neuroscience
neurophilosophy | December 14, 2008Professor Martha J. Farah emailed me recently to ask if I'd help spread the word about Neuroscience Boot Camp, which will take place at the University of Pennsylvania in August of next year:
What happens at Neuroscience Boot Camp?
Through a combination of lectures, break-out groups, panel discussions and laboratory visits, participants will gain an understanding of the methods of neuroscience and key findings on the cognitive and social-emotional functions of the brain, lifespan development and disorders of brain function.
Each lecture will be followed by extensive Q&A. Break-out…
clock | December 13, 2008As you know, H.M. died last week.
Listen to this brief (9 minutes) NPR Science Friday podcast - you will be able to hear Henry Gustav Molaison's voice. But most importantly, he has donated his brain to further scientific study. His brain will be sliced and stained and studied at The Brain Observatory at the University of California, San Diego.
But the way they are going to do it will be in a very Open Science manner. Dr. Jacopo Annese, who is leading the project said, in this interview, that the entire process will be open - there will be a forum or a blog where researchers from around…
neurophilosophy | December 12, 2008Recent advances in functional neuroimaging have enabled researchers to predict perceptual experiences with a high degree of accuracy. For example, it is possible to determine whether a subject is looking at a face or some other category of visual stimulus, such as a house. This is possible because we know that specific regions of the brain respond selectively to one type of stimulus but not another.
These studies have however been limited to small numbers of visual stimuli in specified categories, because they are based on prior knowledge of the neural activity associated with the conscious…
purepedantry | December 11, 2008I caught this article on ScienceDaily about the work of Professor Bart Hoebel at Princeton who has been attempting to show that sugar is an addictive substance like a drug. He presents data at the American College of Neuropsychopharmacology meeting to suggest that sugar fulfills the criterion for substances that we traditionally define as addictive:
Professor Bart Hoebel and his team in the Department of Psychology and the Princeton Neuroscience Institute have been studying signs of sugar addiction in rats for years. Until now, the rats under study have met two of the three elements of…
grrlscientist | December 9, 2008tags: encephalon, brain, behavior, cognition, neurobiology, neuroscience, blog carnival
The last frontier: The brain.
Image: Orphaned. Contact me so I can provide credit and linkage.
Welcome to Encephalon! This is the blogosphere's neuroscience blog carnival that focuses specifically upon the brain, neuroscience, perception and behavior. If you sent me an essay or video about the brain and its relationship to behavior, perception, cognition, or learning, then it is included here! Also, please accept my sincerest apologies for the one day delay in publishing Encephalon: a police action in…
neurophilosophy | December 9, 2008In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin noted that facial expressions vary little across cultures. We all recognize that someone whose eyes and mouth are wide open, and whose eyebrows are raised, is afraid. This characteristic expression is a social signal, which warns others of a potential threat and serves as a plea for help. It also enhances our ability to sense potential threats, by increasing the range of vision and enhancing the sense of smell.
Recognizing fear in others involves perceiving cues which we are consciously aware of as well as subliminal…
j7uy5 | December 8, 2008Tapentadol
is a drug for pain. It was approved by the US FDA for the
treatment of moderate to severe pain. The
href="http://www.fda.gov/bbs/topics/NEWS/2008/NEW01916.html">FDA
news release was dated 24 November 2008, although the actual
approval was a few days earlier.
Tapentadol acts on μ-opioid receptors, making it similar to
morphine
and its ilk. Do we need another opioid agonist? And
if so,
why? Suspicions deepen because it was produced by the same
company that makes tramadol. Indeed, it is similar to
tramadol in
many ways. Tramadol is the active ingredient in
Ultram®, now…
clock | December 5, 2008Everyone who's ever taken a Neuroscience class in college remembers the strange case of H.M.
H.M. suffered from epilepsy. Back in 1953, his brain was operated on - some large chunks (the hippocampi) were removed. Epilepsy was gone. So was his memory.
He could remember his life before surgery, but could not form any new memories. More specifically, he could not remember any new events ('declarative memory'), things that happened to him. Whatever he experienced years, months, weeks, days, hours, even minutes before, was forever lost. Every moment was a fresh moment. Every day a new…
purepedantry | December 5, 2008Patient H.M. just died:
In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation in Hartford to correct a seizure disorder, only to emerge from it fundamentally and irreparably changed. He developed a syndrome neurologists call profound amnesia. He had lost the ability to form new memories.
For the next 55 years, each time he met a friend, each time he ate a meal, each time he walked in the woods, it was as if for the first time.
And for those five decades, he was recognized as the most important patient in the history of brain science. As a participant in hundreds of studies, he helped…
neurophilosophy | December 5, 2008The amnesic patient known as H.M., who is the best known case study in neuropsychology, has died, at the age of 82.
H.M., whose full name has now been revealed as Henry Gustav Molaison, lost completely the ability to form new memories following a radical surgical procedure to treat his severe and intractable epilepsy.
The operation was performed in 1953 by William Scoville, a neurosurgeon at Hartford Hospital in Connecticut. Using an experimental technique he had recently developed, Scoville removed both of H.M.'s hippocampi in their entirety, together with some of the surrounding structures…
edyong | December 2, 2008A ridiculous number of science-fiction TV series and films have moments where characters exchange minds, from the brilliance of Quantum Leap to the latest season of Heroes. Body-swapping is such a staple of imaginative fiction that it's tempting to think that it has no place being scientifically investigated. But Valeria Petkova and Henrik Ehrsson beg to differ - while actually exchanging minds is clearly impossible, these two scientists have created an illusion that can make people feel that another body - be it a mannequin or an actual person - is really theirs.
The idea that our bodies…
neurophilosophy | December 2, 2008Body ownership - the sense that one's body belongs to one's self - is central to self-awareness, and yet is something that most of us take completely for granted. We experience our bodies as being an integral part of ourselves, without ever questioning how we know that our hands belong to us, or how we can distinguish our body from its surroundings.
These issues have long intrigued philosophers and psychologists, but had not been investigated by neuroscientists until recently. Now researchers from the Karolinska Institute report that they have induced a "body-swap" illusion, whereby…
neurophilosophy | December 1, 2008Synaesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimuli of one sensory modality evoke experiences in another modality. This is thought to occur as a result of insufficient "pruning" during development, so that most of the pathways connecting parts of the brain mediating the different senses remain in place instead of being eliminated. Consequently, there is too much cross-talk between sensory systems, such that activation of one sensory pathway leads simultaneously to activity in another.
Once believed to be extremely rare, synaesthesia is now thought to be relatively common. The cross-…
edyong | November 27, 2008
It goes without saying that we are capable of noticing changes to our bodies, but it's perhaps less obvious that the way we perceive our bodies can affect them physically. The two-way nature of this link, between physicality and perception, has been dramatically demonstrated by a new study of people with chronic hand pain. Lorimer Moseley at the University of Oxford found that he could control the severity of pain and swelling in an aching hand by making it seem larger or smaller.
Moseley recruited 10 patients with chronic pain in one of their arms and asked them to perform a series of ten…
neurophilosophy | November 26, 2008The term body image was coined by the great neurologist Henry Head and refers to a mental representation of one's physical appearance. Constructed by the brain from past experience and present sensations, the body image is a fundamental aspect of both self-awareness and self-identity, and can be disrupted in many conditions.
Disruption of the body image can have profound physical and psychological effects. For example, body image distortion is implicated in eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa, and also leads to phenomena such as phantom limb syndrome and body dysmorphic disorder;…
neurophilosophy | November 25, 2008For most of us, visual perception is crucial for spatial navigation. We rely on vision to find our way around, to position ourselves and localize objects within the surroundings, and to plan our trajectory on the basis of the layout of the environment. Blind people would therefore seem to be at a disadvantage. Unable to rely on vision, they depend instead upon different sorts of cues to form their representations of space. They rely, for example, on proprioception, which provides a sense of the location, movement and posture of one's own body through space, and on vestibular information…
neurophilosophy | November 24, 2008Prosopagnosia is a neurological condition characterised by an inability to recognize faces. In the most extreme cases, the prosopagnosic patient cannot even recognize their own face in the mirror or a photograph, and in his 1985 book The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, the neurologist Oliver Sacks describes the extraordinary case of a farmer who lost the ability to recognize the faces of his cows!
Also known as face blindness, prosopagnosia is associated with damage to specific parts of the temporal lobes. But there are also documented cases of patients who have the condition in the…
edyong | November 24, 2008Have you ever seen someone that you're sure you recognise but whose face you just can't seem to place? It's a common enough occurrence, but for some people, problems with recognising faces are a part of their daily lives. They have a condition called prosopagnosia, or face blindness, which makes them incredibly bad at recognising faces, despite their normal eyesight, memory, intelligence, and ability to recognise other objects.
Prosopagnosia can be caused by accidents that damage parts of the brain like the fusiform gyrus - the core part of a broad network of regions involved in processing…
neurophilosophy | November 19, 2008This beautiful image of the brain of a 5-day-old zebrafish larva, which was created by Albert Pan of Harvard University, has just won 4th place in the 2008 Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging competition. (See a larger version here.)
It was created using the Brainbow technique, a genetic method for labelling neurons, with which individual cells can be made to express a random combination of fluorescent proteins. An image of a mouse brainstem labelled using the same method was awarded 1st prize in last year's competition.
neurophilosophy | November 19, 2008Last Thursday's episode of the Radio 4 programme In Our Time featured a very interesting discussion about recent developments in neuroscience research. Presenter Melvynn Bragg was joined by psychologist Martin Conway of Leeds University, cognitive neuroscientist Gemma Calvert of the University of Warwick and philosopher David Papineau of Imperial College, who talked about the concept of the grandmother cell, new findings which show that the brain makes decisions before we are consciously aware of them, and the relationship between mind and brain. (Download MP3, 20Mb; thanks Ross!)
The most…