neuroscience
j7uy5 | January 18, 2010I've been mulling this over for a few days, finally deciding to write
about it. There was an article in the NYT on 13 January 2010
about an NEJM article:
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/health/research/14morphine.html">
href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/14/health/research/14morphine.html">Morphine
May Help Traumatic Stress
By BENEDICT CAREY
Published: January 13, 2010
Doctors have long hoped to discover a "morning-after pill"
to blunt the often disabling emotional fallout from traumatic
experiences. Now it appears that they have had one on hand all along:
morphine...In…
bioephemera | January 17, 2010
A short (~4 minute) sweet overview of the political power of data visualization, by Tufte disciple Alex Lundry. He says so-called "dataviz" exists (you guessed it) "at the intersection of art and science." Quite right, sir!
You'll note Lundry makes use of the classic pirates-global warming relationship, Tufte's "pie charts suck" message, and so on. It's one of several good videos from a great event I really want to get to - igniteDC. I'd also like to mention that I'll be reviewing Connie Malamed's new book, Visual Language, which appears near the end of the video, in about a week or so, so…
neurophilosophy | January 13, 2010VIEWING a stimulus for a prolonged period of time results in a bias in the perception of a stimulus viewed afterwards. For example, after looking at a moving stimulus for some time, a stationary stimulus that is viewed subsequently appears to drift in the opposite direction. These after-effects reveal to us the properties of our perceptual system. They occur because the neurons which are sensitive to the initial stimulus re-calibrate their responses; they adapt to compensate for the earlier enduring stimulus, and so can continue to encode current stimuli efficiently.
It was long thought that…
j7uy5 | January 11, 2010Those of us who watch the drug development pipeline have been pining
for a nonaddictive anti-anxiety drug. Occasionally there are
glimmers of hope. One candidate is
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emapunil">emapunil, aka XBD-173
or AC-5216. In 2004, there was an article in the British
Journal of Pharmacology about this. That article described
promising findings, in rats and mice. Now, there is an article in
Science that finally show some findings in humans.
href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1575165/">Antianxiety
and antidepressant-like effects of AC-5216, a…
milhayser | January 10, 2010
It's Friday, time to kick back and let ScienceBlogs do your homework for you. On Cognitive Daily, Dave Munger wonders how outfielders are so good at running to the right spot to catch a fly ball—are they calculating trajectories in their heads, or making optical deductions? To answer this question, researchers put virtual reality helmets on skilled ball players, then made the virtual balls break the laws of physics as the players tried to "catch" them. On Built On Facts, Matt Springer calculates the energy required to raise the mass of the world's tallest building into the sky, all so "…
milhayser | January 7, 2010
ScienceBloggers liked Avatar, but that hasn't stopped them from picking the science apart from the science fiction. On The Scientific Indian, Selva wonders how communication between the humans and their avatars could take place inside the "vortex," when all other kinds of transmission are disrupted. PZ Myers on Pharyngula lauds the detailed flora and fauna imagined for Pandora, but laments that the natives ended up looking so safely human in an otherwise alien world. On Greg Laden's Blog, Greg turns a critical eye to the film's anthropological undercurrents, comparing the representation…
edyong | January 6, 2010The latest issue of Eureka, the Times's monthly science supplement, is out today. I've been incredibly supportive of the venture and it's great to see that a major national newspaper is increasing its science coverage, rather than cutting back on it. For this issue (the fourth, I think), I've written a piece on fear and memory, including a lot of research that I've previously covered in this blog.
While writing the piece, I interviewed a scientist called Todd Sacktor who's doing some fascinating work in this field. Sacktor discovered that a protein called PKMzeta is vital for storing memory…
edyong | December 29, 2009Many of us have just spent the Christmas season with a persistent and irritating ringing noise in our ears. But now that the relatives have gone home for the year, it's worth remembering that a large proportion of the population suffers from a more persistent ringing sensation - tinnitus. It happens in the absence of noise, it's one of the most common symptoms of hearing disorders, and it's loud enough to affect the quality of life of around 1-3% of the population.
There have been many suggested treatments but none of them have become firmly established and most simply try to help people…
bioephemera | December 29, 2009There are two contradictory headlines today on Google News, both regarding someone I couldn't care less about. However, they nicely illustrate one of my key concerns about the internet: the pervasive illusion that the "wisdom of crowds" is in fact wisdom, or in fact fact.
Both stories involve the heinous Jon Gosselin, who as far as I'm concerned is a waste of attention. You may have heard that the former reality TV star had his apartment trashed over the holidays, and that no one knows who's responsible. But if one turns to Google News, one can see that People Magazine appears to have an…
edyong | December 19, 2009This is part six of nine of the NERS poll of the year, in which you good people tell me your favourite stories of the year, as covered in this blog, through the medium of button-clicking. Each poll features a specific scientific discipline, and today neuroscience craves your attention. Your choices:
Guerrilla reading - what former revolutionaries tell us about the neuroscience of literacy
Pre-emptive blood flow raises big questions about fMRI
Tetris to prevent Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder flashbacks
Beta-blocker drug erases the emotion of fearful memories
Why information is its own…
neurophilosophy | December 17, 2009HOW do you react when you see somebody else in pain? Most of us can empathize with someone who has been injured or is sick - we can quite easily put ourselves "in their shoes" and understand, to some extent, what they are feeling. We can share their emotional experience, because observing their pain activates regions of the brain which are involved in processing the emotional aspects of pain.
But can seeing somebody else in pain actually cause pain in the observer? People with mirror-touch synaesthesia are known to experience touch sensations when they see others being touched, and this may…
neurophilosophy | December 15, 2009MEMORY is one of the biggest enduring mysteries of modern neuroscience, and has perhaps been researched more intensively than any other aspect of brain function. The past few decades have yielded a great deal of knowledge about the cellular and molecular mechanisms of memory, and it is now widely believed that memories are formed as a result of biochemical changes which ultimately lead to the strengthening of connections between nerve cells.
It is, however, also clear that memories are not encoded at the level of single neurons. Instead, the memory trace is thought of as a flurry of…
neurophilosophy | December 13, 2009
IN February of this year, Jacopo Annese (above), a neuroanatomist and radiologist at the University of California, San Diego travelled to Boston to take delivery of a brain. For Annese, collecting brains is not unusual - he is, after all, director of UCSD's Brain Observatory, which will eventually become a comprehensive library of brains donated by people who had neurological conditions such as Alzheimer's Disease, as well as by healthy people of all ages. This time though, the brain he collected was very special: it belonged to the amnesic patient Henry Molaison, who for more than 50 years…
edyong | December 9, 2009Bringing an old memory back to mind would, you might think, strengthen it. But not so - when memories are recalled, they enter a surprisingly vulnerable state, when they can be reshaped or even rewritten. It takes a while for the memory to become strengthened anew, through a process called reconsolidation. Memories aren't just written once, but every time we remember them.
This system allows us to rapidly update our memories with new information, for a more flexible and adaptable brain. It also means that the very act of remembering provides a valuable window of opportunity, during which…
bioephemera | December 2, 2009As many of you know, I've been working for the past couple of years on youth internet health and education issues. While the stereotype is that younger = tech savvier, that's not strictly true. Younger kids may be better acquainted with the internet, may use it more, and may feel more comfortable with it, but that doesn't necessarily mean they have the cognitive skills or experience to differentiate between manipulative content, unreliable content, and good content.
How many of you, as adults, have been tricked into clicking on a deceptive banner ad that looked like genuine content? How many…
edyong | December 1, 2009Oscar Wilde once said, "One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything, except a good reputation." All well and witty, but for those of us who aren't Victorian cads, reputation matters. It's the bedrock that our social lives are built upon and people go to great lengths to build and maintain a solid one. A new study shows that our ability to do this involves the right half of our brain, and particularly an area called the lateral prefrontal cortex (PFC).
Disrupting the neurons in this area hampers a person's ability to build a reputation while playing psychological…
edyong | November 30, 2009This article is reposted from the old Wordpress incarnation of Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder is the most common developmental disorder in children, affecting anywhere between 3-5% of the world's school-going population. As the name suggests, kids with ADHD are hyperactive and easily distracted; they are also forgetful and find it difficult to control their own impulses.
While some evidence has suggested that ADHD brains develop in fundamentally different ways to typical ones, other results have argued that they are just the result of a delay in the…
clock | November 28, 2009The application deadline for the NESCent blogging competition and travel award to ScienceOnline2010 is December 1, 2009. So hurry up - see the contest conditions and entries so far and meet the judges.
So, hurry up. Write (or choose an existing) post in the area of evolutionary biology and send it in. Two lucky winners will get travel grants to ScienceOnline2010. Yes, we are full, and there are 101 people on the waiting list. But the two NESCent winners have their spots saved just for them!
edyong | November 25, 2009What part of the body do you listen with? The ear is the obvious answer, but it's only part of the story - your skin is also involved. When we listen to someone else speaking, our brain combines the sounds that our ears pick up with the sight of the speaker's lips and face, and subtle changes in air movements over our skin. Only by melding our senses of hearing, vision and touch do we get a full impression of what we're listening to.
When we speak, many of the sounds we make (such as the English "p" or "t") involve small puffs of air. These are known as "aspirations". We can't hear them,…
edyong | November 20, 2009In my final year of university, with exam deadlines looming and time increasingly fleeting, I considered recording some of my notes and playing them over while I was asleep. The concept of effectively gaining 6 extra hours of revision was appealing, but the idea didn't stick - it took too long to record the information and the noise stopped me from sleeping in the first place. And the whole thing had a vague hint of daftness about it. But a new experiment suggests that the idea actually has some merit, showing that you can indeed strengthen individual memories by reactivating them as you…