neuroscience
neurophilosophy | March 13, 2008Best-selling fantasy writer Terry Pratchett, who announced in December that he has a rare form of early onset Alzheimer's, has pledged $1million for research into the disease.
In a speech given ealier today at the Alzheimer's Research Trust Netowrk Conference in Bristol, Pratchett said that he compliments his conventional treatment with various unspecified alternative remedies, in the hope that he can slow the progression of the illness:
The NHS kindly allows me to buy my own Aricept because I'm too young to have Alzheimer's for free...But, on the whole, you try to be your own doctor. Teh…
neurophilosophy | March 12, 2008Thanks to Natasha Dantzig for drawing my attention to this talk from last month's TED Conference in Monterey, California:
Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened - as she felt her brain functions slip away one by one, speech, movement, understanding - she studied and remembered every moment. This is a powerful story about how our brains define us and connect us to the world and to one another.
Taylor describes her experience in terms of unlocking the hidden potential…
purepedantry | March 12, 2008A Christmas present, maybe? Maybe not.
A "neurotheology" researcher called Dr Michael Persinger has developed something called the "God Helmet" lined with magnets to help you in your quest: it sounds like typical bad science fodder, but it's much more interesting than that.
Persinger is a proper scientist. The temporal lobes have long been implicated in religious experiences: epileptic seizures in that part of the brain, for example, can produce mystical experiences and visions. Persinger's helmet stimulates these temporal lobes with weak electromagnetic fields through the skull, and in…
j7uy5 | March 12, 2008XP13512 is an experimental new drug currently
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phase III trials for the treatment of
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rel="tag">restless legs syndrome. I was
reminded about this after seeing a post at
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and following the link to Sleep Expert, and browsing from there.
The author, Dr. Poceta, wrote about
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rel="tag">…
neurophilosophy | March 11, 2008
UCSD-TV, the local television station broadcast by the University of California at San Diego, has a series called Grey Matters, which is devoted to neuroscience.
To date, fifteen full-length presentations have been produced for the series, all of which are availabe online in RealPlayer at the UCSD-TV website. They can also be viewed on the UCTV YouTube Channel, along with the other programs produced (all 1,800+ of them).
The programs in the neuroscience series cover topics such as autism, aging, decision making, neural stem cells, perception, and development and evolution of the brain.
neurophilosophy | March 10, 2008
In today's issue of The New Yorker, John Lancaster reviews a new book called Perfumes: The Guide, by Luca Turin and Tania Sanchez.
Olfaction (the sense of smell) is, as Lancaster notes, "a profound mystery". Why is it, for example, that two aromatic molecules with almost identical structures can smell completely different from each other?
Take this molecule, R-carvone, which smells of spearmint (and also elicits a cooling sensation, because it binds to, and activates the "cold" receptor TRPM8). It is one of two enantiomers, or mirror images, of the carvone molecule.
S-carvone is chemically…
neurophilosophy | March 9, 2008
My fellow M.Sc. student Maria informs me that Brain Awareness Week is about to begin:
[This annual event]...is an international effort organized by the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives to advance public awareness about the progress and benefits of brain research. The Dana Alliance is joined in the campaign by partners in the United States and around the world, including medical and research organizations; patient advocacy groups; the National Institutes of Health, and other government agencies; service groups; hospitals and universities; K-12 schools; and professional organizations.…
neurophilosophy | March 8, 2008
Sea cucumbers are marine invertebrates which live on the sea floor and feed on debris that drift down. When threatened, they can harden their skin within seconds, so that they are less likely to be devoured by the approaching predator.
This behaviour is made possible by the structure of the sea cucumber's skin, whose deeper layers contain a network of collagen nanofibres enveloped within a viscous and elastic matrix of connective tissue. The arrangement of the collagen can be transiently modified, in response to a protein secreted by nerve cells found in the skin, which alters the chemical…
neurophilosophy | March 7, 2008
Here's the first 10 minutes of the recent episode of Horizon about sensory deprivation, which I discussed about 6 weeks ago. The entire program has been uploaded to YouTube: here are parts 2, 3, 4 and 5.
terrasig | March 5, 2008Yesterday, we received tomorrow's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine and, yet again, I nearly walked into a tree coming back from the mailbox. This (abstract, full text), folks, is a fascinating medical detective story rivaled only by (and similar to) the discovery that Parkinson's disease could be caused by contaminant from a faulty clandestine synthesis of an analog of the opiate, meperidine. (1979, 1983)
Here's the backstory: in the US, our newly-implemented restrictions on ephedrine and pseudoephedrine OTC drug products are due to the use of these chemicals as starting…
edyong | March 5, 2008Modern brain-scanning technology allows us to measure a person's brain activity on the fly and visualise the various parts of their brain as they switch on and off. But imagine being able to literally see what someone else is thinking - to be able to convert measurements of brain activity into actual images.
It's a scene reminiscent of the 'operators' in The Matrix, but this technology may soon stray from the realm of science-fiction into that of science-fact. Kendrick Kay and colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley have created a decoder that can accurately work out the one…
clock | March 4, 2008News from SCONC:
Linda Buck is the Nobel-Prize winner that may live farthest from NC (but still in the U.S.). She will give a seminar Monday, March 10 at 4 p.m. in the Grand Ballroom of the Talley Center at NCSU. Buck won the Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2004 for the discovery of olfactory receptors and subsequent work on the neurobiological basis for smell. The title of her talk is "Olfactory Sensing in Mammals." Buck is based at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. This seminar is part of a series put on by the W.M. Keck Center for Behavioral Biology at NCSU.
neurophilosophy | March 3, 2008
[Introduction|Part 2|Part 3]
The study by McKemy et al is of great significance, as it led to the identification and characterization of the first cold receptor. This study also suggests that TRP channels have a general role in thermosensation, as all the previously identified TRP channels are sensitive to heat.
Dhaka et al (2007) show that TRPM8 is required for sensitivity to innocuous cool stimuli and is also involved in sensing noxious cold temperatures. The TRPM8 knockout mice generated in this study have only a partial deficit in sensing noxious cold stimuli, so it is most likely that…
neurophilosophy | March 3, 2008The 40th edition of Encephalon, which is now up at Mind Hacks, includes some excellent entries from the usual suspects. The next edition will be at Pure Pedantry on March 17th. If you'd like to contribute, email permalinks to your neuroscience or psychology blog posts to encephalon{dot}host{at}gmail{dot}com.
neurophilosophy | March 1, 2008
(Image: Kymmy Lorrain/BrainCells, Inc.)
The two winners of GE Healthcare's 2007 IN Cell Image Competition will be going on display on the NBC screen in New York City's Times Square at 7pm on Friday, March 7th and Saturday, March 8th.
This confocal image, which won the vote of the scientific panel of judges, shows cultured stem cells from the human neocortex. The cells are stained with antibodies for the neuronal marker Tuj1 (green), the glial cell marker GFAP (red) and DNA (blue).
neurophilosophy | March 1, 2008Gazzaniga is a professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California in Santa Barbara, and director of the Law and Neuroscience Project.
In the 66-minute interview, he discusses, among other things, the use and misuse of neuroimaging data in the courtroom, the ethics of cognitive enhancement, and the pioneering studies of split brain patients that he carried out with Roger Sperry in the 1960s.
neurophilosophy | February 29, 2008
[Introduction|Part 2]
Takashima et al (2007) carried out one of the first investigations of the distribution of TRPM8-positive sensory nerve terminals in various peripheral structures, using transgenic mice which express enhanced green fluorescent protein under the control of the TRPM8 transcriptional promoter.
First, they confirmed that the transgene expression was neuron-specific, by showing that cultured DRG and TG neurons from the transgenic animals expressed both GFP and the pan-neuronal marker PGP-9.5. The correspondence of GFP and PGP-9.5 coexpression with TRPM8 immunoreactivity…
edyong | February 28, 2008
Chimpanzees may not be able to recite Hamlet or giving rousing speeches but there is no doubt that they are excellent communicators. They exchange a wide variety of sophisticated calls and gestures that carry meaning and can be tailored to different audiences.
The sophistication of chimp communication doesn't stop there. Jared Taglialatela from the Yerkes National Primate Research Center has found that chimp signals and human speech are both strongly influenced by the same area in the left half of the brain - a region called the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG).
In humans, the left IFG is home…
purepedantry | February 28, 2008We have all heard about the runner's high, and a great many of us have felt it. When you are running a marathon, about an hour or two in you feel a feeling of euphoria right like you could run forever. Of course you can't, but you don't feel that way. (In my case the runner's high immediately precedes the runner's heart attack.)
It is still not entirely clear what causes the runner's high, but Boecker et al. have taken a big step in explaining it using PET scanning.
The prevailing theory is that the runner's high is caused by endorphins. Endorphins are endogenous opioid…
neurophilosophy | February 28, 2008
One shouldn't really need an excuse to embed this fantastic performance by Thelonious Monk, but now there is one: NIDCD researchers believe that they have identified the cognitive neural substrate of jazz improvisation.
For the study, which is published in the open access journal PLoS One, Charles Lamb and Allen Braun recruited six professional jazz pianists. The participants were asked to play a specially-designed keyboard whilst their brain activity was monitored with functional magnetic resonance imaging.
In the control condition, the musicians were asked to play an ascending or…