Friday, December 29, 2006

Challenging the link between the human microcephalin gene, evolution, and cognition.

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Michael Balter writes an interesting account in Science Magazine over the controversy over the interpretation of data on the microcephalin ...
4 comments:
Thursday, December 28, 2006

Actions speak louder than brain images.

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There is growing concern over the pseudoscientific use of brain imaging to predict behaviors or assign a character type. Apoorva Mandavill...

Brain self repair

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Jan's laboratory at UCSF (Cell Volume 127, Issue 6, 15 December 2006) has looked at an area of the brain known as the subventricular zon...
1 comment:
Wednesday, December 27, 2006

A bull market in Brain Fitness and Calisthenics

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I've been meaning for some time to do a post on the avalanche of interest in aging baby boomers not loosing their marbles any faster tha...
6 comments:

Synchronies to bind our brains... check out the movie

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A commentary by Sporns and Honey and an article by Bassett et al in PNAS delve into (quoting Spors and Honey) "explaining how functi...

A review of MindBlog

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A colleague recently pointed out this review of MindBlog , which I had completely missed. And to lay on another bit of self-promotion, let...
Tuesday, December 26, 2006

Thought without language - metacognition in Animals

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The Dec. 15 issue of The New Scientist has an interesting article by Helen Philips, "The Known Unknown," about game playing in m...
4 comments:

In defense of order....

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Check out this response by Jessica Duquette to the NY Times article on disorder that was the subject of yesterday's post. She argues ...
Monday, December 25, 2006

Disorder as the detritus of a creative mind...

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This is the subtitle title of a recent essay in the New York Times, "Saying Yes to Mess", by Penelope Green. Being a tidy cont...
1 comment:
Friday, December 22, 2006

The giving season: food and money -an evolutionary link?

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This short note from the Editor's choice section in the Dec. 22 issue of Science: "Although the giving of gifts is a common activit...

During sleep: a brain memory dialogue

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It has been known for some time that specific patterns of nerve firing in "place cells" of the rat hippocampus occur during learni...
1 comment:
Thursday, December 21, 2006

Mind Wars

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I would like to recommend to you an interesting, authoritative, and well written book on the massive amount of research being conducted by t...
Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Abolishing pain with a single sodium channel mutation

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Even though this blog is mainly about nervous systems, brains, and behaviors, I'm occasionally drawn back to my roots as a molecular bio...
Tuesday, December 19, 2006

When the "why?" isn't crucial...

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I would like to point you to a brief article by Sally Satel in today's New York Times Science Section that mirrors my own sentiments abo...
3 comments:

An auditory-motor 'mirror" system is engaged by positive emotions.

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More on mirror systems from Warren et al in Journal of Neuroscience. Edited clips from their paper: Social interaction relies on the abili...
Monday, December 18, 2006

Sleep deprivation slows the generation of new nerve cells

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An interesting finding from Mirescu et al .... It is known that prolonged sleep deprivation is stressful, has adverse effects on cognitive...
Sunday, December 17, 2006

The Meerkat wars and synchronicity

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It is the year of the Meerkats. These engaging foot long denizens of the Kalahari desert show behaviors that mirror the best and the worst ...
1 comment:
Saturday, December 16, 2006

The decline of civility and etiquette on the web.

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Having been the recipient of some rather amazing invective comments on this blog (which I didn't permit to be published), not to mention...
3 comments:

A "mind reading" prosthesis for autistic people?

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Another clip from the NYTimes Magazine "Ideas" issue: "The Emotional-Social Intelligence Prosthesis, developed by Rana el Kal...
1 comment:
Friday, December 15, 2006

Sporno

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I can't resist passing on David Haskell's piece in the NYTimes magazine "Ideas" issue in its entirety. When approached to ...