neuroscience
neurophilosophy | October 22, 2007
Here's the first 10 minutes of a documentary called Extraordinary People: The Boy Who Sees Without Eyes. It's about Ben Underwood, a blind teenager from Sacramento who uses echolocation.
At the age of 2, Underwood was diagnosed with retinoblastoma, a rare form of cancer that that affects about one in 5 million children. One year later, his eyes were surgically removed, to prevent the tumour from spreading throught the optic nerve and into the brain.
Soon after his surgery, Underwood realized that he could use echoes to determine the positions of objects, and began to develop this "six…
neurophilosophy | October 21, 2007Researchers from the Microsoft Corporation recently filed an application for a patent for a brain-computer interface that can "classify brain states".
They say that the device is needed to obtain accurate feedback about the effectiveness of computer-user interfaces, because the conventional way of getting this information - by interview - is often unreliable.
To me this sounds a bit like the overblown claims that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can be used to determine whether an individual is lying or telling the truth. Except that this seems like an even bigger exaggeration.
neurophilosophy | October 20, 2007
The November issue of National Geographic has a cover story about memory, called Remember This.
The author of the article is a journalist called Joshua Foer, who won the 2006 USA Memory Championships after entering the competition to research a book.
Foer discusses a number of amnesic patients, including the famous H.M., on whom much of what we know about memory is based, and E.P, who suffered severe retrograde and antergrade amnesia following a herpes simplex infection which completely destroyed his hippocampi.
The article touches on the work of researchers who have made major contributions…
cevans | October 17, 2007Dr. Oliver Sacks is a rare bird in the world of medicine: not only is he one the country's top neurologists, but he also has a knack for weaving clinical profiles of his most exceptional patients into lovely, thoughtful books that open up the complex workings of our minds to the peering eyes of layfolk. His charm has much to do with the fact that he's the embodiment of a long-musty archetype of scientist: blustery, with a lisp, brilliant, and eccentric, a member of the American Fern Society, and fascinated with fluorescent minerals.
His latest book, Musicophilia, tackles our intimate mental…
clock | October 16, 2007Attention! How your brain manages its need to heed:
Two perennial polarities beloved by brain geeks -- networks versus modules and top-down versus bottom-up attention -- get linked in this week's essay, in which UC Berkeley's Mark D'Esposito reviews an imaging study of how monkeys use their brains to direct their attention. The results, suggests D'Esposito, add threads to vital strands of neuroscientific thought.
neurophilosophy | October 16, 2007
These pictures illustrate macrosomatognosia, the condition in which abnormal activity in the somatosensory regions of the brain causes one to perceive the body, or parts of it, to be abnormally large.
Both pictures are representations of partial macrosomatognosia, in which specific parts of the body are affected. They were drawn by artists who experience migraines, and were submitted as entries to the Migraine Art Competition.
The picture on the left shows the migraine sufferer lying on a bed, with elongated hand, arms and neck, and an enlarged head that appears to be floating up towards…
neurophilosophy | October 16, 2007In the Journal of Neurophysiology, Chris Moore of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT reviews the evidence for his hemo-neural hypothesis:
Brain vasculature is a complex and interconnected network under tight regulatory control that exists in intimate communication with neurons and glia. Typically, hemodynamics are considered to exclusively serve as a metabolic support system. In contrast to this canonical view, we propose that hemodynamics also play a role in information processing through modulation of neural activity. Functional hyperemia, the basis of the fMRI BOLD signal,…
cortex | October 16, 2007It's an audacious idea, and I didn't believe it was possible until I saw the video. But it really is possible to teach blind people to see using their tongue. By connecting a camera to an array of electrodes that stimulate the sensitive nerves inside the mouth - a pixel of light is translated into a slight pinch - scientists can literally retrain the brain. Check out the video:
This might seem like an impossible example of sensory plasticity, but it's been done before. The neuroscientist Mriganka Sur, for example, literally re-wired the mind of a ferret, so that the information from its…
neurophilosophy | October 15, 2007An international team of researchers led by Tony Wyss-Coray of the Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine report that they have developed a blood test that can predict with 90% accuracy the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease.
By analyzing the concentrations of 18 different biomarkers, Wyss-Coray and his colleagues were able to identify, long before any symptoms were evident, those patients with mild cognitive impairment that progressed to Alzheimer's 2-6 years later.
Alzheimer's Disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder…
neurophilosophy | October 15, 2007Scientist and journalist Sunny Bains discusses how Swiss researchers are using central pattern generator (CPG) chips to develop self-organizing furniture.
CPGs are networks of spinal neurons that generate the rhythmic patterns of neural activity which control locomotion. I wrote about them earlier this year, in the context of the "robo-salamander" designed and built by Auke Jan Ijspeert and his colleagues, of the Biologically Inspired Robotics Group at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
The robo-salamander is a modular robot, as it consists of identical units…
j7uy5 | October 15, 2007Previously, I
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about investigation of
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for treatment of
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rel="tag">fibromyalgia. Now there is
evidence that it may have a role in treatment of an entirely different
pain syndrome:
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rel="tag">migraine.
href="http://spectrum.ieee.org/oct07/5599">Researchers
Testing New Electric…
neurophilosophy | October 14, 2007The journal Nature, in association with The Dana Foundation, has just launched a monthly neuroscience podcast called NeuroPod.
In the first edition, Kerri Smith discusses the potential applications of cognitive enhancement in warfare, the role of stress in memory formation, and the possibility of developing anaesthetics from chilli peppers.
[Via Action Potential]
neurophilosophy | October 14, 2007
How you perceive the image depends on the distance from which you are viewing it. From up close, you'll see Albert Einstein, but if you move further back from the screen, you'll see Harry Potter.
This is one of a series of hybrid images created by Aude Oliva of the Computational Visual Cognition Lab at MIT. Here's an explanation of how these images work, and here's the spinning silhouette illusion from yesterday.
[Original image uploaded to Flickr by Jeremiah Owyang]
neurophilosophy | October 13, 2007This "right brain vs left brain test" from the Herald Sun is doing the rounds on the internet today. The article contains the so-called "spinning silhouette" optical illusion (below), and states that if you see the the dancer rotating in a clockwise direction "you use more of the right side of your brain and vice versa."
You've probably heard this left/ right brain dichotomy before. It goes something like this: the left hemisphere of the brain is logical, deductive, mathematical, etc., while the right hemisphere is artistic, visual and imaginative. The idea stems at least partly from the…
neurophilosophy | October 12, 2007
Researchers from the Biomedical Engineering Laboratory at Keio University in Japan have developed a brain-computer interface that enables users to control the movements of Second Life avatars without moving a muscle.
The device consists of a headset containing electrodes which monitor electrical activity in the motor cortex, the region of the brain involved in planning, executing and controlling movements.
All a user has to do to control his/her avatar is imagine performing various movements. The activity monitored by the headpiece is read and plotted by an electroencephalogram, which…
neurophilosophy | October 10, 2007
Vaughan has found a fascinating article about the many references to neurological syndromes in Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
On the right is one of Sir John Tenniel's original illustrations for the book. It accompanies the following passage:
"Curiouser and curiouser!" cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English); "now I'm opening out like the largest telescope that ever was! Good-bye, feet!" (for when she looked down at her feet, they seemed to be almost out of sight, they were getting so far off). "Oh, my poor…
neurophilosophy | October 9, 2007The 33rd edition of Encephalon, which has just been posted at GNIF Brain Blogger, includes posts on magnetoreception, cellular senescence in Alzheimer's Disease, and how the use of DNA microarrays is providing insights into human brain evolution.
The next edition of the carnival will be hosted by Zachary at Distributed Neuron, on October 22nd. If you'd like to contribute, send permalinks to your neuroscience or psychology blog posts to encephalon{dot}host{at}gmail{dot}com, or use this submission form.
clock | October 9, 2007My former SciBling David Dobbs regularly posts on the SciAm Blog, usually bringing in guest contributors highlighting novel research in neuroscience. Today, he invited Charles Glatt to review an interesting study on the interaction between genes and environment in development of depression. David writes:
This week reviewer Charles Glatt reviews a study that takes this investigation a level deeper, examining how two different gene variants show their power -- or not -- depending on whether a child is abused, nurtured, or both. As Glatt describes, this study, despite its grim subject,…
neurophilosophy | October 8, 2007In The New Yorker, Jerome Groopman discusses the work of Adrian Owen, a researcher at Cambridge University's Cognitive and Brain Sciences Unit who has been using functional imaging to assess patients in a vegetative state.
Neurologists face major problems in diagnosing the persistent vegetative state (PVS) and other "disorders of consciousness" such as the minimally conscious state (MCS), not least because there is no reliable means of assessing the level of consciousness in patients.
Large proportions of patients in such conditions are therefore misdiagnosed, and, until recently, most…
neurophilosophy | October 7, 2007A new study in the British Medical Journal concludes that "there is no strong evidence to associate chronic traumatic brain injury with amateur boxing,"
The authors systematically reviewed 36 observational studies of amateur boxers published over the past 50 years. But they acknowledge that the general quality of the studies is very poor, so, despite the conclusion, their findings are actually inconclusive.
In an accompanying editorial, neurologist and sports physician Paul McRory notes that boxers' careers are much shorter now than they were in the first half of the last century. Boxers…