neurophilosophy | November 8, 2007Today's New York Times contains a very good opinion piece about the benefits of physical exercise for maintaing and improving brain health, by Sandra Aamodt, editor-in-chief of Nature Neuroscience, and Sam Wong, an associate professor of molecular biology and neuroscience at Princeton.
There is good evidence that exercise can slow age-related cognitive decline. Specifically, it is known to improve the executive brain functions which control other cognitive processes, and which begin to decline in one's 70s. Executive function is better in elderly people who have remained athletic throughout…
neurophilosophy | November 7, 2007
Researchers from the National Institute on Aging in Baltimore have produced an "atlas" of the activity of nearly 17,000 genes in 5 different regions of the mouse central nervous system.
Using microarrays, the NIA team measured the levels of mRNA transcripts in the cortex, hippocampus, striatum, cerebellum and spinal cord. Samples were taken from young, middle-aged and old-aged mice of both sexes, and maintained on either a normal or a calorie restricted diet.
In this way, the transcriptome of each region, or the whole repertoire of mRNAs found in each region, was obtained. The…
neurophilosophy | November 7, 2007
The introductory chapter of Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, by Frederick K. Goodwin and Kay Redfield Jamison, provides an excellent description of how Emil Kraepelin first classified manic depression (or bipolar disorder) and related conditions in the late 19th century, and how his work has influenced the way in which psychiatrists treat these illnesses today.
Kraepelin (1856-1926, right), who is considered to be the founder of modern psychiatry, was the first to distinguish between manic depression and schizophrenia, which were at the time both…
neurophilosophy | November 5, 2007
Washington Treasury Secret Service Bureau chief M. R. Allen acts as a subject in a demonstration of the polygraph test, at the U.S. Secret Service Men's Convention in 1941. (Image: Bettmann/ Corbis)
This week, the NPR Morning edition featured a three-part series on lie detection, which included a story about Daniel Langleben, a neuropsychiatrist at the University of Pennsylvannia who uses functional magnetic resonance to try and determine how brain activity differs when one is lying or telling the truth.
I attended a presentation by Langleben at the Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging…
neurophilosophy | November 5, 2007
Vaughan is recruiting participants for a study of the neuropsychology of hypnosis which he is involved in.
In the first stage of the research, participants will be asked to answer a series of short questionnaires and complete a short test, to determine the extent of their suggestibility (their willingness to believe and act upon the suggestions of others), which is closely related to one's 'hynotisablity'.
The study will be carried out at the Institute of Psychiatry in South London, and the first stage will take place on three consecutive Saturdays, beginning next weekend, on the 10th…
neurophilosophy | November 5, 2007I've just found this rather annoying - and (I think) completely useless - blog called brain-master, whose content consists largely of the partial feed for this blog.
neurophilosophy | November 5, 2007Primate Diarist Eric has just posted the 35th edition of Encephalon, the neuroscience and psychology blog carnival.
My favourite posts this time round are the Neurocritic's examination of the purported discovery of the "neural basis for optimism", and Jake's description of two-photon fluorescence microscopy for in vivo imaging of neuronal activity. (There's no link to this latter post - Eric has linked twice to Jake's other submission, but this should be fixed soon.)
The next edition of Encephalon will be hosted by Noam at Brain in a Vat on November 19th. If you'd like to contribute, email…
neurophilosophy | November 4, 2007
The Brainloop brain-computer interface, demonstrated at the VisionSpace laboratory for perception and cognition at FH Joanneum, University of Applied Sciences in Austria. (Photo by Miha Fras, courtesy of Aksioma/ Institute for Contemporary Art, Ljubljana)
What will they think of next? First, there was the brain-computer interface for controlling Second Life avatars, and yesterday I mentioned a gig in which the music is controlled by the audience's brainwaves. Now, researchers from Austria and Slovenia have developed a device called Brainloop, which can be used to navigate in Google Earth:…
neurophilosophy | November 4, 2007
Zahi Hawass (centre), director of the Supreme Council of Egyptian Antiquities, supervises the removal of Tutankhamun's mummy from his sarcophagus in the underground tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Luxor. (Image: Ben Curtis/ AP)
The face of Tutankhamun has been revealed to the public for the first time.
The boy king, who is believed to have been 19 years old when he died, is the best known of all the pharaohs. But he was in fact rather unremarkable. Far more interesting was his father Akhenaten, the inventor of monotheism.
neurophilosophy | November 4, 2007This morning, I noticed that the number of subscribers displayed in my feed count (the orange rectangle on the left) had dropped drastically, from more than 800 to 415, and started wondering why my readers are unsubscribing en masse from my RSS feed. But it turns out that there has been a glitch in the subscriber stats from Google Feedfetcher stats: they were offline all day yesterday, and the service should return to normal tomorrow.
neurophilosophy | November 3, 2007James Fung, a musician and computer engineer at the University of Toronto, has developed a program that can convert EEG recordings into music.
Fung is involved in the Regenerative Brain Wave Music Project, which "explores new physiological interfaces for musical instruments."
As part of the project, he staged a concert in which the music and lighting were controlled by the audience's brainwaves.
There's more information, and some footage of the concert, in the film clip below.
[Via Mind Update]
neurophilosophy | November 2, 2007
On November 4th, 1906, during a lecture at the 37th Conference of South-West German Psychiatrists in Tubingen, the German neuropathologist and psychiatrist Alois Alzheimer (1864-1915, right) described "eine eigenartige Erkrankung der Hirnrinde" (a peculiar disease of the cerebral cortex). In the lecture, he dicussed "the case of a patient who was kept under close observation during institutionalisation at the Frankfurt Hospital and whose central nervous system had been given to me by director Sioli for further examination". This was the first documented case of the form of dementia that…
neurophilosophy | November 2, 2007
You may have noticed the small icon on the right displayed on yesterday's post about tracking moving objects and on Wednesday's post about the Brainbow genetic labelling system.
The icon denotes a post that includes a discussion on peer-reviewed research, and is intended to distinguish such posts from other posts that often appear on blogs. It (and several other similar icons) was designed for the Bloggers for the Peer-Reviewed Research Reporting (BPR3) initiative, which was spearheaded by Dave Munger.
Posts featuring the icons will be aggregated in categories at the BPR3 website, so that…
neurophilosophy | November 1, 2007
The ability to attend to multiple moving objects simultaneously is fundamental to many of the tasks we perform regularly, such as driving, or taking part in team sports.
Numerous studies in which participants are asked to track dots moving around on a screen have led researchers to the conclusion that 4 is the maximum number of objects that can be tracked. It is therefore widely believed that the "magical number" 4 is the fixed upper limit of visual attention.
This has, therefore, led to the assumption that the visual system has a "fixed architecture" which places a limit on the number of…
neurophilosophy | November 1, 2007
This knitted woollen Brain Bag, designed by Jun Takashi for the Undercover label, is the ultimate accessory for the fashion-conscious female neuroscientist.
[Via Boing Boing]
neurophilosophy | November 1, 2007The 2007 Weblog Award finalists have just been announced, but for some reason, the list does not include links to the blogs. So here are the finalists in the Best Science Blogs category:
SciGuy
Junk Science
In the Pipeline
Journey by Starlight
Pharyngula
Bad Astronomy
Invasive Species Weblog
ScienceBase
Climate Audit
Bootstrap Analysis
neurophilosophy | October 31, 2007
Researchers from Harvard University have developed a remarkable genetic technique that enabled them to visualize complete neuronal circuits in unprecedented detail, by using multiple distinct colours to label individual neurons.
The technique, called Brainbow, works in much the same way as a television uses the three primary colours to generate all the colour hues. With multiple combinations of up to four differently coloured fluorescent proteins, a palette of approximately 100 labels has been produced.
To develop Brainbow, the researchers used the Cre/loxP site-specific recombination…
neurophilosophy | October 31, 2007Fear, that most primitive of emotions, is good, at least when it is kept under control. It is essential for survival, allowing an organism to detect a potential threat to its life. Too much fear, however, can lead to pathological conditions such as anxiety, phobia, paranoia, or post-traumatic stress disorder.
The neural circuitry which processes information about fear is well mapped, but otherwise, little else is known about the biological basis of this emotion. In recent years, however, neuroscientists elucidated some of the cellular and molecular mechnisms underlying fear. A greater…
neurophilosophy | October 30, 2007
An article about Oliver Sacks, from the current issue of Seed magazine, has just just been made available online.
Author Jonah Lehrer, who met with Sacks to research the article, provides interesting biographical details about the neurologist, including how he started out as a science writer.
In the late 1960s, Sacks carried out a clinical study in which a new drug called L-dopa was used to treat patients with encephalitis-induced Parkinsonian symptoms. The study drew heavy criticism, because the treatment had severe side effects, and the symptoms eventually returned in all of the patients.…
neurophilosophy | October 30, 2007My post on the ethnobiology of voodoo zombification has just been translated into Greek.
As far as I know, this is the second time something I've written has been translated into another language. (There's also an Italian translation of my post on Phineas Gage.)