neuroscience
neurophilosophy | October 8, 2009SECOND LIFE is an online "virtual world" which enables users to create a customised avatar, or digital persona, with which they can interact with each other. It has become incredibly popular since its launch just over 6 years ago, with millions of "residents" now using it regularly to meet others, socialize and even to have virtual sex. Second Life is now filled with virtual communities and institutions - it has businesses and universities, and its own virtual economy.
Now, imagine a futuristic version of Second Life, in which avatars can transfer sensations to the bodies of their users.…
bioephemera | October 7, 2009Just got in from a really interesting talk by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age. Mayer-Schonberger's concern is that with a shift to digital modes of storage, we've transitioned from a biologically hardwired default of forgetting information, to a default of remembering. It's literally gotten harder to erase certain types of information than it has to retrieve it. Many types of ephemera just aren't ephemeral anymore.
Why is this a problem? In addition to swamping us with unwanted, outdated information we'd all rather forget (high school…
neurophilosophy | October 7, 2009VISION is now well known to modulate the senses of touch and pain. Various studies have shown that looking at oneself being touched can enhance tactile acuity, so that one can discriminate between two pinpoints which would otherwise feel like a single sensation. And last year, researchers from the University of Oxford showed that using binoculars to make a limb look larger or smaller than it actually is can respectively enhance and diminish painful sensations.
These phenomena occur because the brain fuses stimuli from different sensory systems to generate a coherent experience of bodily…
omnibrain | October 5, 2009
So how does Superman do it! He can see through buildings and clothing (he checks out Lois Lane's underwear in Superman 1 - more on this later). Many have attempted to answer this question of the ages yet few have explored this in as much depth as J.B. Pittenger who published a study in the journal Perception back in the stone ages (1983) entitled "On the plausibility of superman's x-ray vision"
But first, before we get into the meat of the paper, lets see what others around the InterWebs have said about Superman's amazing seeing through underwear powers.
In Correcting Misconceptions…
terrasig | October 2, 2009The Clinical and Translational Science Network (CTSciNet) section of Science Careers has just published a superb article by Karyn Hede on the issues of depression precipitated during the rigors of medical education. Hede is a freelance writer in Chapel Hill and has contributed before to Science Careers, particularly with this article on the challenges of women MD-PhDs and another on why so many of us have crappy interpersonal and lab management skills.
The current article focuses primarily on the medical profession given its placement in the clinical/translational section but these issues are…
neurophilosophy | October 2, 2009SEVERAL hundred species of fish have evolved the ability to generate electric fields, which they use to navigate, communicate and home in on prey. But this ability comes at a cost - the electric field is generated continuously throughout life, so consumes a great deal of energy, and it can also attract predators which are sensitive to it. Electrogenic fish species therefore utilize various strategies to save energy and to minimize the likelihood of being detected. Some generate irregular pulses of electrical discharges whose rate can be modulated; others can also modulate the strength of the…
edyong | October 1, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material.
At Harvard University, a group of creative scientists have turned the brains of mice into beautiful tangles of colour. By mixing together a palette of fluorescent proteins, they have painted individual neurons with up to 90 different colours. Their technique, dubbed 'Brainbow', gives them an unprecedented vision of how the brain's cells are connected to each other.
The art of looking at neurons had much…
omnibrain | September 30, 2009Wow, their brains are small. It all makes sense now - all they want to do is eat shit and kill their competitors.
Anyone want to translate the, what I'm assuming, is Japanese for me?
-Via Neatorama-
j7uy5 | September 28, 2009The new drug is called iloperidone; the brand name in the USA
will be Fanapt. It is yet another antipsychotic that
blocks D2 and 5HT2 receptors. Although there is no universally
accepted way of classifying drugs into families, it will be referred to
as an atypical or second-generation
antipsychotic. This designation will indicate a loose kind of
similarity to risperidone, aripiperazole, ziprasidone, quetiapine,
olanzapine, clozapine, and paliperidone.
It turns out that there is a Wikipedia page for
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iloperidone">iloperidone.
It is not one of the…
omnibrain | September 24, 2009Here's an interesting video from boingboing:
Boing Boing presents a remix of "Synesthesia," a documentary directed by Jonathan Fowler about people whose senses blend, or mix. For instance: a synesthete might see colors when listening to music, or taste flavors when hearing a spoken word.
In this documentary, Dr. David Eagleman of Baylor College of Medicine explains this condition, and four synesthetes explain how they perceive the world.
j7uy5 | September 24, 2009A recent report refers to
the increasing number of Alzheimer patient an "emergency." Yet,
despite an enormous amount of research, and a handful of drugs, we are
not particularly close to having a robust intervention for this
condition.
Perhaps the reason is that we have been looking in the wrong
place. Traditionally, brain disease tend to be thought of a
neuronal diseases, with many interventions aimed at neurotransmitters,
the chemical messengers that convey information from one neuron to
another. But there is a lot more to the brain than neurons and
transmitters.
One researcher is…
neurophilosophy | September 23, 2009
REMOTE-CONTROLLED insects may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but they have already been under development for some time now. In 2006, for example, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA, the Pentagon's research and development branch) launched the Hybrid Insect Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems program, whose ultimate aim is to turn insects into unmanned aerial vehicles.
Such projects provide proof of principle, but have met with limited success. Until now, that is. In the open access journal Frontiers in Integrative Neuroscience, a team of electrical engineers led by…
edyong | September 23, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science. The blog is on holiday until the start of October, when I'll return with fresh material.
Many patients would like their doctors to be more sensitive to their needs. That may be a reasonable request but at a neurological level, we should be glad of a certain amount of detachment.
Humans are programmed, quite literally, to feel each others' pain. The neural circuit in our brains that registers pain also fires when we see someone else getting hurt; it's why we automatically wince.
This empathy makes…
neurophilosophy | September 21, 2009THE vegetative and minimally conscious states are examples of what are referred to as disorders of consciousness. Patients in these conditions are more or less oblivious to goings-on in their surroundings - they exhibit few, if any, signs of conscious awareness, and are usually unable to communicate in any way. It is, therefore, extremely difficult to establish what these patients are experiencing, and the consciousness disorders are among the least understood, and most commonly misdiagnosed, conditions in medicine.
Although technologies such as functional neuorimaging have enabled…
bioephemera | September 21, 2009No, it's not a stupid joke. It's my candidate for the worst press release title of September? "Neurons Found To Be Similar To U.S. Electoral College":
A tiny neuron is a very complicated structure. Its complex network of dendrites, axons and synapses is constantly dealing with information, deciding whether or not to send a nerve impulse, to drive a certain action. It turns out that neurons, at one level, operate like another complicated structure -- the United States, particularly its system of electing a president, through the Electoral College. (source).
Uh. . . thanks for that bizarre free…
neurophilosophy | September 17, 2009A paper by researchers from Princeton University, just published in the open access journal PLoS One, describes a new virus-based technique for probing the connections between neurons while simultaneously monitoring their activity in live animals. Various methods are available for studying the activity of neurons and how they are connected to one another, but examining the co-ordinated activity of multiple nerve cells in neural circuits has, until now, posed a big challenge, because none of them can monitor both activity and connectivity at the same time.
The earliest method for tracing…
bioephemera | September 14, 2009An excellent post from language log:
I propose a voluntary ban on the use of generic plurals to express statistical differences, especially in talking to the general public about scientific results in areas with public policy implications.In other words, when we're looking at some property P of two groups X and Y, and a study shows that the distribution of P in X is different from the distribution of P in Y to an extent that is unlikely to be entirely the result of chance, we should avoid explaining this to the general public by saying "X's have more P than Y's", or "X and Y differ in P", or…
neurophilosophy | September 14, 2009
THIS short film clip shows two images of the same scene. Watch it carefully, and see if you can spot the subtle differences between them. As you watch, your eyes will dart back and forth across the images, so that you can perceive the most important features. And even though you might not be consciously aware of the differences, your brain will have picked up on them. This implicit form of remembering is referred to as relational memory; in this case, the brain is encoding the perceptual associations between items in the image. And recent studies have shown that relational…
clock | September 9, 2009Tuesday, September 22, 2009
6:30-8:30 pm with discussion beginning at 7:00 followed by Q&A
Location: The Irregardless Café, 901 W. Morgan Street, Raleigh 833-8898
Memory problems have become increasingly common as our population ages. The fear of developing dementia is one of the greatest fears of most Americans. There can be memory changes as one grows older, but what determines if these changes are benign versus the beginning of a dementia process like Alzheimer's disease? We will discuss types of memory, the neurobiological basis of memory, and ways to tell normal aging from the…
j7uy5 | September 8, 2009Poets on Prozac is the short title of a book by
psychiatrist-poet Richard M. Berlin, MD. The full title is: Poets
on Prozac: Mental Illness, Treatment, and the Creative Process.
Berlin was an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of
Massachusetts Medical School; now he's in private practice, and a
Senior Affiliate at U Mass. And a writer. His personal
website is here.
A sample of his work is
href="http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/extract/296/7/737">here;
After Reading Music From Apartment 8
for John Stone, MD
When I started out in medicine,
before I married and…