neuroscience
omnibrain | January 11, 2007Just because it should be posted at least once a year -
Pinky and the Brain go over the parts of the brain - in song!
omnibrain | January 8, 2007Check out this new pilot from PBS. You can watch the episode next Wednesday on TV or you can see it right now right here.
If you want this program to continue show your support by watching and sending your love to the website :)
Here is their press release:
22nd Century
"World Wide Mind"
Wednesday, January 17, 2007
8:00 p.m. EST
Ever wonder what the world is going to be like in the future? Will human life spans increase to 250 years or more? Will your personal computer become smarter than you? Will machines shrink so small they can make repairs inside a human cell?
22nd Century is an…
purepedantry | January 8, 2007Daniel Kahneman and Johnathan Renshon, writing in Foreign Policy, put forward a fascinating thesis that because of the way human beings are organized psychologically we are prone to be more hawkish. Basically the thrust of their argument is that social and cognitive psychologists have documented numerous psychological errors that human beings make consistently. In this sense human beings are not exactingly rational. Where our judgment consistently differs from pure rationality we make mistakes. With respect to foreign policy these mistakes make us more hawkish because they place a higher…
cortex | January 8, 2007I've always thought that most reality television was nothing more than unethical psychological experiments in disguise. (What else could Temptation Island or Wife Swap possibly be?) But now ABC has taken this idea to its logical extreme. Last week, the news show Primetime Live, along with social psychologist Jerry Burger, recreated the infamous Milgram experiment.
In 1961, Stanley Milgram used an authoritarian figure, dressed in a white lab coat, to coerce people into committing evil acts. The "scientist" instructed people to shock a screaming subject sitting in the next room. Although no…
omnibrain | January 8, 2007It seems that the New York Times may have some rampant speculation on their hands as to what parts of the brain make a hero ;)
When Mr. Autrey saw the stranger, Cameron Hollopeter, 20, tumble onto the tracks, his brain reacted just as anyone else's would. His thalamus, which absorbs sensory information, registered the fall, and sent the information to other parts of the brain for processing, said Gregory L. Fricchione, an associate professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. Mr. Autrey's amygdala, the part of the brain that mediates fear responses, was activated and sent sensory…
cortex | January 2, 2007There was a nice article in The Times on Sunday about the research of Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist at McGill (and former record producer) who studies the neural substrate of music:
Observing 13 subjects who listened to classical music while in an M.R.I. machine, the scientists found a cascade of brain-chemical activity. First the music triggered the forebrain, as it analyzed the structure and meaning of the tune. Then the nucleus accumbus and ventral tegmental area activated to release dopamine, a chemical that triggers the brain's sense of reward.
The cerebellum, an area normally…
j7uy5 | December 27, 2006NEJM has a very interesting article about the use of PET
scans to differentiate between persons with normal cognitive function,
those with mild cognitive dysfunction, and those with Alzheimer
Disease (AD). Unfortunately, you need a subscription to view
the
full article, but you can read the abstract for free, so I've taken the
liberty of copying it here, then providing some plain-language
commentary. You also can read a more extensive review on
href="http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/549894">Medscape
(free registration required).
href="http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract…
cortex | December 21, 2006My last post on neuroscience and free will generated lots of interesting comments. Please check them out. But I think a few readers misunderstood my ambition. It's easiest to begin by saying what I wasn't trying to do: I wasn't trying to construct a philosophically sound defense of free will (I'm not sure such a thing is possible), or reflect on quantum indeterminacy, or get into a metaphysical debate about the material causality of everything. If you believe, ala Laplace, that the world is governed by a discrete set of material rules (as I do), then, of course, freedom doesn't really exist.…
cortex | December 21, 2006We all know about Proust and his madeleine. One whiff of that buttery cookie, shaped like a seashell, and Proust suddenly remembered his long forgotten childhood in Combray. Proust makes it clear that his sense of smell was the trigger for his memory. He knew that our nose bears a unique burden of memory:
"When from a long distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping,…
neurotopia | December 20, 2006Welcome to Encephalon # 13!!!! Unlucky though it may be, we're up and running (and better late than never). I have to apologize to Encephalon readers, I've been trying to deal with my position being on the chopping block out of the blue. Yes, Virginia, the government doesn't offer job security either.
The next edition will be on 15th January at Mixing Memory, and not on New Year's Day as previously scheduled.
So let's get down to bidness!
We'll kick off with a post on FAK and Control of Axon Guidance, where Migrations comments on a relatively recent paper in Nature Neuroscience by Robles…
cortex | December 20, 2006The Economist believes that "modern neuroscience is eroding the idea of free will":
In the late 1990s a previously blameless American began collecting child pornography and propositioning children. On the day before he was due to be sentenced to prison for his crimes, he had his brain scanned. He had a tumour. When it had been removed, his paedophilic tendencies went away. When it started growing back, they returned. When the regrowth was removed, they vanished again. Who then was the child abuser?
His case dramatically illustrates the challenge that modern neuroscience is beginning to pose…
cortex | December 19, 2006The purpose of dreaming is learning. While you are sleeping, your brain is digesting the day, deciding which new experiences to consolidate into long-term memory. That's the implication of Matthew Wilson's latest paper, which documented the neural activity in the brains of dreaming rats. Here's the Times:
The finding, reported on the Web site of the journal Nature Neuroscience by Daoyun Ji and Matthew A. Wilson, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, showed that during nondreaming sleep, the neurons of both the hippocampus and the neocortex replayed memories -- in repeated…
omnibrain | December 18, 2006
In no particular order...
1) Being a south paw promotes survival from attacks (well at least in crabs). It seems that
The left-handed advantage is realized when snails interact with predators of opposite handedness. Some predatory crabs are "righties" -- and have a specialized tooth on their right claw that acts like a can opener to crack and peel the snail shells. "The 'sinistral advantage,' or advantage to being left-handed, is that it would be like using a can opener backwards for the crab to crack and peel the snail shell,"
Does something like this apply to humans? We're still…
omnibrain | December 16, 2006Another classic...
So I was watching Mythbusters the other night and they were testing a number of "mind contol" devices - they used EEG, etc. They even decided that a couple methods were "plausible."
I decided what I could find out there on the internet...
The first place I looked was EBay - they really do sell everything (I once almost got an antique proctologists uhh.."probe" - it was going to be a gift .. i promise), but anyway - this picture popped up. Only $799.99!
Control people's minds with this amazingly simple technology. The Mind Control Machine converts your voice into something…
omnibrain | December 16, 2006
A number of people have noticed that after getting transplants their personality changes - and not only that- their personality changes to reflect the donors personality.
...though she was born and raised in Tucson, she never liked Mexican food. She craved Italian and was a pasta junkie. But three years ago, all that changed for Jaime Sherman, 28, when she underwent a heart transplant at University Medical Center, after battling a heart defect since birth. "Now I love football, baseball, basketball. You name it, I follow it," said Sherman, a psychology student at Arizona State University. "…
clock | December 14, 2006Identification Of Carbon Dioxide Receptors In Insects May Help Fight Infectious Disease:
Mosquitoes don't mind morning breath. They use the carbon dioxide people exhale as a way to identify a potential food source. But when they bite, they can pass on a number of dangerous infectious diseases, such as malaria, yellow fever, and West Nile encephalitis. Now, reporting in today's advance online publication in Nature, Leslie Vosshall's laboratory at Rockefeller University has identified the two molecular receptors in fruit flies that help these insects detect carbon dioxide. The findings could…
omnibrain | December 14, 2006The mind is the most amazing, lying, cheating, charlatan televangelist ever imagined. It is so good at its job though that one 'part' of the mind can construct a completely false reality and then convince other parts that what it has just constructed is the absolute truth. Not only do other parts of the mind believe this information, they make up extra-information just to justify the original reality constructed. The most important questions though are: Why in the world does the mind have to be such a great con artist? And how does it accomplish this?
In a more formal sense, When a world…
clock | December 13, 2006Let me state up front that this is not a topic I know anything about, but I have always had a curiosity for it, so let me just throw some thoughts out into the Internets and see if commenters or other bloggers can enlighten me or point me to the most informative sources on the topic. This is really a smorgarsbord of seemingly disparate topics that I always felt had more in common with each other than just the fact that they have something or other to do with traffic. I am trying to put those things together and I hope you can help me (under the fold).
1. Models of Traffic Flow
There are two…
cortex | December 13, 2006What are the psychological effects of "doing time"? Do harsher prison conditions create harder criminals? These are the questions that the economists M. Keith Chen and Jesse Schapiro were determined to answer. Their conclusions are sobering:
Some two million Americans are currently incarcerated, with roughly six hundred thousand to be released this year. Despite this, little is known about the effects of confinement conditions on the post-release lives of inmates. In this paper we estimate the causal effect of prison conditions on recidivism rates by exploiting a discontinuity in the…