neuroscience
purepedantry | January 14, 2009I caught this article in O magazine by fellow ScienceBlogger, Rebecca Skloot of Culture Dish. The article isn't bad. It is about why people have trouble overcoming unproductive habits like trouble exercising. But I want to correct something she says that is inaccurate.
Dopamine has a primary role in the signaling reward, and this is a point made in her article. But she also says:
Dopamine teaches your brain what you want, then drives you to get it, regardless of what's good for you. It does this in two steps. First you experience something that gives you pleasure (say, McDonald's french…
bioephemera | January 13, 2009Larry Young has written a rather ambitious essay for Nature that skims over the prairie vole/AVPR1A research, breasts as erotic objects, and evidence of dopamine-based mother love on its way to a "view of love as an emergent property of a cocktail of ancient neuropeptides and neurotransmitters." Young then asks whether "recent advances in the biology of pair bonding mean it won't be long before an unscrupulous suitor could slip a pharmaceutical 'love potion' in our drink."
Unlikely? Maybe - but his point that antidepressants like Prozac influence the same neurotransmitters implicated in love…
neurophilosophy | January 13, 2009The unique capabilities of the human hand enable us to perform extremely fine movements, such as those needed to write or to thread a needle. The emergence of these capabilities was undoubtedly essential in human evolution: a combination of individually movable fingers, opposable thumbs and the ability to move the smallest finger and ring finger into the middle of the palm to meet the thumb gives us dexterity that is unparalleled in the animal kingdom.
Last year, geneticists identified a stretch of DNA which has undergone rapid change in humans but not in chimps, our closest relatives, or in…
ddobbs | January 13, 2009Rolling deadlines have kept me from the blogging desk, but I can occupy it long enough now to call out a few items that either haven't received as much coverage as they might have -- or that have gotten several interesting hits.
⢠At Huffpost, Jeanne Lenzer and Shannon Brownlee offer the FDA a three-step program:
Step One: Admit that you are currently powerless over the industry you are supposed to be regulating. You have let Big Pharma take over your life. You have become dependent on drug company money that comes from the Prescription Drug Fee User Act (PDUFA) of 1992, and over the…
neurophilosophy | January 12, 2009
The Boston Globe has a cool infographic by Jonah Lehrer and Javier Zarracina, describing five simple ways in which sensory perception can be altered using everyday objects. These include the Ganzfeld procedure, a mild sensory deprivation technique which leads to visual or auditory hallucinations; the Pinocchio illusion, in which one's nose is perceived as being incredibly long; and the rubber hand illusion, whereby one can be fooled into thinking that a fake hand is a part of one's own body.
bioephemera | January 12, 2009
I went to a party the other day wearing the shirt above. I'd seen it online, expressed covetousness, and the staffer actually tracked it down and bought it for me (thus scoring major points for A) an early Christmas present, B) listening to my incessant stream-of-consciousness babble, and C) appreciating his girlfriend's geeky streak.)
Anyway, at the party, most of my friends couldn't decipher anything past "OMG, WTF." I was surrounded by "digital immigrants." In fact, I'm a digital immigrant myself: I didn't get my first email account until college, and I never IM'd until a year or two ago…
edyong | January 11, 2009You've just been in a horrific car crash. You're unharmed but the vividness of the experience - the sight of a looming car, the crunching of metal, the overwhelming panic - has left you a bit traumatised. You want something to help take the edge off and fortunately a doctor is on hand to prescribe you with... Tetris.
Yes, that Tetris. According to Emily Holmes from the University of Oxford, the classic video game of falling coloured blocks could prevent people who have suffered through a traumatic experience from developing full-blown post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). As ideas go, it's…
neurophilosophy | January 9, 2009The familiar buzzing sound made by a mosquito may be irritating to us humans, but it is an important mating signal. The sound, produced by the beats of the insect's wings, has a characteristic frequency called the "flight tone"; when produced by a female, it signals her presence to nearby males, thereby attracting potential mates.
Attraction is not simply a matter of the male hearing and homing in on the female's flight tone. Females were long believed to be deaf, but two years ago, it was found that courting pairs interact acoustically to create a duet: both male and female modulate the…
bioephemera | January 6, 2009Neuroskeptic has written a great post evaluating the much-hyped 2008 study that showed people will more readily accept information if a neurosciency-explanation is attached - even if the neuroscience is irrelevant.
If this effect is real, it has big implications for those of us involved in science/health communication - when to use this advantage, and when to eschew it? (Especially when we're trying to explain neuroimaging studies. . ?) And what is the source of this bias - mass media's ongoing love affair with neuroscientific explanations and pretty brain pictures? Or something else entirely?
j7uy5 | January 6, 2009When I was in training, the chairperson (John Greden)
of the department never spoke about schizophrenia. Instead, he
always used the phrase, "the schizophrenias." He believed that
there were different disease states that all produced similar clinical
presentations. But because of the rudimentary state of our
knowledge, we were unable to make clear, meaningful distictions between
these different illnesses. As a result, we were improperly
lumping them together. He thought that soon, we would be able to
make meaningful distinctions between these different illnesses.
Perhaps the advances…
purepedantry | January 5, 2009Seriously, when I read the headlines to this article, I wanted to wretch retch. (Ed. I need to learn how to spell.)
Scientists discover true love
Scientists: True love can last a lifetime
I can feel it welling up now...eh...OK, I feel better.
Just to be clear, I didn't want to wretch retch because I am a deeply cynical person who scoffs at the notion of true love. (That is true, but not why I wanted to wretch retch.) I wanted to wretch retch because scientific research like this inevitably results in the worst kind of popular tripe when communicated in journalism. We are talking the most…
j7uy5 | December 31, 2008Ethanol is a poison. But the difference between poison and
medicine sometimes is only a matter of dosage.
For decades, there have been studies that purport to show a small
benefit from regular consumption of small amounts of ethanol, with
obvious problems caused by excessive alcohol consumption.
Physicians, however, are divided about what to do with this
information. Do we recommend that people have one alcohol
beverage per day, or do we remain silent on the subject?
One reason to be reluctant to recommend moderate drinking, as opposed
to abstinence, is that it is very difficult to prove…
neurophilosophy | December 30, 2008Being so closely related to our own species, monkeys serve as important model organisms, and have provided many insights into the workings of the human brain. Research performed on monkeys in the past 30 years or so has, for example, been invaluable in the development of brain-machine interfaces.
Monkeys have also contributed a great deal to our understanding of the visual system - they were the subjects in many of the classic experiments of Hubel and Wiesel, which showed that the primary visual cortex contains neurons that are responsive to edges and bars moving in specific orientations.…
neurophilosophy | December 24, 2008Your face is a major component of your self-identity, but when you look into a mirror, how do you know that the person you are seeing is really you? Is it because the person in the reflection looks just like you? Or because the reflection moves when you move? Or perhaps because you see the face in the reflection being touched when you reach up to touch yours.
Recent studies have shown that recognizing our own bodies depends upon integrated information from the senses of vision, touch and proprioception (the sense of how our bodies are positioned in space). These cues can easily be…
neurophilosophy | December 23, 2008Synchiria is a neurological condition in which a stimulus applied to one side of the body is referred to both sides. If, for example, one's left hand is touched, he experiences tactile sensations on both hands. People with intact brains do not experience this, probably because of inhibitory mechanisms which prevent activity in one hemisphere of the brain from crossing over to the other.
This phenomenon is therefore very rare, and has only been reported in a small number of brain-damaged patients. It has been described in the auditory sense, whereby a person addresses a patient on the left…
neurophilosophy | December 23, 2008My second article for the Scientific American Mind Matters website is online now. This one is about the recent study which demonstrated that distorting the body image alters pain perception - specifically, it was found that using inverted binoculars to make the hand look smaller than it actually was led to a reduction in the pain and swelling induced by movement in patients with chronic pain.
It is not clear why this happens, but the findings obviously have major implications for pain management. One explanation put forward by the authors is that this simple manipulation caused the subjects…
clock | December 23, 2008A well-written press release on a very well done and exciting study:
Honey bees on cocaine dance more, changing ideas about the insect brain:
In a study published in 2007, Robinson and his colleagues reported that treatment with octopamine caused foraging honey bees to dance more often. This indicated that octopamine played a role in honey bee dance behavior. It also suggested a framework for understanding the evolution of altruistic behavior, Robinson said.
"The idea behind that study was that maybe this mechanism that structures selfish behavior - eating - was co-opted during social…
neurophilosophy | December 22, 2008Spatial navigation is the process on which we rely to orient ourselves within the environment and to negotiate our way through it. Our ability to do so depends upon cognitive maps, mental representations of the surrounding spaces, which are constructed by the brain and are used by it to calculate one's present location, based on landmarks in the environment and on our movements within it, and to plan future movements.
The term "cognitive map" was first used in a landmark 1948 paper, in which the behavioural psychologist Edward Tolman described his now famous studies of rats in mazes. In…
clock | December 20, 2008Happy Anniversary, PLoS ONE!
Today is PLoS ONE's second anniversary and we're celebrating by announcing that the winner of the second PLoS synchroblogging competition is SciCurious of the Neurotopia 2.0 blog.
"This fluent post captures the essence of the research and accurately communicates it in a style that resonates with both the scientific and lay community" - Liz Allen, PLoS.
Here is the winning entry, cross posted in its entirety:
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Einstein was smart, but Could He Play the Violin?
I already wrote one entry for PLoS ONE's second birthday, but I'm feeling sparky…
neurophilosophy | December 16, 2008One of the bigger challenges facing researchers who are developing artificial limbs is to create prostheses that not only act but also feel like real limbs. This is especially true for the hand, which is one of the most sensitive parts of the human body, and although advanced prosthetic hands with fully articulated digits which move independently of one another are now available, they would be far more useful if they provided the user with sensory feedback.
Last year, surgeons from the Rehabilitation Center of Chicago made some progress towards this goal: they fitted amputee Claudia Mitchell…