neurophilosophy | January 24, 2008
The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo (1907-1954) had a life filled with pain. At the age of 6, she contracted polio, and this caused a paralysis of the right leg from which Kahlo took one year to recover. Then, in 1925, Kahlo was involved in a horrific traffic accident: the school bus she was travelling on collided with a streetcar, and a steel handrail penetrated Kahlo's lower torso, leaving her with a fractured pelvis and collarbone, two broken ribs, a broken leg and a crushed foot. Her spinal column was also broken in three places.
Following the accident, the medics who arrived on the scene…
neurophilosophy | January 24, 2008The operation of Trepan, from Illustrations of the Great Operations of Surgery: Trepan, Hernia, Amputation, Aneurism and Lithotomy, by Charles Bell, 1815. (John Martin Rare Book Room at the University of Iowa's Hardin Library for the Health Sciences.)
Trepanation, or trephination (both derived from the Greek word trypanon, meaning "to bore") is perhaps the oldest form of neurosurgery. The procedure, which is called a craniotomy in medical terminology, involves the removal of a piece of bone from the skull, and it has been performed since prehistoric times. The oldest trepanned skull, found at…
neurophilosophy | January 22, 2008
Among the one third of Americans who believe in ghosts are high-ranking officials in the intelligence agencies and military.
In the 1970s and 80s, the CIA funded research into "remote viewing", so that they could train clairvoyants to locate, among other things, Colonel Gaddafi and the U.S. marines kidnapped by Hizbollah.
More recently, it was reported that the military employed remote viewers to find Saddam Hussein, and that the Department of Homeland Security is hoping to adopt Russian "mind-reading" technology to identify terrorists.
So when personnel at the Wright-Patterson Air Force…
neurophilosophy | January 20, 2008
The Canadian Globe and Mail reports on the remarkable case of Stacey Gayle, a 25-year-old woman from Edmonton who has just had neurosurgery to treat intractable epilepsy.
Gayle (right) was suffering from musicogenic epilepsy, a rare form of the condition in which seizures are triggered by music. In some patients with this type of epilepsy, listening to any type of music provokes a seizure. In others, seizures are only triggered by certain types of music.
The stimuli which induce seizures in musicogenic epileptics can be even more specific. In one case, the attacks occurred only when he…
neurophilosophy | January 19, 2008
This diagram of the retina, drawn by Santiago Ramon y Cajal in 1892, comes from Web Vision, a comprehensive overview of the organization of the mammalian retina and visual system compiled by Drs. Helga Kolb, Eduardo Fernandez and Ralph Nelson of the John Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah.
The site is arranged like a book and contains 14 parts. It covers the anatomy, physiology, development and regeneration of retinal circuitry; the primary visual cortex, colour vision and visual psychophysics; and the clinical electrophysiology of various retinal degenerative diseases. It also…
neurophilosophy | January 17, 2008
This film clip describes how neuroscientists have controlled the movements of a humanoid robot using a brain-computer interface (BCI) embedded in the motor cortex of a monkey.
I've written about BCIs before, so I won't go into details here. For more information about how they work, follow the links at the bottom, and for more about this particular device, there's an article in the NY Times by Sandra Blakeslee.
The main difference here is that the monkey and the robot were more than 7,000 miles apart: the monkey was in Miguel Nicolelis's lab at Duke University Medical Center in North…
neurophilosophy | January 15, 2008
A forthcoming PBS documentary called The Lobotomist examines the career of psychiatrist Walter J. Freeman, who performed nearly 3,000 "ice pick" lobotomies during the late 1930s and 1940s.
The hour-long program, which is partly based on Jack El-Hai's book of the same name, contains old footage of Freeman performing the procedure, and features an interview with Howard Dully, who was lobotomized at the age of 12 (and whose memoir was published last year).
Freeman fiercely advocated - and popularized - the lobotomy. He travelled across the U.S. in his "lobotomobile", teaching others how to…
neurophilosophy | January 14, 2008
I returned to UCL today, after spending the first week of the new term writing my second piece of coursework for the M.Sc., a 2,000-word essay about AMPA receptor recomposition in synaptic plasticity, which I'll post on here soon.
The third block began today with a lecture on nociception (pain), and a brain dissection. It wasn't a dissection as such, because human brains are, for some reason, in short supply, so me and the other students spent nearly 2 hours gathered around two preserved specimens - a whole brain and a sagittal section.
This was disappointing, as I was hoping that we might…
neurophilosophy | January 12, 2008Over the past few days, the number of subscribers to my RSS feed has increased to over 1,000, even though the blog hasn't been updated since January 3rd.
I can, therefore, only attribute this to the news that one of my posts is to be featured in the forthcoming OpenLab 2007. Whatever the reason, welcome to any new subscribers who might be reading this. Blogging will resume as per usual soon.
neurophilosophy | January 2, 2008
At A Blog Around the Clock, Bora has announced the posts that will be published in Open Lab 2007, the forthcoming second annual anthology of the best science blogging of last year.
Of the 486 submitted entries, just 50 have made it into the book, and I'm pleased to say that one of them is written by me. It's one of the last posts from my old blog, and I'm currently re-reading it to weed out any errors before it is formatted for the book.
I won't link to the post just yet, as I'm currently extending it slightly for the book, because I think the original ends a bit abruptly. I'll post the…
neurophilosophy | December 30, 2007
A Product of Evolution is an online store which "provide[s] intelligent designs for free thinking truth seekers." The products, which include mens and women's T-shirts, sweatshirts, hoodies, and mugs, are "inspired by...the natural beauty of evolution, science, truth and free inquiry."
On the right is one of the garments sold at the store. The cotton T-shirt reads "God Free: all natural 100% nonreligious". It is available in white, ash grey and light blue and costs $20.99.
[Via Travis Morgan]
neurophilosophy | December 30, 2007I've just found this Encyclopaedia of Computational Neuroscience on Scholarpedia. Each entry is written by an expert in the field, and is very comprehensive.
The project seems to have been started only recently, as many of the entries I've looked at are still empty. Although still incomplete, this is already a fantastic resource that's well worth looking at.
Here are just a few of the finished entries: grid cells by Edvard Moser, mirror neurons by Giacomo Rizzolatti, synaesthesia by V.S. Ramachandran, and the neural correlates of consciousness by Cristof Koch.
Others who have accepted the…
neurophilosophy | December 29, 2007
The mosque of Muhammed Ali, with its slender and elegant twin minarets, is one of Cairo's most prominent landmarks. It is visible in the two photographs of Cairo that I've already posted.
Muhammed Ali was appointed as the Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt in 1805, by the Sublime Porte. He commissioned this mosque, which was built between 1830 and 1848, and is situated on a 12th century citadel built by Salah-el-din al Ayyubi, the Kurdish military leader who ruled over Egypt and who defeated Richard the Lionheart in the second Crusade.
In the early years of his rule, Muhammed Ali's power was…
neurophilosophy | December 29, 2007The editors of the journal Neuron are now publishing readers' comments on the journal's website. Comments can be made online for any paper published in the journal, including all of those in the online back archive.
Neuron is owned by Elsevier, and the decision to publish online readers' comments is an interesting one. This is because although Elsevier is one of several publishing giants who have been vehemently opposed to the open access movement, it is now following in the footsteps of the open access Public Library of Science journals, which began publishing readers' comments earlier this…
neurophilosophy | December 28, 2007
Professor Colin Blakemore (right), a neuroscientist at the University of Oxford who was formerly chief executive of the Medical Research Council (MRC), has been denied a knighthood "because of his outspoken support for animal research."
This is not the first time Blakemore has been overlooked in the annual honours list, and the fact that the honours system is corrupt and outdated will probably be little consolation to him.
Unlike those who have bought the title "Sir", Blakemore deserves a peerage, as he is one of the few scientists who have publicly supported animal research, even though…
neurophilosophy | December 28, 2007In this wonderful passage from King Solomon's Ring, Konrad Lorenz, who, together with Nikolaas Tinbergen and Karl von Frisch founded the science of ethology, describes some of the behaviours of his pet capuchin monkey Gloria:
She occupied a large, roomy cage in my study. When I was at home and able to look after her, she was allowed to run freely about the room. When I went out, I shut her in the cage, where she became exceedingly bored and exerted all her talents to escape as quickly as possible. One evening, when I returned home after a longer absence and turned the knob of the light switch…
neurophilosophy | December 18, 2007
God's Eye View, which depicts four biblical events as if captured by Google Earth, is the work of The Glue Society, a collective of writers, designers and art/ film directors based in Sydney, Australia.
Says Glue Society member James Dive:
We like to disorientate audiences a little with all our work. And with this piece we felt technology now allows events which may or may not have happened to be visualized and made to appear dramatically real. As a method of representation satellite photography is so trusted; it has been interesting to mess with that trust.
Dive reiterates something I…
neurophilosophy | December 18, 2007Ed Yong has posted the 38th edition of Encephalon at Not Exactly Rocket Science. The carnival will return in a month, and the next host will be announced in due course.
neurophilosophy | December 17, 2007
Photograph courtesy of the Exploratorium
Jonah Lehrer* points out an exhibition of Paul Ekman's photographs at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
Ekman is a psychologist at UCSF who has spent time in Papua New Guinea studying the facial expressions of the people there, to try and determine whether or not such expressions are universal, as Darwin suggested in The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals.
The exhibition in San Francisco consists mainly of Ekman's photos of the South Fore peoples, a subgroup of about 8,000 individuals who live in the highlands to the east of…