and the next host will be announced in due course.
December 17, 2007
Photograph courtesy of the Exploratorium
Jonah Lehrer* points out an exhibition of Paul Ekman's photographs at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
Ekman is a psychologist at UCSF who has spent time in Papua New Guinea studying the facial expressions of the people there, to try and…