neuroscience
cortex | November 9, 2006Adaptation is a well known principle of psychology, and yet political strategists have always ignored it. Simply put, sensory adaptation is why you don't notice your underpants: your mind has adapted to their presence. It's a way taking certain constants for granted, and focusing instead on the sensations that are actually changing. My hunch is that negative ads failed this year because there were simply too many of them. Our TV's were saturated with the same cliched allegations, tired montages, and ominous warnings, and so we just tuned it all out. The nasty ads became as noticeable as our…
purepedantry | November 8, 2006I meant to post this early, but the Neurophilosopher has an excellent history of Alois Alzheimer, for whom the disease is named:
On November 25th, 1901, a 51-year-old woman named Auguste Deter (below right) was admitted to the hospital, and was examined by Alzheimer. Deter at first presented with impaired memory, aphasia, disorientation and psychosocial incompetence (which was, at that time, the legal definition of 'dementia'); her condition gradually worsened, and she started losing other cognitive functions and experiencing hallucinations. Because of her age, Deter was diagnosed with…
cortex | November 7, 2006I'd never heard of this disorder before. It's like the awful flipside of fatal familial insomnia:
Every four months or so, Spencer Spearin climbs into bed and sleeps for days or longer.
"I might not be with you for a couple weeks," Spearin said. "I missed my birthday. I missed my graduation. I can't remember what I ate yesterday. I can't remember what I did yesterday."
Many times, the disorder appears after a flu-like illness.
Dr. Emanuel Mignot said patients suffer from periodic episodes of extreme sleepiness and abnormal, child-like behavior.
"They feel like they are in a fog," Mignot said…
clock | November 6, 2006Welcome to the 10th edition of the Encephalon, the blog carnival of brains, minds, neurons, behavior and cognition. This was a busy week (and weekend) for me, so I decided to give up on the spectacularly difficult idea I had for creative hosting and go with a traditional style. After all, it is the contributors' posts that you came here to find, not my artistic aspirations. So, let's get right into it!
Coffee Mug, one of the bloggers on the original Gene Expression won the contest (by solving the neurotransmitter puzzle) last time I hosted The Synapse and the prize is - being highlighted…
clock | November 5, 2006This is the last reminder to send me permalinks to your recent posts related to neurons, brains, behavior and cognition for the next edition of Encephalon, the neuroscience carnival. I need them by midnight today. I'll post the carnival tomorrow morning.
Send the links to:
encephalon.host AT gmail DOT com
or
Coturnix AT gmail DOT com
j7uy5 | October 30, 2006The Neurocritic has the latest edition of
href="http://neurocritic.blogspot.com/2006/10/synapse-spooky-issue-10.html">The
Synapse. It's nicely done. Info
of the next one, and instruction for submission, are at Jake's place,
href="http://scienceblogs.com/purepedantry/2006/10/the_synapse_is_up.php">here.
clock | October 30, 2006The Synapse #10 is up on Neurocritic. Next week, it is the turn for Encephalon (the two neurocarnivals appear on alternate weeks) and it will be hosted by me, right here. Send your entries by November 5th at 5pm EST to: Coturnix AT gmail DOT com.
j7uy5 | October 28, 2006A while back, I wrote about the new treatment for
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ADHD" rel="tag">ADHD
that is under
development,
href="http://www.nrpharma.com/products/NRP104.htm" rel="tag">NRP104.
The original post is
href="http://trots.blogspot.com/2005_02_27_trots_archive.html">here.
In that post, I reviewed the pharmacology of NRP104.
The basic idea is that the company took an old molecule,
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dextroamphetamine" rel="tag">dextroamphetamine,
and tacked a molecule of
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysine">lysine
onto it. …
neurontic | October 27, 2006The Frontal Cortex has an interesting post about a recent study conducted by psychologists at the University of Toronto on the effects of reading fiction. (Full disclosure here: I haven't read the entire study, which was published in the October issue of The Journal of Research in Personality. I just can't bring myself to fork over the money for a subscription at the moment. So, the following observations are based solely on the abstract, which you can read here.) The thrust of the study appears to be this: researchers found that avid fiction readers are more socially adept and empathetic…
purepedantry | October 26, 2006I hadn't actually known this, but the creator of the Dilbert cartoons, Scott Adams, was diagnosed about two years ago with a rare disease called spasmodic dysphonia. Apparently he just recovered -- in spite of overwhelming odds against that happening.
First a bit about spasmodic dysphonia. Spasmodic dysphonia is a movement disorder involving the muscles of speaking. It is characterized by spasms in the adductor and/or abductor muscles of the larynx (the adductor muscles bring the vocal cords together and the abductor muscles bring the vocal cords apart). Spasms in either muscles prevents…
clock | October 23, 2006Encephalon #9 is up on Migrations. The next edition will be here on November 6th. Send your entries to: Coturnix AT gmail DOT com
clock | October 20, 2006Shelley went to the Society for Neuroscience meeting and saw a talk on sleep deprivation, memory and hippocampus.
clock | October 19, 2006The Synapse #9 - the special Society for Neuroscience Edition is up on Pure Pedantry
neurotopia | October 18, 2006I had grand plans in mind for blogging this conference. Then I got a virus and spent the last 2.5 days or so in bed. Lovely. Barely got to even meet Shelley and Jake. Forced to eat room service for meal after meal. Barf!
I'll put some stuff together for next week. In the meantime, I gotta skip town. They're onto me.
cortex | October 18, 2006In response to my recent post on governmental regulation and energy conservation, an excellent debate has started in the comments. On the one hand, there is a long list of areas in which governmental regulation has forced corporations into making decisions that are beneficial for society at large:
Catalytic converters? Mileage requirents on cars? Unleaded gasoline? Clean water act? Clean air act? Endangered species act? Vaccination requirements for public schools? Building codes? OSHA regulations? Fire codes? Why do we have these things? Were they decided on by consumers? Nope. Nearly every…
cortex | October 17, 2006When I lived in London, I used to have to take the bus to Oxford. Without traffic, the ride took 70 minutes, which was just long enough to catch up on my reading and iPOD playlists. But as anyone who knows the M40 will tell you, there is almost always traffic. As a result, I never adjusted to the annoyance of commuting. While I would happily tolerate the 70 minute bus ride - this was my baseline - I would get furious at the fender-bender that made my ride home take twice as long. Commuting was a continual crapshoot, and it drove me crazy.
This is one of the more important and ignored facts of…
cortex | October 16, 2006A few months ago, I offered a completely speculative hypothesis on television and autism:
So how might TV be one of the causes of the "autism epidemic"? A possible answer focuses on the way the newborn brain organizes itself in response to the stimuli it receives. If an infant's world is suffused with cartoons and television shows instead of normal human interaction, then it wouldn't be so outlandish to imagine a brain that is ill-equipped at understanding and interpreting other people. In other words, autistic children are bad at generating a theory of other people's minds because they didn'…
neurotopia | October 15, 2006Almost too cute for words. Poor SFN conference virgin Jake just got his cherry popped. I tried to warn him that this conference is nuts, but does anybody ever listen to me? NOOOOO.
This afternoon had a good run of posters relating to transgenic mouse models of Alzheimer's Disease. Got me thinking a bit about the utility of these models and what we're really testing with them. Ok ok, so I already thought about all this stuff before but I realized that I need to do a blog post on them. I'll collect my thoughts on the matter and get back to you, dear reader. In the meantime, I got to hit…
neurotopia | October 15, 2006Greetings and salutations from the 36th annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience!!!! I'm gonna try and get back in the bloggin' business after some major life changes by writing about exciting news from the forefront. Unfortunately, the only thing I have to report so far is that Jake and Shelley and I had dinner last night and went clubbing, and poor Neurocontrarian ended up crashing on our floor after making out with some hottie.
Ahh, the scientific life. Gonna try and squeeze in an actual science post or two this afternoon, but as today I have to catch up with friends and…
cortex | October 12, 2006At the Judge Rotenberg Center, a private boarding school for special-education students in Canton, Massachusetts, kids with mental disabilities and mental illness (like schizophrenia and autism) get electrically shocked when they misbehave:
The only thing that sets these students apart from kids at any other school in America aside from their special-ed designation is the electric wires running from their backpacks to their wrists. Each wire connects to a silver-dollar-sized metal disk strapped with a cloth band to the student's wrist, forearm, abdomen, thigh, or foot. Inside each student's…