neuroscience
purepedantry | April 16, 2007Thank you, Germany:
Passively listening to Mozart -- or indeed any other music you enjoy -- does not make you smarter. But more studies should be done to find out whether music lessons could raise your child's IQ in the long term, concludes a report analysing all the scientific literature on music and intelligence, which was published last week by the German research ministry.
The ministry commissioned the report -- surprisingly the first to systematically review the literature on the purported intelligence effect of music -- from a team of nine German neuroscientists, psychologists,…
clock | April 15, 2007Sex And Prenatal Hormone Exposure Affect Cognitive Performance:
Yerkes researchers are using their findings to better understand sex differences in cognitive performance, which may lead to increased understanding of the difference in neuropsychological disorders men and women experience.
In one of the first research studies to assess sex differences in cognitive performance in nonhuman primates, researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center have found the tendency to use landmarks for navigation is typical only of females.
This finding, which corroborates findings in rodents and…
cortex | April 13, 2007Stalin famously said that "A single death is a tragedy. A million deaths is a statistic." Sadly, it turns out that Stalin's observation is psychologically accurate. That, at least, is the conclusion of Paul Slovic, a scientist at the University of Oregon. Slovic set out to answer a tragically simple question: Why do good people ignore mass murder and genocide?
The answer may lie in human psychology. Specifically, it is our inability to comprehend numbers and relate them to mass human tragedy that stifles our ability to act. It's not that we are insensitive to the suffering of our fellow human…
cortex | April 12, 2007So I'm sitting in the movie theater the other day (I went to see The Lives of Others - go see it), and as soon as the first scene begins, the elderly lady sitting next to me says to herself: "Gosh darnit! I've already seen this movie! But it sounded so different when I read about it!"
When the movie was over, I struck up a conversation with the woman. It turns out that she read the description of the movie in the lobby and didn't recognize any of the plot elements. However, as soon as she saw the face of the main character she instantly remembered having seen the movie a few weeks before. At…
cortex | April 8, 2007A friend of mine (who happens to be Ph.D student in economics) sent me a skeptical email regarding a recent article that sought to measure marginal utility:
I'm really not convinced that marginal utility can be so easily correlated with activity in the midbrain. I think one of the virtues of the economic definition of marginal utility is that it's ultimately vague in definition. Depending on the context it can be happiness or money or satisfaction or whatever that person wants. I'm not sure it benefits from a strict neuroscientific definition.
I understand the skepticism. But I think there is…
cortex | April 5, 2007Marginal utility can be measured. According to new research out of Wolfram Schultz's lab, poor people are much quicker learners than rich people when playing a Pavlovian paradigm for small amounts of money. (Poor people took about 12 trials to figure out the game, while rich people took about 35 trials.) This behavior was then confirmed with fMRI. Sure enough, rich people demonstrated less dopaminergic midbrain activity than poor people in response to the experimental paradigm. They were bored by the pocket change. Here's the abstract:
A basic tenet of microeconomics suggests that the…
cortex | April 5, 2007Dave and Greta Munger have posted an excellent reply to the following question:
What's the difference between psychology and neuroscience? Is psychology still relevant as we learn more about the brain and how it works?
You have to be a pretty staunch reductionist to believe that neuroscience makes psychology obsolete. After all, according to scientific materialism, neuroscience is ultimately just a subset of quantum mechanics. So should we all become physicists? Of course not. While our different levels of inquiry are obviously interconnected, they are also autonomous. As Dave points out,…
cortex | April 4, 2007Does power corrupt? And is absolute power absolutely corrupting? Here's some suggestive evidence:
Researchers led by the psychologist Dacher Keltner took groups of three ordinary volunteers and randomly put one of them in charge. Each trio had a half-hour to work through a boring social survey. Then a researcher came in and left a plateful of precisely five cookies. Care to guess which volunteer typically grabbed an extra cookie? The volunteer who had randomly been assigned the power role was also more likely to eat it with his mouth open, spew crumbs on partners and get cookie detritus on…
cortex | April 3, 2007A recent study in The Archives of General Psychiatry suggests that 25 percent of all Americans diagnosed with depression are actually just dealing with the normal disappointments of life, like divorce or the loss of a job. Their sadness is being treated like a medical condition. They were given drugs, when what they really needed was support:
The study also suggested that drug treatment may often be inappropriate for people who are experiencing painful -- but normal -- responses to life's stresses. Supportive therapy, on the other hand, may be useful -- and may keep someone who has been…
omnibrain | April 3, 2007I've been waiting for a long time for major press to finally come around and start telling people how Baby Einstein videos or listening to Mozart isn't going to make your baby into a genius. If you have a baby and are wondering whether a certain product will help your baby become smarter, there is a good rule to follow. If it's on TV it's not going to help and if it costs more than $10 it's not going to help either. I'm sure watching these videos are probably better than kids watching random flashing colors on a TV, but come on.
Here's a snippet of an article from USA Today (Which I'd…
omnibrain | April 2, 2007Is this an April Fools Joke?!
Here's a challenge for everyone - see how many you can debunk!
1. Men's brains are larger, but as they age, they also shrink faster than women's brains.
2. Women's brains operate at a higher temperature, due to burning more glucose.
3. Women use more of their brains when they think.
4. In general, men are better at math and women are better at language skills. This is suggested by research on the brain that has found that the "gray matter" in men's brains is more active during thought while the "white matter" in women's brains is more active. Gray matter is the…
cortex | April 2, 2007I had a very bizarre dream last night. I was driving to the gas station to buy milk. It was the middle of the night. (In case you were wondering, I don't normally make nocturnal milk runs, or buy my dairy products at the local Exxon-Mobil station.) As I pull into the gas station, I notice several police cars parked outside. That's odd, I think. Then, as I get out of my car, I notice a police officer frantically waving at someone near me, trying to tell them something. But I'm determined to get milk, so I head inside. That's when I notice that the store clerk is being held hostage. I've walked…
omnibrain | March 29, 2007Here's a music video that some students from a neuroscience lab made. Perhaps they should be given more work to do?!
cortex | March 28, 2007In a recent issue of The New Republic, Alex Heard takes David Sedaris to task for blurring the line between memoir and novel, fiction and non-fiction, truth and lies:
I do think Sedaris exaggerates too much for a writer using the nonfiction label. And after spending several weeks fact-checking four of his books--Barrel Fever (1994), Naked (1997), Me Talk Pretty One Day (2000), and Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (2004)--I'd recommend that he issue Oprah Moment apologies to a few people, including all the unclothed frolickers at the Empire Haven nudist camp in the summer of 1996;…
purepedantry | March 27, 2007If you are like me, you spend a lot of time not thinking about anything in particular. You read a couple papers, get a little work done, and then you stare off into space for a period of pleasant mindlessness.
From a neuroscientist's perspective, we spend a lot of time determining how we react to particular stimuli or how we accomplish certain cognitive tasks. We tend to view the brain as a little black box that coordinates responses to particular stimuli -- admittedly elaborate responses, but responses nonetheless.
What we don't spend much time doing is figuring out what we are doing…
neurontic | March 27, 2007Just a quick note to let everyone know that Neurontic is pleased to host the next edition of Encephalon, the carnival for brain aficionados everywhere. Please send your entries to neurontic [at] gmail.com no later than the morning of Sunday April 8, so your host has time to digest them. (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink: If you miss the deadline, it's no biggie. We'll just forward your entry on to the next host.) For those of you who are unfamiliar with the rules, here's a primer:
Encephalon Submission Guidelines:
Contributors can submit up to 3 posts in any of the following categories:
artificial…
omnibrain | March 26, 2007I just added two new blogs to the blogroll (which I hate doing for some reason).
The first is Ginny's who is a staffer here at ScienceBlogs and is a freelance science writer. Her blog is named Sequitur. You can also find links to all her science writing on the sidebar. What's that blog name about Ginny?
The second blog I discovered when Kate left some good comments on some of my posts :)
The Anterior Commissure "was started as a new year's resolution with the intention of developing a better understanding of the field of science in a more global context. It has become a horrible…
cortex | March 23, 2007Over at Mind Matters, there's a typically fascinating discussion of a paper concerning the underlying mechanisms of executive control and attention:
To find out what happens during attentional lapses, a team of researchers led by Daniel H. Weissman used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to try to identify how these brain areas behave when attention is paid and when it flags. They describe their work in "The Neural Bases of Momentary Lapses in Attention." They measured localized blood flow (and thus, presumably, brain activity) with the scanner as their test subjects tried to solve…
omnibrain | March 23, 2007I almost forgot about Multimedia Friday!
Here's some brain surgery! [edit by Sandra - the procedure in the video is removal of a Hydatid cyst. It's a tapeworm, eww!]
Hahaha.... soooo cheezy. Wilder Penfield - the greatest Canadian alive!
omnibrain | March 23, 2007I just made it back from backpacking (pictures forthcoming) in the Chisos mountains and figured I'd post a little short neato study I found since I'm way too tired to write anything with actual content (not that I ever really do anyway).
In the study, the researchers used genetic engineering to introduce a snippet of DNA that encodes instructions for how to make the red photopigment into the mice's genome. They then tested whether the mice could discriminate between two different colored lights.
Pretty neat eh!? Here's the msnbc write up.
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ahhh it seems The Loom actually has a very…