neurophilosophy | August 21, 2008William James on consciousness and memory:
The stream of thought flows on; but most of its segments fall into the bottomless abyss of oblivion. Of some, no memory survives the instant of their passage. Of others, it is confined to a few moments, hours or days. Others, again, leave vestiges which are indestructible, and by means of which they may be recalled as long as life endures.
neurophilosophy | August 19, 2008The notorious Australian bushranger Edward "Ned" Kelly was apprehended in 1878, following a confrontation during which he and his gang killed three policemen. Upon his arrest, Kelly was thus described by the police:
5'10" tall, weight 11st 4lbs, medium build, sallow complexion, dark brown hair, hazel eyes, scar on top of head, two scars on crown, scar on front of head.
Eyebrows meeting, two natural marks between shoulder blades.
Two freckles lower left arm, scar on ball of left thumb, scar on back of right hand and three scars on left thumb.
Kelly was convicted of robbery and murder and…
neurophilosophy | August 19, 2008Self-recognition was long believed to be unique to humans. However, it was established more than 30 years ago that the great apes are capable of recognizing themselves in the mirror, and more recently it has been found that dolphins and elephants can too.
Now Prior et al provide the first evidence of mirror self-recognition in a non-mammalian species. In this film clip from the supplementary materials which accompany the paper, a magpie (which is actually a female) realizes that it has a mark on the side of its head after seeing its relection in the mirror. It then removes the mark by…
neurophilosophy | August 19, 2008Encephalon 52 is online now at Ouroboros, and includes entries about grandmother cells, the neurobiology of sleep and the use of transcranial direct current stimulation to improve bad driving.
neurophilosophy | August 17, 2008Last week, I wote about the robot controlled by a "brain" in a culture dish, and in that post, I mentioned that several other groups, including members of the Neuroengineering Lab at Georgia Tech, have been doing similar work.
Steve Potter, who leads one of the groups at Georgia Tech's NeuroLab (and whose work I wrote about back in 2006), has now left a comment on the post, saying that the claims made by the University of Reading researchers are exaggerated:
I am disappointed to see Kevin Warwick again overstating things, but am especially bothered when it is about things we are also doing in…
neurophilosophy | August 16, 2008Earlier this year, Sam Wang kindly sent me a copy of Welcome to Your Brain, the recently published book he has written with Sandra Aamodt. In a note slipped inside the book, he tells me that "We've done our best to make it both accessible and informative," and I think that he and Aamodt have succeeded in that aim.
Welcome to your Brain is indeed accessible and full of interesting facts about the brain. Wang is an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Stanford and Aamodt is editor in chief of the journal Nature Neuroscience. In their book, they draw on recent research…
neurophilosophy | August 15, 2008This blog is included in a list of Top 100 Mental Health and Psychology Blogs, compiled by a site called Online University Reviews.
The list is divided into a number of categories - general, cognitive and forensic psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, addiction, anxiety, autism, bipolar disorder and depression. Many of the sites listed are already on my blogroll, but a few of them are new to me.
neurophilosophy | August 15, 2008You may have read elsewhere that publishing giant Reed Elsevier has been caught copying Mike Dunford's content without permission (and copyrighting it as their own!), which is extremely hypocritical from a company that opposes the open access movement and makes huge profits from restricting access to scientific data.
I''m not going to discuss the matter any further - others have already said plenty about it - but I thought that now would be an appropriate time to post this opinion piece I wrote back in March 2002. It was originally published in Al-Ahram Weekly, the English-language edition of…
neurophilosophy | August 14, 2008Here's a nice follow-up to my article about prion diseases. It's an excerpt from Deadly Feasts: The "Prion" Controversy and the Public's Health, by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Richard Rhodes. The book documents the work of Daniel Carleton Gajdusek, the American physician who provided the first description of kuru. Gajdusek travelled to Papua New Guinea in the late 1950s and lived among the Fore peoples. He studied their culture and performed autopsies on kuru victims. William Arens, an anthropologist at Stony Brook University, notes that Gajdusek didn't actually witness the Fore's ritual…
neurophilosophy | August 13, 2008Researchers from the Cybernetic Intelligence Research Group at the University of Reading have developed a robot whose movements are controlled by neurons growing in a culture dish.
The robot's "brain" consists of several hundred thousand neurons isolated from embryonic rat neocortex. The cortical tissue was first dissected out, then treated with enzymes which caused the cells to dissociate from one another. The resulting cell suspension was then added to a culture dish containing nutrients.
Rather than plating the cells onto a standard culture dish, the researchers instead grew them on one…
neurophilosophy | August 12, 2008Participation in most sports requires agility, impeccable timing and the planning and execution of complex movements, so that actions such as catching a ball or throwing it into a hoop can be performed. Performing well at sports also requires anticipating and accurately predicting the movements of others.
Athletes and sportspersons undergo years of specialized training to hone these abilities, and nobody would sensibly argue that they are not more proficient at them than others. Indeed, numerous behavioural studies show that those who take part in sports have better sensory and motor skills…
neurophilosophy | August 11, 2008
National Library of Medicine / Hot Medical News
This silent film clip shows several victims of a disease called kuru. They are - or rather were - members of the South Fore, a tribe of approximately 8,000 people who inhabit the Okapa subdistrict of the Eastern Highlands Province of Papua New Guinea. In the 1950s and '60s, a kuru epidemic swept through the South Fore, claiming the lives of more than 1,000 members of the tribe. Later it was established that the disease was transmitted by the tribe's practice of ritualistic mortuary cannibalism.
The word kuru means "shaking death" in the Fore…
neurophilosophy | August 8, 2008The classic Nobel Prize-winning studies of David Hubel and Torsten Weisel showed how the proper maturation of the developing visual cortex is critically dependent upon visual information received from the eyes. In what would today be considered highly unethical experiments, Hubel and Weisel sewed shut one eye of newborn kittens. They found that this monocular deprivation had dramatic effects on the visual part of the brain: the columns of cortical tissue that normally receive inputs from the closed eye failed to develop, while those that receive inputs from the other eye were significantly…
neurophilosophy | August 7, 2008
In The Conjurer, by Hieronymus Bosch (above), a medieval European magician performs in front of a small crowd. As the spectators marvel at the conjurer's tricks, their attention is diverted away from the pickpockets who steal their belongings. The painting illustrates well that magicians throughout the ages have had an understanding of attention and awareness, and that their art is in large part based on their ability to subtlely manipulate these processes in their audience.
Recently, there has been a great deal of interest in what magic can teach us about the brain. A year ago, scientists…
neurophilosophy | August 7, 2008The use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs, or roadside bombs) has led to an increase in the numbers of troops sustaining traumatic brain injury during military service in Afghanistan and Iraq. Such injuries are caused by the high pressure shock waves generated by the explosions, which cause rapid head movements, such that the brain is sheared and torn as it comes into contact with the inside of the skull.
Whereas conventional traumatic brain injuries caused by penetrative head wounds are easily diagnosed, those who sustain this kind of closed head injury often exhibit no external wounds…
neurophilosophy | August 6, 2008The Science Blogging Conference will be held at the Royal Institution, 21 Albemarle Street, London W1S 4BS, on August 30th, 2008.
According to the organizers, the event has now reached its attendance capacity, but if you'd like to be placed on the waiting list, send an email to network[at]nature.com, with the subject line 'Science blogging conference', stating your job title, affiliation and a link to your blog if you have one.
Here's the conference programme, and below is a list of registered attendees, along with links to their Nature Network profiles and blogs/websites.
Registered…
neurophilosophy | August 5, 2008A few neuroscience blogs I've come across recently, most of them new:
V1
Dr. Shock
Frontal Blogotomy
Neuronism
NeuroTechnica
NeuroWhoa!
Persistent Activity
neurophilosophy | August 5, 2008SYNAESTHESIA is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory pathway evokes sensations in another sensory modality. This may occur because of abnormal connections between the brain's sensory systems, or because the flow of information between those systems is not inhibited as usual.
First described in the 1880s by Francis Galton, synaesthesia is known to exist in several different forms. Galton described "persons who almost invariably think of numerals in visual imagery". This form, now known as grapheme-colour synaesthesia, was experienced by the physicist Richard Feynman,…
neurophilosophy | August 5, 2008The 51st edition of Encephalon is online now at The Mouse Trap. This time, host Sandeep has interspersed the entries with haikus about the mind and brain.
neurophilosophy | August 3, 2008Last month, I travelled to Bristol to meet 37-year-old Heather Perry, one of a very small number of people to have voluntarily undergone trepanation for non-medical reasons. As we ate a pub lunch, I asked Heather about her experience. Below is a transcript of our conversation.
M: How did you first hear about trepanation, and why did you decide to have it done?
HP: The first time I heard about trepanation was when I was a kiddie. I was really into Bob Dylan and John Lennon, and I remembered that Lennon had mentioned that he wanted it done. He had spoken to Bart Huges about it, and Bart had…