neurophilosophy
Posts by this author
August 22, 2007
A significant proportion of people with HIV/ AIDS develop neurological symptoms, such as impaired co-ordination, personality changes, deficits in learning and memory, and mania and depression.
HIV-associated dementia is difficult to treat; although highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) has…
August 21, 2007
The New York Times contains an article by George Johnson, who attended the recent Magic of Consciousness Symposium in Las Vegas, at which a number of well-known magicians discussed how they exploit the limits of perception in their performances:
Apollo, with the pull of his eyes and the arc of…
August 21, 2007
You've probably gathered that I've spent a long weekend in New York City with other ScienceBloggers and members of the SEED magazine team. I think it's fair to say that a good time was had by all.
I've posted some of the pics I took out there, but I haven't written anything about the trip.…
August 21, 2007
Atlas at the Rockefeller Plaza. More blogger pics below.
Bora Zivkovic (aka Coturnix) with some really handsome (but quite hairy) guy.
Mike Dunford, Suzanne Franks, Janet Stemwedel and Rob Knop.
Shelley Batts, Rob Knop, Mike Dunford and Josh Rosenau.
August 20, 2007
Kevin Beck.
More pics of the ScienceBloggers in NYC below.
Jennifer Jacquet.
Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science and Storm World.
Sheril Kirshenbaum, Mooney's co-blogger.
August 20, 2007
...in the Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science is a fantastic new blog that needs a shorter name. It's by Jack Josephy, who's studying philosophy and cognitive science at the University of Sussex.
See also Distributed Neuron, by Zachary Tong, a biology undergraduate at Rensselaer Polytechnic…
August 19, 2007
I heard this being played by someone who was selling records and CDs in the street, next to a bar we went into last night. It's an old favourite of mine, from way back when hip hop was still good. There's no video, so enjoy looking at the album cover while you listen. It's by Big Daddy Kane…
August 19, 2007
More photos below.
Rob Knop - spent all weekend in the hotel room. Snores quite loudly.
Mike Dunford - snores very loudly.
Shelley Batts - behaves very badly when drunk.
RPM - drinks other peoples' beer.
More photos coming soon.
August 16, 2007
Greetings from New York City. I arrived at JFK at about noon, and got a proposal of marriage about 20 minutes later, from a lady who works at Howard Beach subway station, who said she loved my accent! (Even though I sound nothing like Hugh Grant!)
Anyway, after about 2 hours on the A train, I'm…
August 14, 2007
In today's New York Times, John Tierney discusses an argument by Nick Bostrom, director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford, that our existence could be nothing more than a computer simulation being run by posthumanists.
Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological…
August 13, 2007
After writing this recent post about Fyodor Dostoyevsky's epilepsy, I decided it was time I re-read one of the great author's novels, and chose The Idiot, because it contains Dostoyevsky's most vivid descriptions of the epileptic aura. (It is widely believed that Dostoyevsky based the protagonist,…
August 13, 2007
Head over to Memoirs of a Postgrad for the 29th edition of Encephalon.
The 30th edition will be hosted at Neurofuture on 27th August. If you'd like to contribute, please email permalinks to your neuroscience/ psychology blog posts to encephalon{dot}host{at}gmail{dot}com, or use this submission…
August 12, 2007
There's an interesting case study in The Lancet, about a woman who began hearing voices with speech impairments following a bicycle accident.
The 63-year-old woman was treated at the University Hospital of Psychiatry in Bern, Switzerland, after falling from her bicycle and hitting her head.…
August 12, 2007
At Open Access News, there's an interview with Pat Brown, cofounder of the Public Library of Science.
August 11, 2007
From The Times:
A ruling by the national drug watchdog to limit access to an Alzheimer's drug has been upheld by the High Court.
The drug company Eisai challenged the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) over its guidance that for most patients Eisai's drug Aricept…
August 11, 2007
Catherine Watt, of the Koestler Parapsychology Unit at the University of Edinburgh, claims that teaching students how to study paranormal phenomena is "great...for stimulating critical thinking."
August 9, 2007
(From the Gilbert Lab at the University of Texas)
This carpenter ant (genus Campanotus), and the bullet ant in the first film clip below (Paraponera clavata), have fallen victim to parasitic fungi of the genus Cordyceps, which manipulate the behaviour of their host in order to increase their own…
August 9, 2007
Slate Magazine has a report from the DARPATech conference, containing details of the contraptions under development by those mad Pentagon scientists, including the robotic surgeon trauma pod and this prosthetic arm:
At one display area, a pair of armless volunteers and a young veteran missing his…
August 9, 2007
I've just received a copy of Best of the Brain from Scientific American, courtesy of the publishers, Dana Press.
Best of the Brain is fantastic a collection of essays from SciAm and SciAm Mind, by leading neuroscientists, such as Antonio Damasio and Eric Kandel, and top science writers like Carl…
August 8, 2007
Alzheimer's is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterised by the formation of senile plaques consisting of amyloid-beta protein. The molecular genetic basis of Alzheimer's is very complex. Amyloid-beta is a toxic protein fragment produced by abnormal processing of amyloid precursor…
August 8, 2007
Vaughan discusses the recent revelations that psychologists play a key role in military "interrogations", and provides plenty of links about the subject, including this article from Vanity Fair about two psychologists who developed torture techniques for the CIA.
As I have mentioned, my father…
August 8, 2007
A new study by researchers at Stanford University shows that fast food branding affects the taste preferences of preschoolers.
3- to 5-year-old children from low-income families were given pairs of five identical foods and drinks and asked to indicate if which, if any, tasted better.
The children…
August 8, 2007
Can single neurons be replaced by artificial ones, perhaps nano-bots
of some kind?
No. Artificial neurons have not been developed.
Could a cluster of neurons be replaced by an artificial cluster?
No, but devices such as cochlear implants and the electrode arrays used for deep brain stimulation can…
August 7, 2007
From the BBC:
Microbes locked in Antarctic ice for as much as eight million years have been "resuscitated" in a laboratory.
Researchers melted five samples of ice from the debris-covered glaciers of Antarctica which range in age from 100,000 years to eight million years.
When…
August 7, 2007
Traumatic brain injury (TBI) is said to be one of the signature injuries of the conflict in Iraq, and accounts for a larger proportion of troop casualties than it has in previous wars fought by the United States. According to the Defense and Veterans Brain Injury Center, the U. S. military formally…
August 7, 2007
A few new additions to my feed reader:
Advances in the History of Psychology - whose "primary mission...[is] to notify readers of publications, conferences, and other events of interest to researchers and students of the history of psychology." By Jeremy Trevelyan Burman, Ph.D. student in the…
August 7, 2007
And it's my identity that's been stolen: there's somebody else masquerading as the neurophilosopher.
August 6, 2007
It is well known that traumatic memories, or those with other emotional significance, are more persistent than trivial or mundane ones. The death of a loved one, for example, is far more readily recalled than an uneventful car journey to work.
Evolutionarily, enhanced memory of a highly…
August 6, 2007
Some readers seem to be having problems posting comments.
I've alerted the ScienceBlogs technical support team, so this should be resolved soon.
August 6, 2007
Here are 5 short clips from a film called The Squid and its Giant Nerve Fiber, which was made at the Plymouth Marine Laboratory in the 1970s. One of the clips includes footage of Alan Hodgkin performing patch voltage clamp experiments on the squid axon.
Hodgkin, together with Andrew Huxley, used…