neurophilosophy | October 21, 2007
This photograph of a blue passion flower (Passiflora caerulea) was taken in our little garden about 2 months ago.
neurophilosophy | October 21, 2007Researchers from the Microsoft Corporation recently filed an application for a patent for a brain-computer interface that can "classify brain states".
They say that the device is needed to obtain accurate feedback about the effectiveness of computer-user interfaces, because the conventional way of getting this information - by interview - is often unreliable.
To me this sounds a bit like the overblown claims that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) can be used to determine whether an individual is lying or telling the truth. Except that this seems like an even bigger exaggeration.
neurophilosophy | October 20, 2007The 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…
neurophilosophy | October 20, 2007And is James Watson in the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease?
In this review of Craig Venter's autobiography A Life Decoded and James Watson's Avoid Boring People, Financial Times science editor Clive Cookson says that Venter's Nobel Prize prize is overdue, perhaps because of "the outdated bad-boy image he retains among some sections of the scientific establishment".
Venter and Watson were the first two people to have their personal genomes sequenced. Venter's genome was published last month in the open access journal PLoS Biology, and Watson's genome is available at the CSHL website.
In…
neurophilosophy | October 19, 2007
A mussel clinging to a sheet of teflon. (Image credit: Haeshin Lee/ Phillip Messersmith)
The marine mollusc Mytilus edulis inhabits ecological niches in the intertidal zone, which is exposed to air during low tide and submerged in water during high tide. Being so turbulent, these niches are inhospitable to many forms of life; the organisms that do inhabit such harsh conditions are suitably adapted, and the success of the mussel is due largely to its ability to adhere to virtually any kind of surface.
The mussel's steadfast grip is achieved by means of collagenous threads consisting of a…
neurophilosophy | October 19, 2007In Time magazine, orthopaedic surgeon Scott Haig relates his practical experience of an ethical dilemma.
While performing a biopsy, Haig's patient inadvertently finds out her prognosis of cancer. In the operating room is an anaesthesiologist who has a dose of propofol ("milk of amnesia") at the ready.
If you were the anaesthesiologist, would you administer - without consent - the propofol, so that the patient's memories of the last few minutes are erased? For Haig, there is no dilemma.
neurophilosophy | October 19, 2007James Watson has been suspended from his position as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory following the racist comments he made last week.
In last weekend's Sunday Times, Watson is quoted as saying that he is "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says not really."
He is now saying that his words were presented incorrectly, making them open to misinterpretation:
I can certainly understand why people, reading those words, have reacted in the…
neurophilosophy | October 18, 2007Smart dust refers to a network of wireless, autonomously-acting microscopic devices. Built with microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and using molecular manufacturing processes, these devices would act as sensors, detecting anything from light and vibrations to chemicals and pathogens, and communicating the information over long distances.
Microscopic devices such as this are still hypothetical, and the only place smart dust can be found is within the pages of science fiction novels. (For example, Michael Crichton's Prey, published in 2002, is based on the idea of the emergence of organised…
neurophilosophy | October 18, 2007I've just received this email from Stephanie Porter, one of the authors of the Oxford University Press blog:
I wanted to share with you a compelling series of posts from our new Complete Writing Guide to NIH Behavioral Studies Grants. Both posts are excerpts from the book that extend pointers on how to write a successful grant submission. The book is a hefty but invaluable resource, and these tips are just the thing to get you refocused on your grant writing! I am hoping you will encourage your readers to check out the series.
Grant Writing: Things That You Can Do To Learn…
neurophilosophy | October 18, 2007If you haven't noticed already, the ScienceBlogs homepage has changed somewhat. The list of channels has changed, and the homepage for each channel has been redesigned.
This means that you'll have to resubscribe to the new channels to get the content you want in your feed reader. For example, posts that would previously have gone into the Brain and Behaviour channel (including most of the content of this blog) will now be in the new Life Science channel.
If you take a look at the landing page for each channel, you'll notice that there's an image at the top. If you'd like your own science…
neurophilosophy | October 17, 2007
(Photo by Felice Frankel)
Reseacher, author and science photographer Felice Frankel is the winner of this year's Lennart Nilsson Award for Medical, Technical and Scientific Photography.
Frankel is a researcher at MIT and a senior research fellow at Harvard University's Faculty of the Arts and Sciences, where she is head of the Envisioning Science Program, which emphasizes the use of images to communicate science.
Frankel has written several books on this subject (the latest one, called Envisioning Science, was published by MIT Press in 2002), and some of her writing on it can be found…
neurophilosophy | October 17, 2007James Watson and Francis Crick made the most significant discovery of the twentieth century: they elucidated of the molecular structure of DNA in 1953, and later shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for their work.
So Watson and Crick are very illustrious, to say the least. But when Watson continues to make racist statements such as this, he loses much of his credibility, and one finds it very difficult to take him seriously:
[I am] inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa [because] all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours -…
neurophilosophy | October 16, 2007These pictures illustrate macrosomatognosia, the condition in which abnormal activity in the somatosensory regions of the brain causes one to perceive the body, or parts of it, to be abnormally large.
Both pictures are representations of partial macrosomatognosia, in which specific parts of the body are affected. They were drawn by artists who experience migraines, and were submitted as entries to the Migraine Art Competition.
The picture on the left shows the migraine sufferer lying on a bed, with elongated hand, arms and neck, and an enlarged head that appears to be floating up towards…
neurophilosophy | October 16, 2007In the Journal of Neurophysiology, Chris Moore of the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT reviews the evidence for his hemo-neural hypothesis:
Brain vasculature is a complex and interconnected network under tight regulatory control that exists in intimate communication with neurons and glia. Typically, hemodynamics are considered to exclusively serve as a metabolic support system. In contrast to this canonical view, we propose that hemodynamics also play a role in information processing through modulation of neural activity. Functional hyperemia, the basis of the fMRI BOLD signal,…
neurophilosophy | October 16, 2007According to an economic analysis carried out by the Home Office, immigrants earned more and paid more tax than native Britons did last year.
neurophilosophy | October 16, 2007The editors of PC Magazine have compiled a list of their favourite 100 blogs of the year. Only one of them is a science blog.
neurophilosophy | October 15, 2007An international team of researchers led by Tony Wyss-Coray of the Department of Neurology and Neurological Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine report that they have developed a blood test that can predict with 90% accuracy the early stages of Alzheimer's Disease.
By analyzing the concentrations of 18 different biomarkers, Wyss-Coray and his colleagues were able to identify, long before any symptoms were evident, those patients with mild cognitive impairment that progressed to Alzheimer's 2-6 years later.
Alzheimer's Disease is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder which…
neurophilosophy | October 15, 2007Scientist and journalist Sunny Bains discusses how Swiss researchers are using central pattern generator (CPG) chips to develop self-organizing furniture.
CPGs are networks of spinal neurons that generate the rhythmic patterns of neural activity which control locomotion. I wrote about them earlier this year, in the context of the "robo-salamander" designed and built by Auke Jan Ijspeert and his colleagues, of the Biologically Inspired Robotics Group at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland.
The robo-salamander is a modular robot, as it consists of identical units…
neurophilosophy | October 14, 2007Here's another of my favourite bands - Funkadelic, playing I Got a Thing (1970). The perfect acoustic accompaniment to pink Cadillacs and full-length fur coats, this could well be the funkiest film footage ever recorded. (And that is a blue Ku Klux Klan outfit he's wearing.)
neurophilosophy | October 14, 2007The journal Nature, in association with The Dana Foundation, has just launched a monthly neuroscience podcast called NeuroPod.
In the first edition, Kerri Smith discusses the potential applications of cognitive enhancement in warfare, the role of stress in memory formation, and the possibility of developing anaesthetics from chilli peppers.
[Via Action Potential]