neuroscience
neurophilosophy | August 30, 2007I was contacted by Craig J. Phillips earlier this year, but neglected to mention the comment he posted at my old blog. Craig posted this comment here several days ago:
I am a traumatic brain injury survivor and a master's level rehabilitation counselor. I sustained an open skull fracture with right frontal lobe damage and remained in a coma for 3 weeks at the age of 10 in August of 1967. I underwent brain and skull surgery after waking from the coma. Follow-up cognitive and psychosocial testing revealed that I would not be able to succeed beyond high school. In 1967 Neurological…
neurotopia | August 29, 2007Finally we get some data on changes in AD pathology with statin use! Statins are taken for lowering cholesterol, but they have other beneficial effects such as modulating inflammatory responses. Thus, they could prove beneficial in the treatment of AD given the disease has a significant inflammatory component.
According to the press release
The two changes in the brain that are considered the most definitive hallmarks of Alzheimer's are brain "plaques" and "tangles." After controlling for variables including age at death, gender, and strokes in the brain, the researchers found…
cortex | August 29, 2007Ten years ago, neuroscientists were bullish about pharmaceuticals. It sometimes seemed as if every tenured professor was starting his own drug company or consulting for someone else's drug company. But virtually none of those drugs have come to market, at least not yet. The brain is an exquisitely complicated machine, and every beneficial effect seems to inspire numerous side-effects. (Our neurons also have a labyrinth of redundant pathways, which makes it treat any particular bit of errant cellular activity.) It's a little depressing how many of our most effective drugs owe nothing to the…
neurophilosophy | August 29, 2007 Alzheimer's Disease is the most common form of age-related dementia, affecting an estimated 25 million people worldwide.The pathological hallmarks of this condition, which were described 100 years ago by the German pathologist Alois Alzheimer, consist of plaques of amyloid beta protein and neurofibrillary tangles made of tau protein. These insoluble deposits accumulate within the brain, and are believed to be toxic to nerve cells.
Now, researchers from Harvard Medical School show that the amyloid plaques in mice with Alzheimer's-like pathology can be effectively cleared by implanting cells…
neurophilosophy | August 29, 2007This paper appeared in the February 1999 issue of the Canadian Journal of Neurological Sciences:
Phantom erection after amputation of penis. Case description and review of the relevant literature on phantoms.
Fisher C. M., Neurology Service, Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston 02114, USA.
BACKGROUND: Perception of a phantom limb is frequent after an amputation of an upper or lower extremity. Phantom penis is reported infrequently.
METHOD: Case description and literature review.
RESULT: The phenomenon of phantom penis followed total penectomy. Several aspects were unusual,…
clock | August 28, 2007If we are not there at the moment of birth, how come we can bond with the baby and be good fathers or good adoptive parents? Kate explains. Obligatory Reading of the Day.
Update: Related is this new article by former Scibling David Dobbs: The Hormone That Helps You Read Minds
Update 2: Matt responds to Kate's post.
Update 3: Kate wrote a follow-up: Why help out? The life of an alloparent
neurophilosophy | August 28, 2007Multitasking refers to the simultaneous performance of two or more tasks, switching back and forth between different tasks, or performing a number of different tasks in quick succession. It consists of two complementary stages: goal-shifting, in which one decides to divert their attention from one task to another, and rule activation, by which the instructions for executing one task are switched off, and those for executing the other are switched on. Multitasking involves dividing one's attention between the tasks, and because each task competes for a limited amount of cognitive resources,…
neurophilosophy | August 27, 2007The final post at Neurofuture is a fantastic 30th edition of Encephalon, which, as usual, includes good stuff from the best neuroscience and psychology blogs on the web.
The next edition of the carnival will be hosted by Dr. Deb Serani on September 10th. If you'd like to contribute, email permalinks to your neuroscience or psychology blog posts to encephalon{dot}host{at}gmail{dot}com, or use this submission form.
neurophilosophy | August 26, 2007
I start my M.Sc. in neuroscience in about a month's time. The recommended text is Principles of Neural Science, by Kandel, Schwartz and Jessel. It's a great book that I'll get round to buying one day, but, because I'm on a limited budget, I'll have to make do with the abridged version, Essentials of Neural Science and Behavior, and Fundamental Neuroscience, by Zigmond, et al., both of which have been sitting on a shelf at my mother's house for a few years.
neurophilosophy | August 24, 2007This year, several research groups have used bacterial proteins called channelrhodopsins to develop a technique with which light can be used to control the activity of nerve cells or the behaviour of small organisms.
For example, Ed Boyden's group at the MIT Media Lab used the method to activate or inhibit neurons on a millisecond-by-millsecond timescale, while Karl Deisseroth and his colleagues at Stanford have created an optical on/off switch that can control the movements of the nematode worm.
Devices employing such technologies could in theory be used in advanced neural prostheses for a…
cortex | August 24, 2007The Best Cigarette, a poem by Billy Collins:
Don't forget that cigarette addiction seems to be modulated by the insula, a brain area that secretes aversive emotions. Earlier this year, a team of scientists at the University of Iowa found that cigarette addicts with damaged insulas were 136 times more likely to have their addictions erased than smokers with damage to other parts of the brain. Once their insula was offline, the awful emotions associated with nicotine withdrawal vanished. "My body forgot the urge to smoke," one man confessed. While his brain still wanted that rush of toxic…
cortex | August 24, 2007Our mind has a sick sense of humor. It turns out that as we lose our memory, and sink into the darkness of dementia, the last memories to disappear are the memories we spent our lives trying to repress. So the final thing that you know is what you've been trying to forget:
For more than half a century, Rachel Kane kept the memories at bay.
There were her daughters to think of, twins born in a displaced persons camp in the aftermath of the second World War. Kane didn't want to burden them with tales of the Holocaust, of a husband shot to death by the Nazis, a baby who starved to death in the…
cortex | August 23, 2007Here's a very cool experiment:
Using virtual reality goggles, a camera and a stick, scientists have induced out-of-body experiences -- the sensation of drifting outside of one's own body -- in healthy people, according to experiments being published in the journal Science.
When people gaze at an illusory image of themselves through the goggles and are prodded in just the right way with the stick, they feel as if they have left their bodies.
I think there are two surprising lessons in this experiment.
The first odd finding is that our sense of being in a body is a surprisingly cognitive…
neurophilosophy | August 23, 2007Olaf Blanke, of the Federal Polytechnic of Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, explains how it was done:
Read more about the study at New Scientist and Ars Technica.
neurophilosophy | August 23, 2007 Obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) is a psychiatric condition which is characterized by intrusive thoughts and ritualized and repetitive behaviours, such as excessive hand-washing, which are performed in order to neutralize the obsessions. OCD is one of a spectrum of disorders that includes Tourette's Syndrome, autism and bipolar disorder.
OCD affects approximately 2% of the population, and is listed by the World Health Organization as being amongst the top 10 most debilitating illnesses, in terms of decreased quality of life and loss of income. It is often treated - only mildly…
neurophilosophy | August 22, 2007A significant proportion of people with HIV/ AIDS develop neurological symptoms, such as impaired co-ordination, personality changes, deficits in learning and memory, and mania and depression.
HIV-associated dementia is difficult to treat; although highly active anti-retroviral therapy (HAART) has led to improved prognoses for patients, these drugs do not effectively penetrate the blood brain barrier. So, the brain can act as a "silent reservoir" for HIV, which can therefore cause lasting and irreparable damage.
Exactly how HIV causes dementia was unknown. But a new study by researchers…
cortex | August 22, 2007Silas Weir Mitchell was a great American neurologist. Unfortunately, he's best known now for pioneering "the rest cure," which became a common treatment for hysteria and other afflictions of the "frail female nervous system". (See, for example, "The Yellow Wallpaper," by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.)
But Weir Mitchell's most important contribution to neurology came from his diagnosis of phantom limbs, which he called "sensory ghosts". His discovery came during the middle of the Civil War, when he was working as a doctor at Turner's Lane hospital in Philadelphia. The battle of Gettysburg had…
cortex | August 20, 2007There's an illuminating four part series looking at neuroscientist Gary Lynch in the LA Times. It's written by Terry McDermott. What makes this series so compelling is that it does two things rarely done by science journalists.
First of all, the articles present Gary Lynch as a complex human being, complete with the usual human flaws, features and foibles. Most newsy profiles of scientists portray the researcher as some sort of emotionless lab machine, motivated by nothing but the search for objective truth. This, of course, is a false stereotype. Science is a human endeavor, and the data is…
cortex | August 17, 2007Given the recent bursting of the housing bubble (let's hope, at least, that we've hit rock bottom), Kevin Drum raises an interesting issue:
Bubbles come along with some frequency these days, always with some shiny new reason for bankers to become irrationally exhuberant. Just in the last couple of decades we've seen bubbles in S&Ls (safe as houses!), South American countries (sovereign states never default!), junk bonds (greed is good!), dotcoms (eyeball, not profits!), and now housing (safe as houses!). Every time, it turns out that there's nothing new at all. The economy has not been…
purepedantry | August 14, 2007This has got to be the dumbest article I have ever read.
The headline reads: Brain blood flow helps treat depression.
Well, yeah. Try having a brain without blood flow, and you will be pretty depressed too.
It gets better. Here is what the article says:
Israeli scientists have confirmed the usefulness of established molecular imaging approaches in the treatment of depression.
"Individuals in a depressed emotional state have impaired cerebral blood flow," said Associate Professor Omer Bonne at Hadassah-Hebrew University Medical Center in Jerusalem. "Clinical improvement in depression is…