neurophilosophy
Posts by this author
September 26, 2007
The New York Times has an article about how Richard Dawkins, PZ Myers and Eugenie Scott (director of the National Center for Science Education) were duped into appearing in Expelled, a film that puts forward the case for intelligent design and depicts science as something that limits freedom of…
September 26, 2007
Just posted on the Seed website is an article about the evolution of language by Juan Uriageraka, from the October issue of Seed Magazine. Most of the article concerns the role of the FoxP2 gene in the brains of songbirds. (I discussed this gene earlier in the week in my post about echolocation.)…
September 26, 2007
In the Annals of Neurology, a team of physicians, led by Tony Ro of the Department of Psychology at Rice University in Houston, Texas, report the unusual case of a woman who began to feel sounds following a stroke
The woman, a 36-year-old professor, suffered a rare type of cerebrovascular accident…
September 25, 2007
I received an email earlier today from one Nelson Abreu, who offered a criticism of the experimentally-induced out-of-body experiences that were reported recently, in the hope that I might post a reaction on my blog.
In his message, Mr. Abreu tells me that the studies "reveal interesting things…
September 25, 2007
The Learner.org website has a large collection of video teaching modules for high school, college and adult students, including modules on the brain and mind.
The Brain module has 32 film clips, ranging in length from 5-20 minutes. They include films about Phineas Gage, the visual system, sensori-…
September 25, 2007
Both EurekAlert and ScienceDaily have a story called "Sense of taste different in women with anorexia nervosa". The stories have been "adapted" from a press release issued earlier today by the University of California, San Diego.
This "adaption" is nothing more than a reproduction of the press…
September 25, 2007
To celebrate the 100th email issue of its research digest, the British Psychological Society has asked leading psychologists and bloggers to write a few paragraphs about the most important psychology experiment that's never been done.
Contributors include Susan Blackmore, Richard Gregory, Vaughan…
September 25, 2007
Recently, I've been getting the occasional duplicated comment. I thought this had something to do with the comments being held in moderation, but, as Brian explains, it appears to be because of an error.
Thanks Brian.
September 24, 2007
Echolocation - or biological sonar - can be thought of as an auditory imaging system that is used by organisms in environments where vision is ineffective. It involves the emission of vocalizations by the animal, and the detection of the echoes of those sounds, which are used to produce three-…
September 24, 2007
Grrl Scientist has just posted the 32nd edition of Encephalon at Living the Scientific Life. As usual, the carnival includes entries from the best neuroscience and psychology blogs on the web.
The next edition of Encephalon will be hosted at GNIF Brain Blogger on October 8th. If you'd like to…
September 23, 2007
(Image credit: John B. Carnett)
The September issue of Popular Science magazine has an article about one of the first clinical trials in which deep brain stimulation is being used to treat patients with severe depression who do not respond to drugs or electroconvulsive therapy.
The image…
September 23, 2007
(Gene Genie logo created by by Ricardo Vidal)
Welcome to the 16th edition of Gene Genie, the carnival of genes and genetic diseases.
In this edition, genetics gets personal. The recent publication of Craig Venter's genome (and, before that, James Watson's) was big news. It ushered in the new…
September 22, 2007
In this inaugural weekend photoblogging post, I give you this photograph of Beit el-Din Palace, which I took on a trip to Lebanon about 5 years ago.
Beit el-Din (which translates as "House of Religion") is in the Chouf region of Lebanon, about 50 km southwest of Beirut. The Chouf is the…
September 22, 2007
In an op-ed from yesterday's NY Times, Christopher Lane, a professor of English at Northwestern University, argues that shy kids are not mentally ill, and that they shouldn't be given medication.
The piece brought to mind this critique of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (…
September 22, 2007
That's the cost of war in Iraq, according to a new analysis by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Public Policy lecturer Linda J. Bilmes.
The money spent on one day of war in Iraq ($720 million) could provide healthcare for more than 420,000 American children or buy homes for…
September 21, 2007
This 3D reconstruction of the presynaptic terminal show the nuts and bolts of intercellular communication in the nervous system. They were generated by Siksou et al, from serial electron micrographs of neurons from the rat hippocampus.
The blue spheres are synaptic vesicles containing…
September 21, 2007
A study by a team of German researchers shows that the brains of paedophiles respond differently to those of healthy controls to erotic images.
Martin Walter, of the Department of Psychiatry at Otto-von-Guricke University in Magdeburg, and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging…
September 21, 2007
Yellow Red Blue, by Wassily Kandinsky.
After attending a performance of Wagner's opera Lohengrin in St. Petersburg, Kandinsky said, "I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me."
Kandinsky was describing his experience of a condition…
September 21, 2007
ScienceBlogs has two new additions: On Being A Scientist and a Woman and A Few Things Ill Considered.
September 21, 2007
Google Reader has an excellent feature which enables users to display items from the RSS feeds to which they are subscribed in a "link blog".
I set up one of these link blogs earlier this year, and displayed the RSS feed in the sidebar on my old blog. My shared items can be viewed here, and the…
September 20, 2007
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has just published its annual Education at a Glance report.
The survey includes statistics on enrolment and completion rates for primary, secondary and tertiary education from the 30 OECD member countries, including the numbers of…
September 20, 2007
I found this two-part documentary on YouTube. It's about a musician called Clive Wearing, who became amnesic following a herpes encephalitis infection that damaged his hippocampus, as well as parts of his frontal and temporal lobes.
Wearing's is the most severe case of anterograde amnesia…
September 20, 2007
In this article from Wired, Sharon Weinberger discusses "mind-reading" technology that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security hopes to use to identify terrorists.
The DHS is interested in Semantic Stimuli Response Measurements Technology (SSRM TEK), which has been developed at the…
September 19, 2007
(Image credit: Emmanouil Filippou / GreecePhotoBank/ Current Biology)
Giant hornets are the honeybee's arch enemy. They enter nests, kill the bees and take them home to feed their young. Before leaving the nest, the pioneer foraging hornet secretes a hormone which attracts its nestmates.…
September 19, 2007
Coptic leaf from the Gospel of Mark, Egypt, c. AD 500. (Southern Methodist University)
Nearly half of the world's 7,000 languages are likely to become extinct over the course of this century, according to an article in the NY Times which discusses a recent study of endangered languages. (See…
September 18, 2007
Top science bloggers (including Bora, Carl, Abel Pharmboy, PZ and Razib) have been asked by The Scientist to nominate their favourite science blogs. You can see their choices, and nominate your own favourites, here.
September 18, 2007
More on the cultural destruction of Iraq, or, as Robert Fisk calls it in this article from The Independent, the death of history.
September 18, 2007
At some point in the distant past, there was a dramatic increase in brain size in our hominid ancestors. From approximately 2 million years ago, to the present day, brain volume in the hominid lineage has increased by a factor of 3.5: the brain of Homo erectus had a volume of about 400 milliliters…
September 18, 2007
(Image credit: Karolinska University Hospital)
A study led by neuroscientist Peter Fransson of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden shows that there is spontaneous activity in at least 5 resting-state networks in the brains of sleeping babies.
Fransson and his colleagues used functional magnetic…