neurophilosophy | September 7, 2007
The trajectory of a foam boomerang with LED lights, by Michael Murphree.
From an article called The science of boomerangs, in last month's issue of Popular Mechanics.
neurophilosophy | September 7, 2007
The Believer has an interview with primatologist Franz de Waal:
De Waal's research is no friend to human vanity. In the grand tradition of Galileo and Darwin, de Waal provokes those who seek to draw a clear line between human beings and everything else. But his message is an optimistic one. If human morality has deep roots in our evolutionary past, then we can expect it to be more resilient, less susceptible to the contingencies of history. Seeing morality in this light also undermines the view of human beings as inherently selfish--a view that de Waal terms "veneer theory." Morality,…
neurophilosophy | September 7, 2007The film below shows surgeons from the Neuroscience Institute at Le Bonheur Children's Medical Center perform a hemispherectomy on a 6-year-old girl with epilepsy. This involves removing a large part of the girl's left hemisphere; the corpus callosum, the bundle of approximately 100 million nerve fibres connecting the two hemispheres, is then severed.
One of the surgeons in the film describes epilepsy as "an electrical storm" in the brain. The procedure is performed to remove the eye of this "storm". The corpus callosum is then severed, just in case the tissue which is the source of the…
neurophilosophy | September 7, 2007
From the BBC:
Doctors in China have discovered 26 sewing needles embedded in the body of a 31-year-old woman.
They think they were inserted into Luo Cuifen's body when she was a baby by grandparents upset she was not a boy.
Some of these needles have penetrated vital organs, such as the lungs, liver and kidneys. One has even broken into three pieces in the woman's brain.
Presumably, this was a failed attempt at female infanticide. Because of the one child policy, there is a preference among Chinese couples for boys over girls, as only boys carry on the family name. Hence,…
neurophilosophy | September 7, 2007The Manipulation of Human Behavior, a manual for psychological torture techniques written by leading psychologists and psychiatrists, is now available online.
Published by John Wiley & Sons in 1961, the 323-page book was edited by Albert D. Biderman of the Bureau of Social Science Research and Herbert Zimmer, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Georgia, and funded by the U.S. government.
The editors' introduction reads:
This book represents a critical examination of some of the conjectures about the application of scientific knowledge to the manipulation of…
neurophilosophy | September 6, 2007
Scanning electron micrograph of the moray eel's secondary jaw, with highly recurved teeth. Scale bar= 500 micrometres. (Rita Mehta/ Nature)
In today's issue of Nature, evolutionary biologists from the University of California, Davis report that the moray eel (Muraena retifera) has a protractable jaw that it uses to grasp and swallow prey, in a manner that is reminiscent of the creatures in the Alien films.
Most bony fish feed by a suction mechanism. The suction-feeding abilities of morays are limited, so until now it was not known how they could swallow the large fish and…
neurophilosophy | September 6, 2007Researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign have demonstrated a device which can control the movements of a wheelchair when its operator thinks of specific words.
The Audeo is a human-computer interface consisting of a neckband containing sensors which detect the electrical signals sent by the brain to the muscles in the larynx. The signals are transmitted wirelessly to a computer, which decodes them and matches them to pre-programmed signals before sending them to the wheelchair.
The Audeo was developed by Michael Callahan and Thomas Coleman, who together set up…
neurophilosophy | September 6, 2007Susan Greenfield, one of the U.K.'s most prominent neuroscientists, has just launched a brain-training computer program called MindFit.
The software was developed by a company called MindWeavers, for which Greenfield, and David Moore, the director of the MRC Institute for Hearing Research, are scientific officers.
In this BBC news story, Greenfield is quoted as saying that "There is now good scientific evidence to show that exercising the brain can slow, delay and protect against age-related decline."
That may be the case, but why spend good money on computer games when free Soduko…
neurophilosophy | September 6, 2007
Bill Choisser (left) has written an online book called Face Blind!, where he describes his experiences of prosopagnosia, a neurological condition in which the ability to recognize faces is impaired.
In extreme cases, prosopagnostics are unable to recognize family members, and even their own face.
Prosopagnosia (commonly known as face blindness), often occurs as a result of damage to a region of the brain called the fusiform gyrus, located near the inferior (lower) surface of the temporal lobe at the midline. The damage may be due to head injury, stroke, or various neurodegenerative…
neurophilosophy | September 6, 2007Here are a handful of new blogs I've just found:
Neurofeedback on the Brain
Mind Modulations
Neuromod Blog
Gray Matters
Cognitive Neuroscience Review
And here are two new blogs by philosophers of mind:
The IP Blog
Colin McGinn
neurophilosophy | September 6, 2007Olfaction (smell) is the most mysterious of senses, and is wrongly regarded as insignificant by most people. The sense of taste, for example, consists in large part of smell - try holding your nose next time you eat - and the recent identification of putative pheromone receptors in humans suggests that olfaction affects behaviour in as yet unknown ways.
The human nose, while not as sensitive as, say, that of a dog, can still detect very low concentrations of odorant molecules as they diffuse through the air. The initial event in the process of olfaction is the recognition of an odorant…
neurophilosophy | September 5, 2007From a comic book called What are Cosmic Rays, by researchers at the Solar-Terrestrial Evironment Laboratory at Nagoya University in Japan.
There are 5 others in English, and more in Japanese.
neurophilosophy | September 5, 2007Mild cognitive impairment affects many cognitive functions, particularly memory. People with mild cognitive impairment are 3-4 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's Disease; hence, it is regarded as a transition stage between normal age-related cognitive decline and Alzheimer's Disease.
Researchers Emory University School of Medicine and Rush University Medical Center in Chicago now report that reduced levels of a receptor found in nerve cells is associated with the onset of mild cognitive impairment. A strong correlation between receptor levels and cognitive performance was also found.…
neurophilosophy | September 5, 2007
Erasing Memory: The Cultural Destruction of Iraq is a 28-minute film from the Archaeology Channel which documents the plundering of Iraqi archaeological sites and looting and destruction of priceless artifacts.
This destruction of Iraq's heritage has been going on since the U.S. invaded the country in March 2003, and continues to this day. The looting of artifacts from the Iraq museum in Baghdad, which took place soon after the U.S. began its military action, was widely publicized, but the mass media now makes no mention of the subject.
In the last few years, many objects looted from various…
neurophilosophy | September 5, 2007
Just in time for my return to university, Mozilla has released the Firefox Campus Edition, which comes with 3 essential add-ons for students:
FoxyTunes is a personalized music aggregator which can be used to control any media player, and to collect music videos, lyrics, album covers, news and more;
StumbleUpon lets you channel surf the internet to find websites and multimedia content based on your interests; and
Zotero, an easy-to-use extension that helps you to collect, manage and cite your research sources.
Mozilla has also developed an extension called Biobar, a toolbar for browsing…
neurophilosophy | September 4, 2007The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA), the governmental body that regulates fertility treatments in the U.K., looks set to approve the use of hybrid embryos for stem cell research at a meeting later on today.
Earlier this week, the HFEA published its public consultation on the subject. This revealed that, although many people found the idea of human-animal hybrid embryos to be repugnant, most approved of it when they better understood the reasons for it.
Researchers can create hybrid embryos by the transferring nuclei from human cells into animal egg cells from which…
neurophilosophy | September 4, 2007
In the 1880s, Francis Galton described a condition in which "persons...almost invariably think of numerals in visual imagery." This "peculiar habit of mind" is today called synaesthesia, and Galton's description clearly defines this condition as one in which stimuli of one sensory modality elicit sensations in another of the senses.
There are several different kinds of synaesthesia, and the condition is now known to be far more common than was previously thought. Galton was describing a specific type of synaesthesia, called grapheme-colour synaesthesia, in which printed numbers or letters…
neurophilosophy | September 4, 2007 At 3 Quarks Daily, Abbas Reza reviews Steven Pinker's new book, Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature, which is published by Allen Lane later this month.
Pinker discusses the book in this recent interview.
neurophilosophy | September 3, 2007This is alarming: the New York Times has an article about a new study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, which shows that the number of under 20s diagnosed with bipolar disorder has increased 40-fold (from 25 to 1003 per 100,000) between 1994 and 2003:
Bipolar disorder is characterized by extreme mood swings. Until relatively recently, it was thought to emerge almost exclusively in adulthood. But in the 1990s, psychiatrists began looking more closely for symptoms in younger patients.
Some experts say greater awareness, reflected in the increasing diagnoses, is letting…
neurophilosophy | September 3, 2007
In The rise and fall of the prefrontal lobotomy, I discussed the heart-breaking case of Howard Dully, whose stepmother had him lobotomized when he was12 years old.
Dully relates his story in My Lobotomy, an autobiographical book which is co-authored by novelist and journalist Charles Fleming. My Lobotomy is published today in the U.S., and in a few month's time in the U.K.
Both Dully and Fleming have contacted me recently, and Fleming has kindly agreed to send me a copy of the book, so I'll write more about it when I've read it. Meanwhile, you can read more about it on Dully's blog…