neuroscience
neurophilosophy | April 21, 2008
Our German counterparts at ScienceBlogs.de have produced this 21-minute video of an interview they did with neuroscientist Eric Kandel, who won the 2000 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his work on the cellular and molecular mechanisms of learning and memory in the sea slug Aplysia californica.
Kandel is one of the authors of Principles of Neural Science, the standard textbook for neuroscience at the undergraduate and postgraduate level. His autobiography, In Search of Memory, which was published in 2006 (and which I reviewed at the time), won the LA Times Book Award for Science…
neurophilosophy | April 20, 2008
Currents carried by sodium and potassium ions through the membrane of the giant axon of Loligo.
Get more documents
Docstoc is a useful tool for sharing PDFs, PowerPoint presentations and Word and Excel documents. It can also be used to embed files of these formats into a blog post in a customizable document viewer.
I've just set up an account, and have uploaded two papers by Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley, in which they describe their classic experiments on the giant axon of the squid. With these experiments, which were performed in the early 1950s, Hodgkin and Huxley…
edyong | April 18, 2008
It's late at night and although I want to finish this post, I'm pretty shattered. At the moment, I sorely need to boost my concentration and attentiveness and stave off the effects of fatigue. In lieu of actually getting some sleep, the ability to pop a little pill that will have the same effect sounds pretty enticing. Unfortunately (or perhaps luckily), the closest thing I have available is some coffee in the kitchen.
But for many people, taking a pill to sharpen your mental faculties - a so-called "cognitive enhancer" - is a much easier deal. A large number of prescription drugs can…
neurophilosophy | April 15, 2008I've just got the feedback on my final piece of coursework, and it's better than I expected:
A well written description of TrpM8 function in cold sensation. It is written clearly and in the context of experimental evidence. Some additional figures to summarise the results discussed would have been helpful.
The choice of papers demonstrates a clear understanding of the field and were a coherent choice. The candidate also extends their discussion on the significance of the findings through the citing of other works. This is clearly a distinction level essay. However, a further discussion…
clock | April 13, 2008
Since everyone is posting about spiders this week, I though I'd republish a sweet old post of mine, which ran on April 19, 2006 under the title "Happy Bicycle Day!" I hope you like this little post as much as I enjoyed writing it:
This week's theme for the Tar Heel Tavern is bicycle. I was wondering what to write about. Perhaps about crazy bicycle rides I had as a kid. Or a fun riff on "fish needing a bicycle". Then, I was saved! Because, today is the Bicycle Day! That's just great, because I can go on a scientific tangent with a local flavor.
If you do not know what Bicycle Day is,…
edyong | April 13, 2008Our brains are shaping our decisions long before we become consciously aware of them. That's the conclusion of a remarkable new study which shows that patterns of activity in certain parts of our brain can predict the outcome of a decision seconds before we're even aware that we're making one.
It seems natural to think that we carry out actions after consciously deciding to do so. I decide to start typing and as a result, my hands move around a keyboard. But according to modern neuroscience, that feeling of free will may be an illusion. For over twenty years, experiments have suggested that…
terrasig | April 12, 2008". . .you got marijuana in my lead."
Two great tastes that do not go great together (with apologies).
[Welcome Fark.com readers on 12 Oct 2008 - I comment on the recent story here and you can read our other posts on drugs of abuse here. Thanks for stopping by - APB]
A concise but fascinating medical detective story appears in the letters of this week's (10 Apr 2008) issue of the New England Journal of Medicine (free full text at the time of this posting.).
An astute group of physicians at Leipzig Hospital in Germany noted a local surge of young people presenting with classic symptoms of…
neurophilosophy | April 7, 2008
A 58-year-old man from Cumbria has had electrodes implanted his brain in order to treat his compulsive gambling.
Raymond Mandale (right), who suffers from Parkinson's, claims that his gambling habit was caused by a prescribed drug he had been taking to alleviate the symptoms of his condition, and is now seeking compensation from the manufacturers of the drug.
Mandale's case is not unprecedented. In the past few months, several Parkinson's patients who began gambling compulsively after taking the dopamine agonist Mirapex have brought lawsuits against the pharmaceuticals companies involved.…
neurophilosophy | April 6, 2008What with the current debate about the use of "smart" drugs by academics, I thought it pertinent to republish this old piece from January of last year, about a bacterial toxin which has been shown to enhance fear conditioning and spatial memory in mice.
In the late nineteenth century, the great Spanish neuroanatomist Santiago Ramon y Cajal suggested that memories might be formed by the strengthening of connections between nerve cells:
Cerebral gymnastics are not capable of improving the organization of the brain by increasing the number of cells, because it is known that the nerve cells…
neurophilosophy | April 3, 2008From my inbox:
First Interdisciplinary NeuroSchool of the European Neuroscience and Society Network,
EMBL, Monterotondo (Rome)
Sept. 28th-Oct. 5th
We are pleased to invite applications to the first interdisciplinary 'NeuroSchool' of the European Neuroscience and Society Network, a five year programme involving leading neuroscientists and social scientists from eleven European countries in collaborative research and debate. The aim of the school is to foster learning in a interdisciplinary symmetrical environment. It is intended for graduate students and post-doctoral fellows…
neurophilosophy | April 2, 2008
Bora Zivkovic is coming to London on Wednesday April 9th, and several events have been organized for his visit, which I'll be going to. First, there'll be a behind-the-scenes tour of the Natural History Museum, starting at 4.30pm, followed by a few drinks at The Queen's Arms.
If you're in London and would like to join us on the NHM tour, you should email Karen via the link above. Or you might like to meet us at the pub; we'll be there from about 6.30 onwards.
Incidentally, Bora has written about the new NIH initiative to crack down on the use of neuroenhancing drugs by academics…
purepedantry | April 2, 2008How do neurons in your brain encode the diversity of stimuli present in the world? This is one of the questions that neuroscientists have to answers about how the brain works. The world holds an infinite array of things to see, hear, touch, etc., yet your brain only has a finite number of neurons to encode them. How is this infinite diversity assimilated by a machine with finite components?
To address this issue, I want to talk about Hromadka et al. publishing in the journal PLoS Biology. Hromadka et al. perform electrical recordings in the auditory cortex of unanesthetized rats. (The…
neurophilosophy | April 1, 2008My broadband connection was down for the whole day yesterday, so I was unable to link to the latest edition of Encephalon, which is now up at Of Two Minds and is, apparently, hosted by none other than Paris Hilton.
As usual, this edition includes some fantastic entries from some of the best neuroscience and psychology blogs on the web. I especially like the Neurocritic's short discussion about the practice in eastern countries of using the odour of smelly shoes to control epileptic seizures, and Jennifer's post about Rita Levi-Montalchini's discovery of nerve growth factor (NGF) and the role…
clock | April 1, 2008There have recently been several articles in the media about brain enhancers, so-called Nootropics, or "smart drugs". They have been abused by college students for many years now, but they are now seeping into other places where long periods of intense mental focus are required, including the scientific research labs. Here is a recent article in New York Times:
So far no one is demanding that asterisks be attached to Nobels, Pulitzers or Lasker awards. Government agents have not been raiding anthropology departments, riffling book bags, testing professors' urine. And if there are illicit…
edyong | March 29, 2008Bad experiences can be powerful learning aids for our sense of smell. A new study reveals that electric shocks can make people more sensitive to the differences between very similar chemicals that previously smelled identical.
Every day, thousands of different molecules waft past our nose. Many of these are uncannily similar and some are more important to others. Wen Li from Northwestern University wanted to see how people learn to distinguish the critical smells from the unimportant ones.
Smell the difference
Working in the lab of smell guru, Jay Gottfried, Li attempted to train 12…
neurophilosophy | March 28, 2008
Jennifer Ouellette reports from a month-long program on the anatomy, development and evolution of the brain, at the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics, with a fantastic post called Tools of the brain trade.
Inspired by a talk given by Winifred Denk, about reconstructing brain circuitry using serial electron microscopy, Jennifer's post covers the discovery by Camillo Golgi of the silver chromate method for impregnating samples of brain tissue, and the refinement of the technique by Santiago Ramon y Cajal. It concludes with a brief mention of modern imaging techniques, such as two-photon…
neurophilosophy | March 26, 2008Traditionally, the use of tools was believed to be restricted to humans and several other primate species, and, like language, was argued to be a major driving force behind the evolution of the human brain. However, this view is now being challenged. For example, in recent years it has become clear that birds have sophisticated tool-using abilities. Now, a group of researchers from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute in Japan have demonstrated for the first time that rats degus* can be trained to use simple tools.
The new study, by Okanoya et al, is published online today in the open access…
neurophilosophy | March 25, 2008A comparative neuroimaging study performed by researchers from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Oxford, provides clues to how human language evolved.
In the past, it was believed that the increase in brain size during human evolution occured mainly to accomodate our complex linguistic abilities. But the findings of this new study suggest that the emergence of language also required major modifications in how the brain is wired.
Using diffusion tensor imaging (DTI, a type of functional magnetic resonance imaging which I described in…
terrasig | March 18, 2008This issue was brought up by my fellow blogger, Joseph at Corpus Callosum, following an article in yesterday's LA Times.
For those not familiar with the concept or countries other than the US where laws may differ, generic drugs are those with the same active chemical as the originally-approved "brand name" drug. The original drug manufacturer is the one that conducts all of the preclinical and clinical safety and efficacy testing, natural product isolation and/or chemical synthesis, formulation with inactive ingredients to assure dissolution and reproducible release of the drug, etc. In…
neurophilosophy | March 15, 2008For the benefit of new readers, I've selected what I think are the best posts from this blog.
Wilder Penfield, Neural Cartographer: The patient lies on the operating table, with the right side of his body raised slightly. The anaesthetist sterilizes his scalp and injects it with Nupercaine to produce analgesia - the patient will remain fully conscious throughout the procedure. Behind the surgical drapes, three large incisions are made in his scalp. A large flap of bone is then cut from his skull, and turned downward to expose the surface of his brain. The ultraviolet lights which illuminate…