neuroscience
j7uy5 | January 14, 2008
href="http://www.researchblogging.org/">
alt="Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research"
src="http://www.researchblogging.org/public/citation_icons/rb2_large_gray.png"
height="50" width="80">Sounds
too good to be true. Perhaps it is. For one,
there is only one
published case. For another, it has to be injected near the
spine in order to have
this effect. The arthritis medication,
href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/medmaster/a602013.html"
rel="tag">etanercept (
href="http://enbrel.com/" rel="tag">Enbrel®)
has been shown, in at least one case, to result in…
omnibrain | January 12, 2008
The memory-evaluation study, headed by Dr. Franklin McCarroll of New York University's School of Psychology, revealed that approximately 47 percent of Jenkins' hippocampus is dedicated to storing notable video-game victories and frustrating last-minute defeats, while 32 percent of his amygdala contains embedded neurological scripts pertaining to game strategies, character back stories, theme songs, and cheat codes. In addition, his entire dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is devoted to remembering the time he did a helicopter dunk from half-court with Shawn Kemp at the buzzer to beat the…
clock | January 7, 2008
I had no time to read this in detail and write a really decent overview here, perhaps I will do it later, but for now, here are the links and key excerpts from a pair of exciting new papers in PLoS Biology and PLoS ONE, which describe the patterns of expression of a second type of cryptochrome gene in Monarch butterflies.
This cryptochrome (Cry) is more similar to the vertebrate Cry than the insect Cry, also present in this butterfly. The temporal and spatial patterns of expression of the two types of Cry suggest that they may be involved in the transfer of time-information from the…
terrasig | January 6, 2008The first 2008 issue of New England Journal of Medicine came yesterday in the snailmail box and I read the following story with such great interest that I nearly walked into a tree. Bear with me but the news lately has taken me on a neuroscience streak without my having specific professional expertise in the area.
The famed Johns Hopkins neuroscientist, Solomon H. Snyder, MD, DSc, has a commentary entitled, "Seeking God in the Brain - Efforts to Localize Higher Brain Function" (currently available as free full text). The commentary was very loosely directed at a study elsewhere in the issue…
omnibrain | January 4, 2008Some scientists seem to think so. Check out this comparison between a sagittal section of a brain and this piece of art:
Pretty striking similarity isn't there?
Partly as a joke to entertain sceptical colleagues, he and the team went on a brain trawl, and found many other examples. The team is convinced the artists were fascinated by the scientific discoveries being made by anatomists, but their theories had to be concealed in the imagery of their paintings, particularly when their clients were so often senior clergy who might see their scientific interests as blasphemous or even heretical…
omnibrain | January 4, 2008The mind is a complicated and a still very much unknown entity. The earliest conceptions of the mind didn't even have it placed in the brain, instead it was very much separate from the body. This is of course all very silly, the only possibility is that the mind wholly and completely resides in the neural system and that system is responsible for every aspect of the mind, from perception, to language, and even for experiencing the presence of a higher power.
With all of these misperceptions of the mind it isn't surprising that people could think that this soul of ours could interact with…
neurophilosophy | December 30, 2007I've just found this Encyclopaedia of Computational Neuroscience on Scholarpedia. Each entry is written by an expert in the field, and is very comprehensive.
The project seems to have been started only recently, as many of the entries I've looked at are still empty. Although still incomplete, this is already a fantastic resource that's well worth looking at.
Here are just a few of the finished entries: grid cells by Edvard Moser, mirror neurons by Giacomo Rizzolatti, synaesthesia by V.S. Ramachandran, and the neural correlates of consciousness by Cristof Koch.
Others who have accepted the…
j7uy5 | December 30, 2007This cartoon was written before intranasal orexin was
developed, but
the same idea applies:
href="http://www.researchblogging.org/">
alt="Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research"
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height="50" width="80" class="inset">
title="Provigil.com" href="http://provigil.com/"
rel="tag">Provigil (
title="monograph about modafinil"
href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/druginfo/medmaster/a602016.html"
rel="tag">modafinil)
title="A Review of the Effects of Modafinil on Cognition in Schizophrenia"
href="…
omnibrain | December 27, 2007Title: Brain Juice.
Year: 1996-1997
Summary: A Brain comes to life and tries to take over the world through cable access TV. There are even cameos by Beavis and Butthead and the cast of the Wizard of Oz.
And obviously made in Canada ;)
Weird eh?!
sb admin | December 24, 2007 "Why do those holiday tunes get stuck in your head so much?" I was invited to pose this question to Dr. Robert Zatorre, Co-Director of the BRAMS: Brain Music and Sound lab at the Montreal Neurological Institute at McGill University. Dr. Zatorre is a leading expert in neuroscience research on the biological basis of music; if anyone is able to explain why Jingle Bell Rock is haunting me, it's him.
Commonly known as earworms, some songs repeat in our mind. They are "typically annoying," said Dr. Zatorre. We often can't control it, the sounds won't go away, and they loop, repeating a refrain or…
j7uy5 | December 23, 2007Roche
Molecular Diagnostics offers a test that can determine which
type of genes a person has for enzymes that metabolize antidepressant
medication. The test costs $ 300 to $400, and can be ordered
by healthcare professionals, or by consumers.
The idea is that it might be possible to predict which medications
might be better for a particular patient. That has appeal,
because many people have to try more than one medication in the quest
to find one that is both tolerable and effective.
If a person metabolizes a drug much more rapidly than most
people, then that person might need a higher…
sb admin | December 21, 2007Since you've all been clamouring to see it, here's my new tattoo, and a video clip of the work in progress. It's an intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cell, my favourite type of neuron. The artist was Gordon at Brain Drops, highly recommended. :)
Enjoy your holidays!
j7uy5 | December 20, 2007This is a brain MRI animation, showing sequential slices of
the brain,
from top to bottom. It was a featured image
at
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:User-FastFission-brain.gif">Wikipedia.
This was created by a Wikipedia user,
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Fastfission"
title="User:Fastfission">Fastfission.
The explanation follows:
Made from an
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/fMRI" class="extiw"
title="w:fMRI">fMRI
scan I had done. Goes from the top of my brain straight through to the
bottom. That little dot that appears for a second on the…
neurophilosophy | December 18, 2007Ed Yong has posted the 38th edition of Encephalon at Not Exactly Rocket Science. The carnival will return in a month, and the next host will be announced in due course.
neurophilosophy | December 17, 2007
Photograph courtesy of the Exploratorium
Jonah Lehrer* points out an exhibition of Paul Ekman's photographs at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
Ekman is a psychologist at UCSF who has spent time in Papua New Guinea studying the facial expressions of the people there, to try and determine whether or not such expressions are universal, as Darwin suggested in The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals.
The exhibition in San Francisco consists mainly of Ekman's photos of the South Fore peoples, a subgroup of about 8,000 individuals who live in the highlands to the east of…
neurophilosophy | December 13, 2007
Merged series of phase contrast micrographs showing neurite outgrowth in rat dorsal root ganglion cells grown on an acetylcholine biopolymer. (Christiane Gumera)
Last year, Yadong Wang and his colleagues at the Georgia Institute of Technology reported that they had produced a dopamine biopolymer that promotes the growth of neurites in PC12 cells.
Now, the team have taken that work one step further, with the finding that another similar polymer has the same effect on nerve cells. When Wang and Ph.D. student Christiane Gumera cultured the cells on an acetylcholine polymer…
neurophilosophy | December 13, 2007The word "wOOt" - spelt with zeros instead of the letter 'o' - has just been voted as Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary's Word of the Year. Coined by internet users, and defined as an interjection "expressing joy", it's quite apt today, because my axon guidance essay was returned with a mark of 80%.
I posted the essay in 4 parts while I was away in Egypt. Here it is again:
Part 1: The growth cone.
Part 2: A novel axon guidance mechanism.
Part 3: The turning point.
Part 4: New directions.
wOOt!
sb admin | December 13, 2007 December 13 is my birthday! Yippee, you say, how old am I? Old enough to not say... I will shamelessly mention the Amazon wish list linked from my contact page, and remind you that Omni Brain has a tip jar in the sidebar (shared with Steve). But I'm not desperate for anything and there are plenty of deserving charities who need your money (I recommend UNIFEM). I'm thankful they are helping people in a more direct way than I can.
Anyway. I'm celebrating aging with a new tattoo, and am very excited about it! I've been interested in intrinsically photosensitive retinal ganglion cells (ipRGCs…
j7uy5 | December 12, 2007 I haven't gotten
back to
the "selection of antidepressants" series. Mostly that is
because, alphabetically, the next one is supposed to be citalopram.
While
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citalopram">citalopram
(Celexa™)
is a perfectly fine antidepressant, it is kind of boring.
So to spice things up a little bit, I'm going to jump ahead to
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desvenlafaxine" rel="tag">desvenlafaxine.
This is a drug that is in development by
href="http://www.wyeth.com/" rel="tag">Wyeth.
They plan to market it with the brand name,
href="http://www.wyeth…
neurophilosophy | December 11, 2007Sega is to develop toys controlled by thought, in collaboration with NeuroSky, a Silicon Valley-based start-up company that interfaces biological feedback (such as brain waves) to consumer electronics.
The toys will be based on NeuroSky's ThinkGear, a brain-computer interface (BCI) consisting of a headset which incorporates an EEG. The device is basically the same as the BCIs used to control Second Life avatars and Google Earth, but looks much slicker than either.
BCIs can actually be used for more worthwhile purposes. For example, invasive devices consisting of electrode arrays implanted…