neurophilosophy
Posts by this author
November 16, 2007
In his Insect Lab Studio, sculptor Mike Libby customizes real insects with parts from antique pocketwatches and electronic components from old circuit boards. Here, he describes how the idea first came to him:
One day I found a dead intact beetle. I then located an old wristwatch, thinking of…
November 16, 2007
Synaesthesia is a condition in which stimuli of one type evoke sensations in another sensory modality. For example, hearing particular sounds might evoke strong sensations of colour or (more rarely) words might evoke strong tastes in the mouth.
In The Hidden Sense, social scientist Cretien van…
November 15, 2007
At the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego last week, a group of researchers presented data on a speech prosthesis which they say could soon enable a paralyzed man to talk again.
The device, which consists of 3 gold recording wires, was implanted into the brain of Eric Ramsey, who was…
November 15, 2007
From KMBC:
Clay County sheriff's deputies said David Theiss, of Kansas City, possessed a Colorado River toad with the intention of using it as a hallucinogenic.
Experts said it's possible to lick the toad's venom glands to achieve psychedelic effects.
Most pet stores don't sell the Colorado River…
November 14, 2007
An individual ant is quite insignificant, but a large group of ants can do quite remarkable things. Likewise, neurons evolved to communicate with each other, and are quite useless except when connected to a network of other neurons.
I've always liked to use the ant colony as an anology for brain…
November 13, 2007
Regular readers will know that I rarely write about politics. But this post is an exception, as it is written in memory of my father, who died on this day 7 years ago. That's my father on the left, with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, who died almost exactly four years later.
Some 14…
November 12, 2007
Today's Independent contains an extract from Taking the Proverbial, a book about the psychology of proverbs by Geoff Rolls.
The extract includes sections from the book which discuss the proverbs "An elephant never forgets" and "Practice makes perfect". The section about the first includes a nice…
November 9, 2007
The Los Angeles Times reports on "Robo-moth", a cleverly designed contraption, built from cheap off-the-shelf parts, which was presented at the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego earlier this week.
Robo-moth is a 6-inch-tall wheeled robot to which attached tobacco horn moth has been…
November 9, 2007
The cover of the current issue of Neuron features this brainland map, by Sam Brown, a cartographer based in New Zealand. Printed A3, A2 and A1 sized copies of the map can be purchased from Unit Seven.
...created from a reference photo of a real human brain which was used to build the 3D…
November 9, 2007
Biological anthropologist Greg Laden and theoretical physicist Dave Bacon have just joined ScienceBlogs. Both of these blogs are fantastic, so go and check them out.
If you're a regular reader of this blog, it's safe to say that you're interested in neurobiology, so you'll probably want to read…
November 8, 2007
Today's New York Times contains a very good opinion piece about the benefits of physical exercise for maintaing and improving brain health, by Sandra Aamodt, editor-in-chief of Nature Neuroscience, and Sam Wong, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton.
There is…
November 7, 2007
Researchers from the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore have produced an "atlas" of the activity of nearly 17,000 genes in 5 different regions of the mouse central nervous system.
Using microarrays, the NIA team measured the levels of mRNA transcripts in the cortex, hippocampus, striatum,…
November 7, 2007
The introductory chapter of Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, by Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison, provides an excellent description of how Emil Kraepelin first classified manic depression (or bipolar disorder) and related conditions in the late…
November 5, 2007
Washington Treasury Secret Service Bureau chief M. R. Allen acts as a subject in a demonstration of the polygraph test, at the U.S. Secret Service Men's Convention in 1941. (Image: Bettmann/ Corbis)
This week, the NPR Morning edition featured a three-part series on lie detection, which included…
November 5, 2007
Vaughan is recruiting participants for a study of the neuropsychology of hypnosis which he is involved in.
In the first stage of the research, participants will be asked to answer a series of short questionnaires and complete a short test, to determine the extent of their suggestibility (their…
November 5, 2007
I've just found this rather annoying - and (I think) completely useless - blog called brain-master, whose content consists largely of the partial feed for this blog.
November 5, 2007
Primate Diarist Eric has just posted the 35th edition of Encephalon, the neuroscience and psychology blog carnival.
My favourite posts this time round are the Neurocritic's examination of the purported discovery of the "neural basis for optimism", and Jake's description of two-photon fluorescence…
November 4, 2007
The Brainloop brain-computer interface, demonstrated at the VisionSpace laboratory for perception and cognition at FH Joanneum, University of Applied Sciences in Austria. (Photo by Miha Fras, courtesy of Aksioma/ Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana)
What will they think of next? First,…
November 4, 2007
Zahi Hawass (centre), director of the Supreme Council of Egyptian Antiquities, supervises the removal of Tutankhamun's mummy from his sarcophagus in the underground tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor. (Image: Ben Curtis/ AP)
The face of Tutankhamun has been revealed to the public for…
November 4, 2007
This morning, I noticed that the number of subscribers displayed in my feed count (the orange rectangle on the left) had dropped drastically, from more than 800 to 415, and started wondering why my readers are unsubscribing en masse from my RSS feed. But it turns out that there has been a glitch in…
November 3, 2007
James Fung, a musician and computer engineer at the University of Toronto, has developed a program that can convert EEG recordings into music.
Fung is involved in the Regenerative Brain Wave Music Project, which "explores new physiological interfaces for musical instruments."
As part of the project…
November 2, 2007
On November 4th, 1906, during a lecture at the 37th Conference of South-West German Psychiatrists in Tubingen, the German neuropathologist and psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915, right) described "eine eigenartige Erkrankung der Hirnrinde" (a peculiar disease of the cerebral cortex). In the…
November 2, 2007
You may have noticed the small icon on the right displayed on yesterday's post about tracking moving objects and on Wednesday's post about the Brainbow genetic labelling system.
The icon denotes a post that includes a discussion on peer-reviewed research, and is intended to distinguish such posts…
November 1, 2007
The ability to attend to multiple moving objects simultaneously is fundamental to many of the tasks we perform regularly, such as driving, or taking part in team sports.
Numerous studies in which participants are asked to track dots moving around on a screen have led researchers to the conclusion…
November 1, 2007
This knitted woollen Brain Bag, designed by Jun Takashi for the Undercover label, is the ultimate accessory for the fashion-conscious female neuroscientist.
[Via Boing Boing]
November 1, 2007
The 2007 Weblog Award finalists have just been announced, but for some reason, the list does not include links to the blogs. So here are the finalists in the Best Science Blogs category:
SciGuy
Junk Science
In the Pipeline
Journey by Starlight
Pharyngula
Bad Astronomy
Invasive Species…
October 31, 2007
Researchers from Harvard University have developed a remarkable genetic technique that enabled them to visualize complete neuronal circuits in unprecedented detail, by using multiple distinct colours to label individual neurons.
The technique, called Brainbow, works in much the same way as a…
October 31, 2007
Fear, that most primitive of emotions, is good, at least when it is kept under control. It is essential for survival, allowing an organism to detect a potential threat to its life. Too much fear, however, can lead to pathological conditions such as anxiety, phobia, paranoia, or post-traumatic…
October 30, 2007
An article about Oliver Sacks, from the current issue of Seed magazine, has just just been made available online.
Author Jonah Lehrer, who met with Sacks to research the article, provides interesting biographical details about the neurologist, including how he started out as a science writer.
In…
October 30, 2007
My post on the ethnobiology of voodoo zombification has just been translated into Greek.
As far as I know, this is the second time something I've written has been translated into another language. (There's also an Italian translation of my post on Phineas Gage.)