neuroscience
clock | May 31, 2008News from SCONC (Science Communicators of North Carolina):
On Thursday, June 5 at 7 p.m. in the Banquet Hall of the Morehead Planetarium in Chapel Hill, NC:
Public Lecture:
The Beautiful Mind: Breakthroughs and Breakdowns of the Brain,
with Dr. Ayse Belger.
neurophilosophy | May 30, 2008Encephalon 46 is now online at The Neurocritic's blog, and contains lots of fantastic neuroscience blogging, including posts on Senator Ted Kennedy's brain tumour, phantom supernumery limbs, and anti-drug vaccines.
The previous edition, at PodBlack Blog, also contains plenty of good reading material; I didn't link to it at the time as I was still busy with my exam revision.
neurophilosophy | May 29, 2008
Neuroscientists at the University of Pittsburgh report that they have successfully trained monkeys to feed themselves using a robotic arm controlled by a brain-computer interface (BCI). The study has been covered extensively in the media, and I've written quite a lot about these devices in the past, so, rather than elaborate on it here, I'll refer you to my previous posts, and to this post by Ed at Not Exactly Rocket Science.
However, I suggest that the new study is somewhat overhyped in some of the news stories that I've read. According to The Independent, for example, it is "a…
edyong | May 29, 2008Think of celery, an airplane or a dog. Each of these words, along with the thousands of others in the English language, create a different and unique pattern of activity in your brain. Now, a team of scientists has developed the first computer programme that can predict these patterns for concrete nouns - tangible things that you can experience with your senses.
With an accuracy of around 70%, the technique is far from perfect but it's still a significant technological step. Earlier work may have catalogued patterns of brain activity associated with categories of words, but this is the…
edyong | May 28, 2008The realm of science-fiction has just taken a big stride towards the world of science fact, with the creation of a prosthetic arm that can be moved solely by thought. Two monkeys, using only electrodes implanted in their brains, were able to feed themselves with the robotic arm complete with working joints.
Bionic limbs have been fitted to people before but they have always worked by connecting to the nerve endings in the chest. This is the first time that a prosthetic has been placed under direct control of the relevant part of the brain.
The study, carried out by Meel Velliste from the…
j7uy5 | May 28, 2008
href="http://www.researchblogging.org">
alt="ResearchBlogging.org"
src="http://www.researchblogging.org/images/rbicons/ResearchBlogging-Medium-White.png"
height="50" width="80">Just as
we learn of favorable studies about rTMS (see yesterday's post on this blog), studies that suggest
that ECT could be surpassed, the ECT camp fires again. A new
study by Sackeim indicates that a new form of ECT is highly effective,
with lower negative impact on cognition. The difference is in
the length of the electrical pulse. They use what they call
an ultrabrief pulse (0.3 millisecond), as…
neurophilosophy | May 27, 2008New research shows that a protein found in green algae can partially restore visual function when delivered into the retina of blind mice, taking us one step further towards genetic therapy for various conditions in which the degeneration of retinal cells leads to imapired vision or complete blindness.
Normally, light entering the eye falls upon the rods and cones at the back of the retina. These are the photoreceptors: they are packed with a light-sensitive protein called rhodopsin, which initiates an electrical signal when struck by photons (the particles which carry light).
The signals…
j7uy5 | May 27, 2008Jonah posted an
href="http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2008/05/tms.php">interesting
video of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transcranial_magnetic_stimulation"
rel="tag">Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS)
on The Frontal Cortex. That got me to
wondering if there was anything new.
In January 2007, the US FDA
href="http://www.fda.gov/ohrms/dockets/ac/07/briefing/2007-4273b1_00-index.htm">concluded
that rTMS was safe, but they were unconvinced of its effectiveness.
Their conclusion
href="http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jan07/comments/1697">was
arguable,
but the…
terrasig | May 26, 2008Let me say from the outset that I am too close to this issue, in many ways, to be fully objective. However, this issue is likely to be of interest to those in the academic community and especially anyone who followed the now-discredited 2006 Duke lacrosse case.
On 15 May Duke graduating senior and guest columnist, Kristin Butler, wrote an editorial in The Duke Chronicle entitled, "Summa cum loony." Her editorial addressed the fellow graduation across town of Solomon Burnette, convicted in 1997 of robbing two Duke students, and Crystal Gail Mangum, the exotic dancer hired by Duke lacrosse…
clock | May 23, 2008No matter how cutesy the acronim SAD is. Joseph reports on a study that links SAD to serotonin. But serotonin itself may not be necessary to understand how SAD works, though an intimate link between serotonin and melatonin (the former is the biochemical precursor of the latter) suggests that serotonin should be looked at in this context.
Also, if you suffer from SAD you should be very careful preparing for your long-distance travel: getting jet-lagged may trigger a bout of a few days of depression regardless of the time of year.
j7uy5 | May 22, 2008
alt="ResearchBlogging.org"
src="http://www.researchblogging.org/images/rbicons/ResearchBlogging-Medium-White.png"
align="left" border="0" height="50" hspace="3"
vspace="3" width="80">I have to admit, I
retain some skepticism about the concept of
href="http://scienceblogs.com/clock/2008/04/seasonal_affective_disorder_th_2.php">Seasonal
Affective Disorder. Research such as the topic of
this post helps, though, to lend some credibility to the concept.
It is true that exposure to bright light therapy (BLT) can alleviate
symptoms of SAD. That alone would seem to verify the…
neurophilosophy | May 21, 2008
The WBUR/NPR programme On Point has a very interesting interview with Jill Price (right), a 42-year-old woman from Los Angeles who has a "non-stop, uncontrollable and automatic" episodic memory.
Known in the scientific literature as A.J., Price is the first documented case of hyperthymestic syndrome, a condition in which autobiographical memories cannot be forgotten. Consequently, Price recalls every miniscule detail of her life since the age of 14, "like a movie" which is played over and over again on a daily basis.
Since Price's case was first reported in 2006, a handful of people have…
neurophilosophy | May 17, 2008The brain is an organ of staggering complexity, consisting of hundreds of billions of cells (and tens of thousands of different cell types) which form millions of specialized circuits that are organized into thousands of discrete areas. Neuroscientists have a number of methods for investigating brain circuitry and the connectivity of neurons within circuits. One of these involves exploiting the abilities of certain viruses, such as the herpes viruses, to target nerve cells; genetically manipulated viruses can be used to trace the synaptic connections between cells. This method has its…
neurophilosophy | May 15, 2008Four years ago this week, leading neuroscientists and psychologists convened at Columbia University for the Brain and Mind Symposium, "to discuss the accomplishments and limitations of reductionist and holistic approaches to examining the nervous system and mental functions".
Speakers included the Nobel Prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel, developmental neurobiologist Thomas Jessell, who heads Columbia's new neuroscience research centre, and pioneering child psychiatrist Michael Rutter, whose reassessment of John Bowlby's theory of maternal deprivation proved highly influential.
On the…
edyong | May 13, 2008
Three-toed sloths have a reputation for being some of the sleepiest of all animals, largely due to a single study, which found that captive sloths snooze for 16 hours a day. That certainly seems like a sweet deal to me, but it seems that the sloth's somnolent reputation has been exaggerated.
A new study - the first ever to record brain activity in a wild sleeping animal - reveals that wild sloths are far less lethargic than their captive cousins. In their natural habitat, three-toed sloths sleep for only 9.6 hours a day, not much more than an average first-year university student.
Wild…
purepedantry | May 9, 2008We have known for some time that there is a double dissociation (I will define that term in a minute) between location and identification in the visual system. Neuroscientists speak of a "where" pathway that goes from the primary visual cortex in the occipital lobe up into the parietal lobe. Lesions to this pathway produce deficits in locating objects in space using vision. There is also a "what" pathway that goes from the primary visual cortex down into the temporal lobe. Lesions to this pathway produce deficits in identifying objects using vision.
We knew that was true for vision, but…
neurophilosophy | May 3, 2008
This beautiful two-photon microscopy image, by Alanna Watt and Michael Hausser, shows a network of Purkinje cells in the cerebellar cortex. Named after the Czech anatomist who discovered them, Purkinje cells are the largest cells in the mammalian brain. They have a planar structure with a highly elaborate dendritic tree which forms hundreds of thousands of synapses with the parallel fibres of cerebellar granule cells, and a single axon which projects down into the deep cerebellar nuclei.
The image comes from a collection inspired by the UCL Neuroscience website, which has just been launched…
neurophilosophy | April 29, 2008My exams begin on Friday, so things are going to be pretty quite around here until around mid-May. I will post various bits and pieces over the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime, here are some interesting links that I've found recently:
In the New York Times Magazine, Gary Marcus discusses the possibility of memory chips - future generations of neural implants which use algorithms inspired by Google to augment the retrieval of information.
The author of the above article is interviewed by Carl Zimmer on bloggingheadsTV. Marcus is a professor of psychology at NYU, and the author of a…
edyong | April 29, 2008
Forget 'smart drugs' or brain-training video games. According to new research, a deceptively simple memory task can do what no drug or game has done before - it can boost your 'fluid intelligence', your ability to adapt your powers of reasoning to new challenges. Fluid intelligence doesn't rely on previous knowledge, skills or experience. It's at work when we solve new problems or puzzles, when we draw inferences and spot patterns, and when we test ideas and design experiments. To see what I mean, try testing yours.
Fluid intelligence appears to be strongly influenced by inherited…
edyong | April 21, 2008The easiest way to talk to someone else is face-to-face. If you can see the movements of a person's lips and facial muscles, you can more easily work out what they're saying, a fact made obvious if you're trying to have a conversation in a noisy environment. These visual cues clue our brains in on how best to interpret the signals coming from our ears.
But what happens when that's not possible, like when you're chatting on the phone or listening to a recorded message? New research suggests that if you've spoken to someone before, your brain uses memories of their face to help decode what…