Neuroscience

The effects of a "bug" in the analysis of functional neuroimages (AFNI) software was greatly exaggerated, a finding that is in defiance of numerous other studies which have found that false positive rates in the analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) of the brain may negate the findings of countless previous studies.  Functional magnetic resonance imaging has been used by everyone from social psychologists to neuroscientists to try and correlate behavior to biology, sometimes to ridiculous effect, like that political conservatives in the United States have actual…

Neurological and psychiatric conditions both involve the brain, but are treated very differently. Put simply, neurologists are trained to deal with the “brain” and psychiatrists to deal with the “mind”. Neurologists and psychiatrists formally parted company in the late 19th century. Ever since the days of Sigmund Freud – who was originally a neurologist but is also the father of psychoanalysis – the way we think about brain disorders has been coloured by this artificial divide. For example, motor neurone disease is treated as a purely neurological condition. The disease, which causes…

Some people have an extreme fear of spiders or other objects while others have breathing difficulties and accelerated heart beat in small rooms or large gatherings of people. Some anxiety attacks occur for no apparent cause. Some patients suffer from the detrimental impacts on their everyday lives, they have problems at work and withdraw from social contacts. A new study has linked variants of a gene with increased risk of developing anxiety disorders. Mental, social and inherited factors are linked to anxiety disorders and the team pinpointed at least four variants of the GLRB gene (glycine…

A new fMRI study used neural activity in 80 people to accurately predict the virality of 80 New York Times health articles. Well, it's the New York Times, a top five newspaper in the U.S. so the results are going to be skewed by that, as were the articles selected; the public loves weak observational claims about health and the demographic that reads the New York Times is most inclined to believe claims about miracle vegetables, scary chemicals and diet fads.  But one one article spreads like wildfire through social media and another doesn't is something everyone trying to monetize…

Though scant progress has been made in treating or understanding Alzheimer's disease in the last 100 years, one thing is known; there are declines in glucose levels in the hippocampus early on. What has remained unclear is whether that is a cause or consequence.  A new Translational Psychiatry study in mice declares that glucose deprivation in the brain triggers the onset of cognitive decline, memory impairment in particular. The hippocampus plays a key role in processing and storing memories. It and other regions of the brain, however, rely exclusively on glucose for fuel -- without…

A new analysis finds that youths who hold off on trying marijuana until age 17 do better on cognitive tests and drop out of school at a lower rate than those who start by age 14. Obviously negative health behavior in alcohol and cigarettes are linked in the same ways, but those two have not gotten the health halo that marijuana has gotten, thanks to politicians who have turned a blind eye to health concerns in the interest of generating more revenue. The study found links between cannabis use and brain impairment only in the areas of verbal IQ and specific cognitive abilities related to…

In the first installment of this two-part post, I mentioned that from my perspective I had understood Kaepernick had a right to protest as an American, but all of that sentiment had changed through a series of interlocking events. Here is what I mean by the interlocking events. There is curious coming together of a few topics from current events that is taking place now. We have Kaepernick and his season-long protest, and the way it is tied to Black Lives Matter because his beautiful wife is an advocate and he is actually doing all of this to show off for her. Then you have the death of Fidel…

In America we have the right to protest, so when Kaepernick started his protest by refusing to honor the flag and the national anthem during NFL pre-game ceremonies a lot of people thought it was wrong, and a lot of people thought it was right. That’s America for you. And no matter what anybody thought, nobody disagreed about the fact that it was his right to protest like that – it is part of what it means to be American. It’s about free speech and our inalienable rights as American citizens. Somehow, in my mind, all of that changed through a series of interlocking events. Of course, I still…

We know that there is sound on planets and moons in the solar system – places where there’s a medium through which sound waves can be transmitted, such as an atmosphere or an ocean. But what about empty space? You may have been told definitively that space is silent, maybe by your teacher or through the marketing of the movie Alien – “In space no one can hear you scream”. The common explanation for this is that space is a vacuum and so there’s no medium for sound to travel through. But that isn’t exactly right. Space is never completely empty – there are a few particles and sound waves…

Taking music lessons increases brain fiber connections in children, according to a recent small study. The researchers studied 23 healthy children between the ages of five and six years old. All of the children were right handed and had no history of sensory, perception or neurological disorders. None of the children had been trained in any artistic discipline in the past. The study participants underwent pre- and post-musical-training evaluation with diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) of the brain. DTI is an advanced MRI technique, which identifies microstructural changes in the brain's…