neuroscience
ksharpe | February 7, 2009Review by Scicurious, from Neurotopia
Originally published on: February 5, 2009 1:45 AM
I am an unabashed lover of Scientific American. Well, ok, I'm also a grad student. So I can't AFFORD Scientific American. But luckily, Scientific American has podcasts! There's a regular weekly one that is around 40 minutes long, and then there are daily ones, called '60-second science'. 60-second science represents the latest science tidbits as they come out, and, most endearing to Sci, they cover the good, the bad, and the weird. So I was very excited when I found out that Scientific American,…
bioephemera | February 6, 2009
Ready for the weekend? Having trouble focusing? Indulge yourself in this luscious nine-minute film from the National Gallery of Art about Vermeer's masterpiece "The Music Lesson." It leisurely unpacks the painting's geometry and shadows, showing a glimpse of the techniques that let Vermeer make quotidian Delft resemble a gold-drenched daydream.
Vermeers are often described as highly realistic, crisp, even jewel-like. Although the illusion of reality is powerful, Vermeer, like all good artists, made judicious alterations to the scene before him. This video of "The Music Lesson" shows an…
neurophilosophy | February 5, 2009When Sir Francis Galton first described the "peculiar habit of mind" we now call synaesthesia, he noted that it often runs in families. Modern techniques have confirmed that the condition does indeed have a strong genetic component - more than 40% of synaesthetes have a first-degree relative - a parent, sibling or offspring - who also has synaesthesia, and families often contain multiple synaesthetes.
Synaesthesia is known to affect females more than males, and although the female predominance of the condition is now known to have been exaggerated, the condition is presumed to be linked to…
neurophilosophy | February 2, 2009During the first half of the twentieth century, the American psychologist Karl Lashley conducted a series of experiments in an attempt to identify the part of the brain in which memories are stored. In his now famous investigations, Lashley trained rats to find their way through a maze, then tried to erase the memory trace - what he called the "engram" - by making lesions in different parts of the neocortex.
Lashley failed to find the engram - no matter where he made a lesion, his experimental animals were still able to find their way through the maze. As a result, he concluded that memories…
j7uy5 | February 2, 2009This needs to be replicated before any conclusions can be drawn, but it
is encouraging. 21 patients with relapsing-remitting
href="http://health.nytimes.com/health/guides/disease/multiple-sclerosis/overview.html?scp=1-spot&sq=multiple%20sclerosis&st=cse">multiple
sclerosis, in whom conventional treatment failed, were given a stem
cell treatment. 17 patients improved; 16 had no relapse at all;
none got worse. They were studied over a period of two to four
years. The study was published in The Lancet Neurology, (
Early Online Publication, 30 January 2009) $ for full access:…
clock | February 1, 2009Long-time readers of this blog remember that, some years ago, I did a nifty little study on the Influence of Light Cycle on Dominance Status and Aggression in Crayfish. The department has moved to a new building, the crayfish lab is gone, I am out of science, so chances of following up on that study are very low. And what we did was too small even for a Least Publishable Unit, so, in order to have the scientific community aware of our results, I posted them (with agreement from my co-authors) on my blog. So, although I myself am unlikely to continue studying the relationship between the…
bioephemera | January 29, 2009Weirdest lede ever?
A giant flower beetle with implanted electrodes and a radio receiver on its back can be wirelessly controlled, according to research presented this week.
Go DARPA!
Article (MIT Technology Review) here. Video here.
edyong | January 29, 2009Serotonin is a chemical jack-of-all-trades. It relays messages between the cells of the brain and in doing so, controls everything from anger to sleep, body temperature to appetite. But in one insect, it is the key to Pandora's box, periodically unleashing some of the most destructive swarms on the planet. It is the chemical responsible for turning solitary desert locusts into massive plagues.
With desert locusts, you get two insects for the price of one. For most of their lives, they are positively antisocial and will avoid other locusts - a far cry from the devastating swarms that farmers…
neurophilosophy | January 27, 2009In his epic poem Visions of the Daughters of Albion, William Blake asks: "Where goest thou O thought? To what remote land is thy flight?" More than two centuries later, memory remains as one of the enduring mysteries of neuroscience, and despite decades of intensive research using modern techniques, we still have no answer to the questions posed by Blake.
Traditionally, memory has been regarded as consisting of several distinct processes or storage systems. Short-term memory (sometimes referred to as working memory) stores information that is required for the task at hand, but is severely…
neurophilosophy | January 26, 2009What sensory cues do we rely on during the perception of speech? Primarily, of course, speech perception involves auditory cues - we pay close attention to the sounds generated by the speaker. Less obviously, the brain also picks up subtle visual cues, such as the movements of the speakers mouth and lips; the importance of these can be demonstrated by the McGurk effect, an auditory illusion in which the visual cues accompanying spoken words can alter one's perception of what is being said.
Integration of these auditory and visual cues is essential for speech perception. But according to a…
j7uy5 | January 26, 2009On 14
January, 2008, the US FDA
href="http://www.frx.com/news/PressRelease.aspx?ID=1244788">approved
milnacipran for use in treatment of
href="http://www.med.umich.edu/painresearch/pro/fibromyalgia.htm">fibromyalgia.
It is ( or soon will be) available in tablets of 12.5, 25, 50, and
100mg. It has been marketed as an antidepressant in Europe for
years, but has not been available in the USA until now.
Milnacipran is a drug that inhibits reuptake of serotonin and
norepinephrine. The effect on norepinephrine is stronger than the
effect on serotonin. It can be thought of as an SNRI,…
ddobbs | January 25, 2009
The book opens so thrillingly -- a plane crash, a last-second Super Bowl victory, and a first chapter that comfortably reconciles Plato and Ovid with Tom Brady and John Madden -- that it spawns a worry: Can the book possibly sustain this pace?
"How We Decide" delivers. Jonah Lehrer, -- author of "Proust Was a Neuroscientist," blogger at Frontal Cortex, and (full disclosure) an online acquaintance and sometime colleague of mine for a couple years now (I asked him to take over editorship of Scientific American's Mind Matters last year, and we share blogging duties at VeryShortList:Science)…
edyong | January 21, 2009The blood that flows into our heads is obviously important for it provides nutrients and oxygen to that most energetically demanding of organs - the brain. But for neuroscientists, blood flow in the brain has a special significance; many have used it to measure brain activity using a technique called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI.
This scanning technology has become a common feature of modern neuroscience studies, where it's used to follow firing neurons and to identify parts of the brain that are active during common mental tasks. Its use rests on the assumption that the…
purepedantry | January 21, 2009This post over at Neuroskeptic reignites a debate -- if it ever really stopped -- as to the role of impaired adult neurogenesis in causing depression and the function of anti-depressants in stimulating neurogenesis to treat the disease.
This is one of those hot topics in neuroscience. If you look away for just a second the entire field changes, so I thought I would do a little update on where the field stands.
Short summary: Whether neurogenesis is at fault in the etiology of depression is still a very controversial idea among neuroscientists with mixed evidence. Many anti-depressants…
ddobbs | January 20, 2009One theory about antidepressants is that they relieve depression by encouraging neurogenesis -- the creation of new neurons. Neuroskeptic reviews a study that argues against this idea.
the neurogenesis hypothesis has problems of its own. A new paper claims to add to what seems like a growing list of counter-examples: Ageing abolishes the effects of fluoxetine on neurogenesis.
The researchers, Couillard-Despres et. al. from the University of Regensburg in Germany, found that fluoxetine (Prozac) enhances hippocampal neurogenesis in mice - as expected - but found in addition that this only…
neurophilosophy | January 20, 2009Delusions are pathological beliefs which persist despite clear evidence that they are actually false. They can vary widely in content, but are always characterized by the absolute certainty with which they are held. Such beliefs reflect an abnormality of thought processes; they are often bizarre and completely unrelated to conventional cultural or religious belief systems, or to the level of intelligence of the person suffering from them.
The delusions experienced by psychiatric patients are sometimes categorized according to their theme. For example, schizophrenics often suffer from…
neurophilosophy | January 19, 2009The brains of vertebrates are asymmetrical, both structurally and functionally. This asymmetry is believed to increase the efficiency of information processing - one hemisphere is specialized to perform certain functions, so the opposite is left free to perform others. In the human brain, for example, the left hemisphere is specialized for speech. This has been known since the 1860s, when the French physician Paul Broca noted that the aphasia (or inability to speak) which is a common symptom of stroke is associated with damage to a discrete region of the left frontal lobe.
Very little is…
edyong | January 18, 2009
You swallow the pill. As it works its way through your digestive system, it slowly releases its chemical payload, which travels through your bloodstream to your brain. A biochemical chain reaction begins. Old disused nerve cells spring into action and form new connections with each other. And amazingly, lost memories start to flood back.
The idea of a pill for memory loss sounds like pure science-fiction. But scientists from the Massachussetts Institute for Technology have taken a first important step to making it a reality, at least for mice.
Andre Fischer and colleagues managed to restore…
bioephemera | January 16, 2009ScienceOnline09 kicks off tonight. Formerly known as the Duke Blogging Conference, it's a weekend of interactive sessions on science blogging with lots of Sciblings and others representing the science blogging collective. Follow along on the conference wiki or Scibling Bora's blog for all the details.
I am extremely disappointed that I am too sick to go and co-chair the arts sessions with Glendon Mellow, but I made the right decision, because I am not getting better - I spent Wednesday at the State of the Net conference only a few miles from home, and I was destroyed afterward. I'll be…
j7uy5 | January 15, 2009There is a thought-provoking editorial in the openly-accessible Journal of Psychiatry of Neuroscience (JPN): Has the time come for clinical trials on the antidepressant effect of vitamin D?
(45 KB PDF). In it, the editor of the the Journal, Simon N.
Young, PhD, argues that there is enough evidence to justify increased
research efforts.
He points to a recent article in the Archives of General Psychiatry to support this view:
Depression Is Associated With Decreased 25-Hydroxyvitamin D and Increased Parathyroid Hormone Levels in Older Adults
Witte J. G. Hoogendijk, MD, PhD; Paul Lips, MD,…