Neuroscience

Social networks on the internet have grown greatly in the past few years. None more than the near ubiquitous Facebook, with over 800 million active users, half of which log in on any given day. Yet, there is great variability in the size of the online social networks of individual people. Is this correlated with the real-world networks of people? Does this have a neural basis? It are exactly these questions that were investigated in a new study, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. By collecting MRI scans of 125 healthy volunteers (independently replicating the experiments in…

The issue at hand: a student with Asperger's Syndrome feels the teacher withholds recess breaks at a whim; the teacher feels that withholding recess is reinforcing the consequences of the student's actions.  From their personal viewpoints, each of them is correct.  Clearly, there is bad communication or signaling going on here. Note I use the shorthand 'Aspie' for 'someone with Asperger's syndrome', itself either a form of high-functioning autism, or a related pervasive developmental disorder (PDD), and the term 'neurotypical' to describe someone who does not have Asperger's. On…

Recently, I read an article in the New York Times entitled Do You Suffer From Decision Fatigue? which presents neurological work showing contrary effects in people trying to exercise will power: more activity in the nucleus accumbens, the brain’s reward center, and a corresponding decrease in the amygdala, which ordinarily helps control impulses. Glucose levels in the different parts of the brain are implicated here.  This is particularly bad for dieters, because 1. In order not to eat, a dieter needs willpower. 2. In order to have willpower, a dieter needs to eat. However, I’m…

"[W]ho you are depends on the sum total of your neurobiology." --David Eagleman Modern neuroscience is making advances in knowledge that our society is not keeping up with, may not be able to keep up with. David Eagleman explores these new inroads in what we know about the brain, the conscious mind, and free will in the interesting (and at times frustrating) Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. Some readers will get a kick out of Eagleman's terminology, referring to the subconscious and unconscious forces of the brain as zombie systems, and find, as Colbert did, the whole idea of a…

Rhythmic activity of nerve cells supports spatial navigation, say a group of researchers who recently showed that cells in the entorhinal cortex, important for spatial navigation, oscillate with individual frequencies. These frequencies depend on the position of the cells within the entorhinal cortex. The activity of individual neurons in this brain region represents different positions in space. If an animal is in a certain location, a certain neuron fires. The rhythmic activity of each cell may enable us to code a set of positions, which form a regular grid. Computer simulations of…

In Norway, after a psychopath shot up an island summer camp, several first-person shooter games disappeared from the market for a while - yet the shooter was an organic farmer and organic produce was not pulled from shelves. Why the difference?  It is a common belief that simulated violence results in aggressive behavior in real life.  That makes sense.  Anti-smoking campaigners contend even having smoking in a television show or movie is training children to smoke so sex and violence would be lumped in that group.  But is that science?  Researchers from the…

Good news for migraine sufferers.  Your treatment may have gotten a little cheaper.  Exercise is often prescribed as a treatment for migraine, though without sufficient scientific evidence that it really works, but research from the Sahlgrenska Academy at the University of Gothenburg shows that exercise is just as good as drugs at preventing migraines. And so are relaxation techniques. Doctors use a variety of different methods to try and prevent migraines.  Topiramate is used in the pharmaceutical camp while relaxation exercises help some. Exercise is also frequently…

I'm back, after an extended hiatus due to my big move to Chicago to begin grad school.  I’ve been pummeled by work for the past month, so I’ll keep this one short and sweet. The future is here! We can manipulate the nervous systems of living beings with focused beams of electromagnetic energy.  This new trick has been termed optogenetics: the optical manipulation of genetically altered cells.  The journal Nature Methods chose optogenetics as their 2010 method of the year because previous techniques for exploring the nervous system, like the application of drugs or…

This weekend is the first episode in a three-part "Brain Games" series on the National Geographic channel.  Since National Geographic does not have a show on the 'science' of ghost hunting, and since statistics show 97% of Internet readers never finish an article, if you are not a regular Science 2.0 reader I am okay endorsing this and telling you in the first paragraph you will enjoy it, so you can set your DVR and move on to reading about the trial of Michael Jackson's doctor.    "Brain Games" is geared toward consumer science media but you'll enjoy it even if you have a Ph.D…

It's "Second Life"...for monkeys.  And a lot more real.   Scientists have demonstrated a two-way interaction between a primate brain and a virtual body - they learned to employ brain activity alone to move an avatar hand and even identify the texture of virtual objects.  Without moving any part of their real bodies, the monkeys used their electrical brain activity to direct the virtual hands of an avatar to the surface of virtual objects and, upon contact, were able to differentiate their textures. Although the virtual objects employed in this study were visually identical,…