neuroscience
cortex | February 12, 2007Here's Pat Churchland, from a recent New Yorker profile (not online):
Paul and Pat believe that the mind-body problem will be solved not by philosophers but by neuroscientists, and that our present knowledge is so paltry that we would not understand the solution even if it were suddently to present itself. "Suppose you're a medieval physicist wondering about the burning of wood," Pat likes to say in her classes. "You're Albertus Magnus, let's say. One night, a Martian comes down and whispers, 'Hey, Albertus, the burning of wood is really rapid oxidation!' What could he do? He knows no…
cortex | February 12, 2007What biological organ does this machine resemble?
In leaping beyond the two- and four-core microprocessors that are being manufactured by Intel and its chief PC industry competitor, Advanced Micro Devices, Intel is following a design trend that is sweeping the computing world.
Already, computer networking companies and the makers of PC graphics cards are moving to processor designs that have hundreds of computing engines, but only for special applications.
For example, Cisco Systems now uses a chip called Metro with 192 cores in its high-end network routers. Last November Nvidia introduced…
omnibrain | February 11, 2007As an academic your currency is your reputation, and how often your papers get cited (well assuming they aren't citing you for making up data). The inevitable result of this are battles of ideas being fought out at conferences, in special issues of journals and in review articles. If you discover something interesting and the mechanisms are not clearly visible (as they usually are not - especially in something like psychology!) other scientists begin to attack you - especially if your new idea challenges theirs!
In the science of the brain there are a few debates that immediately come to…
cortex | February 11, 2007It's a fine line separating intelligence and insanity. According to a new study, the same gene that makes you smarter also makes you more likely to go crazy:
Most people inherit a version of a gene that optimizes their brain's thinking circuitry, yet also appears to increase risk for schizophrenia, a severe mental illness marked by impaired thinking, scientists at the National Institutes of Health's (NIH) National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have discovered. The seeming paradox emerged from the first study to explore the effects of variation in the human gene for a brain master switch,…
cortex | February 9, 2007It's just an n of 1, a small anecdote within a larger story, but it illuminates some of the perpetual controversies of the cognitive sciences, from the accuracy of the IQ test to the plasticity of the human mind. It occurs on page 189 of Michael Lewis' The Blind Side, a gripping history of the left tackle position in football. It's also the story of Michael Oher, an impoverished kid from the mean streets of Memphis. When the book begins, Oher is virtually homeless. His mom is addicted to crack. But through a strange twist of fate, Oher is enrolled at a fancy Christian private school, where…
clock | February 8, 2007
The penultimate installment of lecture notes in the BIO101 series. Help me make it better - point out errors of fact and suggest improvements:
It is impossible to cover all organ systems in detail over the course of just two lectures. Thus, we will stick only to the basics. Still, I want to emphasize how much organ systems work together, in concert, to maintain the homeostasis (and rheostasis) of the body. I'd also like to emphasize how fuzzy are the boundaries between organ systems - many organs are, both anatomically and functionally, simultaneously parts of two or more organ systems…
omnibrain | February 7, 2007Can someone tell me if this site is for real?
Here's a demo:
Off topic
Heres is a not probable, but possible theory of future humans. Aliens are evolved Asian people. A colleague of mine stated that Asian people have bigger brains than others. This got me thinking and I was thinking of this for a while now, even before he told me this and what he said confirmed this. Depictions of aliens look a lot like asian people, just with bigger heads.
This makes me want to be asian
posted by George Christodoulou at 10:21 PM 0 comments
Is this just a blog to gather advertising dollars or what?
omnibrain | February 7, 2007Are you looking forward to the paper? You know you are.... an fMRI study of scene processing...
Almost through the review process...I'll post the abstract very very soon....you excited yet???
Ok... fine here's a sampler...
Humans and animals use information obtained from the local visual scene to orient
themselves in the wider world. Although neural systems involved in scene perception
have been identified, the extent to which processing in these systems is affected by
previous experience is unclear.......
omnibrain | February 7, 2007Direct from the Horses Mouth:
NEURO-KINETIK NEURO-KINETIK NEURO-KINETIK NEURO-KINETIK NEURO-KINETIK
Parapsychology/"psychic research" is presently not having sufficient number of man hours devoted to it. Yet, this field of endeavor can be a significant part of mainstream science. Via a conceptual overlap in subject matter, even laboratories connected with experimental psychology, physical anthropology, etc. could (via the enabling technology of brain imaging) locate the neuroanatomical basis for the generation or reception of parapsychological/psychical energies.
The main obstacle to…
cortex | February 6, 2007I couldn't sleep last night. As far as I can tell, there was no particular reason for my insomnia. I wasn't stressed, or anxious, or caffeinated, or sick. My mind was tired, but my brain just wasn't in the sleeping mood.
For me, one of the most annoying parts of insomnia is the way I continually almost fall asleep. I'm drifting off into that dreamy netherworld, my thoughts growing languid and slow, when all of a sudden I remember I can't sleep, and snap back into awakeness. It's damn annoying.
What causes this insomniac process? If I had to venture a guess, I'd go with a theory put forth by…
omnibrain | February 5, 2007I'm sure you remember all the articles last week telling us how people with strokes causing damage to the insula have reported that they no longer feel the urge to smoke. In this weeks New York Times health section Sandra Blakeslee explores the insula in depth, examining both the possible treatment options as well as the many other functions it serves.
Here's a good snipit from the article:
If it does everything, what exactly is it that it does?
For example, the insula "lights up" in brain scans when people crave drugs, feel pain, anticipate pain, empathize with others, listen to jokes, see…
cortex | February 5, 2007Conscious awareness is difficult to measure. On the one hand, it's a private, subjective phenomenon that resists easy quantification. (Only I know what I am aware of.) On the other hand, neuroscience won't be able to understand many mental phenomena - like consciousness - unless it can develop objective measurements for these slippery, subjective phenomena.
Traditional measurements of awareness have relied on self-reports of confidence. For example, experimental subjects might be asked to judge whether a cloud of dots moved to the left or to the right. They are then asked to report how…
cortex | February 2, 2007It's a shocker: getting hit in the head by enormous men running at high speed is bad for your brain. The NY Times today has a riveting article chronicling the retirement travails of Ted Johnson, a former middle lineback for the Patriots:
Ted Johnson helped the New England Patriots win three of the past five Super Bowls before retiring in 2005. Now, he says, he forgets people's names, misses appointments and, because of an addiction to amphetamines, can become so terrified of the outside world that he locks himself alone inside his Boston apartment in bed with the blinds drawn for days at a…
omnibrain | February 2, 2007Watch as Max sneezes out his brain and tries to figure out what to do!
This cartoon is AWESOME :) I give it 4 astrocytes or something like that...
See more videos below the fold.
Here's one of the most pointless - poorly drawn - boring you tube videos I've ever seen! I love it!
It's a girl drawing a neuron and all its parts :)
This should really be over at Retrospectacle... in any case - here's a pretty cool parrot doing crazy sound effects.
omnibrain | January 31, 2007Here's the basic story...
New work by a team of researchers has shed light on why hallucinogenic compounds cause altered states in creatures. It has long been known that hallucinogenic compounds have a high affinity for a certain receptor in the central nervous system (5-HT2A, or 2AR), and that when these receptors are blocked, the hallucinogenic side effects are mitigated. What has remained a mystery is why other non-hallucinogenic compounds with a similar affinity for these 2ARs do not produce similar side effects.
How do you know a mouse is tripping balls? It's not like you can show them…
clock | January 31, 2007While study of Time-Perception is, according to many, a sub-discipline of chronobiology, I personally know very little about it. Time perception is defined as interval timing, i.e., measuring duration of events (as opposed to counting, figuring which one of the two events happened first and which one second, or measuring time of day or year).
Still, since this blog is about all aspects of biological timing, I have to point you to a new paper in Neuron (press release) about a new computer model for human time-perception.
"If you toss a pebble into a lake," he explained, "the ripples of water…
omnibrain | January 31, 2007A team of researchers from UCLA has created a model of how the brain could potentially tell time and has also tested a part of the model on human subjects.
"If you toss a pebble into a lake," he explained, "the ripples of water produced by the pebble's impact act like a signature of the pebble's entry time. The farther the ripples travel the more time has passed.
"We propose that a similar process takes place in the brain that allows it to track time," he added. "Every time the brain processes a sensory event, such as a sound or flash of light, it triggers a cascade of reactions between brain…