Category: Linkage

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

Best Life magazine has probably one of the most sensible articles I’ve yet come across on back pain. Another good read by Jonah Lehrer, who you may know from the Frontal Cortex blog.

Morons and Idiots Buy a Brain! Omni Brain finds an odd hip-hop video that encourages us to purchase a new cerebrum.

Sharp Brains has a fantastic review of its most popular recent articles.

Mobile phones disrupt sleep (lectures, movies, funerals).

The San Francisco Chronicle discusses the new exhibits at the SF Exploratorium that allow you to watch your own mind at work.

People use the internet to confirm their pre-existing beliefs. So, no different from any other source of information then.

SciAm discusses ‘evolutionary economics‘ and what it tells us about how we reason about money.

A fantastically comprehensive article on the treatment of multiple sclerosis made it to the front page of Wikipedia this week.

Cognitive Daily has an article on the cognitive psychology of film. Interestingly, in the Richard Gregory talk I linked to the other day, he notes very little is known about how we comprehend film across shots. This post covers exactly this process!

This history of theories about mind over medical matters and the psychology of illness is covered in an article from Slate.

BBC News reports on a new study that has found that world-wide, the risk of depression peaks at 44, except in America.

The Wall Street Journal look at studies that cite head injuries as a factor in antisocial behaviour, offending and other social ills.

Salon has a polemic piece on antidepressants and the ‘medicalisation of misery’.

A special infrared hat that cures Alzheimer’s? Respectful Insolence has a rightly sceptical look at the odd contraption.

The Phineas Gage Fan Club discusses a recent study showing suggesting that sleep ‘disconnects’ the brain’s emotional circuits.

National Geographic has a fun and beautiful interactive brain demo.

An article in The Atlantic argues that multitasking is dumbing us down and driving us crazy.

Frontiers in Neuroscience is a new open-access neuroscience journal. Bravo!

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

The fantastic Claudia Hammond explores the curious psychology of disgust on BBC Radio 4’s science programme Frontiers.

Advances in the History of Psychology notes the passing of Paul D McLean, creator the the “Triune Brain Theory“. Every time you hear the phrase ‘reptilian brain’, that’s McLean at work.

AI learns to play Ms Pac Man. Presumably, it will soon by driven insane by the annoying music.

To the bunkers! Charmingly wide-eyed transhumanists discuss the ‘singularity‘ – supposedly when computers will overtake the abilities of the human mind.

No really, to the bunkers! Israel intend to deploy an AI-controlled missile system that “could take over completely” from humans. Not that anyone would notice if it went bezerk I guess.

Neurophilosophy looks at a case of epilepsy triggered by hip-hop. As we noted back in October, the Beastie Boys created hip-hop triggered by epilepsy.

Dave Munger of the mighty Cognitive Daily reviews the new book by the Blakeslees on embodied cognition over at The Quarterly Conversation.

Which self-help books for depression do psychologists recommend for depression? PsyBlog looks at an interesting study on the most effective bibliotherapists.

A link between walking speed and mental quickness in the elderly is reported in an intriguing study covered by the BPS Research Digest.

The philosophy of friendship is discussed in a podcast from Philosophy Bites

Cognitive Daily examines the ‘remember / know‘ distinction, one of the most important ideas in long-term memory research.

The myth of the mid-life crisis? An article in The New York Times questions one of our most persistent cultural clichés.

The Frontal Cortex has an interesting meta-piece on whether neuroscience is being overly popularised.

Dr Pascale Michelon writes her first article as one of Sharp Brains expert contributors on neuroimaging and the ‘<a href="http://www.sharpbrains.com/blog/2008/01/23/looking-inside-the-brain-is-my-brain-fit/
“>cognitive reserve‘.

Scientific American’s Mind Matters blog discusses how to create out of body experiences in the lab.

Immanuel Kant, or can he? Fragments of Consciousness has a great post on philosophy teams.

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

The BPS Research Digest covers some more amazing studies that find that our names are linked to our choices and performance.

Games console chip to be used for MRI analysis reports io9. Mostly cool for the beautiful MRI tractography image.

Furious Seasons covers a new study that finds placebo outperforms antipsychotics in treating aggression in patients with learning disabilities.

A series of studies that suggest we have little conscious access to the workings of our own mind are collected by PsyBlog.

Time magazine has a great article on how siblings of autistic children adapt and interact in the family.

Why should not old men be mad? 3QuarksDaily has a poignant W.B. Yeats poem.

Science News covers two novel studies into the genetics of autism.

Tracing the history of syphilis. Advances in the History of Psychology covers a recent controversy over the origins of what was once one of the major causes of madness.

The Observer covers the case of Howard Dully, who had a lobotomy at the age of 12 and later created a moving, powerful and unmissable radio programme about his experiences.

Deric Bownd’s looks at an interesting argument that cooperation and choosiness necessarily evolved together.

Film footage of the ice pick lobotomy, which Dully was subjected to, is discovered by Neurophilosophy, as part of an upcoming documentary.

Phenomenology and Cognitive Science makes a special double issue on Dennett’s heterophenomenology freely available online.

The BrainWave neuroscience and arts festival kicks off in New York in April and The Neurocritic has a preview.

The Onion report an astounding case where neuroscientist discover that half of a 26-year-old’s memories are Nintendo-related.

Does too much dreaming lead to depression? The Mouse Trap discusses an intriguing hypothesis.

The first chapter of a new book The Philosophy of Social Cognition has been posted online.

My Mind on Books lists some recent and forthcoming books on the self to look forward to.

Can artificial life help us solve the mind-body problem? Brain Hammer investigates with a link to Pete Mandik’s full-text paper.

Cognitive Daily has another fantastic demonstration on how older people adapt to blurred vision.

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

A neuroimaging study on ESP! The Neurocritic looks at a recent study that investigated parapsychology using brain scanners.

Drug companies approximately spend $30 billion dollars promoting drugs in the US – twice as much as they spend on research and development, according to a new study in PLoS Medicine.

Scientific American reviews the year in robots. To the bunkers!

Sociologist Laura Maria Agustin argues that double standards in how we think about rich and poor people who cross borders is clouding the debate on ‘sex trafficking‘ in Reason magazine.

Harvard Magazine has an article on the genetics of autism and why the condition is being increasingly thought of a spectrum of traits rather than a cut-and-dry diagnosis.

Mirror Neurons – Rock Stars or Backup Singers? Neuroscientist Gregory Hickok argues against the mirror neuron hype on SciAm’s Mind Matters blog.

Professor of Robert Sylwester is interviewed on Sharp Brains on the cognitive science of learning.

Could a computers have a conscience? The Buffalo News ponders the possibilities.

PBS has a full programme and website on the debate over the increasing trend for medicating children with psychiatric drugs.

An article in Wired argues that the next victim of climate change will be our minds.

New hope for tinnitus sufferers as BBC News article discusses some new treatments in the pipeline.

Intelligence and working memory may be the key to identifying the genes for schizophrenia, suggests new research.

Furious Seasons has a careful analysis of one of the most important studies of treating depression yet completed.

How do we know we’re not dreaming? Eric Schwitzgebel looks at the possibilities.

Cognitive Daily has a fascinating article on whether your name affects your performance and preferences (something known as nominative determinism).

Quick links from (roughly) the past week in mind and brain news:

San Francisco Science Cafe puts video online of a talk on the neuroscience of meditation.

AP News reports US Military apparently not recording suicides in Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.

Was the development of cooking a kickstart to the evolution of the modern human brain? SciAm investigates.

The New York Times has an interesting piece on the use of dissociation (‘splitting off’ areas of consciousness) in endurance sports people.

Glossy Autism magazine now available on newsagent shelves (also covers Aspergers, ADHD etc). Not sure how I feel about that.

Retrospectacle has neurosurgical tools of the 19th century! To only be used with a large bottle of brandy (by the patient, not the surgeon, although by the look of the tools, it probably didn’t make a huge amount of difference).

Hypothalmus activity may be crucial in migraines, reports BBC News.

The New York Times on a study where researchers stimulated a single dendritic spine in a neuron (wow).

The mighty Fortean Times discusses the Wellcome Collections’ new exhibition on sleep and dreaming.

More from the increasingly cognitive New York Times: an article on synaesthesia induced by a brain injury.

The Guardian covers a slightly tongue-in-cheek study that notes the similarities between images in Renaissance paintings and brain structures.

The mind is a control structure for an autonomous agent. The Science and Consciousness Review has a feature article on modelling unconscious perception in artificial intelligence.

Studying the anthropology of depression during motherhood. The New York Times looks at the work of Dr. Marian Radke-Yarrow.

The BPS Research Digest on a study that found that students who endorsed sex stereotypes showed more biased recall of their past exam performance (e.g. girls thought they did worse at maths, boys worse at art, than they actually did).

Cognitive Daily looks at research which attempts to answer the question ‘does test-taking help students learn?’

Psychologist Carol Dweck is interviewed about her work on praise, motivation and achievement in children.

Bad Science has an mp3 of Ben Goldacre giving the President’s Lecture at the British Pharmacology Society’s annual conference: More than molecules ‚Äì how pill pushers and the media medicalise social problems.

Certain brain injuries (that, unsurprisingly, affect parts of a key anxiety circuit) may prevent PTSD, reports Treatment Online.

Deric Bownds looks at the role of nature vs nurture in the visual cortex.

The Neurotech Industry Organisation both reviews 2007 and looks forward to 2008.

PsyBlog gets philosophical with articles on the relationship between happiness and the work of Schopenhauer and Epicurus.

Quick links from (roughly) the past week in mind and brain news:

BBC Radio 4’s Thinking Allowed has discussions on myths about sex trafficking and the history of hunger.

Science and Consciousness Review has a feature on whether Theory of Mind is dependent on episodic memory?

Omni Brain finds a spoof video on installing a DIY brain-computer interface.

There’s a great review of new book ‘Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind’ on Metapsychology that looks at some of the skeletons in the psychoanalytic closet.

An article for the Washington Post describes one of Stanley Milgram’s lesser known but enormously endearing experiments.

Oliver Sacks describes the case of Mrs O’C and her musical hallucinations for NPR Radio. He first described her in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and updated her story in Musicophilia. He presents the complete version in this short programme.

On the same theme, Scientific American had a good ‘music and the brain‘ article in November’s issue that I missed earlier.

Bad headline but interesting sleep study. A better headline would be ‘quality of sleep influences how the brain stores memories’ – a subtle but important difference.

The New York Times reports that adverts aiming to ‘promote awareness’ about childhood psychiatric disorders are cancelled after complaints about scaremongering and insensitivity.

A genetic test for genes that may alter response to antidepressant drugs becomes commercially available, and Corpus Callosum has a great analysis of its limitation and significance.

Is it possible to be too happy? Cognitive Daily discusses a study which investigated whether there is an optimal happiness level.

The 38th edition of psychology and neuroscience writing carnival Encephalon has just arrived online and this fortnight it’s ably hosted by Not Exactly Rocket Science.

A couple of my favourites include an excellent article (how did I miss it before?) from Pure Pedantry reviewing the evidence that show mental illness is a poor predictor of violence in light of recent shootings in the US, and another on the functions of the hippocampus from Memoirs of a Postgrad.

There’s a whole stack more in the same edition, so have a look through for the latest and greatest from the last two weeks.

Link to Encephalon 38.

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

Novelist A.S. Byatt (who has had a long-standing interesting in brain science) writes an article in The Times arguing that ‘neuroscience is helping us to understand how art works ‚Äì and it may offer us a way out of narcissism’.

We perceive music differently depending on how we dance to it. A completely fascinating study covered by the inimitable Cognitive Daily.

Tonometric is a website where you can take musical perception tests which contribute to studies on the neuroscience of music.

Developing Intelligence looks at work which suggests IQ can be predicted by a simple reaction time test.

How would you complete the word jo_? Students who had been asked to contemplate their own death were more likely to form positive words (like ‘joy’) than others. More evidence for a positive cognitive bias in the face of death, reported by the BPS Research Digest.

The Literary Review gets stuck into a new book on Freud’s last year.

Wired reports that Sega and NeuroSky are to make mind-controlled toys.

SciAm’s Mind Matters blog discusses some recent work on ‘stereotype threat‘, an interesting effect where people perform worse if they think the test might confirm a stereotype about them (e.g. black people are academic under-achievers, white men are athletic under-performers etc).

PsyBlog asks you to vote now for your favourite in its weird psychology studies series.

Repeated Exposure to Media Violence Is Associated with Diminished Response in an Inhibitory Frontolimbic Network. Important research published in PloS One.

Corpus Callosum discusses a case of personality change caused by a brain tumour in a 28-year-old male-to-female transsexual patient that was recently reported in the NEJM.

The New York Times discusses the phenomena where parents look back and realise they may have elements of conditions such as autism or ADHD after their children are diagnosed.

The Neurocritic has a fantastic article on altered self-perception in people with body dysmorphic disorder.

Remarkable savant Daniel Tammet, is profiled in The New York Times.

Why do I feel like I’m falling when I go to sleep? Pure Pedantry digs up some fascinating work on this curious and common experience.

Infiltrating the waiting room: ‘Information leaflets’ in doctor’s surgeries could be drug company advertising according to an article in The Guardian.

Crap headline but interesting story about decoding the neural code of neurons involved in visual recognition.

Neurophilosophy collects four parts of his essay on axon guidance in a single post and gets confirmation of what we already knew.

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

Chewing gum and context-dependent memory: The independent roles of chewing gum and mint flavour. A paper currently ‘in press’ for the British Journal of Psychology.

Sharp Brains has an interview with Prof Robert Emmons, a psychologist who studies gratitude.

In light of the recent UK case of a supposedly dead man who turned up claiming he couldn’t remember the last five years of his life (now under arrest for fraud!) the BBC has an article on why men go missing, and neuropsychologist Dr Eli Jaldow discusses whether this type of amnesia is likely, in The Times.

PsyBlog starts a fascinating series on the unconscious.

A fantastic ‘turning tables’ visual illusion is discovered by Living the Scientific Life

Science News reports on a new theory on the neuroscience of the organisation of thinking. Abstract of scientific paper here.

The influence of eye disorders on the development of impressionist art is discussed by Neurophilosophy

How America Lost the War on Drugs: a fantastic Rolling Stone article on how billions were spent in a futile attempt to stop people taking drugs.

Frontal Cortex looks at a possible link between business acumen and dyslexia.

Partial Recall: Why Memory Fades with Age. Scientific American looks at the neuroscience behind memory decline in normal ageing.

Guantanamo detainee attempts suicide by slashing himself with a sharpened fingernail. When will these terrorists acts of asymmetric warfare cease?

Cognitive Daily looks at kids’ misconceptions about numbers – and how they fix them.

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

The Washington Post has an article on the ongoing trial using MDMA (‘Ecstasy’) assisted psychotherapy to treat post-traumatic stress disorder.

Babies learn how to make social evaluations in the first few years of life, according to a new study reported by BBC News.

The Guardian has an article on combining a high-flying career with ongoing mental illness.

For men the brain activation in the ventral striatum is dependent not only on the size of reward, but also how it compares to other people’s rewards.

Google in your brain? PageRank as a semantic memory model: Developing Intelligence examines an interesting view on memory for facts.

Is the beauty of a sculpture in the brain of the beholder? Stupid headline, interesting study.

A great post from Mixing Memory on a favourite experiment: research on schema (like mental frameworks) for memory.

Is the famous Christian poem ‘Footprints’ a case of cryptomnesia: the unconscious copying of another creative work? Rachel Aviv for the Poetry Foundation investigates.

Cognitive economics comes to the aid of football goalkeepers, via the BPS Research Digest.

The University of Virginia has a great ‘Psychedelic Sixties‘ online exhibit.

Neurophilosophy finds a wonderful image generated from a supercomputer simulation of brain microcircuitry.

The Dana Foundation has an excerpt from Sandra and Matthew Blakesee’s new book ‘The Body Has a Mind of Its Own’ available online.

Are rocks conscious? Arguing no is harder than you think, and the New York Times covers controversy.

Probably one of the most important emerging fields in biology is epigenetics. Corpus Callosum tackles a new study on the epigenetic transmission of PTSD risk markers.

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

Glamour model Daisy Thompson-Lake has a forthcoming paper on synaesthesia in the British Journal of Psychology.

Cognitive Daily looks at whether selfishness or competition is the strongest influence on behaviour.

How does physical stress and illness affect mental states and psychopathology? ABC All in the Mind investigates.

PsyBlog examines recent research on achieving sustainable happiness.

Hollywood actor Forest Whittaker hails the pioneering brain surgeon that saved his mother’s life.

ABC Radio National’s Ockham’s Razor looks at the infamous case of Sir Roy Meadow and the debates over the existence of ‘Munchhausen’s syndrome by proxy’.

The New York Times has an article on South Korean boot camps to cure children of non-existent internet addiction.

Denial and public belief. ABC News covers research showing that highlighting false reports may actually make them more widely believed.

The BPS Research Digest looks at research on why sexism towards females in the workplace has a negative effect on males too.

Interesting post on Action Potential shock! The under-performing Nature blog has two great articles on the genetic control of intelligence and innate social evaluation in children.

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

NPR has a radio programme exploring the significance of dreams and nightmares.

The first version of chocolate is discovered to be 500 years older than previously thought

The Washington Post has an article on ways of optimising your brain function.

An artificial speech implant is looked at by Neurophilosophy.

The Neurocritic rounds up the group smack-down to the nonsense election brain scanning ‘study’ we reported on earlier.

Japan suffers an average of 90 suicides a day, spurring the government into action, according to a report by The Times.

The New York Times has an article by an economist doing the maths on the process of dating and dating success.

Men talk more than women overall, but not in all circumstances, according to a new study covered by Science Daily.

A forthcoming science series called Curious has launched their website with video clips of some interesting neuroscience stuff.

BBC Radio 4’s Case Notes has a special on chronic fatigue syndrome.

BBC News report on more evidence that a healthy diet cuts Alzheimer’s risk.

PLoS One has an interesting paper on how gene expression in the human hippocampus differs in cocaine users compared to others.

Dr Petra analyses the Sex Addiction Screening Test and discovers it’s not been validated despite being widely used.

Teaching children philosophy brings persistent, long-term cognitive benefits, according to a study reported by the BPS Research Digest.

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

The Neurocritic covers a fascinating study that modelled group interest for new web information. Full text: pdf.

Call for a ban on controversial ‘Dolphin Assisted Therapy’. Controversial or just completely bizarre?

Brain Waves covers the top 10 neuroscience trends of 2007.

Activity is reduced in visual areas to direct activation toward hearing areas when we’re trying to listen to complex sounds, according to a new study covered by BBC News.

The New Republic has an in-depth review of a new book on the biology of altruism.

A study in this month’s British Journal of Psychiatry found that people with schizophrenia can be more logical than people without a psychiatric diagnosis.

The Scientific American Mind Matters blog covers some of the highlights of the Society for Neuroscience annual conference.

The BPS Research Digest looks at a study on psychiatrists who treat themselves for mental illness.

The LA Times has an in-depth and important article entitled ‘Are we too quick to medicate children?’

Van Gogh and the history of manic depression is discussed by The Neurophilosopher.

BBC News reports on an intriguing new genetic study of epilepsy: two genes are known individually to increase the chance of having a seizure, but carrying both makes epilepsy less likely.

A study finds further evidence that genetics has a role in determining sexual orientation in men.

PsyBlog discusses the false consensus bias and why we all stink as intuitive psychologists.

The Guardian reports on a study that suggest love at first sight is just sex and ego. Presumably, only if you do it right though.

Amygdala abnormalities linked to violent aggression in a study covered by Treatment Online.

Developing Intelligence reports that an artificial intelligence model of speech recognition develops what seem to be the equivalent of mirror neurons.

How we understand what doctors say can be quite different, even when they use the same words, depending on how serious we think the illness is. Cognitive Daily covers a fantastic applied psychology study.

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

The Holy Grail of memory: researchers identify brain waves that distinguish false memories from real ones. The downside, you need to have your skull opened and electrodes implanted into your brain. Full paper: pdf.

ABC Radio has science teacher Dr Berry Billingsley discussing her life with Harry, her nine-year-old son who has Asperger’s syndrome.

PsyBlog tackles a bizarre but charming experiment on tickling.

The NYT reviews Sacks’s new book Musicophilia.

Brain Dynamics Underlying the Nonlinear Threshold for Access to Consciousness. Rooaaarrrr!! Hardcore consciousness research in PLoS Biology.

Wired go inside the world’s only plant-intelligence lab. [Roll your own George Bush joke here].

Video of some of the most fundamental (and smallest) aspects of learning in the brain are captured on video and explained by Pure Pedantry.

A couple on fear:
* Neurophilosophy examines the neurobiology of fear.
* That Nearly Scared Me to Death! Let’s Do It Again. Wired looks at why we can enjoy being frightened.

Salon discusses what psychology tells us about our seemingly inbuilt prejudices and how to overcome them.

A cool new visual illusion is discovered by Mixing Memory.

Can you use your ‘gut instinct‘ to find things faster? Cognitive Daily investigates and sports the spiffy new ‘blogging on peer review research’ icon.

Eric Schwitzgebel has a short, sweet and endearingly appropriate epitaph for a philosopher.

Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:

BPS Research Digest has an article on the secret to remembering material long-term.

Dennis Brain has a posse, sorry, orchestra.

Mixing Memory discusses the psychology of women in maths, science, and engineering.

A transcript of R.D. Laing interviewing Van Morrison in 1986. Personally, I’m still waiting for Thomas Szasz to interview the Spice Girls.

Why do some babies talk sooner than others? The mighty Cognitive Daily investigates.

The Washington Post reports on a US Government committee who have concluded that only exposure therapy is known to be effective in treating PTSD. Presumably the Cochrane report on psychological treatments for PTSD escaped them at the time.

Newsweek has a report and video on a case of ‘multiple personality disorder’ which is remarkable largely for the fact that it tells us our concepts about the condition have barely moved on since the famous cases in the 70s.

The ‘source of optimism’ has not been found in the brain, but two brain areas have been identified which are relatively more active when positive events are imagined.

Furious Seasons notes the curios yoga-themed advertising campaign for antipsychotic ziprasidone (aka Geodon).

Lack of sleep makes it more difficult to manage negative emotions. This story got mangled by much of the press. BBC News did the best job, but it’s probably best to read the original abstract.

PsyBlog reviews The Most Dangerous Animal, a book on war and human behaviour.

Lovely Francis Crick quote: “Any theory that fits all the facts is bound to be wrong since some of the facts will be misleading”. James Watson is probably wishing he remembered this before putting his foot in his mouth about race and intelligence and subsequently losing his job.

The Phineas Gage Fan Club discusses a wonderfully clear schematic map of the visual cortex.

Just beautiful, if not slightly surreal. Neurophilosophy finds an online exhibition of photos from an abandoned soviet brain research lab.

The 34th edition of the psychology and neuroscience writing carnival Encephalon has just arrived with the best in the last fortnight’s mind and brain writing.

On this occasion it’s hosted by the Distributed Neuron blog, which is part of an ambitious project to create biologically inspired neural network technology.

A couple of my favourites in this edition of Encephalon include depictions of Alice in Wonderland syndrome in migraine-inspired art and an article that considers claims that differences in executive function are almost entirely inherited.

Needless to say, there’s much more in the complete edition.

Link to Encephalon 34.