neurophilosophy
Posts by this author
October 17, 2007
(Photo by Felice Frankel)
Reseacher, author and science photographer Felice Frankel is the winner of this year's Lennart Nilsson Award for Medical, Technical and Scientific Photography.
Frankel is a researcher at MIT and a senior research fellow at Harvard University's Faculty of the Arts and…
October 17, 2007
James Watson and Francis Crick made the most significant discovery of the twentieth century: they elucidated of the molecular structure of DNA in 1953, and later shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work.
So Watson and Crick are very illustrious, to say the least. But when…
October 16, 2007
These pictures illustrate macrosomatognosia, the condition in which abnormal activity in the somatosensory regions of the brain causes one to perceive the body, or parts of it, to be abnormally large.
Both pictures are representations of partial macrosomatognosia, in which specific parts of the…
October 16, 2007
In the Journal of Neurophysiology, Chris Moore of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT reviews the evidence for his hemo-neural hypothesis:
Brain vasculature is a complex and interconnected network under tight regulatory control that exists in intimate communication with neurons and…
October 16, 2007
According to an economic analysis carried out by the Home Office, immigrants earned more and paid more tax than native Britons did last year.
October 16, 2007
The editors of PC Magazine have compiled a list of their favourite 100 blogs of the year. Only one of them is a science blog.
October 15, 2007
An international team of researchers led by Tony Wyss-Coray of the Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine report that they have developed a blood test that can predict with 90% accuracy the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease.
By analyzing the…
October 15, 2007
Scientist and journalist Sunny Bains discusses how Swiss researchers are using central pattern generator (CPG) chips to develop self-organizing furniture.
CPGs are networks of spinal neurons that generate the rhythmic patterns of neural activity which control locomotion. I wrote about them…
October 14, 2007
Here's another of my favourite bands - Funkadelic, playing I Got a Thing (1970). The perfect acoustic accompaniment to pink Cadillacs and full-length fur coats, this could well be the funkiest film footage ever recorded. (And that is a blue Ku Klux Klan outfit he's wearing.)
October 14, 2007
The journal Nature, in association with The Dana Foundation, has just launched a monthly neuroscience podcast called NeuroPod.
In the first edition, Kerri Smith discusses the potential applications of cognitive enhancement in warfare, the role of stress in memory formation, and the possibility of…
October 14, 2007
How you perceive the image depends on the distance from which you are viewing it. From up close, you'll see Albert Einstein, but if you move further back from the screen, you'll see Harry Potter.
This is one of a series of hybrid images created by Aude Oliva of the Computational Visual Cognition…
October 14, 2007
A reader writes:
Dear Mo,
I want to quote your Brain in a Nutshell Essay. Can you please provide me some bibliographic data of this essay. I don't want to cite just Mo and a short-lived URL.
I was flattered to get this email, but I wasn't sure how to respond. I suggested something along these…
October 13, 2007
This "right brain vs left brain test" from the Herald Sun is doing the rounds on the internet today. The article contains the so-called "spinning silhouette" optical illusion (below), and states that if you see the the dancer rotating in a clockwise direction "you use more of the right side of your…
October 13, 2007
I took this one a couple of weeks ago, as I was crossing Albert Bridge one evening.
October 13, 2007
Fellow neuroscience blogger Shelley Batts is one of 20 finalists in the running for the Student Blogging Scholarship. She's up against some stiff competition for the $10,000 first prize, and is currently in 2nd place with about 20% of the votes.
For her Ph.D., Shelley is researching the…
October 12, 2007
Researchers from the Biomedical Engineering Laboratory at Keio University in Japan have developed a brain-computer interface that enables users to control the movements of Second Life avatars without moving a muscle.
The device consists of a headset containing electrodes which monitor electrical…
October 12, 2007
This is an installation by New York-based artist Janice Caswell, called Competitive Races: The View from the Netroots.
My drawings and installations represent mental maps, an investigation of the mind's peculiar ways of organizing memories. I attempt to trace the edges of recalled experience,…
October 12, 2007
Just published by University of Chicago Press is A Century of Nature: Twenty-One Discoveries that Changed Science and the World. The book contains seminal Nature papers published over the last 100 years, each of which is accompanied by commentary from a leading scientist in the field.
Included in…
October 11, 2007
Ants and aphids have a symbiotic (or mutually beneficial) relationship. The aphids provide the ants with a food-source - the sugar-rich honeydew they excrete when eating plants - and, in return, the ants protect the aphids from ladybirds and other insects that prey on them.
To ensure a constant…
October 11, 2007
Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, the Malaysian orthopaedic surgeon aboard the Russian rocket that is now on its way to the International Space Station, can observe Ramadan and perform other acts of Muslim worship by following the guidelines set out in this small booklet, which was produced by 150 Islamic…
October 11, 2007
This wall painting was discovered by a team of French archaeologists working at Djade al-Mughara, a Neolithic site in Northern Syria.
The red, black and white painting measures 2 square meters, and has been dated to around 9,000 BC (making it the oldest known wall painting). Team leader Eric…
October 10, 2007
Vaughan has found a fascinating article about the many references to neurological syndromes in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
On the right is one of Sir John Tenniel's original illustrations for the book. It accompanies the following passage:
"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried…
October 9, 2007
The vilification of Arabs in American popular culture serves an ideological purpose: the dehumanization of America's "enemy" in the "clash of civilisations".
(Via Woman of Color Blog)
October 9, 2007
The 33rd edition of Encephalon, which has just been posted at GNIF Brain Blogger, includes posts on magnetoreception, cellular senescence in Alzheimer's Disease, and how the use of DNA microarrays is providing insights into human brain evolution.
The next edition of the carnival will be hosted by…
October 8, 2007
The Royal Society has just put Robert Hooke's folio online.
The 320-year-old notebook, which had been missing for centuries, was discovered in January of last year. In it, Hooke provides details of his experiments, and of the workings of the newly-formed Royal Society, of which he was first…
October 8, 2007
In The New Yorker, Jerome Groopman discusses the work of Adrian Owen, a researcher at Cambridge University's Cognitive and Brain Sciences Unit who has been using functional imaging to assess patients in a vegetative state.
Neurologists face major problems in diagnosing the persistent vegetative…
October 8, 2007
The 2007 Annual Review of Anthropology has just been published, and is freely available online.
It includes reviews called The Archaeology of Religious Ritual, The Archaeology of Sudan and Nubia, Genomic Comparisons of Humans and Chimpanzees and Anthropology and Militarism.
October 7, 2007
Wouldn't you be? Even if you weren't a 13-year-old pupil at a boys-only school?
My mother just found these old school reports and brought them over to me. Below are reports for maths, physics and biology. They're all handwritten, but, I think, legible.
October 7, 2007
A new study in the British Medical Journal concludes that "there is no strong evidence to associate chronic traumatic brain injury with amateur boxing,"
The authors systematically reviewed 36 observational studies of amateur boxers published over the past 50 years. But they acknowledge that the…
October 6, 2007
Left lateral view of the whole horse skeleton, from the Handbook of Animal Anatomy for Artists (1898, 1911-25), by Wilhelm Ellenberger, Hermann Baum and Hermann Dittrich. From the Veterinary Anatomical Illustrations at the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections (via BibliOdyssey).
I've…