Neuroscience Can't Heal a Divided Nation
Brain activation during challenges to political vs. non-political beliefs (Figure modified from Kaplan et al., 2016).
Lately I ' ve been despairing about the state of America.
I ' m not sure how denying access to affordable health care, opposing scientific facts like global warming and the benefits of vaccines, alienating our allies, banning Muslims, building a wall, endorsing torture, and (Source: The Neurocritic)
Source: The Neurocritic - January 14, 2017 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Penn's Restoring Active Memory dataset freely available
Image from an earlier DARPA news story
Restoring Active Memory (RAM) is a DARPA research program that aims to enhance memory in military personnel who have suffered traumatic brain injuries. The goal is to design an implant, or “memory prosthesis,” that will treat memory loss via electrical stimulation.
Although the failure to replicate a previous study that showed a beneficial effect (Source: The Neurocritic)
Source: The Neurocritic - December 25, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Bad news for DARPA's RAM program: Electrical Stimulation of Entorhinal Region Impairs Memory
The neural machinery that forms new memories is fragile and vulnerable to insults arising from brain injuries, cerebral anoxia, and neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer ' s. Unlike language, which shows a great deal of plasticity after strokes and other injuries, episodic memory — memory for autobiographical events and contextual details of past experiences — doesn ' t recover after (Source: The Neurocritic)
Source: The Neurocritic - December 22, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
19th Century DIY Brain Stimulation
Fig. 4 (Wexler, 2016). Lindstrom ' s Electro-Medical Apparatus (ca. 1895), courtesy of the Bakken.
Think the do-it-yourself transcranial direct current stimulation movement (DIY tDCS) is a technologically savvy and hip creation of 21st century neural engineering? MIT graduate student Anna Wexler has an excellent and fun review of late 19th and early 20th century electrical stimulation (Source: The Neurocritic)
Source: The Neurocritic - December 2, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Airplane Headache II: The Sequel
Airline travel during the holidays is one big headache. But for some people, “airplane headache” is a truly painful experience. The headache occurs during take-off and landing, is unique to plane travel, and is not associated with other conditions. The pain is severe, with a jabbing or stabbing quality, and located on one side of the head (usually around the eye sockets or forehead). (Source: The Neurocritic)
Source: The Neurocritic - November 27, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
How did Gall Identify his 27 Faculties?
Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828), a founding father of phrenology
Phrenology was the pseudoscience of identifying a person ' s character and mental abilities on the basis of skull morphology ( “bumps on the head”). The enterprise was based on four assumptions (Gross, 2009):
intellectual abilities and personality traits are differentially developed in each individual
these abilities and traits (Source: The Neurocritic)
Source: The Neurocritic - November 20, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Haunting Delusions of Identity
We present here a woman who, not content with seeing doubles, sometimes has the delusion that people around her are transformed physically and psychologically into other people.Sylvanie G., 49 years of age (nothing to note from her family history) was admitted to Vaucluse on 9 February 1924 for melancholic depression and paranoia with ideas of persecution. She improved and was discharged on March 1924 but was readmitted 8 years later on 9 March 1932, never having lost her delusions, says the record.. . .Objects and animals which she owns appeared to her to be altered or simply displaced: ’They have changed my hens, they...
Source: The Neurocritic - October 29, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Update on Indie Neuroblogs
Independent Neuroblogs, a combined aggregate feed for non-network Neuroscience Blogs, was started on FriendFeed in response to the proliferation of blog networks in 2010. The associated Twitter account@neuroghettohas survived the demise ofFriendFeed,Yahoo Pipes, and nowtwitterfeed. The feeds are currently being shared through the servicedlvr.it.What initially started as a group of 38 neuro/psych blogs in September 2010 grew to a list of8597 independent blogs in November 2012. You can read about the history of why I initiated the neuroghetto project in this post:Independent Neuroblogs as part of the science blogging ecosyst...
Source: The Neurocritic - October 20, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Self-Appointed Destructive Critic
by@bahniks - click on image for a larger viewBy now, those of you familiar with the “methodological terrorism” controversy (PDF) are probably sick of it. I won ' t go into any detail, other than to say that disagreements between the communities of (1) traditional psychologists who respect the current peer review process, and (2) reformers who advocate replication, post-publication peer review in social media, and alternate modes of dissemination, have been heated. In a nutshell, are the new media bad for science or good for science?Here, I ' d like to examine some ideas in isolation from their source(s). This is ...
Source: The Neurocritic - September 28, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Coming Soon: The Neural Correlates of Procrastination
Zhang, Wang& Feng (2016) (Source: The Neurocritic)
Source: The Neurocritic - September 17, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
The Neural Lace Tour
Stevie Nicks and Elon Musk—finally together in this stunning collection...ElonYou have the limbic system, the cortex and a digital layer above the cortex that could work well and symbiotically with you--Elon Musk ' s craziest idea is the AI-beating Neural LaceStevie:Now here I go again, I see the crystal visionsI keepmy visionsto myself--Dreams, Fleetwood MacCreating a neural lace is the thing that really matters for humanity to achieve symbiosis with machines— Elon Musk (@elonmusk)June 4, 2016Stevie:I need you to love meI need you todayGive to me your leatherTake from meMy lace--Leather and Lace, Stevie...
Source: The Neurocritic - September 16, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Pain, Synesthesia, Aging, The Dress, and more
Vote for your favorites in the 2016Brain Awareness Video Contest!You can submit up totwo votes for The People ' s Choice Award. You don ' t need to be a member of the Society for Neuroscience.Deadline: September 30, 2016. (Source: The Neurocritic)
Source: The Neurocritic - September 6, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Music from Your Brain
The journalBrain has a new review on the history of converting theelectroencephalogram (EEG) into sound (Lutters& Koehler, 2016). The translation of data into sound, known assonification, has been applied to brain waves since the 1930s. In addition to early scientific and medical applications, sonification of the EEG has been used in the field of experimental music.In 1965, physicist Edmond Dewan and composer Alvin Lucier collaborated onMusic for the Solo Performer:Sitting on a chair, eyes closed, Lucier ’s brainwaves were recorded from his scalp, amplified andchannelled to numerous loudspeakers scattered around...
Source: The Neurocritic - August 30, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Healing Prayer and the Brain: Not a Match Made in Heaven
Activity of the medial prefrontal cortex after psycho-spiritual healing (Baldwin et al., 2016).Everything we do and feel and experiencechanges the brain. Psychotherapy, juggling, taxi driving, poverty, reading, drugs, art, music, anger, love. If it didn ' t we ' d bedead. Why should prayer be any different? The trick is to accurately determine the structural or physiological changes that are unique to a specific activity. And when assessing the effectiveness of clinical interventions, how the changes compare to an adequately matched control intervention. Plenty of high profile studies have failed to do that, including a re...
Source: The Neurocritic - August 27, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Scientific Study Shows Mediums Are Wrong 46.2% of the Time
Not a very good showing, eh?Here ' s our latest study on mediumship: " Prediction of Mortality Based on Facial Characteristics " . Available here:https://t.co/jVMHmF07Dj— Dean Radin (@DeanRadin)May 21, 2016In the study,“Participants were asked to press a button if they thought the person in a photo was living or deceased. Overall mean accuracy on this task was 53.8%, where 50% was expected by chance (p< 0.004, two-tail). Statistically significant accuracy was independently obtained in 5 of the 12 participants. ”The abstract claims the participants showed better than chance performance, but even if we accept this l...
Source: The Neurocritic - August 7, 2016 Category: Neuroscience Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
