Friday, March 30, 2007

Looking for hidden signs of consciousness

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In the 22 March issue of Nature, Kerri Smith discusses the debate over a 'brain-activity' test for patients in a vegetative state (...

Fractal Animation

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From Jock Cooper:

A primer on, and reservations about, TMS - transcranial magnetic stimulation

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O'Shea and Walsh offer a brief introduction to TMS, and its use in cognitive neuroscience: As any schoolboy with a toolkit or a broken t...
Thursday, March 29, 2007

Your Brain on Music

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I have finally finished reading, and would like to strongly recommend, Daniel J. Levitin's book "This Is Your Brain on Music."...

Interlude: some Franz Liszt

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Since I am doing an adjacent post on music and the brain, I thought I would post a bit more of my playing: Les Cloches de Genève, from Anné...
1 comment:
Wednesday, March 28, 2007

The Inner Life of a Cell - another audio-visual interlude

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Correlation of conscious perception with synchronization of neural activity across cortical areas.

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Melloni et al. offer interesting measurements that correlate electrical activity with stimuli that are consciously versus unconsciously per...
4 comments:

The structure of consciousness

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This is the title of an essay by Buzsaki in the March 15 issue of Nature. It has the following summary of three basic architectural schem...
Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Damage to the prefrontal cortex increases utilitarian moral judgements

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In other words, people with a rare injury - damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex - expressed increased willingness to kill or harm ...

Innateness and culture in language evolution - a bit of heresy.

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Kirby et al ask: Although languages vary, they share many universal structural properties. Where do these universals come from? A great deal...
Monday, March 26, 2007

Brain imaging can infer your hidden intentions....

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As a followup to the 3/14 posting on NeuroLaw , this report from Haynes et al. seems relevant. Here is their abstract, along with a figur...

'Thinking about thinking' shown in Rats...

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A simple experiment can be used to demonstrate 'thinking about thinking', or metacognition in humans, monkeys, and bottlenose dolphi...

Why antipsychotics lose their effectiveness...

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Antipsychotics often lose efficacy in patients despite chronic continuous treatment. Why this occurs is not known. It is known, however, tha...
Sunday, March 25, 2007

Karate Chimp

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As a followup to my 3/22/07 post on primate origins of morality, I thought I would pass on two entertaining videos of the chimp repertoire....

Spearing Chimp

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Chimps fashion sharp pointed spears they use to stab prey (in this case a Bush Baby. The actual thrusting of the spear was not caught on ca...

Exploiting the moral impulse

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Daniel Gilbert writes a nice OpEd piece in today's NY Times, titled "Compassionalte Commercialism" (He is the psychology pro...
Friday, March 23, 2007

Brain movies...

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Great images, even if the verbal narrative is a bit vacuous. The time lapse photos of neurons growing in cell culture are nice, as they fad...
1 comment:

New brain cell synthesis supports new memories? It isn't that simple.

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Several laboratories have performed experiments suggesting that our ability to store new memories might be related to the generation of new ...

Reduce social recognition in mice by reducing amygdala oxytocin receptors.

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From Choleris et al. : Social recognition constitutes the basis of social life. In male mice and rats, social recognition is known to be go...
Thursday, March 22, 2007

Take a whiff of Oxytocin and become a better mind-reader!

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Domes et al. show that a single oxytocin dose from a nasal inhaler (Syntocinon spray, Novartis, Basel, Switzerland) improves the ability of ...