Psychology
neurophilosophy | October 20, 2007
The November issue of National Geographic has a cover story about memory, called Remember This.
The author of the article is a journalist called Joshua Foer, who won the 2006 USA Memory Championships after entering the competition to research a book.
Foer discusses a number of amnesic patients, including the famous H.M., on whom much of what we know about memory is based, and E.P, who suffered severe retrograde and antergrade amnesia following a herpes simplex infection which completely destroyed his hippocampi.
The article touches on the work of researchers who have made major contributions…
clock | October 16, 2007As last week's Journal Club on PLoS ONE has been a success (and no, that does not mean it's over - feel free to add your commentary there), we are introducing a new one this week!
Members of the Potsdam Eye-Movement Group have now posted their comments and annotations on the article Parts, Wholes, and Context in Reading: A Triple Dissociation.
You know your duty: go there, read the paper, read what the group has already posted in their commentary, register, and add your own comments and questions. Rate the article. If you blog about it, send your readers to do the same. If your blogging…
sb admin | October 12, 2007Via Metacafe, here's an audio/visual illusion involving reading lips and seeing voices (nothing to do with synaesthesia) called the McGurk Effect.
razib | October 10, 2007Nature has two papers on language which I'll pass along (I don't know enough about this area to say anything non-tardish) for those who have an interest in such things.
First, our old friend Martin Nowak is behind a group which published an article titled Quantifying the evolutionary dynamics of language:
...Here we describe the emergence of this linguistic rule amidst the evolutionary decay of its exceptions, known to us as irregular verbs. We have generated a data set of verbs whose conjugations have been evolving for more than a millennium, tracking inflectional changes to 177 Old-English…
neurophilosophy | October 9, 2007The 33rd edition of Encephalon, which has just been posted at GNIF Brain Blogger, includes posts on magnetoreception, cellular senescence in Alzheimer's Disease, and how the use of DNA microarrays is providing insights into human brain evolution.
The next edition of the carnival will be hosted by Zachary at Distributed Neuron, on October 22nd. If you'd like to contribute, send permalinks to your neuroscience or psychology blog posts to encephalon{dot}host{at}gmail{dot}com, or use this submission form.
omnibrain | October 6, 2007Music education in the United States has typically been one of the first thing to be cut when it comes to balancing the budget. This is a horrible shame since music is one of those things (above any of the other arts) that has a wide ranging effect on peoples intellectual achievement. One of the holy grails in education and psychology is skill transference. Imagine being able to train one ability that positively affects the performance of many many other abilities. Sounds a bit ridiculous eh?! Well, music seem to be one of the only things that can have this effect. Psychologists have…
grrlscientist | October 3, 2007tags: researchblogging.org, treatment-emergent suicidal ideation, suicide, citalopram, celexa, SSRI, black box warning
Despite what the news might have you believe, it is quite rare for a depressed person to exhibit increased suicidal thinking after they have begun treatment with an SSRI, such as citalopram (celexa). According to the statistics, so-called "treatment-emergent suicidal ideation" occurs only in approximately 4% of all people taking citalopram, whereas this same phenomenon also occurs in 2% of all placebo-treated cases. However, in those unusual cases where suicidal ideation…
clock | October 2, 2007Galilei kicked us out of the Center of the Universe.
Darwin kicked us off the Pinnacle of Creation
Freud kicked the Soul out of our Brains.
Few remain adherents of Geocentrism.
The opponents of evolution are legion and very vocal (in this country, and a couple of Middle Eastern ones), but they have been defeated so soundly so many times, they had to concede more and more ground, and though they are getting sneakier with time, their efforts are becoming more and more laughable and pitiful.
So, the last Big Fight will be about the Soul. The next area of science to experience a big frontal…
neurophilosophy | September 27, 2007The new issue of Monitor on Psychology, the American Psychology Association's monthly magazine, has a special feature on the mental health of military personnel.
The feature includes articles about the military's efforts to recruit and train psychologists, and the changes that are being made, following criticisms earlier this year, that the Department of Defense is neglecting the mental health of its troops.
(Via Mind Hacks)
Related:
Military over-reach & mental health
neurophilosophy | September 25, 2007To celebrate the 100th email issue of its research digest, the British Psychological Society has asked leading psychologists and bloggers to write a few paragraphs about the most important psychology experiment that's never been done.
Contributors include Susan Blackmore, Richard Gregory, Vaughan Bell of Mind Hacks and ScienceBlogs' own Chris Chatham. The contributions are being published at the BPS Research Digest blog over the next few weeks.
omnibrain | September 24, 2007
alt="Openlab 2007" title="The Best Science Writing on Blogs 2007" />
Can you solve this problem?
Given a human being with an inoperable stomach tumor, and lasers which destroy organic tissue at sufficient intensity, how can one cure the person with these lasers and, at the same time, avoid harming the healthy tissue that surrounds the tumor?
For the solution and evidence from Laura Thomas and Alejandro Lleras (2007) that shows that moving your eyes in a specific way can help you solve the problem, continue reading after the break.
In the 1940's and 50's gestalt psychologists began to…
grrlscientist | September 20, 2007A couple days ago, I mentioned that I, along with several other blog writers, had been invited to participate in a conference call-interview with several experts who were going to discuss the topic of bipolar disorder with us so we could write about it on our blogs. Well, thanks to a friend here in NYC, who lent me his cell phone so I could make that call without using more of my severely limited daytime minutes, I did get to participate in this discussion. Even though I was not sure what to expect, I found it to be fascinating. I have not yet received the recording of the phone call, but I…
neurophilosophy | September 20, 2007
I found this two-part documentary on YouTube. It's about a musician called Clive Wearing, who became amnesic following a herpes encephalitis infection that damaged his hippocampus, as well as parts of his frontal and temporal lobes.
Wearing's is the most severe case of anterograde amnesia ever recorded. Unlike the famous amnesic Henry M., who can learn simple motor skills, Wearing is incapable of forming any new memories whatsoever.
Wearing is the subject of this article in The New Yorker, by Oliver Sacks, whose new book about music and the mind is to be published soon.
[The…
sb admin | September 18, 2007 The Best Visual Illusion of the Year Contest is now accepting submissions for its 2008 prizes. The Neural Correlate Society hosts this fun and popular event now entering its fourth year. Last year's winning illusion will be tough to top!
New this year are the three winners' trophies, designed by sculptor Guido Moretti. The trophies themselves are visual illusions that change shape when you rotate them. Very cool. Click here to see the sculptures' shapes when rotated.
The image above is one of the 2007 entrants, "It's a Circle, Honest!" by David Whitaker. Here's how he created it.
neurophilosophy | September 18, 2007Christian Jarrett has posted an excellent collection of resources for students and teachers of A-Level psychology.
Christian's post includes links to PDFs of key papers in cognitive, developmental, biological and social psychology, including a classic 1968 paper from American Psychologist, called Hemisphere deconnection and unity in consciousness, in which the Nobel Prize-winning neurobiologist Roger W. Sperry reports his behavioural studies of split brain patients, and discusses their implications:
One of the more general and also more interesting and striking features of this syndrome may…
omnibrain | September 17, 2007
I have a project that I could use your help on. Yes... you!
If that didn't get you excited I'm not sure what will ;)
Here's the essentials from the wiki:
Welcome to the Help Steve get his Ph.D. Wiki
This project aims to collect as many distinct scene gists as possible (as a first step - the later steps are classified at the moment!). These are separated into two categories, Scene Gist and Social Gist. A Scene gist is the basic name or category for a scene that does not consist of any humans. You should be able to name the scene nearly instantly as soon as you look at it. For example a jail…
omnibrain | September 17, 2007A ground breaking new study from Florida State University has determined that we look at attractive people! Who woulda thought!
But really:
In a series of three experiments, Maner and his colleagues found that the study participants, all heterosexual men and women, fixated on highly attractive people within the first half of a second of seeing them. Single folks ogled the opposite sex, of course, but those in committed relationships also checked people out, with one major difference: They were more interested in beautiful people of the same sex.
Ok.. for reals.. It is a pretty interesting…
neurophilosophy | September 16, 2007The Inquisitive Mind (In-Mind) is an online quarterly social psychology magazine written by staff and students at the Free University in Amsterdam.
The site has articles that cover all areas of social psychology, written in such a way as to make the field easily accessible to the general public. There are also links to psychology resources and stories in the news, and a discussion forum.
Free registration is required for full access to the contents of the site.
neurophilosophy | September 14, 2007From my inbox:
Scientific American.com recently launched a brand new podcast called 60-Second Psych, which runs every Thursday for a one-minute commentary on the latest studies in brain and behavior...Though only a couple of episodes old, this podcast is already the #2 ranked podcast on Apple iTunes in the Science and Medicine category.