brain
edyong | January 16, 2009
Using genetic engineering, a group of scientists have developed a way of sneaking a virus past the brain's defences. Don't panic - this isn't some nightmare scenario. It could be the first step to curing a huge number of brain diseases.
The brain seems incredibly well protected amid its shell of bone and cushioning fluid. But even the strongest of forts needs supply lines, and brain is no exception.
A dense network of blood vessels carries vital oxygen to its cells. These vessels are a potential vulnerable spot, providing access for bacteria and other disease-causing organisms to migrate…
grrlscientist | December 9, 2008tags: encephalon, brain, behavior, cognition, neurobiology, neuroscience, blog carnival
The last frontier: The brain.
Image: Orphaned. Contact me so I can provide credit and linkage.
Welcome to Encephalon! This is the blogosphere's neuroscience blog carnival that focuses specifically upon the brain, neuroscience, perception and behavior. If you sent me an essay or video about the brain and its relationship to behavior, perception, cognition, or learning, then it is included here! Also, please accept my sincerest apologies for the one day delay in publishing Encephalon: a police action in…
edyong | November 27, 2008
It goes without saying that we are capable of noticing changes to our bodies, but it's perhaps less obvious that the way we perceive our bodies can affect them physically. The two-way nature of this link, between physicality and perception, has been dramatically demonstrated by a new study of people with chronic hand pain. Lorimer Moseley at the University of Oxford found that he could control the severity of pain and swelling in an aching hand by making it seem larger or smaller.
Moseley recruited 10 patients with chronic pain in one of their arms and asked them to perform a series of ten…
edyong | November 24, 2008Have you ever seen someone that you're sure you recognise but whose face you just can't seem to place? It's a common enough occurrence, but for some people, problems with recognising faces are a part of their daily lives. They have a condition called prosopagnosia, or face blindness, which makes them incredibly bad at recognising faces, despite their normal eyesight, memory, intelligence, and ability to recognise other objects.
Prosopagnosia can be caused by accidents that damage parts of the brain like the fusiform gyrus - the core part of a broad network of regions involved in processing…
edyong | October 19, 2008
We've all acted impulsively before, and we have the horrendous clothes, echoing bank accounts and hilarious memories to show for it. But science is beginning to show that impulsive people may be particularly vulnerable to drug addiction, and there is little funny or harmless about that.
According to Government statistics, half a million people in the UK are addicted to class A drugs like cocaine, heroin and amphetamines. All too often, drug addiction and other compulsive disorders like obesity are dismissed as issues of 'willpower' and those who succumb to temptation are labelled as '…
edyong | October 14, 2008
I have only ever seen one car crash and I remember it with crystal clarity. I was driving home along a motorway and a car heading the opposite way simply veered into the central reservation. Its hood crumpled like so much paper, its back end lifted clear off the tarmac and it spun 180 degrees before crashing back down in a cloud of dust. All of this happened within the space of a second, so the details may be different to what I remember. But the emotions I felt at the time are still vivid - the shock of the sight, the fear for the passengers, the confusion over what had happened.
Many…
edyong | October 12, 2008
It's mid-October. For most of us, our New Year's resolutions have long been forgotten and our bad habits remain frustratingly habitual. The things that are bad for us often feel strongly compelling, be they high-fat foods, gambling or alcohol. And nowhere is the problem of addiction more widespread, serious and dangerous than the case of cigarette smoking.
Smoking is the leading preventable cause of death in the developed world, and in the UK, it kills five times more people than all non-medical causes combined. The dangers of smokers are both well-established and well-known, and…
edyong | October 2, 2008
You are not the person you used to be. Two weeks ago, the surface of your skin was covered with a completely different set of cells, which have since died and flaked off. Four month ago, you had a wholly different set of red blood cells. Since birth, your body has grown tremendously in size and much of it is constantly regenerating, replacing old cells with new ones.
But your brain is different. At birth, the part of your brain that controls your most human abilities - the neocortex - came fully equipped with 100 billion neurons. These same neurons have lasted throughout the years and…
edyong | September 13, 2008
As you read this post, your computer is probably busy. You may have multiple programs running in the background, with email clients, anti-virus software or file-sharing software all competing for valuable memory. The ability of computers to multi-task has grown substantially in recent years, as processors have become increasingly powerful.
Evolution has chartered a similar course, and humans are particularly talented at dividing our attention among multiple priorities. Now scientists are showing that the asymmetrical differences between the two sides of our brain are essential for this…
edyong | September 6, 2008
A stranger walks up to you and a friend and offers to give you both £100. As always, there is a catch - your friend must choose how to split the money between you. Accept his offer, and you both keep your respective shares; reject it, and you both come away empty-handed. Now imagine your friend offered you a single pound. What do you do? Most people would reject the offer to spite the friend. Even though you would financially better off if you accepted, you friend's proposal is unfair and rather insulting. Clearly, economic status is not the only thing at stake here.
Psychologists use…
pontiff | August 6, 2008A very cool discovery out of Caltech: auditory synesthesia. Synesthesia, you probably know, is an effect wherein the stimulation of one sense causes automatic sensations in another sense. For example, grapheme-color synesthesia is where numbers or letters appear to those observing to be shaded or tinged with different colors. Now two researchers at Caltech, Melissa Saenz (Who I know! I know someone who discovered something really cool!) and Christof Koch, have identified a new form of synesthesia, auditory synesthesia. To describe it, it's funner to read what Dr. Saenz has to say about…
pontiff | July 25, 2008An interesting idea from Mark Changizi from RPI: can one design pictures which, when interpreted by your vision, perform a computation? Press release here (note to RPI public relations department: you should probably make it so that the webpage address of your press releases can be copied from the browser address bar. Somewhere a web designer should be shot.) and paper in Perception published here.
The basic idea is to use the orientation information we glean from looking at objects to perform computations. Thus for example, Changizi suggest that we can represent zeros and ones via the two…
edyong | July 15, 2008Which of these strings of letters is easier to remember: QKJITJGPI or BBCITVCNN?
Chances are, you chose the latter string, where the nine letters are the combined names of three television networks. This neatly illustrates a fundamental property of human memory - that we remember long strings of information more easily if we can break them down into bite-sized chunks. In this case, a nine-letter string can be divided into three lots of three letters. You probably use similar strategies for remembering telephone numbers, credit card details, or post codes.
Now, Lisa Feigenson and Justin…
grrlscientist | July 11, 2008tags: researchblogging.org, birdsong, personality traits, mate choice, sexual selection, risk taking, European collared flycatcher, Ficedula albicollis, László Zsolt Garamszegi
Male European collared flycatcher, Ficedula albicollis, singing.
Image: Beijershamn Ãland, 23 May 2004 [link].
Canon EOS 300D Digital Rebel 1/1000s f/8.0 at 400.0mm iso400.
Most people don't believe that animals possess distinct personalities, although they readily recognize and can describe individual personalities among their family, friends and neighbors and are aware of the importance of individual personalities…
edyong | June 20, 2008
The differences between heterosexual and homosexual people are as much the subject of fascinating science as they are a source of social debate. And in many cases, the former can help to inform the latter. There is now plenty of research which shows that a person's sexual orientation, far from being a phase or a lifestyle choice, is a reflection of fixed properties of their brain that develop at an early age.
A new study adds new weight to this evidence by using brain-scanning technology to look at the differences between the brains of gay and straight people. Ivanka Savic and Per Lindstrom…
edyong | June 14, 2008
We've all found gems hidden among junk before - the great album you own but never listened to, the book on your shelf that you never read, or the boot sale item that's worth a fortune. Geneticists are no different. Two years ago, Katherine Pollard and Sofie Salama discovered that one of the most important genes in human evolution has been lying in plain sight, hidden within a pile of genetic clutter.
Humans and our closest cousins, chimpanzees, evolved from a common ancestor, and we famously share anywhere from 96-99% of our DNA. This similarity suggests an obvious question: what are the…
edyong | May 29, 2008Think of celery, an airplane or a dog. Each of these words, along with the thousands of others in the English language, create a different and unique pattern of activity in your brain. Now, a team of scientists has developed the first computer programme that can predict these patterns for concrete nouns - tangible things that you can experience with your senses.
With an accuracy of around 70%, the technique is far from perfect but it's still a significant technological step. Earlier work may have catalogued patterns of brain activity associated with categories of words, but this is the…
grrlscientist | May 22, 2008tags: osprey, fish eagle, Pandion haliaetus, raptors, streaming video
This viral streaming video depicts 10 optical illusions in two minutes, and reveals how they are done. Despite the fact this is made by a company as a form of advertizing, I still think it is interesting to watch [2:16].
edyong | April 18, 2008It's late at night and although I want to finish this post, I'm pretty shattered. At the moment, I sorely need to boost my concentration and attentiveness and stave off the effects of fatigue. In lieu of actually getting some sleep, the ability to pop a little pill that will have the same effect sounds pretty enticing. Unfortunately (or perhaps luckily), the closest thing I have available is some coffee in the kitchen.
But for many people, taking a pill to sharpen your mental faculties - a so-called "cognitive enhancer" - is a much easier deal. A large number of prescription drugs can…
edyong | March 29, 2008Bad experiences can be powerful learning aids for our sense of smell. A new study reveals that electric shocks can make people more sensitive to the differences between very similar chemicals that previously smelled identical.
Every day, thousands of different molecules waft past our nose. Many of these are uncannily similar and some are more important to others. Wen Li from Northwestern University wanted to see how people learn to distinguish the critical smells from the unimportant ones.
Smell the difference
Working in the lab of smell guru, Jay Gottfried, Li attempted to train 12…