neurophilosophy | October 14, 2007How you perceive the image depends on the distance from which you are viewing it. From up close, you'll see Albert Einstein, but if you move further back from the screen, you'll see Harry Potter.
This is one of a series of hybrid images created by Aude Oliva of the Computational Visual Cognition Lab at MIT. Here's an explanation of how these images work, and here's the spinning silhouette illusion from yesterday.
[Original image uploaded to Flickr by Jeremiah Owyang]
neurophilosophy | October 14, 2007A reader writes:
Dear Mo,
I want to quote your Brain in a Nutshell Essay. Can you please provide me some bibliographic data of this essay. I don't want to cite just Mo and a short-lived URL.
I was flattered to get this email, but I wasn't sure how to respond. I suggested something along these lines:
Costandi, M. (2007). The Brain in a Nutshell. Neurophilosophy Weblog. Retrieved on September 26, 2007, from http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2007/08/the_brain_in_a_nutshell.php
As luck would have it, the second edition of Citing Medicine: The NLM Style Guide for Authors, Editors, and…
neurophilosophy | October 13, 2007This "right brain vs left brain test" from the Herald Sun is doing the rounds on the internet today. The article contains the so-called "spinning silhouette" optical illusion (below), and states that if you see the the dancer rotating in a clockwise direction "you use more of the right side of your brain and vice versa."
You've probably heard this left/ right brain dichotomy before. It goes something like this: the left hemisphere of the brain is logical, deductive, mathematical, etc., while the right hemisphere is artistic, visual and imaginative. The idea stems at least partly from the…
neurophilosophy | October 13, 2007
I took this one a couple of weeks ago, as I was crossing Albert Bridge one evening.
neurophilosophy | October 13, 2007Fellow neuroscience blogger Shelley Batts is one of 20 finalists in the running for the Student Blogging Scholarship. She's up against some stiff competition for the $10,000 first prize, and is currently in 2nd place with about 20% of the votes.
For her Ph.D., Shelley is researching the degeneration of hair cells in the inner ear. So take a minute to vote for Shelley, because hers is the kind of work that could eventually lead to better treatments for the deaf and hard of hearing.
neurophilosophy | October 12, 2007Researchers from the Biomedical Engineering Laboratory at Keio University in Japan have developed a brain-computer interface that enables users to control the movements of Second Life avatars without moving a muscle.
The device consists of a headset containing electrodes which monitor electrical activity in the motor cortex, the region of the brain involved in planning, executing and controlling movements.
All a user has to do to control his/her avatar is imagine performing various movements. The activity monitored by the headpiece is read and plotted by an electroencephalogram, which relays…
neurophilosophy | October 12, 2007This is an installation by New York-based artist Janice Caswell, called Competitive Races: The View from the Netroots.
My drawings and installations represent mental maps, an investigation of the mind's peculiar ways of organizing memories. I attempt to trace the edges of recalled experience, plotting the movement of bodies and consciousness through time and space.
This work arises out of a desire to capture experience, an impulse to locate, arrange and secure the past. I use a pared-down, coded language through which points, lines and fields of color define spaces and retell narratives,…
neurophilosophy | October 12, 2007Just published by University of Chicago Press is A Century of Nature: Twenty-One Discoveries that Changed Science and the World. The book contains seminal Nature papers published over the last 100 years, each of which is accompanied by commentary from a leading scientist in the field.
Included in the book are the 1953 paper in which James Watson and Francis Crick reported the structure of DNA and 1980 paper in which Christiane Nusslein-Volhard and Eric Wieschaus report homeotic mutations in the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster.
Some of the book's content has been made available online for…
neurophilosophy | October 11, 2007
Ants and aphids have a symbiotic (or mutually beneficial) relationship. The aphids provide the ants with a food-source - the sugar-rich honeydew they excrete when eating plants - and, in return, the ants protect the aphids from ladybirds and other insects that prey on them.
To ensure a constant supply of honeydew, some ant species cultivate large numbers of aphids, and prevent them from straying too far from the colony by biting and damaging, or even completely removing, their wings. The ants also secrete a chemical from their mandibles which inhibits wing development in juvenile aphids.…
neurophilosophy | October 11, 2007Sheikh Muszaphar Shukor, the Malaysian orthopaedic surgeon aboard the Russian rocket that is now on its way to the International Space Station, can observe Ramadan and perform other acts of Muslim worship by following the guidelines set out in this small booklet, which was produced by 150 Islamic scholars and scientists at a conference held 18 months ago by the Malaysian National Space Agency.
neurophilosophy | October 11, 2007This wall painting was discovered by a team of French archaeologists working at Djade al-Mughara, a Neolithic site in Northern Syria.
The red, black and white painting measures 2 square meters, and has been dated to around 9,000 BC (making it the oldest known wall painting). Team leader Eric Coqueugniot says, "It looks like a modernist painting. Some of those who saw it have likened it to work by (Paul) Klee."
neurophilosophy | October 10, 2007Vaughan has found a fascinating article about the many references to neurological syndromes in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
On the right is one of Sir John Tenniel's original illustrations for the book. It accompanies the following passage:
"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); "now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!" (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off). "Oh, my poor…
neurophilosophy | October 9, 2007
The vilification of Arabs in American popular culture serves an ideological purpose: the dehumanization of America's "enemy" in the "clash of civilisations".
(Via Woman of Color Blog)
neurophilosophy | October 9, 2007The 33rd edition of Encephalon, which has just been posted at GNIF Brain Blogger, includes posts on magnetoreception, cellular senescence in Alzheimer's Disease, and how the use of DNA microarrays is providing insights into human brain evolution.
The next edition of the carnival will be hosted by Zachary at Distributed Neuron, on October 22nd. If you'd like to contribute, send permalinks to your neuroscience or psychology blog posts to encephalon{dot}host{at}gmail{dot}com, or use this submission form.
neurophilosophy | October 8, 2007
The Royal Society has just put Robert Hooke's folio online.
The 320-year-old notebook, which had been missing for centuries, was discovered in January of last year. In it, Hooke provides details of his experiments, and of the workings of the newly-formed Royal Society, of which he was first administrator and then secretary.
Hooke was a contemporary - and a rival - of Isaac Newton. He was a polymath who made major contributions to many scientific disciplines, including astronomy, palaeontology, physics, and biology. For example, he was one of the first people to examine cells under the…
neurophilosophy | October 8, 2007In The New Yorker, Jerome Groopman discusses the work of Adrian Owen, a researcher at Cambridge University's Cognitive and Brain Sciences Unit who has been using functional imaging to assess patients in a vegetative state.
Neurologists face major problems in diagnosing the persistent vegetative state (PVS) and other "disorders of consciousness" such as the minimally conscious state (MCS), not least because there is no reliable means of assessing the level of consciousness in patients.
Large proportions of patients in such conditions are therefore misdiagnosed, and, until recently, most…
neurophilosophy | October 8, 2007The 2007 Annual Review of Anthropology has just been published, and is freely available online.
It includes reviews called The Archaeology of Religious Ritual, The Archaeology of Sudan and Nubia, Genomic Comparisons of Humans and Chimpanzees and Anthropology and Militarism.
neurophilosophy | October 7, 2007
Wouldn't you be? Even if you weren't a 13-year-old pupil at a boys-only school?
My mother just found these old school reports and brought them over to me. Below are reports for maths, physics and biology. They're all handwritten, but, I think, legible.
neurophilosophy | October 7, 2007A new study in the British Medical Journal concludes that "there is no strong evidence to associate chronic traumatic brain injury with amateur boxing,"
The authors systematically reviewed 36 observational studies of amateur boxers published over the past 50 years. But they acknowledge that the general quality of the studies is very poor, so, despite the conclusion, their findings are actually inconclusive.
In an accompanying editorial, neurologist and sports physician Paul McRory notes that boxers' careers are much shorter now than they were in the first half of the last century. Boxers…
neurophilosophy | October 6, 2007
Left lateral view of the whole horse skeleton, from the Handbook of Animal Anatomy for Artists (1898, 1911-25), by Wilhelm Ellenberger, Hermann Baum and Hermann Dittrich. From the Veterinary Anatomical Illustrations at the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections (via BibliOdyssey).
I've just submitted this fantastic post about the evolution of the horse, by Brian Switek, for inclusion in Open Lab 2007, the anthology of the best science blogging of the year that will be published in January.