Psychology
omnibrain | January 31, 2007Here's the basic story...
New work by a team of researchers has shed light on why hallucinogenic compounds cause altered states in creatures. It has long been known that hallucinogenic compounds have a high affinity for a certain receptor in the central nervous system (5-HT2A, or 2AR), and that when these receptors are blocked, the hallucinogenic side effects are mitigated. What has remained a mystery is why other non-hallucinogenic compounds with a similar affinity for these 2ARs do not produce similar side effects.
How do you know a mouse is tripping balls? It's not like you can show them…
omnibrain | January 31, 2007A team of researchers from UCLA has created a model of how the brain could potentially tell time and has also tested a part of the model on human subjects.
"If you toss a pebble into a lake," he explained, "the ripples of water produced by the pebble's impact act like a signature of the pebble's entry time. The farther the ripples travel the more time has passed.
"We propose that a similar process takes place in the brain that allows it to track time," he added. "Every time the brain processes a sensory event, such as a sound or flash of light, it triggers a cascade of reactions between brain…
omnibrain | January 31, 2007Hah... if you haven't already - head on over to the NYT's for the new Tierney Lab Blog. He has an interesting post today about why people find Graceland so appealing.
I went to Memphis this past weekend seeking a scientific understanding of Graceland. I was there for a meeting of social psychologists, and I wanted to drag a few a few of them out to Elvis Presley's home so they could explain its appeal.
Fortunately, I didn't have to. A team of researchers already had data from Graceland to present at the meeting.
omnibrain | January 28, 2007 Check out the brains of mice on drugs. This site is a very strange one to say the least- it starts with a bunch of high mice in a club of sorts just struggling to stand up. Then the interactive flash demo starts in which you have to drag a mouse into a comfy chair which transports it into a weird device that shows what's happening to the mouse's brain depending on what it snorted, smoked, or injected earlier.
Freakin' weird - a wee bit trippy ;). Especially from an academic institution.
Check out the Mouse Party.
clock | January 26, 2007This is two years old (February 16, 2005) but still as provocative....(also my belated contirbution to the Blog For Choice Day) and I'll repost the second part of it next Friday.
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William Raspberry wrote an editorial in Washington Post last weekend (I picked a link to a syndication that does not require registration instead of dinosaurid WaPo) about the sexual practices of young people, mainly college people. This is not the first time he wrote on this topic. For instance, he wrote a column a few years ago, immediately after the release of the…
omnibrain | January 25, 2007It seems that alcoholics just can't seem to get a joke. In this study from Germany, participants underwent a series of tests including, mood, intelligence, memory, psychomotor skills, and their ability to enjoy a joke.
For example, one of the jokes tested on the subjects began as follows: It was Mother's Day. Anna and her brother had told their mother to stay in bed that morning. She read her book and looked forward to breakfast. After a long wait she finally went downstairs. Anna and her brother were both eating at the table.
The subjects were given a choice of five punchlines:
a) Anna said…
omnibrain | January 25, 2007Answer... They both have tasteless protests when someone dies from something they attribute to the wrong thing.
A Scientology group targeting "toxic" medications plans to protest in Sudbury today for a public airing of any drugs given to the teen accused of murdering another boy at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School last week.
The group's gripe hits as the Sudbury community struggles to cope with Friday's stabbing death of straight-A student James Alenson, 15.
Scientologists are demanding at the demonstration that:
the types of drugs given to accused killer John Odgren, 16, and the…
omnibrain | January 23, 2007I used to love these books! Check out this funny post about Mr. Bump over at Mind Hacks.
I've been notified of a rare case of focal retrograde amnesia that doesn't seem to have been reported in the medical literature.
Focal retrograde amnesia is where memory for past events and personal information is lost, while the ability to remember new events is spared.
The case is described in Mr Bump Loses His Memory by Roger Hargreaves (ISBN 1844229866).
omnibrain | January 23, 2007There is an interesting article from todays New York Times about magical thinking in children well worth checking out.
Psychologists and anthropologists have typically turned to faith healers, tribal cultures or New Age spiritualists to study the underpinnings of belief in superstition or magical powers. Yet they could just as well have examined their own neighbors, lab assistants or even some fellow scientists. New research demonstrates that habits of so-called magical thinking -- the belief, for instance, that wishing harm on a loathed colleague or relative might make him sick -- are far…
ksharpe | January 23, 2007His January 24 lecture in Toronto is sold out, but Steven Pinker fans can get a sneak preview of the cognitive scientist's forthcoming book, The Stuff of Thought, and his current work on metaphor, indirect speech, and the the neuroscience of swearing, in this Toronto Star profile.
From the article:
"As it turns out, people swear in five different ways. That's why it took me a while to figure this out," [Pinker] says.
it's not all prurient interest. Pinker's work on salty language serves to get at the role of metaphor in human thought and expression. Far from being the province of high-school…
omnibrain | January 22, 2007
It's kinda an intense picture don't you think? I found this on a relatively generic article about Steven Pinker from the Toronto Star.
omnibrain | January 22, 2007I ran across this blog which has all sorts of optical illusions, and they are not limited to the ones in psychology text books.
Check it out!
omnibrain | January 20, 2007Ok... this is just silly ;)
I guess the wikipedia people think so as well - spoil sports!
omnibrain | January 19, 2007Oooo... I like this :)
Some people seem to continually have their heads in the clouds. Perhaps they are pondering during their drive to work the next pickle 24 protagonist Jack Bauer will find himself in. Or maybe they are assessing while buttering toast the Indianapolis Colts' chances of finally making it to the Super Bowl. Or considering where they will dine that evening as they tap out an e-mail. The question is: What makes their minds veer from the task at hand?
Researchers at Dartmouth College may have the answer. They found that a default network of regions in the brain's cortex--a…
omnibrain | January 18, 2007Ok... not really - but I see some lawsuits coming on who can research the wild girl ;)
PHNOM PENH, Cambodia (AP) - A woman who disappeared in the jungles of northeastern Cambodia as a child has apparently been found after living in the wild for 19 years, police said Thursday.
The woman - believed to be Rochom P'ngieng, now 27 years old - cannot speak any intelligible language, so details of her saga have been difficult to confirm. "She is like half-human and half-animal," said Mao San, police chief of Oyadao district in Rattanakiri province. "She's weird. She sleeps during the day and stays…
scientificactivist | January 17, 2007Over at Pure Pedantry, Jake informs us that a documentary about Dr. Phillip Zimbardo's infamous 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment has been uploaded onto YouTube in five parts. Jake's post includes the five videos (about 50 minutes total) and some background on the experiment and Dr. Zimbardo, whom Jake was once a TA for back at Stanford.
In the experiment, students were randomly divided into "guards" and "prisoners" and forced to work or live in a makeshift prison for two weeks. The participants adopted their respective roles so easily, with such shocking and destructive outcomes, that the…
omnibrain | January 17, 2007It looks like there are a couple of interesting articles/TV shows out there in the last couple days highlighting some Omni Brain topics of the last few weeks.
You know how I love the mind control people, It looks like the Washington Post has a great article on it...
Mind Games
New on the Internet: a community of people who believe the government is beaming voices into their minds. They may be crazy, but the Pentagon has pursued a weapon that can do just that.
And of course you all remember the severed dogs head! National Geographic is producing a show about the Russian research that came up…
omnibrain | January 15, 2007I always find it interesting when advertisers use basic psychological research to sell their products - In this case Mountain Dew uses an RSVP task.
Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) is a technique in psychology (it's also being used for more practical things like displaying text on small displays) used to study a number of topics like attentional blink, temporal masking and repetition blindness. This ad doesn't quite fit into that mold since you don't know what the target is before hand, but the basic idea is there - show a bunch of pictures (or words) in rapid succession and your…
omnibrain | January 13, 20071: Nat Neurosci. 2007 Jan;10(1):27-9. Epub 2006 Dec 17.
Mechanisms of scent-tracking in humans.
* Porter J,
* Craven B,
* Khan RM,
* Chang SJ,
* Kang I,
* Judkewicz B,
* Volpe J,
* Settles G,
* Sobel N.
299 Life Science Addition, MC 3200, Program in Biophysics, University of California Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720, USA.
Whether mammalian scent-tracking is aided by inter-nostril comparisons is unknown. We assessed this in humans and found that (i) humans can scent-track, (ii) they improve with practice…