neurophilosophy | December 15, 2007The film clip below shows a pack of killer whales co-operating to catch a seal. First, they break up the ice floe on which their prey is standing, and push it out into open water. Then, they create large waves to knock the seal into the water.
This kind of behaviour has been observed in killer whales before, and is apparently passed on from one generation to the next.
Read more at Nature News.
neurophilosophy | December 15, 2007Remote viewing is a form of "psychoenergetic perception" (i.e. clairvoyance) developed as part of a long-term $20 million research program initiated by U.S. intelligence agencies in the early 1970s. Now known by the codename Stargate, the program was initiated largely in response to the belief that the Soviets were spending large amounts of money on psychic research.
Research into remote viewing began in 1972 at the Stanford Research Institute, "an independent non-profit research institute that conducts contract research and development for government agencies" (actually, a think tank that…
neurophilosophy | December 13, 2007
Merged series of phase contrast micrographs showing neurite outgrowth in rat dorsal root ganglion cells grown on an acetylcholine biopolymer. (Christiane Gumera)
Last year, Yadong Wang and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology reported that they had produced a dopamine biopolymer that promotes the growth of neurites in PC12 cells.
Now, the team have taken that work one step further, with the finding that another similar polymer has the same effect on nerve cells. When Wang and Ph.D. student Christiane Gumera cultured the cells on an acetylcholine polymer…
neurophilosophy | December 13, 2007The word "wOOt" - spelt with zeros instead of the letter 'o' - has just been voted as Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary's Word of the Year. Coined by internet users, and defined as an interjection "expressing joy", it's quite apt today, because my axon guidance essay was returned with a mark of 80%.
I posted the essay in 4 parts while I was away in Egypt. Here it is again:
Part 1: The growth cone.
Part 2: A novel axon guidance mechanism.
Part 3: The turning point.
Part 4: New directions.
wOOt!
neurophilosophy | December 11, 2007
Here's an article about a sophisticated type of advertising which uses hypersonic sound:
New Yorker Alison Wilson was walking down Prince Street in SoHo last week when she heard a woman's voice right in her ear asking, "Who's there? Who's there?" She looked around to find no one in her immediate surroundings. Then the voice said, "It's not your imagination."
Indeed it isn't. It's an ad for "Paranormal State," a ghost-themed series premiering on A&E this week. The billboard uses technology manufactured by Holosonic that transmits an "audio spotlight" from a rooftop speaker so that the…
neurophilosophy | December 11, 2007Sega is to develop toys controlled by thought, in collaboration with NeuroSky, a Silicon Valley-based start-up company that interfaces biological feedback (such as brain waves) to consumer electronics.
The toys will be based on NeuroSky's ThinkGear, a brain-computer interface (BCI) consisting of a headset which incorporates an EEG. The device is basically the same as the BCIs used to control Second Life avatars and Google Earth, but looks much slicker than either.
BCIs can actually be used for more worthwhile purposes. For example, invasive devices consisting of electrode arrays implanted…
neurophilosophy | December 10, 2007The New York Times has just published its seventh annual list of the year's best ideas, which includes:
Alzheimer's telephone screening: a "telephone quiz" consisting of 50 questions, designed to measure the "cognitive vital signs", such as short-term memory loss, which can identify Alzheimer's Disease long before any visible symptoms;
The God Effect: the finding, made by Ara Norenzayan, an associate professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, that thoughts of God make people act more altruistically; and,
Neurorealism: coined by bioethicist Eric Racine,…
neurophilosophy | December 10, 2007
Yesterday's Sunday Feature on BBC Radio 3 was program about the evolution of music, by Ivan Hewitt. It isn't available online yet, but should be uploaded onto the Sunday Feature page soon, and will remain there for a week.
The progam features linguist Steven Pinker of Harvard University, who argues that music is a kind of evolutionary by-product, and anthropologist and cognitive archaeologist Steven Mithen from the University of Reading in the UK, who believes it was fundamental to human evolution.
And on NPR, there's an interview with husband-and-wife primatologists Dorothy Cheney and…
neurophilosophy | December 9, 2007Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, discusses race and IQ, arguing that the differences in the IQ scores of blacks and whites are due largely to environmental factors.
Nisbett begins his article by mentioning James Watson, who recently retired from his post as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory following racist comments he made. Now it turns out that one of Watson's great grandparents was African.
Related:
On the peculiarities of the Negro brain
neurophilosophy | December 9, 2007
It actually rained very lightly while we were walking along this small beach in Alexandria about three weeks ago. Generally though, the weather in Egypt was warm and sunny - in stark contrast to the wet and windy weather we're having in London at the moment.
neurophilosophy | December 8, 2007About 2 years ago, researchers reported the discovery of the so-called "Halle Berry cell" in the human brain. This, and similar cells which respond selectively to other well-known celebrities, famous landmarks or categories of objects are located on the medial surface of the temporal lobe.
The same group of researchers now report that they can decode the activity of these cells to predict what people are seeing. The ability to decode this neural activity will prove to be very useful in the development of brain-computer interfaces for amputees and paralyzed patients.
The cells in question were…
neurophilosophy | December 8, 2007Jennifer writes to point out a documentary about neuroplasticity which is being aired on PBS this month. Follow the link for a 3-minute preview, which features Michael Merzenich.
neurophilosophy | December 4, 2007
An article in the NY Times discusses the work of Michael Marmor, a professor of ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine who has created a computer simulation of how eye diseases such as macular degeneration and cataracts have affected the painting styles of a number of impressionist artists.
Claude Monet, for example, was known to have suffered from slowly progressive cataracts. Although diagnosed in 1912, problems with his vision began about 7 years earlier, when Monet, who was then 65, began to complain of changes in his perception of colour:
...colors no longer had the same intensity…
neurophilosophy | December 3, 2007
Researchers from Kyoto University's Primate Research Institute report that a young chimp can out-perform university students on a working memory task. (Cognitive psychologists use the term working memory to refer to the temporary storage and manipulation of information.)
The researchers developed a memory test called the limited-hold memory task in order to compare the working memory of their chimps with that of humans. In the task, numbers are displayed on a screen for fractions of a second, before being covered by white squares. The subject is then required to touch the squares in correct…
neurophilosophy | December 3, 2007The 37th edition of Encephalon, hosted by Bora at A Blog Around the Clock, includes posts from students in PZ's neurobiology class, as well as the first piece of coursework for my M.Sc., an essay on axon guidance which I posted in four parts while I was away in Egypt.
neurophilosophy | December 1, 2007
Using sophisticated techniques to silence or activate specific neurons, researchers from Stanford University have established that a simple behaviour used by fruit fly larvae to evade attack from parasitic wasps is triggered by a type of sensory neuron that is similar to the neurons which respond to painful stimuli in mammals.
Although little is known about the somatosensory system of fruit flies, several lines of evidence have implicated sensory cells called multidendritic neurons as nociceptors (cells that are responsive to noxious chemical, mechanical or thermal stimuli).
First, with…
neurophilosophy | November 30, 2007
This brain map comes from The Book of Life: The Spiritual and Physical Constitution of Man (1912), by the obscure mystical philosopher Alesha Sivartha, who is sometimes referred to as a "grandfather of the new-age movement".
The map is of particular interest, as it approaches modern neurology but still retains a few elements of phrenology, and is therefore a transition between the two. (Click on the image for a larger version.)
It is based on the experiments of the pioneering Scottish neurologist David Ferrier, who functionally mapped the sensory and motor cortices by lesion studies and…
neurophilosophy | November 30, 2007
Emotional Systems is the inaugural exhibition at the Centre for Contemporary Culture Centre La Strozzina at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, Italy. It begins tomorrow and runs until 3rd February, 2008.
The...installation...[includes] an exhibition, a publication and a programme of lectures designed to investigate the topic of emotions, proposing a reinterpretation of the correlation between the contemporary artist, the work of art and the user, in the light of the latest discoveries in the neurological sciences about the human brain and its effects on the emotions.
The artists in the…
neurophilosophy | November 29, 2007
The image on the right is a supercomputer simulation of the microcircuitry found within a column from the neocortex of the rat brain.
The simulation is a tour de force of computational neuroscience: a single column is a highly complex structure, containing approximately 10,000 neurons and 30 million synapses, and the image is based on 15 years' worth of research into the morphology of many different cell types in the rat cortex, and the unique repertoire of receptors and ion channels expressed by each, as well as their connectivity and electrophysiological properties.
Nevertheless, this is…