neurontic | April 10, 2007Those of you who have been following this blog since the beginning will already have heard about Rutgers Anthropologist Helen Fisher's theory that SSRI's are endangering people's ability to fall in love and stay in love. If you have, the title of the the article I just wrote for Psychology Today online will be familiar: Sex Love, and SSRIs, but this piece delves into the issue far more deeply than my previous posting.
I hope you'll take the time to read it. While no long term studies have yet confirmed Fisher's theory, there's enough evidence to warrant further inquiry. Everything we know…
neurontic | April 8, 2007
Welcome to Encephalon, the blog carnival for brain geeks and those who love them. We got a heap of submissions this time around, so let's dive right in:
The Brain: An Owner's Manual
First up, Alvaro over at Sharp Brains discusses how aging brains may be affecting the legal profession, and urges us to keep our own memory problems in perspective in "Baby Boomers, Healthy Aging and Job Performance."
If you're still convinced that your brain is putt-putting along like an old jalopy, it might be time to read up on the "three easy and quick mental exercises that everyone should be doing daily…
neurontic | March 31, 2007(Originally published in ChelseaNow, March 23-29)
"I like to think of today's event as the NBA finals combined with the Super Bowl and the World Series," said world-renowned memory expert Tony Buzan in his opening remarks at the 10th annual USA Memory Championship on March 10.
Before him in the auditorium of the Con Edison building on Irving Pl., a group of students, analysts, software engineers, and one journalist prepared to compete in a series of mind-bending events in the hopes of being crowned the strongest mental athlete in America. Seven hours later, the victor, 38-year-old David…
neurontic | March 31, 2007Want the inside scoop on Neurontic? Check out my recent interview with the folks on the Seed mother ship.
neurontic | March 27, 2007Just a quick note to let everyone know that Neurontic is pleased to host the next edition of Encephalon, the carnival for brain aficionados everywhere. Please send your entries to neurontic [at] gmail.com no later than the morning of Sunday April 8, so your host has time to digest them. (Nudge, nudge, wink, wink: If you miss the deadline, it's no biggie. We'll just forward your entry on to the next host.) For those of you who are unfamiliar with the rules, here's a primer:
Encephalon Submission Guidelines:
Contributors can submit up to 3 posts in any of the following categories:
artificial…
neurontic | March 24, 2007Want to know what the life of a recently graduated journalism MA with staggeringly high student loans looks like? Not so much? Well, I don't blame you. It's not exactly the stuff memoirs are made of, but it is keeping me extremely busy. There's been some freelance reporting for The New York Times and Fortune Small Business Magazine, a regular gig fact-checking at The New York Observer, a couple of pieces for Psychology Today, along with my normal gig writing about community events for the local newspapers.
Hustling is a prerequisite for success in this field, and as long as I get to write…
neurontic | March 8, 2007Hello fellow brain geeks,
The Neurophilosopher has done us all a huge favor and compiled an exhaustive list of all of the neuroscience-related blogs out there. I've spent the morning adding new (and long-delayed) sites to the blogroll and thought you might want to take a look as well: Neurophilosopher's Neuroscience Blog List.
neurontic | March 6, 2007If I understand correctly, the seat of emotion is in the brain, in the limbic system, so why do I get butterflies in my stomach when I'm nervous?
Sincerely,
Stomach Upset
Dear Stomach Upset,
Remember that Steve Martin movie The Man With Two Brains? Well, it turns out they got the number wrong. It should have been The Man With Three Brains. There was the brain Dr. Hfuhruhurr carried around in the jar (voiced by the girl from Wings if I remember correctly), the one in his skull, and the one in his stomach . . . That's right, his stomach. According to researchers in the field of…
neurontic | March 5, 2007Sorry for the ongoing radio silence, folks. Your friendly neighborhood blogger has come down with a vicious case of the flu. I plan to get right back up on the horse once the fever tremors have died down. In the meantime, here are a few interesting links:
*Mind Hacks highlights a special edition of ABC radio's Science Show, exploring "Social Intelligence Hypothesis"--the theory that human brain growth was spurred by "the need to work in groups and make sense of complex relationships."
*Clive Thompson over at Collision Detection discusses a recent piece in the New Scientist detailing findings…
neurontic | February 25, 2007I've been holding off on commenting about the anti-religion campaign being spearheaded by Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett for a number of reasons. But I find myself growing increasingly frustrated with it and I finally feel compelled to put in my two cents.
Initially I hesitated to speak out because I understand the impulse behind the Dawkins/Dennett campaign and I have some sympathy for their plight. There are, of course, a number of factors fueling their crusade. First and foremost, there is fear. For most of the twentieth century, secular humanism reigned supreme. And those of us who…
neurontic | February 18, 2007There are two kinds of silly science, folks. There's good silly science, exemplified this week by three high school kids who got together and decided the best way to fulfill their AP Psychology requirement was to rejigger a Britney Spears' video so it looked like she was singing a ballad about the occipital lobe.
And then there's bad silly science. This week's winner in the bad silly science category? Brian Witcombe, a British radiologist, who burned through some of the tax payers hardearned cash to deliver this stunning revelation:
Sword swallowers run a higher risk of injury when they are…
neurontic | February 16, 2007Recently I discovered that my therapist is taking an anti-depressant for depression. I also suffer from chronic depression and understand that, if properly treated, depression doesn't jeopardize the ability to do one's job. (I, for one, am successful despite my condition.) But since my discovery, I am more reluctant to trust his judgment. Is this a case of the blind leading the blind?
Sincerely,
Anxious Analysand
Dear Anxious Analysand,
Let me start by saying that your reservations are perfectly reasonable. When someone initially seeks treatment for depression, he's generally hoping to find a…
neurontic | February 12, 2007*Scientists inaugurate new mental health condition so vague it applies to everyone over the age of 12, Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder. The hallmarks of the condition include "worrying about life, feeling tense, restless, or fatigued, being concerned about their weight, noticing signs of aging, feeling stress at work, home, or finding activities they used to enjoy, like shopping, challenging."
*A Philadelphia-based technology company brings us one step closer to the Brave New World by marketing MRI-based lie detection testing to Corporate America as a…
neurontic | February 12, 2007My last semester at NYU, I had the opportunity to take a class with Steven Johnson. Just to set the record straight for those of you who've only encountered his name on Gawker, Johnson was a fabulous teacher and looks nothing at all like Steve Buscemi. (Having always had kind of a thing for Buscemi, I can't say I'm entirely happy about that.) In any case, during the course of the class, we were visited by a couple of blogging luminaries, shipped in to discuss "the dissolution of print journalism and the future of new media." I won't bore you with the specifics. Suffice it to say, print…
neurontic | February 2, 2007I'm a big fan of YouTube. Any medium that facilitates the sharing of my favorite commercials (see Burger King Chicken Fries and Citreon C4 Transformer) and allows me to watch Michel Gondry solve a Rubik's Cube with his feet is OK by me. That said, it's rare to stumble on a YouTube offering that meets the stringent requirements of "brain blogging." So you can imagine my delight at finding this: An excerpt of autistic savant Stephen Wiltshire drawing an aerial view of Rome from memory.
I've spent a good chunk of time reading about autistics with peculiar gifts, but I've never seen a savant…
neurontic | January 30, 2007I'm a day late to the party, but I wanted to draw your attention to the latest edition of Encephalon, which is being hosted by the folks at Sharp Brains. I was particularly intrigued by The Neurophilosopher's review of Jonathan Moreno's book Mind Wars, which apparently includes evidence that "the majority of psychological research carried out during the mid-20th century was funded by the military," unbeknownst to researchers.
Too bad X-Files is off the air. Sounds like Moreno's claims would have made for one hell of an episode.
neurontic | January 28, 2007This week in Silly Science:
*Attractive young psychology professor is stunned to discover that "it sucks to be rejected based on how you look."
Three new studies spearheaded by University of Buffalo Assistant Professor Lora Park provide the "first known evidence that some people anxiously expect that they will be rejected by others because of their physical appearance," according to a January 27 article in Science Daily. But wait that's not all: Park's research also suggests that people who deem themselves unattractive are "preoccupied with their body and weight in unhealthy ways."
Next…
neurontic | January 19, 2007I was so struck by Adam Penenberg's recent article in Fast Company that I'm going to break my own rule and direct your attention to a totally non-brain related topic: The future of touch screens.
I'm no technofetishist, but even I was blown away by the revolutionary touch screen technology being developed by NYU's Jefferson Han. Han's demonstration at the 2006 TED conference left a crowd of tech-luminaries, including Google's Sergey Brin and Larry Page, speechless:
Han began his presentation. His fingertips splayed, he placed them on the cobalt blue 36-inch-wide display before him and traced…
neurontic | January 16, 2007Thanks to the herculean efforts of A Blog Around the Clock's tireless Bora Zivkovic, the newly-minted Science Blogging Anthology, The Open Laboratory, is now available for purchase!
Featuring 50 stellar science posts from 2006, The Open Laboratory's contributors range from Carl Zimmer of The Loom and Jennifer Ouellette of Cocktail Party Physics to little ol' me.
To read more about the genesis of the anthology, please visit The Clock.
neurontic | January 11, 2007A couple of months ago a friend of mine recommended I pick up Richard Power's new novel The Echo Maker. "It's right up your alley," he said, "It's all about a man suffering from a bizarre brain condition." I added it to my Amazon shopping cart within the hour.
In The Echo Maker, Powers' character Mark flips his truck on an icy stretch of road in Nebraska and ends up in the hospital in a near-vegetative state. His sole-remaining family member, his sister Karin, immediately rushes to his bedside to nurse him back to health. Mark remains comatose for long enough that the doctors begin to lose…