brain & behavior
From Flickr, by The G-tastic 7
November 22, 2008
DrugMonkey
Repost: Musty Must-Read: "A study of trial and error reactions in mammals" "Defective Man A. Age, 45 years. ....Ranch laborer in the experimenter's employ... nervous suspicious, "muddled" person, with a grievance against society in general, and a surprising fund of self-acquired misinterpretations relating to social environment. He expressed a belief that my experiment was dangerous meddling with the human mind... constant dread of apparatus...labored under a suspicion that it was not the simple structure that it pretended to be"
November 21, 2008
Terra Sigillata
The Friday Fermentable: Mediterranean and Nearby Island Wines, by Erleichda The flavors of Greece, Sicily, and even Croatia (don't tell Bora Zivkovic) - but who would've intended for their wine to smell of Vicks VapoRub? Some great values, great drinking, and great company!
Cognitive Daily
Casual Fridays: Does having kids destroy your memory? Last week we wondered how having kids affects our own childhood memories. In many ways, our kids remind us of our own childhood, allowing us to relive our favorite memories. But kids also distract us by being so adorable (or...
Gene Expression
In Defense of Monogamy! OK, not really, but I have a new piece in The Guardian's Comment Is Free on polygamy....
November 20, 2008
A Blog Around The Clock
New and Exciting in PLoS this week So, let's see what's new in PLoS Genetics, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Pathogens, PLoS ONE and PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases this week. As always, you should rate the articles, post notes and comments and send trackbacks when you blog about...
bioephemera
It might be a fluke . . . or, brain worms could be on the rise! Mo at Neurophilosophy has a really freaky story/video about a parasitic worm that invaded a woman's brain. This one is worth watching. . . and you can use it...
Not Exactly Rocket Science
The spread of disorder - can graffiti promote littering and theft? Real-world experiments show that signs of petty crime make passers-by more likely to litter or steal
The Frontal Cortex
Metacognition in the Rat I'm a contributor to Very Short List: Science, the latest offshoot of the VSL brand. (David Dobbs is another contributor.) For those who don't know, VSL is a very short email on something interesting sent daily to your inbox. We...
November 19, 2008
Cognitive Daily
Seeing shapes in two different ways: how and when it happens A Necker cube is bi-stable figure, meaning that it can be perceived as two different three-dimensional objects, depending on how you look at it: Cube A is ambiguous -- the true Necker cube. Cube B and cube C show the...
A Blog Around The Clock
Neurophilosophy
Neuroscience on the wireless Last Thursday's episode of the Radio 4 programme In Our Time featured a very interesting discussion about recent developments in neuroscience research. Presenter Melvynn Bragg was joined by psychologist Martin Conway of Leeds University, cognitive neuroscientist Gemma Calvert of the...
Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge
For no good reason at all Except that someone I trust far more than I do myself thinks this might not be so bad. To most of you I'm a semidescript blogger who tends to wax and wane in his anti-religious, anti-nonsense ways, coming and going...
November 18, 2008
A Blog Around The Clock
New and Exciting in PLoS ONE Mass Mortality of Adult Male Subantarctic Fur Seals: Are Alien Mice the Culprits?; GP-9s Are Ubiquitous Proteins Unlikely Involved in Olfactory Mediation of Social Organization in the Red Imported Fire Ant, Solenopsis invicta; The Neural Basis of Object-Context Relationships on Aesthetic Judgment; A Green Fluorescent Protein with Photoswitchable Emission from the Deep Sea
A Blog Around The Clock
Neurophilosophy
Optogenetic therapy for spinal cord injury Optogenetics is a recently developed technique based on microbial proteins called channelrhodopsins (ChRs), which render neurons sensitive to light when inserted into them, thus enabling researchers to manipulate the activity of the cells using laser pulses. Although still very new...
The Corpus Callosum
For the Brain Geek Who Has Everything This looks like a pile of wooden cubes with odd images on them. Assemble them correctly, and you get a 3-D image of the brain...except you can't see it when you are done... ...because the image is entirely inside....
November 17, 2008
Cognitive Daily
Does involving parents really help students learn? Depends on how they're involved One of things I was taught over and over again when I was in education school was the importance of getting parents involved in kids' learning. If you get the parents on your side, my professors insisted, then you're going...
The Frontal Cortex
Humaniqueness and the PFC A nice summary of "humaniquness," or the cognitive talents that make homo sapiens such an unprecedented species: [Marc] Hauser describes animals as having "laser-beam" intelligence, in which each cognitive capacity is locked into a specific function. Humans, by contrast, have...
The Intersection
The Science Review While at The Salk last month for Beyond Belief 3, I also taped this episode of The Science Review for The Science Network with Walter Sinnott-Armstrong, Nita Farahany, Lawrence Krauss, and Roger Bingham. It's a discussion on neurolaw, neuropolitics, and...
November 16, 2008
DrugMonkey
SfN 2008: The $100 Spike "Does electrophysiology really need to be out of reach of the amateur or budget-restricted scientist? What if you were to leave your lab tomorrow? What if the zombie apocalypse happened, you somehow survived, and you still wanted to do neuroscience?"
A Blog Around The Clock
Jumping Spider courtship behavior More movies here...
November 15, 2008
Greg Laden's Blog
Losing the Big Picture: How Religion May Control Visual Attention Atheists are smarter than Calvinists in Dutch Study. But, the Calvinists are quicker at identifying small shapes than the Atheists. Despite the abundance of evidence that human perception is penetrated by beliefs and expectations, scientific research so far has entirely neglected the possible impact of...
November 14, 2008
DrugMonkey
Apparently there's some other unimportant meeting in DC this weekend From the SfN website: G20 Summit in Downtown Washington As Neuroscience 2008 approaches, SfN is monitoring Washington heightened security in effect due to the G20 summit meeting at the National Building Museum. No disruption of meeting activities is anticipated, but...
Neurophilosophy
Christopher Wren & the architecture of the brain The current issue of Nature contains an interesting article about Sir Christopher Wren's contribution to neuroanatomy, by art historians Martin Kemp and Nathan Flis of Oxford University.The article focuses on the anatomical illustrations produced by Wren for Thomas Willis's 1664...
Cognitive Daily
Casual Fridays: Does having kids enhance or detract from our own childhood memories? This morning I was having a conversation with Nora about her AP European history class, and it got me thinking about my own experience taking the same class about 25 years ago (yes, kids, they did have AP classes back...
“Imagine you wake up and have a new sense. No, you can't imagine! If you try, you'll be trapped thinking in terms of your existing senses.“ Rafael C. P. on Can a blind person whose vision is restored understand what she sees?
