Fright Week: The Waking Nightmare of Lord Voldemort
Nightmares can seem very real at times, but then we wake up and realize it was all a bad dream. Now imagine having a vivid nightmare with all the reality of waking life and then... it turns out you're actually awake through it all!This happened to an 11 year old Italian boy who reported frightening auditory and visual hallucinations of Voldemort, the archenemy of Harry Potter, for three straight days. These hallucinations began after a bout of sore throat and fever (38°C). As Vita et al. (2008) report:The day after the resolution of fever, he began to present hallucinations. Hallucinations occurred in the aft...
Source: The Neurocritic - October 25, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Mid-Cingulate Cortex
What happens in the brain during a highly immersive reading experience? According to the fiction feeling hypothesis (Jacobs, 2014), narratives with highly emotional content cause a deeper sense of immersion by engaging the affective empathy network to a greater extent than neutral narratives. Emotional empathy — in this case, the ability to identify with a fictional character via grounded metarepresentations of ‘global emotional moments’ (Hsu et al., 2014) — relies on a number of brain regions, including ventromedial prefrontal cortex (PFC), dorsomedial PFC, anterior insula (especially in the right hemisphere...
Source: The Neurocritic - October 15, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
The use and abuse of the prefix neuro- in the decades of the BRAIN
Two Croatian academics with an anti-neuro ax to grind have written a cynical history of neuroword usage through the ages (Mazur & Rinčić, 2013). Actually, I believe the authors were being deliberately sarcastic (at times), since the article is rather amusing.1 Placing that phenomenon of "neuroization" of all fields of human thought and practice into a context of mostly unjustified and certainly too high – almost millenarianistic – expectations of the science of the brain and mind at the end of the 20th century, the present paper tries to analyze when the use of the prefix neuro- is adequate and when it is dubiou...
Source: The Neurocritic - October 6, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
White House BRAIN Conference
September 30 is the last day of the fiscal year for the US government. So it's no coincidence that President Obama's BRAIN Initiative1 ended the year with a bang. The NIH BRAIN Awards were announced on the last possible day of FY2014, coinciding with the White House BRAIN Conference. A total of $46 million was dispersed among 58 awards involving over 100 scientists.Census of Cell Types (RFA MH-14-215) Tools for Cells and Circuits (RFA MH-14-216) Next Generation Human Imaging (RFA MH-14-217) Large-Scale Recording-Modulation - New Technologies (RFA NS-14-007) Large-Scale Recording-Modulation - Optimi...
Source: The Neurocritic - October 1, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Anthropomorphic Neuroscience Driven by Researchers with Large TPJs
For immediate release — SEPTEMBER 26, 2014Research from the UCL lab of Professor Geraint Rees has proven that the recent craze for suggesting that rats have “regrets” or show “disappointment” is solely due to the size of the left temporal-parietal junction (TPJ) in the human authors of those papers (Cullen et al., 2014). This startling breakthrough was part of a larger effort to associate every known personality trait, political attitude, and individual difference with the size of a unique brain structure.Cullen and colleagues recruited 83 healthy behavioral neuroscientists and acquired structural brain images us...
Source: The Neurocritic - September 26, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Should Policy Makers and Financial Institutions Have Access to Billions of Brain Scans?
"Individual risk attitudes are correlated with the grey matter volume in the posterior parietal cortex suggesting existence of an anatomical biomarker for financial risk-attitude," said Dr Tymula.This means tolerance of risk "could potentially be measured in billions of existing medical brain scans." 1 -Gray matter matters when measuring risk toleranceLet's pretend that scientists have discovered a neural biomarker that could accurately predict a person's propensity to take financial risks in a lottery. Would it be ethical to release this information to policy makers? That seems to be the conclusion of a new paper publis...
Source: The Neurocritic - September 16, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
A Dangerous New Dish
Bibimbop Brugmansia ** Do NOT try this at home.Edible flowers can make for a beautiful garnish on salads and trendy Brooklyn cocktails, but these decorative flourishes can be a disaster for the oblivious amateur. An unusual case report in BMC Research Notes summarizes what happens when you sprinkle toxic flower petals on your bibimbop (Kim et al., 2014).A 64 year old Korean woman came to the emergency room with incoherent speech and fluctuations in attention, orientation and comprehension. She had called her daughter for help but couldn't remember why. (Hint: that's because she ingested flowers containing scopolamine and a...
Source: The Neurocritic - September 7, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Whitman Was Not a Neuroscientist
Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.)-Walt Whitman, "Song of Myself" (from Leaves of Grass)Science is the search for objective truth based on physical laws of the universe. Scientific theories try to explain the consistent and predictable behavior of natural systems. They are generally reductionist, meaning that complex systems are reduced to simpler and more fundamental elements. The principles of physics, for instance, are expressed in the form of beautiful equations that are the envy of the softer sciences.xkcd: PurityThe enterprise of explaining how human brains p...
Source: The Neurocritic - August 31, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Autobiographical Memory for a Life-Threatening Airline Disaster
“My attention shifts to the fact that the comforting engine hum is eerily gone. Where has the comforting hum of the engines gone. Something has gone very, very wrong, the plane continued to shake.” -Daniel Goncalves, recalling the terror of Air Transat Flight 236I'm sitting here in an airport, reading a harrowing first person account of Air Transat Flight 236, which fell out of the sky when it lost all power on Aug. 24, 2001.The plane was bound from Toronto, Ontario to Lisbon, Portugal when a fuel leak in the right engine began 3 hrs and 46 min after takeoff (at 04:38 UTC). The leak went undetected by the flight ...
Source: The Neurocritic - August 24, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
The Neuro Sci-Fi of the Near Future
NEUROTECH LIGHT AND DARK »Tweet length visions of our DARPA-funded futureThe Neurocritic has recently blogged about The Neuroscience of the Future:Neural prosthetics, brain-computer interfaces (BCI), “closed-loop” deep brain stimulation (DBS) devices, and a world without human brain disorders. The first three of these are already here... is the last one possible?Here’s a sample of Neurotech Light and Dark, a sci fi collection of 16 very short stories about neuroscience and technology, by S. Kay.A brain-computer interface controls her robotic arm. As easily as not thinking, she uses it to drink another shot of tequil...
Source: The Neurocritic - August 14, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Interview with Dr. Jan Kalbitzer, author of the "Twitter Psychosis" article
Today I'm chatting with Dr. Jan Kabitzer, a Physician and Leader of the Neurochemistry Research Group at Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin.Dr. Kabitzer is first author of the “Twitter Psychosis” article that made international news and took social media by storm on August 6, 2014. His provocatively titled paper, “Twitter Psychosis: A Rare Variation or a Distinct Syndrome?” (Kalbitzer et al., 2014), appeared online a week earlier in The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. I was struck by the title, of course, and an abstract claiming that “Twitter may have a high potential to induce psychosis in predispos...
Source: The Neurocritic - August 10, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Twitter Psychosis as a Cultural Artifact
The creation of the category “Twitter Psychosis" tells us more about the culture of contemporary psychiatry than it does about the purported dangers of social media overuse. Can Twitter really “cause” psychotic symptoms in predisposed individuals? Or is Twitter merely the latest technical innovation that influences “the form, origin and content of delusional beliefs” (Bell et al., 2005)? Twitter as the new telephone tower, radio waves, microchip implant or personal TV show, if you will.Via Twitter (@DrShock, @vaughanbell), of course, comes news of a one page paper entitled, Twitter Psychosis: A Rare Variation or...
Source: The Neurocritic - July 31, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
The Neurocritic Critiques Critical Neuroscience
I wanted to submit a paper for the Frontiers in Human Neuroscience Research Topic on Critical Neuroscience: The context and implications of human brain research, but I couldn't decide what I should write about.Could I just submit a blog post like Professor of Literary Neuroimaging that critiqued the entrée of fMRI into Literature Departments?“So literature is abandoning Marxism and psychoanalysis in favor of neuroimaging!! Meanwhile, key neuroimagers have taken up psychoanalysis (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2010) and socialism (Tricomi et al., 2010).”Would they accept short humorous pieces like this...Tenure-Trac...
Source: The Neurocritic - July 21, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Scientology Tropes Enter Mainstream Neuroscience?
via @mallelisAt the literary/pop culture/feminist/humor blog known as The Toast, the hilarious Mallory Ortberg has skewered those ubiquitous ads from brain training behemoth Lumosity.The Five Stages Of LumosityStage I – Initiation. . .Friend, are you troubled by persistent waking blackouts? Do you tremble and shudder and flicker out of consciousness when asked to recall basic facts about your acquaintances? Does your right eye fill with blood whenever you have to try to remember your PIN? Let Lumosity patch over those mysterious missing blank spots in your sick and addled mind. “Lumosity: Improving your brain through t...
Source: The Neurocritic - July 13, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
Can a Failed Schizophrenia Drug Prevent PTSD?
This study also provides a perfect example of NIMH's new mandate for specifying a hypothesized mechanism of action for interventions that will be tested in funded clinical trials. Does peri-trauma osanetant (vs. placebo) reduce later development of PTSD symptoms and attenuate amygdala activation to trauma script-driven imagery in fMRI? Is TAC3 gene expression altered in primate models? [The distribution of Nk3R likely differs between mice and primates.] Are there declines in PACAP blood levels in traumatized individuals given osanetant (vs. placebo)? Are there longer-term effects on methylation of ADCYAP1R1 in peripheral b...
Source: The Neurocritic - July 10, 2014 Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: The Neurocritic Source Type: blogs
