neurophilosophy | October 6, 2007As requested by Jenna, I've transcribed the lyrics to Pinky and the Brain's neuroanatomy song.
To my knowledge, the song is anatomically correct, although I think several terms, such as "neural node" and "limbic lobe", are now obselete. There's also one word that I can't quite make out.
neurophilosophy | October 6, 2007The Guardian reports that Craig Venter has created a synthetic chromosome:
[We] can reveal that a team of 20 top scientists assembled by Mr Venter, led by the Nobel laureate Hamilton Smith, has already constructed a synthetic chromosome, a feat of virtuoso bio-engineering never previously achieved. Using lab-made chemicals, they have painstakingly stitched together a chromosome that is 381 genes long and contains 580,000 base pairs of genetic code.
The DNA sequence is based on the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium which the team pared down to the bare essentials needed to support life,…
neurophilosophy | October 6, 2007
Of the hundreds of photographs I've taken of my son, this is one of my favourites. It was taken when he was about 8 months old.
neurophilosophy | October 5, 2007Philosophers Andrew Brook and Pete Mandik provide an uncorrected proof of their paper, The Philosophy and Neuroscience Movement, which is to be published in a forthcoming special issue of Analyse & Kritic.
The paper gives an overview of how philosophy has increasingly been applied to neuroscience, and vice versa, over the past 25 years, during which time a small group of people from each discipline has become dedicated to contributing to the other.
The work of this neurophilosophy movement has involved integrating the philosophy of mind with the science of brain in order to gain a…
neurophilosophy | October 5, 2007The U.S. military has been awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for its alleged plans to develop the "gay bomb".
The device was proposed in 1994 by researchers from the U.S. Air Force Wright Laboratory in Dayton, Ohio. The plans for its development are contained in a 1994 document entitled Harassing, Annoying, and "Bad Guy" Identifying Chemicals, which was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act about 3 years ago:
Chemicals that can affect human behavior so that discipline and moral in enemy units is adversely affected. One distasteful but completely non-lethal example would be strong…
neurophilosophy | October 5, 2007Below is the PowerPoint I presented in the journal club this morning. It's a summary of a recent paper about laterality in the nematode worm:
Poole, R. J. & Hobert, O. (2006). Early embryonic programming of neuronal left/right asymmetry in C. elegans. Curr. Biol. 16: 2279-2292. [PDF]
I mentioned this study in yesterday's post about asymmetry in the nervous system, without going into too much detail. I'm sharing the presentation here because, although the paper is quite complex, the experiments described in it are very elegant.
When it comes to using PowerPoint, I'm a minimalist. I…
neurophilosophy | October 5, 2007New Caledonian crows (Corvus moneduloides) have remarkable tool-using abilities that are at least as sophisticated as those of chimpanzees, if not more so. To date, however, such behaviours have only been observed in contrived experimental conditions.
Using newly-developed miniuatrized animal-borne video cameras, researchers have now filmed wild crows using tools. The footage they have obtained is the first to show the use of tools by crows in their natural habitat.
Used in combination with conventional radio telemetry, the tail-mounted cameras provided the researchers with detailed…
neurophilosophy | October 4, 2007Most organisms are bilaterally symmetrical - that is, along the longitudinal axis, each half of the body is a mirror image of the other. There are, of course, deviations from this basic body plan, the most obvious being large internal organs such as the heart and liver, which, in mammals, are located on the left and right side of the body, respectively.
Despite some recent advances, very little is known about the developmental mechanisms by which the asymmetries in the nervous system are created. What is known comes mostly from studies of the nematode worm Caenorhabditis elegans, which has a…
neurophilosophy | October 4, 2007Now showing on my YouTube channel:
The remarkable cognitive skills and tool-making abilities of crows (see this post)
A documentary about Clive Wearing, who has the most severe case of amnesia ever documented.
The alien jaws of the moray eel (explained here)
Crop-raiding chimps (explained here)
Asphyxio-balling (which is something that bees do, and not a fetish indulged in by Members of Parliament).
neurophilosophy | October 3, 2007The Milken Institute, an independent economics think tank, has just released a large study of the burden of chronic disease on the U.S. economy.
The report provides details on the financial impact of 7 diseases (cancers, diabetes, heart disease, hypertension, stroke, mental disorders and pulmonary conditions), in terms of both the cost of treatment and lost productivity.
Figures are provided for individual states and for the country as a whole. The The current trends are extrapolated to provide estimates of the economic impact over the coming decades. The report also details the savings…
neurophilosophy | October 2, 2007A list for the top 100 medical blogs of September is at the Dutch site Medblog.nl. The ranks are determined with an algorithm that uses 8 paramenters, including number of posts and comments, Google pagerank, Technorati rank and number of incoming links.
neurophilosophy | October 2, 2007
Giovanni Aldini's electrical experiments on executed criminals in Bologna, from Essai theorique et experimental sur le galvanisme, published in 1804. (Image from the Rare Book and Manuscript Collections at Cornell University Library.)
The experiments of Italian physicist Giovanni Aldini (1762-1834) provided Mary Shelley with some of the inspiration for her classic gothic novel Frankenstein.
Aldini was the nephew of Luigi Galvani, who, in the 1700s, made a major contribution to the understanding of nerve function. In 1798, Aldini became a professor of physics at the University of Bologna,…
neurophilosophy | October 2, 2007A method for the preparation of rodent hippocampal slice cultures is now available at Cold Spring Harbor Protocols, a comprehensive online database of research techniques for the life sciences.
The full list of freely available protocols is here.
neurophilosophy | October 2, 2007One of my favourite bands, Radiohead, releases a new album called In Rainbows on October 15th. The album is not being distributed by a record label, but instead will be available exclusively as a digital download from the band's website.
There's nothing particularly innovative about how the album is being released. What is innovative is that you decide how much you want to pay for it. You can decide to pay the recommended retail price for a CD, or to pay nothing at all.
Below is a track from OK Computer, Radiohead's third album, which was released in 1997.
neurophilosophy | October 1, 2007
A team of researchers from Yamaguchi University in Japan has submitted a patent application for an implantable brain cooling device that would be used to develop a new treatment for severe cases of epilepsy.
Epilepsy is a condition that is characterised by abnormal electrical activity in the brain. Many epileptics experience seizures, during which they convulse - sometimes violently - before losing consciousness. These seizures are caused by an "electrical storm" of abnormal neuronal activity that spreads from the locus (or point of origin) to adjacent tissue.
The brain cooling…
neurophilosophy | October 1, 2007I should have discussed the image that I included in yesterday's post about eugenics. Believe it or not, the scale that is illustrated in that image - with "moron" at the top and "idiot" at the bottom - was used by physicians to aid their diagnoses.
Whether one was a moron, an imbecile (of high-, medium- or low-grade!) or an idiot depended upon one's intelligence quotient (IQ), which was determined using the standardized test that was administered widely in the U.S. following its introduction in the early 20th century.
Anyone who scored an IQ of 70 or lower was considered to be "feeble-minded…
neurophilosophy | October 1, 2007For a limited time, the Nature Publishing Group is providing free access to recent research papers and reviews about neuroplasticity from 7 of its journals, including Nature Neuroscience, Molecular Psychiatry, the Journal of Cerebral Blood Flow and Metabolism and Neuropsychopharmacology Reviews (the latest addition to the NPG portfolio).
Below is a selection from the 16 articles that are available:
McClung, C. A. & Nestler, E. J. (2007). Neuroplasticity mediated by altered gene expression. Neuropsychopharm. Rev. doi: 10.1038/sj.npp.1301544. [Abstract/Full text/PDF]
Citri, A. &…
neurophilosophy | September 30, 2007
The word eugenics immediately makes one think of the racial hygiene programs of the Nazis and the experiments performed by Joseph Mengele on those held in the concentration camps, but far fewer are aware that there was a large and powerful eugenics movement in the U.S. during the first half of the 20th century.
For example, by 1941, no less than 33 states endorsed policies for sterilizing "defective"members of society, such as criminals, the "feeble-minded", epileptics, the mentally ill and, of course, blacks (and non-whites in general).
Much of the eugenics research in the U.S. was…
neurophilosophy | September 30, 2007
Below are a few quotes from this interview with theoretical physicist Freeman Dyson, whose new book, A Many-colored Glass, is about to be published.
On science, religion and Richard Dawkins:
I think it's only a small fraction of people who think that [science and religion are at odds]. Perhaps they have louder voices than the others.
I think Richard Dawkins is doing a lot of damage. I disagree very strongly with the way he's going about it. I don't deny his right to be an atheist, but I think he does a great deal of harm when he publicly says that in order to be a scientist, you have to…
neurophilosophy | September 30, 2007According to Pullitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, the answer is yes.