Category Archives: Inside the Brain

A bridge over troubled waters for fMRI?

May 28, 2012 – 5:12 am

Yesterday’s ‘troubles with fMRI’ article has caused lots of debate so I thought I’d post the original answers given to me by neuroimagers Russ Poldrack and Tal Yarkoni from which I quoted. Poldrack and Yarkoni have been at the forefront of finding, fixing and fine-tuning fMRI and its difficulties. I asked them about current challenges [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Theory | Comments (8)

The trouble with fMRI

May 27, 2012 – 10:16 am

I’ve written a piece for The Observer about ‘the trouble with brain scans’ that discusses how past fMRI studies may have been based on problematic assumptions. For years the media has misrepresented brain scan studies (“Brain centre for liking cheese discovered!”) but we are now at an interesting point where neuroscientists are starting to seriously [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Theory | Comments (2)

Neuro images

May 24, 2012 – 8:52 pm

So how did I not know about the amazing neuroimages blog? It has plenty of beautiful pieces like this taken from neuroimaging to historical neuroscience to, er, edible brain sandwiches.

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Seeing | Leave a Comment

Legal highs making the drug war obsolete

May 19, 2012 – 9:32 pm

If you want any evidence that drugs have won the drug war, you just need to read the scientific studies on legal highs. If you’re not keeping track of the ‘legal high’ scene it’s important to remember that the first examples, synthetic cannabinoids sold as ‘Spice’ and ‘K2′ incense, were only detected in 2009. Shortly [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in News | Comments (32)

She’s lost control

May 15, 2012 – 12:38 pm

An article in Slate claims to have detectected a ‘logic hole’ in how much sympathy we feel for people with mental illness as both psychopathy and autism are ‘biological disorders’ that people ‘can’t help’ but we feel quite differently about people affected by them. The ‘logic hole’, however, doesn’t exist because it is based on [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Togetherness | Comments (20)

How the British missed a trip

May 8, 2012 – 1:18 pm

The first ever medical report on the effects of magic mushrooms is featured in an article in Current Biology. The excerpt is from a 1799 report entitled ‘On A Poisonous Species of Agaric’ from an issue of The London Medical and Physical Journal. The psychological effects of hallucinogenic, or ‘magic’ mushrooms were first documented in [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Remembering | Comments (6)

The rise and fall of Dark Warrior epilepsy

May 3, 2012 – 8:21 pm

Of all the names for a neurological disorder in the history of medicine, the most awesome has got to be ‘Dark Warrior epilepsy’. The condition was reported in a 1982 edition of the British Medical Journal and was so named because the patient had seizures – but only while playing the Dark Warrior video game. [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Togetherness | Comments (3)

BBC Future column: Does the internet rewire your brain?

May 2, 2012 – 11:35 am

My column for BBC Future from a few days ago. The original is here. Mindhacks.com readers will have heard most of this before, thanks to Vaughan’s coverage of the Baroness and her fellow travellers. Being online does change your brain, but so does making a cup of tea. A better question to ask is what [...]

By tomstafford | Also posted in Linkage | Comments (11)

Is the brain the centre of your universe?

April 29, 2012 – 11:31 am

The Observer has a fantastic debate between neuroscientists David Eagleman and Raymond Tallis about how much brain science tells us about free will and the unconscious. It’s a wonderful pairing as Eagleman is a broad-thinking wonderboy of neuroscience while Tallis is a veteran street-fighter of brain debates. The main point of contention revlves around whether [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Theory | Comments (2)

The delightful science of laughter

April 28, 2012 – 3:54 pm

Neuroscientist Sophie Scott gave a fantastic talk on the science of laughter for a recent TEDx event that you can now watch online. Talks on the science of humour are famously humourless (usually made all the more dire by the desperate inclusion of some not very funny ‘funny cartoons’) but this discussion of laughter is [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Togetherness | Leave a Comment

Snakes on a brain

April 27, 2012 – 9:16 pm

The latest Journal of Neuroscience features a study on the neuroscience behind Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s famouse Rotating Snakes illusion and to celebrate they’re made a ‘Rotating Brain’ illusion for the front cover. This type of illusion, often called a peripheral drift illusion, was thought to occur due to slow drifting eye movements but this new study [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Seeing | Comments (2)

Don’t tase my lobe

April 27, 2012 – 8:54 pm

A case report in Forensic Science International describes a man who had a taser dart penetate his skull and damage his frontal lobes after getting in a drunken confrontation with police. Curiously, the man was unaware he had a taser dart in his brain and only went to hospital after he got home and noticed [...]

By vaughanbell | Comments (5)

Sound trip

April 8, 2012 – 9:34 pm

A fascinating excerpt about a hallucinogenic drug called DiPT that only causes hearing distortions – from p310 of the book Hallucinations: Research and Practice: A member of the tryptamine chemical family, diisopropyltryptamine (DiPT) is a fascinating substance because, unlike most hallucinogens, its effect are predominantly auditory. It is also probably less sensitive than other hallucinogens [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Hearing and Language | Comments (1)

The future of fMRI

April 4, 2012 – 4:02 pm

Nature has an article looking at the future of fMRI brain scanning in light of its long-lasting hype and recently discovered problems. Brain scanning has become massively popular both in the scientific community and in the media, in great part because the pictures it produces seem quite intuitive: images of the brain with colours on [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in News | Comments (3)

Inside The Ailing Brain

March 30, 2012 – 8:31 am

The Ailing Brain is a fantastic documentary series on the brain and its disorders that’s freely available online. It has been produced in Spanish but the first part is now on YouTube with English subtitles. The series is among the best neuroscience documentary series I have even seen (along with Susan Greenfield’s Brain Story – [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in News | Leave a Comment

Bring the love

March 27, 2012 – 4:10 pm

The world of art, neuroscience and, er… competitive affection, collide in a delightful film about a love competition held in an fMRI scanner. The piece is by film-maker Brent Hoff who seems to be making a series of films based on the idea of emotion competitions. In this film, competitors are asked to ‘love someone [...]

By vaughanbell | Also posted in Togetherness | Comments (1)
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