neuroscience
omnibrain | January 31, 2008Check out the newest events at the Exploratorium. They Sound Great!
Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow/Optimal Experience Researcher)
Among Renowned Speakers To Appear
Mind Lecture Series Continues
February 2, 9, and 23, 2008
"Flow" (Optimal Experience) researcher Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (February 9) is among the renowned speakers featured in the Exploratorium's continuing Mind Lecture Series in February 2008. The series is presented in conjunction with the opening of Mind, a major new Exploratorium collection, four years in the making, made possible by the National Science Foundation.…
neurophilosophy | January 30, 2008
Canadian surgeons have made a serendipitous discovery. While using deep brain stimulation to try suppressing the appetite of a morbidly obese patient, they inadvertently evoked in the patient vivid autobiographical memories of an event that had taken place more than 30 years previously. They also found that the electrical stimulation improved the patient's performance on associative memory tasks.
These unexpected findings raise the possibility that deep brain stimulation could be used to treat patients with Alzheimer's Disease, and the research team is now beginning a small clinical…
terrasig | January 29, 2008. . .that's the message from Dr Bertha Madras, deputy director of the White House Office on National Drug Control Policy, to heroin and morphine users whose lives might be saved in the overdose situation by public distribution of "overdose rescue kits" comprised of a $9.50 nasal spray containing Narcan.
Narcan is the brand name for naloxone, an antagonist (blocker) of these drugs at μ opioid receptors. When an overdose of opioid drugs binds to these receptors in the respiratory control center of a primitive part of our brain, one stops breathing, a situation that pathologists say is "…
neurophilosophy | January 28, 2008In my second coursework essay, I discuss a number of recent studies which demonstrate that synaptic strengthening in different regions of the mammalian brain requires the incorporation of Ca2+-permeable GluR1-lacking AMPA receptors into the postsynaptic membrane of active or newly-potentiated synapses.
Alpha-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazole propionic acid receptors (AMPARs) are glutamate-gated cation channels which mediate fast excitatory neurotransmission in the brain. AMPARs are homo- or heteromeric protein complexes, consisting of different combinations of GluR1-4 subunits. Each…
neurophilosophy | January 27, 2008
Last Tuesday's episode of Horizon, called Total Isolation, is available for viewing and download at the BBC iPlayer website for the next 2 days. In the 50-minute documentary, Professor Ian Robbins, a trauma psychologist at the University of Surrey who specializes in supporting torture victims, reconstructs a highly controversial study first performed in the 1950s.
The new study involved six subjects who volunteered to experience 48 hours of complete sensory deprivation. The volunteers first performed a battery of tests designed to assess various cognitive functions, such as visual…
j7uy5 | January 27, 2008Several days ago, I saw
href="http://www.epicurious.com/articlesguides/blogs/editor/2008/01/expensive-wine.html">an
article about some research on the relationship between the
price of wine, the subjective experience of taste, and the effect of
wine on brain function as assessed by
title="Wikipedia: Functional magnetic resonance imaging"
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMRI" rel="tag">fMRI.
The research is part of the growing body of work that pertains to the
study of neural effects of marketing:
href="www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/persuaders/etc/neuro.html"
rel…
omnibrain | January 25, 2008Via Modern Mechanix:
Reading Thoughts by Radio
Can thoughts be read by radio? "Madam Radora" seems to prove that they can. Madam is not a human being, but a life-size automaton shown at the Permanent Radio Fair in New York. Her "thoughts" and movements are controlled entirely by wireless; no wires of any kind are attached to the table whereon she rests, and a liberal reward is promised the person who can prove that this is not true. Persons desiring to ask questions simply stand before "Madam Radora" with their hands resting on a special pedestal carrying a number of electrical contacts.…
omnibrain | January 25, 2008If I only had a brain:
According to this highly intelligible comment from YouTube this song was featured on Beavis and Butthead - surprise surprise!
DaDrizzL31214 (2 weeks ago)
On Beavis and Butthead, they were waatching this vid and Beavis started going with the tune for the whole song. He wouldn't shut the hell up even after Butthead smacked him upside his head a couple of times. Lol then Butthead started doing the same at the end. XD
j7uy5 | January 25, 2008Usually I cringe when I see yet another newspaper article about
suicide. But I always read them. This time, I did
cringe, but needlessly. The article turned out to be OK.
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/24/washington/24fda.html?ei=5090&en=69952ee3ab69a7b3&ex=1358917200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print">F.D.A.
Requiring Suicide Studies in Drug Trials
By
href="http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/gardiner_harris/index.html?inline=nyt-per"
title="More Articles by Gardiner Harris">GARDINER HARRIS
January 24, 2008
src…
purepedantry | January 24, 2008This review by Luiz Pessoa in Nature Neuroscience Reviews has to be the most intelligent things I have read in a long time. He argues that the notion that cognition and emotion are separable modules -- a notion that permeates the popular impression of the brain in our society (and more than a few scientific discussion) -- is fundamentally wrong:
In this Perspective I will make a case for the notion, based on current knowledge of brain function and connectivity, that parcelling the brain into cognitive and affective regions is inherently problematic, and ultimately untenable for at least…
neurotopia | January 23, 2008If you haven't checked out the DANA Foundation, well, you should. The DANA Foundation and DANA Alliance for Brain Initiatives are dedicated to providing up-to-date scientific information to the public, as well as supporting research and the arts. And they do a heck of a good job at laying out new findings in a very accessible fashion.
I wanted to take a quick moment to plug their book The DANA Guide to Brain Health: A practical family reference from medical experts. This book and CD-ROM, with over 100 scientists and clinicians contributing to the contents, is an excellent primer in a whole…
omnibrain | January 20, 2008Check out this fark photoshop contest using neurons. Here's one of my favorites:
neurophilosophy | January 20, 2008
The Canadian Globe and Mail reports on the remarkable case of Stacey Gayle, a 25-year-old woman from Edmonton who has just had neurosurgery to treat intractable epilepsy.
Gayle (right) was suffering from musicogenic epilepsy, a rare form of the condition in which seizures are triggered by music. In some patients with this type of epilepsy, listening to any type of music provokes a seizure. In others, seizures are only triggered by certain types of music.
The stimuli which induce seizures in musicogenic epileptics can be even more specific. In one case, the attacks occurred only when he…
neurophilosophy | January 19, 2008
This diagram of the retina, drawn by Santiago Ramon y Cajal in 1892, comes from Web Vision, a comprehensive overview of the organization of the mammalian retina and visual system compiled by Drs. Helga Kolb, Eduardo Fernandez and Ralph Nelson of the John Moran Eye Center at the University of Utah.
The site is arranged like a book and contains 14 parts. It covers the anatomy, physiology, development and regeneration of retinal circuitry; the primary visual cortex, colour vision and visual psychophysics; and the clinical electrophysiology of various retinal degenerative diseases. It also…
omnibrain | January 18, 2008Don't play any of the embedded videos if you've ever had a seizure.
Now that we're done with the warning...
We've all heard of the Pokemon incident in Japan where nearly 700 school aged children were admitted to the hospital with "convulsions, vomiting, irritated eyes and other symptoms" common to epilepsy. This lead to a number of government investigations and media companies searching their offerings to determine whether any of their shows had similar scenes that might induce photosensitive epilepsy. According to a CNN report of the incidents:
Dr. Yukio Fukuyama, a juvenile epilepsy…
terrasig | January 18, 2008We're a little bit late here in wishing the DrugMonkey blog a happy 1st blogiversary. Contributors DrugMonkey, BikeMonkey, and PhysioProf have had a very productive year of offering valuable career advice for graduate and postgraduate trainees in the biomedical sciences, general discussions on NIH grant funding, and various topics in neuroscience.
The sci/med blogosphere is populated quite heavily by graduate students, medical students, and postdoctoral fellows. This situation is perhaps easy to explain in that most of these trainees are of an age that is comfortable with social networking…
neurophilosophy | January 17, 2008
This film clip describes how neuroscientists have controlled the movements of a humanoid robot using a brain-computer interface (BCI) embedded in the motor cortex of a monkey.
I've written about BCIs before, so I won't go into details here. For more information about how they work, follow the links at the bottom, and for more about this particular device, there's an article in the NY Times by Sandra Blakeslee.
The main difference here is that the monkey and the robot were more than 7,000 miles apart: the monkey was in Miguel Nicolelis's lab at Duke University Medical Center in North…
purepedantry | January 17, 2008
In neuroscience, we spend a lot of time studying the normal function of the nervous system, and we spend a lot of time studying disease processes that can impair this function. What we don't typically do is study how functional recovery can happen. Functional recovery is how an neurological impaired individual uses existing pathways to compensate for the injury -- thereby improving overall function. The lack of study in this area is unfortunate, particularly because in some cases the brain can show an amazing ability to compensate for injuries.
(Just as an aside, I want to distinguish…
neurophilosophy | January 15, 2008
A forthcoming PBS documentary called The Lobotomist examines the career of psychiatrist Walter J. Freeman, who performed nearly 3,000 "ice pick" lobotomies during the late 1930s and 1940s.
The hour-long program, which is partly based on Jack El-Hai's book of the same name, contains old footage of Freeman performing the procedure, and features an interview with Howard Dully, who was lobotomized at the age of 12 (and whose memoir was published last year).
Freeman fiercely advocated - and popularized - the lobotomy. He travelled across the U.S. in his "lobotomobile", teaching others how to…