neurophilosophy
Posts by this author
January 7, 2009
Healthy aging is characterized by a gradual decline in cognitive function. Mental processes such as attention, memory and the ability to process information are at their peak when people are in their 30s and 40s, but as we get older, we find it increasingly difficult to focus on relevant…
December 30, 2008
Being so closely related to our own species, monkeys serve as important model organisms, and have provided many insights into the workings of the human brain. Research performed on monkeys in the past 30 years or so has, for example, been invaluable in the development of brain-machine interfaces.…
December 24, 2008
Merry Christmas to all my readers. (Or rather Happy Holidays, as many of you, being in America, might say.)
This card is one of a set by Ernst Haeckel which, when expanded, became Kunstformen der Natur (Artforms in Nature), the masterpiece of biological illustration.
December 24, 2008
Your face is a major component of your self-identity, but when you look into a mirror, how do you know that the person you are seeing is really you? Is it because the person in the reflection looks just like you? Or because the reflection moves when you move? Or perhaps because you see the face in…
December 23, 2008
Synchiria is a neurological condition in which a stimulus applied to one side of the body is referred to both sides. If, for example, one's left hand is touched, he experiences tactile sensations on both hands. People with intact brains do not experience this, probably because of inhibitory…
December 23, 2008
My second article for the Scientific American Mind Matters website is online now. This one is about the recent study which demonstrated that distorting the body image alters pain perception - specifically, it was found that using inverted binoculars to make the hand look smaller than it actually…
December 22, 2008
Spatial navigation is the process on which we rely to orient ourselves within the environment and to negotiate our way through it. Our ability to do so depends upon cognitive maps, mental representations of the surrounding spaces, which are constructed by the brain and are used by it to calculate…
December 16, 2008
One of the bigger challenges facing researchers who are developing artificial limbs is to create prostheses that not only act but also feel like real limbs. This is especially true for the hand, which is one of the most sensitive parts of the human body, and although advanced prosthetic hands with…
December 14, 2008
These beautiful watercolour drawings of diseased brain sections come from a book called Reports on Medical Cases, Selected with a View to Illustrate the Symptoms and Cure of Diseases by a Reference to Morbid Anatomy, by Richard Bright.
Bright's book was published in 1827, but these illustrations…
December 14, 2008
Professor Martha J. Farah emailed me recently to ask if I'd help spread the word about Neuroscience Boot Camp, which will take place at the University of Pennsylvania in August of next year:
What happens at Neuroscience Boot Camp?
Through a combination of lectures, break-out groups, panel…
December 12, 2008
Recent advances in functional neuroimaging have enabled researchers to predict perceptual experiences with a high degree of accuracy. For example, it is possible to determine whether a subject is looking at a face or some other category of visual stimulus, such as a house. This is possible because…
December 12, 2008
Archaeologists have unearthed a 2,000-year-old skull containing what they believe to be the remains of a fossilized brain, while excavating a site at the University of York.
Rachel Cubitt, one of the researchers on the dig, felt something moving inside the skull and noticed "an unusual yellow…
December 9, 2008
The top medical breakthrough of the year, according to TIME Magazine, is the creation of motor neurons from ALS patients. (Here are all 50 of the magazine's Top 10 lists for 2008.)
This work was carried out by researchers at Harvard and Columbia universities, and published in the journal Science…
December 9, 2008
In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin noted that facial expressions vary little across cultures. We all recognize that someone whose eyes and mouth are wide open, and whose eyebrows are raised, is afraid. This characteristic expression is a social signal, which warns…
December 5, 2008
The amnesic patient known as H.M., who is the best known case study in neuropsychology, has died, at the age of 82.
H.M., whose full name has now been revealed as Henry Gustav Molaison, lost completely the ability to form new memories following a radical surgical procedure to treat his severe and…
December 2, 2008
Body ownership - the sense that one's body belongs to one's self - is central to self-awareness, and yet is something that most of us take completely for granted. We experience our bodies as being an integral part of ourselves, without ever questioning how we know that our hands belong to us, or…
December 1, 2008
Synaesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimuli of one sensory modality evoke experiences in another modality. This is thought to occur as a result of insufficient "pruning" during development, so that most of the pathways connecting parts of the brain mediating the different senses…
November 26, 2008
The term body image was coined by the great neurologist Henry Head and refers to a mental representation of one's physical appearance. Constructed by the brain from past experience and present sensations, the body image is a fundamental aspect of both self-awareness and self-identity, and can be…
November 25, 2008
For most of us, visual perception is crucial for spatial navigation. We rely on vision to find our way around, to position ourselves and localize objects within the surroundings, and to plan our trajectory on the basis of the layout of the environment. Blind people would therefore seem to be at a…
November 24, 2008
Prosopagnosia is a neurological condition characterised by an inability to recognize faces. In the most extreme cases, the prosopagnosic patient cannot even recognize their own face in the mirror or a photograph, and in his 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, the neurologist Oliver…
November 19, 2008
Fox 10 News has a rather gruesome story about the removal of a live parasitic worm from a woman's brain, which is accompanied by a film clip containing footage of the surgical procedure.
As the film explains, the woman, who lives in Arizona, first started to experience flu-like symptoms,…
November 19, 2008
This beautiful image of the brain of a 5-day-old zebrafish larva, which was created by Albert Pan of Harvard University, has just won 4th place in the 2008 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging competition. (See a larger version here.)
It was created using the Brainbow technique, a genetic method for…
November 19, 2008
Last Thursday's episode of the Radio 4 programme In Our Time featured a very interesting discussion about recent developments in neuroscience research. Presenter Melvynn Bragg was joined by psychologist Martin Conway of Leeds University, cognitive neuroscientist Gemma Calvert of the University of…
November 18, 2008
Optogenetics is a recently developed technique based on microbial proteins called channelrhodopsins (ChRs), which render neurons sensitive to light when inserted into them, thus enabling researchers to manipulate the activity of the cells using laser pulses.
Although still very new - the first…
November 14, 2008
The current issue of Nature contains an interesting article about Sir Christopher Wren's contribution to neuroanatomy, by art historians Martin Kemp and Nathan Flis of Oxford University.
The article focuses on the anatomical illustrations produced by Wren for Thomas Willis's 1664 book Cerebri…
November 12, 2008
It is now well established that the adult mammalian brain - including that of humans - contains at least two discrete populations of neural stem cells which continue to generate new nerve cells throughout life. These newborn neurons are quickly integrated into existing circuits and are essential…
November 11, 2008
Every autumn, millions of songbirds embark upon long distance southerly migrations to warmer climes. Some species migrate during the day, but the majority - including sparrows, thrushes and warblers - do so at night, leaving their daytime habitats just after dusk and spending the next 8-10 hours on…
November 11, 2008
My first contribution to the Scientific American Mind Matters website is now online. The article, called "The Power of the Memory Molecule", is about the recent study which showed that memories can be selectively erased from the brains of mice by altering levels of the enzyme αCaMKII.
November 10, 2008
A team of Japanese researchers has demonstrated that embryonic stem cells obtained from mice and humans can spontaneously organize themselves into cortical tissues when grown in a culture dish under special conditions.
Reporting in the journal Cell Stem Cell, the researchers show that the…
November 4, 2008
The Men's Final of the 1981 Wimbledon Tennis Championships is one of the most memorable events in sporting history. John McEnroe, who was playing against Bjorn Borg, famously challenged one of the referee's calls by throwing a tantrum, during which he shouted the immortal line "You cannot be…