brain & behavior
July 25, 2008
The Quantum Pontiff
Hacking Vision? An interesting idea from Mark Changizi from RPI: can one design pictures which, when interpreted by your vision, perform a computation? Press release here (note to RPI public relations department: you should probably make it so that the webpage address...
The Frontal Cortex
Loss Aversion and Real Estate The latest report on home sales is bleak: Sales of new homes fell in June for the seventh time in the past eight months, more proof that the worst housing slump in decades is getting deeper. The Commerce Department reported...
Respectful Insolence
Oh no! My cell phone's going to kill me! I'm very puzzled. Now, I know that my being puzzled isn't particularly unusual. I'm frequently puzzled. I can't figure out how, for example, anyone with the slightest bit of reasoning ability can do anything other than laugh when informed what...
Effect Measure
Dying for a home Negligent homicide, rationality and guns. A three-fer.
Neurophilosophy
Butterflies of the soul This quote comes from Recollections of My Life, by Santiago Ramon y Cajal: Like the entomologist in search of colorful butterflies, my attention has chased in the gardens of the grey matter cells with delicate and elegant shapes, the mysterious...
July 24, 2008
Zooillogix
Via Ugly Overload: Hippos Hooked on Croc Hippos like to lick crocodiles. WTF?!
Cognitive Daily
Why do more Asians have perfect pitch? Several recent large-scale studies have confirmed a curious finding: Asians are much more likely to have "perfect pitch" than non-Asians. Perfect pitch, more properly called "Absolute pitch," is an extremely rare phenomenon, but it's several times more likely to occur...
Greg Laden's Blog
Does lead exposure cause decreased brain size? A recently published study seems to indicate that adult brain volume is reduced in individuals with significant lead exposure during childhood. While this study may lead to important findings linking lead to reduced cognitive function, it is important to note that observed effect is very...
Neurophilosophy
Clinical trial of deep brain stimulation for depression Depression is a common neuropsychiatric disorder which affects at least 1 in 7 adults. The condition can have a major effect on patients' quality of life, and is a major cause of both disability and suicide.Many patients with depression can...
The Frontal Cortex
The Cognitive Neuroscience of Magic A new paper in one of my favorite journals, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, tries to reverse-engineer the tricks of magicians to learn about the blind spots of the brain. Wired Science explains: Magic tricks may look simple, but they exploit...
July 23, 2008
A Blog Around The Clock
New and Exciting in PLoS ONE Two circadian papers, NIH review process, asexual lizards, butterfly pheromones, white matter, bumblebees and much, much more....
The Frontal Cortex
Choosing is Hard Over at Mind Matters, the expert blog I curate at Scientific American, we're currently featuring a really interesting article by On Amir on the cognitive cost of making decisions: For instance, it's long been recognized that strenuous cognitive tasks--such as...
The Frontal Cortex
The Number Four Look up charming in a dictionary and I'm pretty sure you'll see this video: Because we like to link everything to the brain over here at the Frontal Cortex, it's worth mentioning that the number four also represents the outer...
July 22, 2008
Zooillogix
Manipulating Sound: Two Amazing Animal Adaptations Discovery.com recently reported two instances of animals manipulating sound to master their environments.
A Blog Around The Clock
My picks from ScienceDaily 90 Billion Tons Of Microbial Organisms Live In Deep Marine Subsurface: More Archaea Than Bacteria: Biogeoscientists show evidence of 90 billion tons of microbial organisms--expressed in terms of carbon mass--living in the deep biosphere, in a research article published online...
The Frontal Cortex
Deliberate Practice This kid is a poster child for deliberate practice: Marc Yu, a 9-year-old piano prodigy from Pasadena, Calif., recently played at a benefit for victims of the earthquake in Sichuan, China. And he didn't play "Row, Row, Row Your Boat."...
The Frontal Cortex
The Neuroscience of Insight I've got an article in the latest New Yorker (not online) on the neuroscience of insight. I begin the article with the harrowing story of Wag Dodge and the Mann Gulch fire, before describing the research of Mark Jung Beeman,...
July 21, 2008
A Blog Around The Clock
My picks from ScienceDaily Social Behavior In Ants Influenced By Small Number Of Genes: Understanding how interactions between genes and the environment influence social behavior is a fundamental research goal. In a new study, researchers at the University of Lausanne and the University of...
Cognitive Daily
Why are older people worse at only some visuospatial tasks? A number of studies have found that older adults aren't as good at certain visual tasks compared to younger adults. Mental rotation, for example, is both slower and less accurate. But other studies have found that for certain types of...
The Frontal Cortex
Memory and Addiction David Carr, a media columnist for the New York Times, was addicted to crack for several years in the late 1980's. In the Times Magazine (and in his new book) he tells the story of his own investigation into his...
Neurophilosophy
ESOF2008: Brain-computer-interfaces This morning I attended a talk about the research behind, and clinical applications of, brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). I've written about BCIs many times in the past; they monitor the electrical activity of the brain, either invasively by means of implanted...
Neurophilosophy
Encephalon 50 The 50th edition of Encephalon is now online at SharpBrains. It includes entries about the path planning by hippocampal place cells, the role of calcium ion homeostasis in Alzheimer's Disease and the potential applications of transcranial magnetic stimulation....
July 19, 2008
Evolving Thoughts
The Dark Knight Wow. Just... wow. This is not the best superhero film I have seen. This is perhaps the best film I have seen for over a decade. It is replete with moral problems, Greek tragedy, farce, some serious character development,...
Framing Science
Psychic Detectives and the Chandra Levy Case The capital's police force distracted....
A Blog Around The Clock
Time Perception news Carl Zimmer: How Your Brain Can Control Time: For 40 years, psychologists thought that humans and animals kept time with a biological version of a stopwatch. Somewhere in the brain, a regular series of pulses was being generated. When...
“I would imagine that those who practice a lot have heaps of [attention], because otherwise, well, they'd move on to something el . . . is that a butterfly? Marc on Deliberate Practice
