neurophilosophy | February 22, 2008In an article called Patterns, published in the NY Times earlier this month, neurologist and author Oliver Sacks discusses the geometric visual hallucinations which occur during the migraine auras that he has experienced since early childhood.
Sacks explains that the hallucinations occur as a result of waves abnormal electrical activity sweeping across the visual cortex, and that they reflect the cytoarchitectonics of that part of the brain and the complex patterns of activity within it.
He goes on to speculate that, because this cellular activity is universal, it forms the basis of art and…
neurophilosophy | February 21, 2008In an article from last Saturday's Guardian, Rick Hemsley describes his experience of Alice in Wonderland Syndrome, the neurological condition in which the perception of one's body is distorted:
Floors either curved or dipped, and when I tried walking on them, it felt as though I was staggering on sponges. When I lay in bed and looked at my hands, my fingers stretched off half a mile into the distance.
...my symptoms just got worse. Everything was now distorted, all the time. Walking down the road, parked cars appeared the size of Corgi models, while I'd feel disproportionately tall. At…
neurophilosophy | February 19, 2008
I've just set up a Flickr photoblog, and am in the process of uploading my photographs. I have also installed a Flickr widget in the sidebar on the left; this displays 5 random photos. If you're into photography, please do take a look at my pics. I haven't uploaded many, but feel free to comment on the ones that are there (although you have to be a member of the site to do so). The easiest way to see related photos is to use the tag cloud, and if you want to be notified of newly-uploaded pics, you can subscribe to the RSS feed.
The photo above is, of course, of Khufu's pyramid in Giza. The…
neurophilosophy | February 19, 2008Here's some fascinating footage from 1942, showing Drs. James Watts and Walter Freeman performing a prefrontal leucotomy. The footage accompanies a short article called Lobotomy Revisited, and, like last week's trepanation film clip, is not for the squeamish.)
The procedure shown in the film is the Freeman-Watts Standard Procedure, which had been in use since 1936. This is different from the "ice-pick" lobotomy, which Freeman began to perform in 1945; it more closely resembles the original procedure of the Portugese neurosurgeon Egas Moniz.
neurophilosophy | February 19, 2008As I mentioned recently, Alvaro has taken over as organiser of Encephalon, and he's just posted the latest edition of the carnival, which has two dozen entries on a wide of variety of neuroscience topics. I especially like this one about the hidden neuroanatomical images in Renaissance paintings (or lack thereof).
The next edition of the carnival will be at Mind Hacks on 3rd March. If you'd like to contribute, send your links to encephalon{dot}host{at}gmail{dot}com.
neurophilosophy | February 16, 2008
The great filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock had a profound insight into the workings of the human mind. "There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it," he once said, and the shower scene from Psycho, demonstrates this perfectly.
This scene is one of the most shocking ever filmed. Yet, it does not include any shots of the knife penetrating the flesh of Janet Leigh's character, and the only hint of blood comes right at the end, when it flows into the plughole.
The Mad Mother Psychoshower Curtain above is available from PrankPlace.com, and costs $24.99.
neurophilosophy | February 13, 2008The 3-minute film clip below is definitely not for the squeamish. It comes from a documentary called A Hole in the Head, made in 1998, and shows a Kisi medicine man performing the "operation of the skulls".
neurophilosophy | February 13, 2008Alvaro has kindly agreed to take over as organizer of Encephalon, the neuroscience carnival which I started back in August 2006. He has set up a new homepage for the carnival, and will be hosting the next edition this coming Monday at SharpBrains. If you'd like to contribute, send permalinks to your neuroscience and/or psychology blog posts to encephalon{dot}host{at}gmail{dot}com.
neurophilosophy | February 12, 2008I'm very pleased to announce that Bioephemera has just moved to ScienceBlogs. This fantastic blog is a curiosity box of wonderful things, such as this nineteenth century wax anatomical model by Clemente Susini, of a man's head and neck, which shows the brain's superficial blood vessels and the branches of the trigeminal and hypoglossal nerves. Bioephemera is written by Jessica Palmer, who created four of the five beautiful banners which grace the top of this page.
There are also several other new SBlogs which I haven't gotten round to mentioning yet:
A Good Poop - very amusing papers from the…
neurophilosophy | February 10, 2008Every so often, I get an email from someone who is seeking advice on some medical issue. For example, I received this short message a few days ago:
I just came across your report on Risperdal, and was wondering what your take is on a 3 year old taking Seroquel? How about a dosage of 900 mg per day? My daughter has been on it for almost one year now. Please give me your honest feedback on this.
My honest opinion is that a 2- or 3-year-old child should not be prescribed any kind of antipsychotic. But that's just an opinion, and, I should stress, a non-professional one. I did not study…
neurophilosophy | February 6, 2008
(Photo from National Geographic)
A young victim of Kenya's post-election violence waits at a hospital in Nakuru to have an arrow removed from the back of his skull. The ethnic conflicts have claimed the lives of more than 1,000 people, and the country now faces a humanitarian crisis, with about 310,000 people from the eastern and central provinces fleeing their homes.
neurophilosophy | February 5, 2008The New York Times and Washington Post have stories on the appearance of a mysterious neurological illness in workers at a pig slaughterhouse in the southeastern Minnesota town of Austin.
The condition has been named progressive inflammatory neuropathy (PIN), and has so far been reported in 6 men and 6 women, all of whom complained of burning sensations, weakness and numbness in the limbs. The symptoms developed over periods of between 8 to 213 days, and in some cases progressed to paralysis of the legs. They are likely to be caused by demylination and inflammation of the peripheral nerves…
neurophilosophy | February 4, 2008
Technology blogger Robert Scoble attended the World Economic Forum at Davos, and made quite a few video recordings of the conversations he had with various people while he was there, which he has uploaded to Qik.
In this film, Scoble talks to the Brazilian neuroscientist Miguel Nicolelis, who discussed his recent experiments in which a monkey with a brain-computer interface implanted into its motor cortex controlled the movements of a robot that was located more than 7,000 miles away.
Nicolelis presented his results during a session called Redefining the limits of the human body,…
neurophilosophy | February 4, 2008
[Introduction|Part 2]
It is well established that synaptic strengthening involves the recruitment of AMPARs to the postsynaptic membrane. However, the subunit composition of the receptors has not been investigated closely, so the studies discussed here allow for refinement of this basic model, as they all show that synaptic strengthening involves the incorporation of Ca2+-permeable GluR2-lacking AMPARs to the postsynaptic membrane of active or recently-potentiated synapses.
The studies further demonstrate that synaptic plasticity involves switching of AMPAR subtypes. Bellone and Luscher…
neurophilosophy | February 2, 2008John Pezaris emailed me yesterday to say:
Last spring, you were kind enough to write an article for your Neurophilosophy blog covering my research into restoring sight to the blind, following the publication of our scientific paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. Your article was one of the best ones written: I was really impressed at how accurately you summarized our work.
I'd like to bring to your attention that the project has been named one of the 10 finalists for the Saatchi and Saatchi Award for World Changing Ideas.
Congratulations to John Pezaris and…
neurophilosophy | February 1, 2008Following on from the introduction, I now discuss a number of recent studies which demonstrate that synaptic strengthening in different regions of the mammalian brain requires the incorporation of Ca2+-permeable GluR2-lacking AMPA receptors into the postsynaptic membrane of active or newly-potentiated synapses.
Neurotransmitter release regulates GluR1 levels at the postsynaptic membrane
Harms et al (2005) inhibited neurotransmitter release from specific subsets of cultured hippocampal neurons by transfecting individual cells with the tetanus toxin light chain tagged with cyan fluorescent…
neurophilosophy | January 30, 2008
Canadian surgeons have made a serendipitous discovery. While using deep brain stimulation to try suppressing the appetite of a morbidly obese patient, they inadvertently evoked in the patient vivid autobiographical memories of an event that had taken place more than 30 years previously. They also found that the electrical stimulation improved the patient's performance on associative memory tasks.
These unexpected findings raise the possibility that deep brain stimulation could be used to treat patients with Alzheimer's Disease, and the research team is now beginning a small clinical…
neurophilosophy | January 28, 2008In my second coursework essay, I discuss a number of recent studies which demonstrate that synaptic strengthening in different regions of the mammalian brain requires the incorporation of Ca2+-permeable GluR1-lacking AMPA receptors into the postsynaptic membrane of active or newly-potentiated synapses.
Alpha-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazole propionic acid receptors (AMPARs) are glutamate-gated cation channels which mediate fast excitatory neurotransmission in the brain. AMPARs are homo- or heteromeric protein complexes, consisting of different combinations of GluR1-4 subunits. Each…
neurophilosophy | January 27, 2008
Last Tuesday's episode of Horizon, called Total Isolation, is available for viewing and download at the BBC iPlayer website for the next 2 days. In the 50-minute documentary, Professor Ian Robbins, a trauma psychologist at the University of Surrey who specializes in supporting torture victims, reconstructs a highly controversial study first performed in the 1950s.
The new study involved six subjects who volunteered to experience 48 hours of complete sensory deprivation. The volunteers first performed a battery of tests designed to assess various cognitive functions, such as visual memory…
neurophilosophy | January 24, 2008Today's issue of Nature contains a short review of Open Lab 2007, and the article includes a brief mention of my contribution to the book:
The editor of this second anthology of the best scientific communiqu's from the blogosphere thinks blogs offer new ways to discuss science. The Open Laboratory 2007: the Best Science Writing on Blogs (Lulu.com, 2008) takes the curious approach of using dead tree format to highlight the diversity of scientific ideas, opinions and voices flowing across the Internet. Every year a different guest editor - here Reed Cartwright, a blogger and genetics and…