I’ve just discovered Brain Mart, an online shop for everything (and I mean everything) brain-related. They sell a great deal of educational material as well as a range of ‘brain novelties’.
These stretch from the classic (a phrenonology bust) to the anatomically correct ‘brain cap’ (“Flip up the brim and expose the words, Think, think, think…”) to the slightly worrying ‘Brain Charms’, for adding to a necklace or bracelet.
Link to Brain Mart.
Philosopher and cognitive scientist Shaun Gallagher sits in the hot seat and is interviewed by Science and Consciousness Review who quiz him about how the body and its actions shape our thoughts, and how this can break down to produce bizarre experiences of being controlled by outside forces.
Gallagher draws on the neuroscience of action and the philosophy of consciousness in his interview, in line with much of his previous work.
I think these experiences of ownership and agency [of actions] are manifested at the level of the level of first-order, pre-reflective, phenomenal consciousness. That is, I don’t need to reflect on what I’m doing to generate these experiences. Rather, they are part of and implicit in what my movement feels like.
Link to ‘An Interview with Shaun Gallagher’.
Link to Shaun Gallagher’s homepage.
A recent edition of Bill Amend’s FoxTrot comic strip has a nice twist on the notional glass half-full / glass half-empty psychological ‘test’. The test also features in a Gary Larson Far Side strip entitled ‘The Four Basic Personality Types‘ that adorns the doors of hundreds of psychologists across the globe.
(Thanks Nathan!)
Open-access science journal PLoS Biology has published an article by biologist Peter Lawrence where he suggests that the under-representation of women in science is not because they are biologically unsuited to scientific thinking (as some have controversially suggested), but because employers undervalue those attributes more likely, but not exclusively, to be present in female researchers.
Here I will argue, as others have many times before, that men and women are born different. Yet even we scientists deny this, allowing us to identify the “best” candidates for jobs and promotions by subjecting men and women to the same tests. But since these tests favour predominantly male characteristics, such as self-confidence and aggression, we choose more men and we discourage women. Science would be better served if we gave more opportunity and power to the gentle, the reflective, and the creative individuals of both sexes.
Link to ‘Men, Women, and Ghosts in Science’.
The translations come thick and fast! Ajatus (which means “Thought”, I understand) has now been released by publishers readme.fi in Finland, in hardback no less. Many thanks to Chris Heathcote for picking a copy up for me in Helsinki. He took a photo of the book too, if you’d like to see.
Grab Ajatus at readme’s website if you fancy it, and I’ve put the blurb (in Finnish) below the fold.
I’ll stop with the hard sell now, sorry! I just get excited about these things.
Today’s ‘Start the Week’ on BBC Radio 4 features Steve Rose discussing advances in neuroscience, in drug treatments (for illnesses or mind-enhancement) and the ethical issues that the public will have to increasingly deal with.
Andrew Marr, the presenter, uses this lovely metaphor for brain scanning. It is like, he said (i paraphrase), looking at the outside of a darkened house at night, a house which contains someone moving from room to room turning on and off lights as they do. So when we look at an fMRI scan we might know which neural and/or mental ‘room’ they are in, but we’ve no idea what they’re doing there. Steve Rose agreed: “I don’t believe we’ll ever be able to tell what a person is thinking from a brain scan” (although he added that some of his colleagues would disagree with him).
If you’d like to hear the show, you can listen again here
Interdisciplines is an organisation that aims to link the humanities with the cognitive sciences and their latest online conference focuses on art and cognition.
New and original papers are regularly published on their website and are opened for commentary. The latest in the Art and Cognition workshop and is by philosopher John Hyman who examines the ongoing work on art and neuroscience.
This is a topic which has become increasingly popular in the last decade owing to a number of high profile scientists pondering the issue (with mixed success, it has to be said).
Hyman’s paper is notable as it criticises the current trend of suggesting that adequate theories of aesthetics must, in essence, be neurologically based.
Link to ‘ Art and Neuroscience’ by John Hyman.
Link to Interdisciplines Art and Cognition Workshop.
“Everybody complains of their memory, but nobody of their judgement”.
French writer François de La Rochefoucauld comments on the limits of human insight.
A conference on the science and culture of LSD was recently held to honour the 100th birthday of discoverer Albert Hoffman (as reported previously on Mind Hacks). Wired magazine sent one of their reporters to the gathering and have published a story discussing the event and its impact.
The article particularly focuses on the number of technologists who have claimed that the drug is beneficial to their creative thought, and the increasing research focus on the use of psychedelics in therapy for psychological trauma.
Link to article ‘LSD: The Geek’s Wonder Drug?’
Mind Hacks has been available in Japanese since December 2005, and according to the reviews on Google’s translation of the Amazon.co.jp page, the book’s been exceptionally well translated. (Also, very well received which is gratifying!) I believe this is the translator’s blog and, if so, thanks very much and well done.
Looking at a few more translated pages, including that blog again and the O’Reilly Japan news page, it seems that Mind Hacks sold out at the end of 2005 and has now been reprinted. That’s testament to what must be a great job in translating and re-working the book–and, since I now have the finished object in my hand, some beautiful book design. The binding and production is really good. Congratulations folks! It really is exciting to see Mind Hacks do this well… and very odd to see photos of Tom and me and all other others in the book floating off around the world.
Any Japanese readers out there who’d like to buy the book: Please see the links here and the O’Reilly Japan book page for some sample hacks. Also please do report back!
I’ve tucked a couple of photos below the fold…
February the 14th is fast approaching, St. Valentines day. What can the considerate neuroscientist get his or her loved one?
I think I’ve just had a brilliant idea, and it shouldn’t be too hard to sort out. All you need is a few well-connected neuroimaging buddies and probably four or five hundred pounds to afford the scanning time. Sit yourself in the scanner looking at picures of your beloved, or maybe listening to the song that was playing when you first met. Some quick image analysis later, and a trip to the printers, and – viola! – you have a customised Valentines Day card showing your brain and the activity of your brain as you contemplate the love of your life. The inscription? “Thinking of you” should do it!
Quick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Scientific American ask ‘What’s all that gray matter good for, anyway?‘
Exercise may significantly reduce the risk of developing dementia, especially in those who are frail.
‘Jonathan Edwards looks into… Memory’ in a rather luke warm radio documentary from the BBC (despite some interesting sections on sports psychology).
The Mental Health Foundation launches a campaign to highlight the link between diet and mental health. Their campaign seems a a bit obsessed with fish oil, however. Omega-3 fatty acids can also be found in certain vegetable oils.
Researchers discover that mood is inversely related to the number of meetings you attend.
Men show less activation in the areas related to understanding others emotions when “maintaining justice and issuing punishment” or “witnessing retribution” (take your pick!) according to a new study.
More radio goodness abounds as WNYC’s Radio Lab discusses how the self is represented in the brain and how it can be radically and idiosyncratically altered after brain injury.
The programme is beautifully produced and was really a pleasure to listen to. The first ten minutes even has an audio representation of a firing neuron, skittering through the background.
It includes contributions from the a number of scientists including V.S. Ramachandran, Paul Broks, Julian Keenan and Robert Sapolsky.
The ‘self’ has been a nebulous concept for thousands of years and neuroscience is discovering that it is more curious than was ever imagined.
A free excerpt from the book The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry also covers some of the recent developments in this emerging field of research.
Link to Radio Lab ‘Who am I?’ with audio archive.
Link to info and excerpt from The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry.
A few days after our post on ‘hikikomori’ – the extreme social withdrawal increasingly seen in Japanese adolescents – the New York Times published an in-depth article on the controversy surrounding the phenomenon.
Coincidence? Well… yes. But an interesting and well-timed one nonetheless.
For all the attention, though, hikikomori remains confounding. The Japanese public has blamed everything from smothering mothers to absent, overworked fathers, from school bullying to the lackluster economy, from academic pressure to video games. “I sometimes wonder whether or not I understand this issue,” confessed Shinako Tsuchiya, a member of Parliament, one afternoon in her Tokyo office.
Link to article ‘Shutting Themselves In’.
To follow on from a recent post on videos of neuroscience talks available online, the National Institutes of Health have an additional 129 neuroscience lectures available as streaming video.
The topics cover everything from Dopamine and Motivated Behaviors to A Different View of the Primary Visual Cortex.
Some of the talks are on topics completely new to me, like one on ‘ghrelin‘ – which sounds like something you’d find in a health food shop – but I’m sure all will become clear.
Link to NIH Neuroscience Videocasting.
Science fiction author Philip K. Dick experienced unpredictable altered states of consciousness and his work contains some of the best descriptions of psychosis you are likely to find anywhere.
BBC Radio 4 just broadcast a programme, archived online, that discusses PKD’s kaleidoscopic and life-changing “2-3-74” experience, where he believed he was being contacted by an interdimensional entity called VALIS and that 1970’s California was just an illusion disguising the fact that the 1st century Roman empire still existed.
Link to programme ‘Confessions of a Crap Artist’ (via BoingBoing).
Link to PhilipKDickFans.com
Mind Hacks 
