neurophilosophy
Posts by this author
October 30, 2007
European reseasrchers, led by David Penny of the University of Manchester, have used a medical imaging technique called Very High Resolution X-Ray Computed Tomography to digitally dissect and reconstruct a 1mm-long 53 million-year-old spider that is preserved in a piece of amber.
The pictures, and…
October 29, 2007
Bertalan has found the Virtual Labs Series, a fantastic educational resource produced for science teachers and students by researchers at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute.
The series includes the Transgenic Fly Virtual Lab, the Bacterial Identification Lab, the Cardiology Lab, the…
October 29, 2007
I'm very flattered to have been given two Intellectual Blogger Awards (first by Eric and then by Kate; thank you both). Now, after hard deliberation, I can name five other intellectuals upon which the same honour should be bestowed.
All of the bloggers named below have given me inspiration in one…
October 28, 2007
A new paper about the reproductive behaviour of the spiny anteater, to be published in the December issue of American Naturalist, makes for fascinating - if slightly disturbing - reading.
The spiny anteater (Tachyglossuss aculeatus) is a primitive mammal with an unusual four-headed penis. The…
October 28, 2007
The New York Times Magazine contains a long article about the close ties between evangelical Christians and the Republican party.
October 27, 2007
The Guardian reports that the Ministry of Defence has just started a major study into traumatic brain injury (TBI) in British troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
In an accompanying article, the behavioural, cognitive, emotional and physical symptoms of this "silent injury" are described by…
October 27, 2007
(Image: Ben Osborne)
This photograph of an elephant at a watering hole, by Ben Osborne, has just been announced as the best overall photo in the 2007 Shell Wildlife Photographer of the Year Competition.
"I staked out this waterhole in Botswana's Chobe National Park for three weeks," Osborne…
October 26, 2007
Physicist Chad Orzel, who knows a lot more than I do about the mysterious world of quantum mechanics, criticizes the new model of quantum consciousness proposed by Efstratios Manousakis, which I described recently.
October 26, 2007
The new issue of Current Biology has a freely available primer on the amygdala by Joseph LeDoux of the Center for Neural Science at New York University.
The amgdala is a small, almond shaped structure found on the medial surface of the temporal lobe, just anterior to the hippocampus. Functionally…
October 26, 2007
Some 365 million years ago, during the early Devonian period, the Sarcopterygian (or lobe-finned) fish emerged from the sea and gave rise to the first terrestrial tetrapods.
During the course of their evolution, the tetrapods became adapted to life on land. One big challenge faced by the…
October 26, 2007
In a new poll conducted for Halloween by the Associated Press and market research company IPSOS, one third of respondents said that they believe in ghosts and UFOs, and nearly one half said they believe in extrasensory perception.
A Yahoo! News story summarizes the main findings of the AP/ IPSOS…
October 25, 2007
This film from the Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) website features a 24-minute talk called A Journey to the Center of the Mind, by neuroscientist and neurologist V.S. Ramachandran, who heads the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California…
October 25, 2007
David Chalmers, a professor of philosophy at the Australian National University and director of the Center for Consciousness, has just announced the launch of MindPapers, an online database of papers about the philosophy of mind.
The database is very comprehensive indeed - it includes about 18,000…
October 24, 2007
(Image credit: Alex Klochkov)
Here is a rather macabre set of photographs by Alex Klochkov, apparently taken in an abandoned Russian brain research laboratory.
October 23, 2007
According to Efstratios Manousakis, a professor of condensed matter physics at Florida State University in Tallahassee, the key to consciousness could be lie in the quantum effects that occur in the brain when one is viewing ambiguous figures like the spinning silhouette (or Rubin's vase or the…
October 23, 2007
The New York Times science section has a special issue devoted to sleep.
The feature contains about 10 articles about recent findings in sleep research, including one by Carl Zimmer on how studies carried out on birds are informing us about the functions of sleep.
The title of the post is from a…
October 22, 2007
Here's the first 10 minutes of a documentary called Extraordinary People: The Boy Who Sees Without Eyes. It's about Ben Underwood, a blind teenager from Sacramento who uses echolocation.
At the age of 2, Underwood was diagnosed with retinoblastoma, a rare form of cancer that that affects about…
October 22, 2007
BioMed Central has just launched an online collection of biological images, film clips and animations.
The Biology Image Library is intended for educational and research purposes, and contains more than 11,000 images covering subjects which include neuroscience, developmental biology, and…
October 22, 2007
The 34th edition of the neuroscience and psychology blogging carnival Encephalon is now online at Distributed Neuron.
October 21, 2007
This photograph of a blue passion flower (Passiflora caerulea) was taken in our little garden about 2 months ago.
October 21, 2007
Researchers 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…
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,…
October 20, 2007
And 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-…
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…
October 19, 2007
In 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…
October 19, 2007
James 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…
October 18, 2007
Smart 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…
October 18, 2007
I'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…
October 18, 2007
If 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,…