Stories of interest for September 22nd
- Report Predicts Massive Dementia Burden – September 21 was World Alzheimer's Day. The newest report shows numbers that are quite shocking
Stories of interest for September 22nd
Stories of interest for September 17th
Stories of interest for September 8th
One of the unsolved puzzles of the brain is the question which code is being used when nerve cells communicate with each other. It has been known for more than a century that the basic unit of communication within the nervous system is the pulse-like fluctuation in voltage at the membrane of neurons. But there is still a hot ongoing debate on how these so-called action potentials are combined to form a code for the actual processing and transmission of information. Two forms of coding are popular candidates: one is based on the rate of action potentials (rate coding) and the other relies on the timing of their occurrences (temporal coding).
Researchers now propose that under certain conditions, both forms of coding can in fact be employed simultaneously.
Here is the full article spiking activity propagation in neuronal networks
Stories of interest for August 30th
Stories of interest for August 28th
Stories of interest for August 27th
Stories of interest for August 25th
Stories of interest for August 24th
‘My son, you know no one will help you in this world . . .
You must run to that mountain and come back. That will
make you strong. My son, you know no one is your friend,
not even your sister, your father, your mother. Your legs are
your friends; your brain is your friend; your hands are your
friends; you must do something with them.’
(The words of an Apache father, An Apache Life by Morris
Opler.)
Stories of interest for August 20th through August 21st:
Stories of interest for August 18th
Really nice newsletter in pdf format from the Harvard Mahoney Neuroscience Institute; site has back issues from 1992.
Stories of interest for August 10th
Yes, it’s late and I’ve crested 100 pages of writing now; so, I’m a bit loopy.
Here is my joke (wonder who would ever get this):
“Your mommas so dumb, she tried to copyright The Oral Trail Making Test (OTMT)
( © Dinishak 2010)
lol :X
Stories of interest for August 7th
I was up doing literature reviews (ugh) and came across this article by Joseph B. Martin. It is fascinating to me and resonates with me because Dr. Martin is advocating “cross pollination” of neuroscience, neurology, psychology, and medicine; basically, he wants us all to recover from the split that happened at the turn of the century (20th). In some ways the easiest way to explain the split would be to say that science split with philosophy–neurology and neuroscience developed into hard science and medicine while psychology and in some ways psychiatry took the philosophical route. I’m a big advocate of a unified field with sub specialties; psychologists would learn neuroscience and neurologists would learn therapy.
I found this awesome comic by cartoon by Dwayne Godwin, a professor of neurobiology at Wake Forest University, and Jorge Cham, the former researcher and cartoonist who created PhD Comics; it actually won the the informational graphics category of the 2009 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. Must print it out 🙂 Visit Godwin’s public engagement page, where it and some others can be downloaded as PDFs.
Stories of interest for August 5th
Stories of interest for August 4th
Stories of interest for August 2nd
Stories of interest for July 31st from 13:29 to 13:29: