neurophilosophy
Posts by this author
September 10, 2007
The Royal National Institute for the Deaf, the largest charity representing the U.K.'s 9 million deaf and hard of hearing people, warns that two thirds of youngsters using MP3 players are at risk of premature and permanent hearing loss:
The charity used decibel meters to test the volume of 110…
September 10, 2007
Sport and recreational activities account for some 21% of traumatic brain injuries in American children and adolescents, and football players are particularly prone to head injuries that can lead to permanent brain damage.
American football is associated with more head injuries than any other.…
September 9, 2007
The current issue of The Economist has an intersting article about biologically-inspired architecture:
So far, the use of biomimetic features in buildings has been driven as much by aesthetics as by function, and has been limited to relatively simple, passive systems. The Arab World…
September 9, 2007
Research suggests that liberals and conservatives have different personality traits and "cognitive styles": while liberals are more intellectually curious and tolerant of ambiguity, conservatives have a greater desire to reach decisions quickly and are more consistent in the way they make those…
September 9, 2007
One of my favourite novels, Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, has been faithfully as a comic strip.
September 8, 2007
Bill Scott uses electroencephalogram (EEG) data to create computer-generated images like this one.
(Via Dr. Karen)
September 8, 2007
ABC News has posted a transcript of Osama bin Laden's videotaped statement, in which he refers to Noam Chomsky as "among the most capable" of commentators on the Iraq war.
And in a Mind Hacks exclusive, Vaughan has posted a deleted portion of the statement, in which bin Laden lays out his demands…
September 8, 2007
Spiders make my skin crawl, but it's always amazed me that, despite being mechanical and grotesque, they produce silk, which is not only one of nature's finest materials, but also one of the lightest and strongest.
The creator of the fictional superhero Spiderman wasn't too far off the mark when…
September 8, 2007
You don't have to be a bibliophile to enjoy this compendium of beautiful libraries.
September 8, 2007
Daniel Vasella, chief executive of the Swiss pharmaceutical giant Novartis, discusses the U.S. health care system in an interview with the New York Times.
Vasella, who was listed in the Time 100 of 2004, has this to say about the demographics of Alzheimer's Disease:
In the United States alone…
September 7, 2007
The trajectory of a foam boomerang with LED lights, by Michael Murphree.
From an article called The science of boomerangs, in last month's issue of Popular Mechanics.
September 7, 2007
The Believer has an interview with primatologist Franz de Waal:
De Waal's research is no friend to human vanity. In the grand tradition of Galileo and Darwin, de Waal provokes those who seek to draw a clear line between human beings and everything else. But his message is an optimistic one. If…
September 7, 2007
The film below shows surgeons from the Neuroscience Institute at Le Bonheur Children's Medical Center perform a hemispherectomy on a 6-year-old girl with epilepsy. This involves removing a large part of the girl's left hemisphere; the corpus callosum, the bundle of approximately 100 million nerve…
September 7, 2007
From the BBC:
Doctors in China have discovered 26 sewing needles embedded in the body of a 31-year-old woman.
They think they were inserted into Luo Cuifen's body when she was a baby by grandparents upset she was not a boy.
Some of these needles have penetrated vital organs, such as the…
September 7, 2007
The Manipulation of Human Behavior, a manual for psychological torture techniques written by leading psychologists and psychiatrists, is now available online.
Published by John Wiley & Sons in 1961, the 323-page book was edited by Albert D. Biderman of the Bureau of Social Science Research and…
September 6, 2007
Scanning electron micrograph of the moray eel's secondary jaw, with highly recurved teeth. Scale bar= 500 micrometres. (Rita Mehta/ Nature)
In today's issue of Nature, evolutionary biologists from the University of California, Davis report that the moray eel (Muraena retifera) has a…
September 6, 2007
Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated a device which can control the movements of a wheelchair when its operator thinks of specific words.
The Audeo is a human-computer interface consisting of a neckband containing sensors which detect the electrical…
September 6, 2007
Susan Greenfield, one of the U.K.'s most prominent neuroscientists, has just launched a brain-training computer program called MindFit.
The software was developed by a company called MindWeavers, for which Greenfield, and David Moore, the director of the MRC Institute for Hearing Research, are…
September 6, 2007
Bill Choisser (left) has written an online book called Face Blind!, where he describes his experiences of prosopagnosia, a neurological condition in which the ability to recognize faces is impaired.
In extreme cases, prosopagnostics are unable to recognize family members, and even their own…
September 6, 2007
Here are a handful of new blogs I've just found:
Neurofeedback on the Brain
Mind Modulations
Neuromod Blog
Gray Matters
Cognitive Neuroscience Review
And here are two new blogs by philosophers of mind:
The IP Blog
Colin McGinn
September 6, 2007
Olfaction (smell) is the most mysterious of senses, and is wrongly regarded as insignificant by most people. The sense of taste, for example, consists in large part of smell - try holding your nose next time you eat - and the recent identification of putative pheromone receptors in humans suggests…
September 5, 2007
From a comic book called What are Cosmic Rays, by researchers at the Solar-Terrestrial Evironment Laboratory at Nagoya University in Japan.
There are 5 others in English, and more in Japanese.
September 5, 2007
Mild cognitive impairment affects many cognitive functions, particularly memory. People with mild cognitive impairment are 3-4 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's Disease; hence, it is regarded as a transition stage between normal age-related cognitive decline and Alzheimer's Disease.…
September 5, 2007
Erasing Memory: The Cultural Destruction of Iraq is a 28-minute film from the Archaeology Channel which documents the plundering of Iraqi archaeological sites and looting and destruction of priceless artifacts.
This destruction of Iraq's heritage has been going on since the U.S. invaded the country…
September 5, 2007
Just in time for my return to university, Mozilla has released the Firefox Campus Edition, which comes with 3 essential add-ons for students:
FoxyTunes is a personalized music aggregator which can be used to control any media player, and to collect music videos, lyrics, album covers, news and more…
September 4, 2007
The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the governmental body that regulates fertility treatments in the U.K., looks set to approve the use of hybrid embryos for stem cell research at a meeting later on today.
Earlier this week, the HFEA published its public consultation on the…
September 4, 2007
In the 1880s, Francis Galton described a condition in which "persons...almost invariably think of numerals in visual imagery." This "peculiar habit of mind" is today called synaesthesia, and Galton's description clearly defines this condition as one in which stimuli of one sensory modality elicit…
September 4, 2007
At 3 Quarks Daily, Abbas Reza reviews Steven Pinker's new book, Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, which is published by Allen Lane later this month.
Pinker discusses the book in this recent interview.
September 3, 2007
This is alarming: the New York Times has an article about a new study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, which shows that the number of under 20s diagnosed with bipolar disorder has increased 40-fold (from 25 to 1003 per 100,000) between 1994 and 2003:
Bipolar disorder is…
September 3, 2007
In The rise and fall of the prefrontal lobotomy, I discussed the heart-breaking case of Howard Dully, whose stepmother had him lobotomized when he was12 years old.
Dully relates his story in My Lobotomy, an autobiographical book which is co-authored by novelist and journalist Charles Fleming. My…