neurophilosophy | September 23, 2007
(Image credit: John B. Carnett)
The September issue of Popular Science magazine has an article about one of the first clinical trials in which deep brain stimulation is being used to treat patients with severe depression who do not respond to drugs or electroconvulsive therapy.
The image above shows Diane Hire, one of 17 patients enrolled in the trial, which is being conducted at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio. The X-ray on the right shows the position of the electrodes that have been implanted in Hire's brain.
According to the article, the procedure takes about 4 hours. It…
neurophilosophy | September 23, 2007
(Gene Genie logo created by by Ricardo Vidal)
Welcome to the 16th edition of Gene Genie, the carnival of genes and genetic diseases.
In this edition, genetics gets personal. The recent publication of Craig Venter's genome (and, before that, James Watson's) was big news. It ushered in the new era of personal genomics, to which a special section of this edition of Gene Genie is devoted.
So, without further ado, let's take a look at the entries for this edition.
Genes & genetic diseases
First off, we have several posts about cancer genes. BRCA1 is a tumour suppressor gene that…
neurophilosophy | September 22, 2007
In this inaugural weekend photoblogging post, I give you this photograph of Beit el-Din Palace, which I took on a trip to Lebanon about 5 years ago.
Beit el-Din (which translates as "House of Religion") is in the Chouf region of Lebanon, about 50 km southwest of Beirut. The Chouf is the heartland of the Druze, a sub-Shi'ite sect that developed in the 10th Century.
neurophilosophy | September 22, 2007In an op-ed from yesterday's NY Times, Christopher Lane, a professor of English at Northwestern University, argues that shy kids are not mentally ill, and that they shouldn't be given medication.
The piece brought to mind this critique of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV), by L. J. Davis:
Current among the many symptoms of the deranged mind are bad writing (315.2, and its associated symptom, poor handwriting); coffee drinking, including coffee nerves (305.90), bad coffee nerves (292.89), inability to sleep after drinking too much coffee (292.89), and…
neurophilosophy | September 22, 2007That's the cost of war in Iraq, according to a new analysis by Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Harvard Public Policy lecturer Linda J. Bilmes.
The money spent on one day of war in Iraq ($720 million) could provide healthcare for more than 420,000 American children or buy homes for 6,500 families.
And let's not forget the cost of war for Iraq itself: up to 1.2 million civilians killed, and the destruction of the country's priceless heritage.
neurophilosophy | September 21, 2007
This 3D reconstruction of the presynaptic terminal show the nuts and bolts of intercellular communication in the nervous system. They were generated by Siksou et al, from serial electron micrographs of neurons from the rat hippocampus.
The blue spheres are synaptic vesicles containing neurotransmitter molecules. They are docked at the presynaptic membrane (white). The arrival of an action potential (or nervous impulse) at the nerve terminal leads to an influx of calcium ions, which causes the vesicles to fuse with the membrane and release their contents into the synapse.
The gold…
neurophilosophy | September 21, 2007A study by a team of German researchers shows that the brains of paedophiles respond differently to those of healthy controls to erotic images.
Martin Walter, of the Department of Psychiatry at Otto-von-Guricke University in Magdeburg, and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to compare neural activity in 13 paedophilic patients and 14 healthy control subjects during visual erotic stimulation.
They found that, compared to the controls, activity in several areas of the brain, including the hypothalamus, was reduced in the paedophilic patients.
The hypothalamus…
neurophilosophy | September 21, 2007
Yellow Red Blue, by Wassily Kandinsky.
After attending a performance of Wagner's opera Lohengrin in St. Petersburg, Kandinsky said, "I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me."
Kandinsky was describing his experience of a condition called tone-colour synaesthesia, in which sounds elicit visual sensations. In his paintings, Kandinsky tried to evoke the visual equivalent of a symphony.
The word synaesthesia comes from the Greek roots syn, meaning 'together', and aesthesis, meaning 'sensation'. The condition was first described…
neurophilosophy | September 21, 2007ScienceBlogs has two new additions: On Being A Scientist and a Woman and A Few Things Ill Considered.
neurophilosophy | September 21, 2007Google Reader has an excellent feature which enables users to display items from the RSS feeds to which they are subscribed in a "link blog".
I set up one of these link blogs earlier this year, and displayed the RSS feed in the sidebar on my old blog. My shared items can be viewed here, and the feed for my link blog is here.
neurophilosophy | September 20, 2007The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has just published its annual Education at a Glance report.
The survey includes statistics on enrolment and completion rates for primary, secondary and tertiary education from the 30 OECD member countries, including the numbers of students completing each level of education, the proportions of national wealth and of public and private investment spent on education.
It also summarizes trends in tertiary education, such as the numbers of women entering university, percentages of university graduates by subject, and numbers of…
neurophilosophy | September 20, 2007
I found this two-part documentary on YouTube. It's about a musician called Clive Wearing, who became amnesic following a herpes encephalitis infection that damaged his hippocampus, as well as parts of his frontal and temporal lobes.
Wearing's is the most severe case of anterograde amnesia ever recorded. Unlike the famous amnesic Henry M., who can learn simple motor skills, Wearing is incapable of forming any new memories whatsoever.
Wearing is the subject of this article in The New Yorker, by Oliver Sacks, whose new book about music and the mind is to be published soon.
[The…
neurophilosophy | September 20, 2007
In this article from Wired, Sharon Weinberger discusses "mind-reading" technology that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security hopes to use to identify terrorists.
The DHS is interested in Semantic Stimuli Response Measurements Technology (SSRM TEK), which has been developed at the Psychotechnology Research Institute in Moscow.
SSRM Tek is a software package which can, according to those who developed it, measure peoples' responses to subliminal messages presented to them in a computer game. Terrorists' responses to scrambled images (of, say Osama bin Laden or the World Trade Center) are…
neurophilosophy | September 19, 2007
(Image credit: Emmanouil Filippou / GreecePhotoBank/ Current Biology)
Giant hornets are the honeybee's arch enemy. They enter nests, kill the bees and take them home to feed their young. Before leaving the nest, the pioneer foraging hornet secretes a hormone which attracts its nestmates. Other hornets then congregate at the nest, and attack it en masse. In this way, several dozen hornets can wipe out a colony of tens of thousands of bees in a matter of hours.
Bees normally fend off predators by stinging them. But this doesn't work with hornets, because a bee's stinger…
neurophilosophy | September 19, 2007
Coptic leaf from the Gospel of Mark, Egypt, c. AD 500. (Southern Methodist University)
Nearly half of the world's 7,000 languages are likely to become extinct over the course of this century, according to an article in the NY Times which discusses a recent study of endangered languages. (See this interactive map for more details of the study.)
One language that is not mentioned in the article or in the study, but which is also on the brink of extinction, is Coptic, the ancient language of Egypt's indigenous Christian population.
Coptic is a modified Greek script that includes a…
neurophilosophy | September 18, 2007Top science bloggers (including Bora, Carl, Abel Pharmboy, PZ and Razib) have been asked by The Scientist to nominate their favourite science blogs. You can see their choices, and nominate your own favourites, here.
neurophilosophy | September 18, 2007More on the cultural destruction of Iraq, or, as Robert Fisk calls it in this article from The Independent, the death of history.
neurophilosophy | September 18, 2007At some point in the distant past, there was a dramatic increase in brain size in our hominid ancestors. From approximately 2 million years ago, to the present day, brain volume in the hominid lineage has increased by a factor of 3.5: the brain of Homo erectus had a volume of about 400 milliliters, while that of modern humans is roughly 1,400 ml.
The size of the human brain cannot be accounted for merely by an increase in body size, because Homo erectus was similar in size to modern humans, so the driving for this increase in brain size (or "encephalization") is still a topic of debate…
neurophilosophy | September 18, 2007(Image credit: Karolinska University Hospital)
A study led by neuroscientist Peter Fransson of the Karolinska Institute in Sweden shows that there is spontaneous activity in at least 5 resting-state networks in the brains of sleeping babies.
Fransson and his colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to scan the brains of 12 sleeping babies, for 10 minutes each. They found that there was activity in parts of the brain associated with the processing of visual, motor and auditory information.
This type of activity had previously been observed in sleeping adults, but until now…