neuroscience
cortex | January 31, 2007The epic battle between video game consoles seems to have a clear winner: the Nintendo Wii.
The Wii, which uses an innovative wireless controller to translate the players' motions onto the screen, has upset the order of the video game world. In electronics stores and elsewhere, there are growing signs that the Wii has taken the lead in buzz and sales over another new console, the Sony PlayStation 3, which offers new superlatives in processing power and graphics.
The competitive picture became clearer on Tuesday, when Sony reported disappointing profits that industry analysts attributed…
omnibrain | January 30, 2007 GW Pharmaceuticals has developed a diet drug derived from Marijuana which suppresses the appetite. This is especially surprising for obvious reasons - perhaps a little ironic?!
Clearly the marijuana plant contains many many different compounds - but who would have thought that one of them suppressed the urge to gorge yourself on cheeze doodles and icy pops. The drug will soon be entering into human trials to combat obesity.
Don't get too exited about getting high on the drug though since that doesn't happen to be one of the side effects. Well...that is unless you want to find the secret…
omnibrain | January 29, 2007Lincoln seemed to have all sorts of problems - bipolar depression, unipolar depression, thyroid problems, bad gas, gargantuanism - you name it and someone has claimed he had it! But now it looks like, according to a study of worms, his nerves shattered?
Abraham Lincoln may have suffered from a genetic disorder that literally shattered his nerves, a new study on worms suggests.
Many of the president's descendants have a gene mutation that affects the part of the brain controlling movement and coordination, researchers discovered last year. The mutation prevents nerve cells from "communicating…
cortex | January 29, 2007Paul Krugman's analysis of Milton Friedman's intellectual legacy is one of the best articles I've read recently. Krugman not only paints a balanced portrait of Friedman's accomplishments - great economist, bad popularizer - but ably summarizes the rival tensions in 20th century economics. It's all fascinating stuff, but I was particularly interested in this section on the rational agent model:
For most of the past two centuries, economic thinking has been dominated by the concept of Homo economicus. The hypothetical Economic Man knows what he wants; his preferences can be expressed…
omnibrain | January 28, 2007 Check out the brains of mice on drugs. This site is a very strange one to say the least- it starts with a bunch of high mice in a club of sorts just struggling to stand up. Then the interactive flash demo starts in which you have to drag a mouse into a comfy chair which transports it into a weird device that shows what's happening to the mouse's brain depending on what it snorted, smoked, or injected earlier.
Freakin' weird - a wee bit trippy ;). Especially from an academic institution.
Check out the Mouse Party.
omnibrain | January 26, 2007
SMOKERS who suffer damage to a particular part of their brains appear to be able to quit their nicotine habit easily - a discovery that might open new avenues of addiction research.
A study of smokers who had suffered brain damage of various kinds after a stroke showed that those with injuries to a part of the brain called the insula were in many cases able to quit smoking quickly and easily - saying they had lost the urge to smoke altogether.
The insula receives information from the body and translates it into subjective feelings such as hunger, pain and craving, including craving for drugs…
j7uy5 | January 26, 2007Fibromyalgia
is a disorder of chronic generalized muscle pain and joint stiffness
with the presence on physical exam of at least 11/18 designated tender
points. (The formal definition is a bit more involved.)
Interestingly, the term was not accepted by the AMA until
1987; the formal definition was not developed until 1990(1).
Prior to that, it was widely assumed to have a psychological
basis.
In fact, there still is a tendency in some medical circles, and in some
persons in the general population, to attribute fibromyalgia
Despite a substantial research effort (see
href="http://fm-…
cortex | January 26, 2007It's an astonishingly robust finding:
Smokers with damaged insulas were 136 times more likely to have their addictions erased than smokers with damage in other parts of their brains.
What makes this paper so interesting is that it actually makes sense. The insula has been recognized for more than a decade as a crucial substrate for feeling. It sits at an important neural intersection, and is largely responsible for integrating signals generated by our body - so called "somatic markers" - into mental states. As Antonio Damasio has written (his wife is a co-author on the cigarette paper): "The…
cortex | January 24, 2007Is the Hard Problem of consciousness solvable by science? Will we ever come up with a meaningful explanation as to how squirts of neurotransmitter and minor jolts of electricity create subjective experience? As far as I'm concerned, this is the major philosophical question hovering over neuroscience. If the new Mysterians are right, and we will never understand how the texture of experience arises from neural computation, then neuroscience has a very profound limitation. The most important question in the field will always remain an ineffable mystery. There will always be a big void in the…
cortex | January 23, 2007For most of the 20th century, neuroscience treated our memories like inert packets of information. They were created through Pavlovian reinforcement, and then just shelved away in the brain, like dusty old books in a library. While this approach led to many important discoveries, like CREB, Cam Kinase and cAMP, it also created a strange blind spot in the literature: while scientists were starting to understand how we create a memory, then had no idea how we remember our memories. What happens during he recollection process?
An important paper arrived in 2000, when Karim Nader, Glenn Shafe…
omnibrain | January 19, 2007Oooo... I like this :)
Some people seem to continually have their heads in the clouds. Perhaps they are pondering during their drive to work the next pickle 24 protagonist Jack Bauer will find himself in. Or maybe they are assessing while buttering toast the Indianapolis Colts' chances of finally making it to the Super Bowl. Or considering where they will dine that evening as they tap out an e-mail. The question is: What makes their minds veer from the task at hand?
Researchers at Dartmouth College may have the answer. They found that a default network of regions in the brain's cortex--a…
cortex | January 17, 2007I'm always startled by the sheer variety of toothpastes being sold at my local drug store. It's a classic example of excessive choice: all those different products, most of which seem interchangeable, actually make me less likely to buy anything. I dread the oral health aisle.
So how do corporations distinguish their brand of toothpaste, if they all contain the same active ingredients? The answer is predictable: they spend hundreds of million dollars on advertising:
Procter is backing Pro-Health with a $100 million advertising campaign, its largest spending ever for a new dental product. The…
omnibrain | January 17, 2007It looks like there are a couple of interesting articles/TV shows out there in the last couple days highlighting some Omni Brain topics of the last few weeks.
You know how I love the mind control people, It looks like the Washington Post has a great article on it...
Mind Games
New on the Internet: a community of people who believe the government is beaming voices into their minds. They may be crazy, but the Pentagon has pursued a weapon that can do just that.
And of course you all remember the severed dogs head! National Geographic is producing a show about the Russian research that came up…
cortex | January 16, 2007What is the neural correlate of the self? The easy answer is that nobody knows. We have yet to discover a neurological patient who has lost their sense of identity, but still retained their conscious sensations. Nevertheless, certain brain areas have been implicated in distinguishing the self from non-self.
This 2006 paper by Todd Heatherton of Dartmouth, for example, detected increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) when people were forced to perform "self-referrent tasks". In other words, the mPFC is what recognizes your reflection in the mirror. It might not be the…
purepedantry | January 16, 2007The Stanford Prison experiment was a very famous -- now infamous -- experiment in social psychology that was conducted in 1971 by Dr. Phillip Zimbardo, Stanford psychology professor. You probably remember him if you took a high school or college intro to psychology course because he made a very popular set of instructional videos on psychology that are often used in such courses.
The experiment randomly assigned male undergraduate students to participate in a two week mock prison. They were randomly assigned to be guards and inmates. However, things went horribly wrong. The guards faced a…
cortex | January 16, 2007John Tierney inaugurates his new Science Times column with a charming mediation on a recent neuroeconomics paper published in Neuron:
The economists teamed with psychologists at Stanford to turn an M.R.I. machine into a shopping mall. They gave each experimental subject $40 in cash and offered the chance to buy dozens of gadgets, appliances, books, DVDs and assorted tchotchkes. Lying inside the scanner, first you'd see a picture of a product. Next you'd see its price, which was about 75 percent below retail. Then you'd choose whether or not you'd like a chance to buy it. Afterward, the…
omnibrain | January 13, 20071: Nat Neurosci. 2007 Jan;10(1):27-9. Epub 2006 Dec 17.
Mechanisms of scent-tracking in humans.
* Porter J,
* Craven B,
* Khan RM,
* Chang SJ,
* Kang I,
* Judkewicz B,
* Volpe J,
* Settles G,
* Sobel N.
299 Life Science Addition, MC 3200, Program in Biophysics, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Whether mammalian scent-tracking is aided by inter-nostril comparisons is unknown. We assessed this in humans and found that (i) humans can scent-track, (ii) they improve with practice…
clock | January 12, 2007In a time-crunch like this, one can always count on Buzz Skyline to save the day.....
omnibrain | January 11, 2007Here's a working brain - mine. I took it out of my skull and recorded it.
Produced, Written, Filmed, Edited, and Directed by me! I should go into Hollywood! Isn't it the most amazing movie you've ever seen?!?!