neuroscience
clock | July 28, 2008Science Communicators of North Carolina:
Thursday, August 7
7 p.m.
The Beautiful Mind: Making Memories
Dr. Kelly Giovanello of the UNC-CH Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory Lab. Part of the Morehead Planetarium Current Science Forum.
250 E. Franklin St., Chapel Hill, (919) 962-1236
neurophilosophy | July 26, 2008Today's Daily Telegraph contains a fascinating extract from Norman Doidge's new book The Brain That Changes Itself, about a woman who feels that she is constantly falling because she has lost her sense of balance as a result of damage to the vestibular system.
Cheryl Schiltz, who is now 50 years old, contracted a bacterial infection following a hysterectomy, and was subsequently treated with gentamicin. Excessive use of this antibiotic damages the semi-circular canals, three joined structures in the inner ear which give us our sense of balance by acting like spirit levels to provide…
neurophilosophy | July 24, 2008
Depression is a common neuropsychiatric disorder which affects at least 1 in 7 adults. The condition can have a major effect on patients' quality of life, and is a major cause of both disability and suicide.
Many patients with depression can be treated effectively with antidepressant medications, such as the specific serotonin re-uptake inhibitor (SSRI) fluoxetine (more popularly known as Prozac). However, a significant proportion of patients - up to 20% - do not respond to these drugs, or to other forms of treatment.
Now a study published online in the journal Biological Psychiatry suggests…
neurophilosophy | July 21, 2008This morning I attended a talk about the research behind, and clinical applications of, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). I've written about BCIs many times in the past; they monitor the electrical activity of the brain, either invasively by means of implanted electrodes, or non-invasively by means an electroencephalogram cap, and this activity is analyzed and used to drive a peripheral device, such as a prosthetic limb, or a computer.
Nevertheless, it was an interesting talk, as it featured prominent researchers in the field, and included an application that was hitherto unknown to me. It…
neurophilosophy | July 21, 2008The 50th edition of Encephalon is now online at SharpBrains. It includes entries about the path planning by hippocampal place cells, the role of calcium ion homeostasis in Alzheimer's Disease and the potential applications of transcranial magnetic stimulation.
clock | July 19, 2008Carl Zimmer: How Your Brain Can Control Time:
For 40 years, psychologists thought that humans and animals kept time with a biological version of a stopwatch. Somewhere in the brain, a regular series of pulses was being generated. When the brain needed to time some event, a gate opened and the pulses moved into some kind of counting device.
One reason this clock model was so compelling: Psychologists could use it to explain how our perception of time changes. Think about how your feeling of time slows down as you see a car crash on the road ahead, how it speeds up when you're wheeling around a…
neurophilosophy | July 19, 2008The keynote Speaker for the Human Mind and Behaviour theme is Pierre Magistretti of the Brain-Mind Institute at Ecole Polytechnique Federal de Lausanne in Switzerland.
Title: Looking Inside Your Brain
Abstract: Prof. Magistretti will outline current brain-imaging technology and explore the ethical and societal implications of how, in addition to conventional medical diagnostic applications, it might be sed. He is professor of Neuroenergetics and Cellular Dynamics at the Brain Mind Institute.
Magistretti began his talk by emphaising that despite major developments of neuroimaging techniques…
edyong | July 17, 2008New Scientist's Feedback section has a running series of items on "nominative determinism", that strange phenomenon where a person's bears eerie witness to their occupation, such as a neurologist called Lord Brain, or an article on urology authored by Splatt and Weedon. Well here's another example for them - a new paper about a singing fish from a scientist called Bass.
Beyond the wall-mounted horrors of Big Mouth Billy, fish are not exactly known for their vocal stylings, but one group - the toadfishes and midshipmans - are very noisy indeed. They make a range of dull grunts and hums by…
neurophilosophy | July 16, 2008It is well established that certain types of memory are consolidated during sleep. Now Nature News reports on findings presented at the Federation of European Neuroscience Societies Forum in Geneva last weekend, which suggest that sleep loss can lead to the formation of false memories:
Susanne Diekelmann in Jan Born's lab at the University of Lubeck, Germany, and her colleagues asked volunteers to learn lists of words, each list relating to a particular topic. For example, they might learn the words 'white', 'dark', 'cat' and 'night' -- all of which can be linked to the word 'black' -- but…
purepedantry | July 16, 2008Temporal discounting is our tendency to want things now rather than later. In order to encourage us to save money, banks have to offer us a reward in the form of an interest rate. In order to delay gratification, we have to be convinced that the reward in the future is going to be sufficiently large to compensate us for going without right now.
When economists talk about temporal discounting, they talk about it in terms of what is called the discount rate. The discount rate is the percentage of money that you would have to be offered after a time period to convince you to save.…
neurophilosophy | July 16, 2008
This three-dimensional reconstruction of an amyloid fibril (found at Discover) was created by Nikolaus Grigorieff and his colleagues at Brandeis University, by computer processing of a transmission electron cryomicroscopy image. It is the most detailed image yet of the abnormally folded protein which accumulates to form the senile plaques that are a pathological hallmark of Alzheimer's Disease.
The fibrils consist of a protein fragment called amyloid-beta 1-40, an insoluble forty amino acid polypeptide generated by the sequential actions of a number of enzymes on the amyloid precursor…
neurophilosophy | July 14, 2008
Back in January, the Daily Mail reported on "the helmet that could turn back the symptoms of Alzheimer's." The device is pictured above, held by its inventor, a British GP called Gordon Dougal. It consists of 700 light-emitting diodes which transmit near-infrared light into the brain and can, according to Dougal, stimulate hippocampal neurogenesis, and therefore reverse the cognitive decline associated with Alzheimer's, if worn for 10 minutes a day for about a month.
When the story first came out, David Gorski did a brilliant job of explaining why it is probably too good to be true: Dougal'…
neurophilosophy | July 12, 2008
In the July issue of the magazine Literary Review, Philip Davis discusses the effect of William Shakespeare's use of language on cognitive function.
Davis, a professor of English at the University of Liverpool, and editor of The Reader is working with psychologist Guillaume Thierry and cognitive neuroscientist Neil Roberts to explore how the brain responds to a linguistic trick called functional shift, or word-class conversion, in which the structure of a sentence is changed so that one part of speech (say a noun) is transformed into another (such as a verb).
Functional shift was often…
neurophilosophy | July 9, 2008
A new study, published today in the open access journal PLoS One, provides evidence that remaining mentally active throughout life reduces the rate of age-related neurodegeneration and may therefore stave off Alzheimer's Disease and other forms of dementia.
Valenzuela et al used the Lifetime of Experiences Questionnaire (LEQ) to estimate the extent to which 37 healthy older individuals had engaged in complex mental activity throughout their lives. They also performed functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure hippocampal volume in the participants, at the beginning of the study…
neurophilosophy | July 8, 2008
The humble nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is a millimeter-long roundworm which eeks out its existence in the soil and feeds on bacteria.
Because it lives in a dark environment, and lacks specialized light-sensing organs, the nematode has always been assumed to be completely blind.
However, a new study published online in Nature Neuroscience shows that C. elegans they possess neurons which are sensitive to light. As well as showing for the first time that C. elegans has a rudimentary sense of vision, the findings also shed some light on the evolution of the eye.
Despite lacking eyes,…
purepedantry | July 7, 2008Human beings use stereotyped facial expressions to identify the feelings of others. We can tell what another person is feeling in part because of how their face looks. However, this says very little about why the particular changes in facial musculature are associated with particular feelings. Why do the eyebrows go up when we are afraid instead of down?
To address this issue, Susskind et al., publishing in Nature Neuroscience, looked at the visual and physiological effects of fearful expressions as opposed to expressions of disgust and neutral expressions. They found that when someone…
neurophilosophy | July 7, 2008Over the last two months, Nature has published a series of essays about the latest scientific research into music, and now that the series is complete, it has been made available as a free PDF.
Among the authors of the essays are Aniruddh D. Patel, a theoretical neurobiologist at the Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, who discusses the brain's response to different varieties of music, and Laurel Trainor, director of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind, who explains the neural basis of music perception.
Nature also has a special podcast featuring a discussion between science writer…
j7uy5 | July 7, 2008There is an interesting and thought-provoking essay at The Oil Drum.
It was written by
href="http://www.uvm.edu/giee/?Page=about/students/Nathan_Hagens.html&SM=about/about_menu.html">Nathan
Hagens, a student at the Gund Institute, University of
Vermont.
He makes some errors in the science, and engages in some armchair
hypothesizing (see graph above), but the overall conclusions are not
affected.
He romps through evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, and behavioral
neuroscience on his way to explaining why we have an addiction to oil.
It clearly is not intended to be a…
neurophilosophy | July 6, 2008The 49th edition of Encephalon, which is online now at Neuroscientifically Challenged, includes entries on the limitations of the use of gene therapy for psychiatric disorders, the sensationalization of neuroimaging data by the mass media, and how the relationship between music and movement is manifested in the drumming that accompanies Sudanese martial arts demonstrations.