Neuroscience

The most logical and intuitive place to seek the mind is in the human brain. Neuroscience can observe the workings of perception, memory, thinking, and emotions by using imaging devices to see which sections of the brain light up while it’s performing different functions.  Do Imaging Devices tell us about Subjective Experience? We see chemical and electric signals, in oscillating and bursting patterns, sending communications throughout the brain as study subjects perform mental functions. But, there has been no way to find out what subjective experience is, other than studying how it…

In the excellent book, “The Social Amoebae,” John Tyler Bonner, an emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, describes many social abilities of amoebas including communication, group activity, and individual and group decision making.  Do these raise the question of cognition in amoeba? Individual Cells Behaving as Multicellular Organism Some of their behavior is quite extraordinary. When food is scarce, individual cells join together and form a structure that functions as if it was a multicellular animal.  This slug-like creature, made of individual cells working…

The neuron performs an incredible job in maintaining the mechanics of the cell while still being responsible for the transmission of mental function.  Its responsibilities include: building structures to maintain its long axon, building and rebuilding the large number of input receptors on its dendrites, maintaining the packets of neurotransmitter molecules as they travel down the axon, opening and closing the cell membrane to build dendrites, expelling signaling molecules in a process called budding, and retracting the packets of those signal molecules. Meanwhile it maintains 100,000…

Put a hand on your widow's peak. About an inch below your fingertips in your medial prefrontal cortex is the home of your sense of self. Julian Keenan, director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Lab at Montclair State University, did a nifty trick: He used what is effectively an electric Ping-Pong paddle to zap this region in healthy subjects, overexciting every neuron within range, and thus for about a fifth of a second, knocking that one-cubic-centimeter area of the brain off the grid. And while he did this, he flashed pictures of faces. Blasted subjects retained the ability to recognize…

In a modern culture that promotes releasing the Id to do as it pleases (but then over-regulating what it can have access too, so no cigarettes, video games or trans-fats) fasting is out of place.  Yet people still do it, to the frustration of neo-rationalists and atheist zealots, who note with condescension that it has as little impact on behavior as wearing a football jersey has on the outcome of the Super Bowl. They're right. About the Super Bowl anyway.  Developing a little willpower does have some neuroscience benefits.  The willpower that goes into fasting - be it Lent,…

I don’t multitask. Or, I do it so badly that I end up dropping everything in a massive tangle of badness with me standing baffled at its center. This frustrates my wife to no end. She can balance on a beach ball while writing things in her calendar, listening to Radio Lab, text-messaging, and juggling chainsaws (it’s a neat trick — and also kind of hot). I hold that monotasking allows me to get a string of things done right, one at a time. Kristi thinks that multitasking is a prerequisite for inclusion in post-Stone Age society and that monotaskers should be rounded up and reprogrammed at…

Older maternal age is associated with an increased change of having a child with autism.Older paternal age  is associated with an increased change of having a child with autism. Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASDs) are neurodevelopmental and behavioral disorders characterized by impairments in social interaction and communication and repetitive, sometimes obsessive, behaviors. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recently estimated that as many as one in every 100 children has something in the ASD range. Researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at…

I've just begun reading the recently released review book, "Connectome," from Sebastian Seung of MIT. The basic notion of the book is that you are the emergent result from the interconnections of some 100 billion neurons in your brain. "You are your connectome." This is not a novel idea at its most basic level, however, Dr. Seung is bringing this exciting hypothesis to a broader popular understanding, which will help guide future generations of appreciation for the utterly incredible mass of flesh lodged in our skulls. Mapping the complete interconnections of…

If you are reading this then the recent research by Brian Pasley and colleagues in which speech sounds are reconstructed from measured brain activity has probably already come onto your neuro-radar. It's certainly drawn a lot of media coverage, with some great commentaries including this from Mo Costandi in the Guardian. I you have missed it, Helen Thomson at New Scientist does a good write-up. Amongst the questions that interests me about this is one posed by Guardian Science correspondent Ian Sample in a tweet a couple of days ago (@IanSample). Namely, does this qualify as mind reading and…

I can feel it in the air, so thick I can taste it. Can you? It's the we're-going-to-build-an-artificial-brain-at-any-moment feeling. It's exuded into the atmosphere from news media plumes ("IBM Aims to Build Artificial Human Brain Within 10 Years") and science-fiction movie fountains ...and also from science research itself, including projects like Blue Brain and IBM's SyNAPSE. For example, here's a snippet from the press release about the latter: Today, IBM (NYSE: IBM) researchers unveiled a new generation of experimental computer chips designed to emulate the brain's abilities…