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
September 23rd, 2010
September 18th, 2010
Stories of interest for September 17th
- 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
September 9th, 2010
Stories of interest for September 8th
- StarShipSofa | The Audio Science Fiction Magazine – really nice podcast site for SF fans
September 6th, 2010
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
August 31st, 2010
Stories of interest for August 30th
- Researchers urge reclassification of traumatic brain injury as chronic disease – As practitioners working with patients who have experienced a TBI, we know that the effects can be chronic. Yet, insurance companies view TBI differently. Maybe it's time to consider TBIs as chronic illness?
August 29th, 2010
Stories of interest for August 28th
August 28th, 2010
Stories of interest for August 27th
- Color cube – Piet Mondrian inspired store, so cool! I love Mondrian
August 26th, 2010
Stories of interest for August 25th
- HIV Virus Hides In The Brain? – A recent study suggests that evidence of HIV are found in CSF before they are found in blood.
August 25th, 2010
Stories of interest for August 24th
- Doctor of Medical Meditation | Ethos Magazine – more on IBMT
- What is Integrative Body-Mind Training (IBMT)?: Training, Deep Meditation, Stress Reduction in Five Days – new research points to this type of training as having the ability to change the brain; I'm trying to find some instruction on this but it is scarce.
August 22nd, 2010
‘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.)
August 22nd, 2010
Stories of interest for August 20th through August 21st:
- Cambridge MRCPsych Course – useful links here even though it is for the MRCPsych qualification 🙂
- Biblia Ilustrada – Pretty amazing concept; the old testament line by line but done with illustrations
August 19th, 2010
Stories of interest for August 18th
- Growing up poor can affect brain development – Article regarding how the brain develops when one is impoverished. Of course, the connection is not between money and the brain but varied experiences, positive environments, and possibility–things that are lacking when one is poor. Interestingly, the environment supposedly plays a larger role in IQ level when a child is raised poor (compared to middle class).
August 14th, 2010
Really nice newsletter in pdf format from the Harvard Mahoney Neuroscience Institute; site has back issues from 1992.
August 12th, 2010
Stories of interest for August 10th
- Psychiatry and Psychology – Science Forums – Just came across this forum; kind of funny topics like " Unwanted Sexual Attention…Online Survey -Participants Required!" and "Any way to induce hallucination without drugs?" . Got some good laughs here 😛
August 9th, 2010
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
August 8th, 2010
Stories of interest for August 7th
- Open source scale for use in outcome measure studies – COMBI site with a bunch of scales for use as outcome measures commonly used in the field of brain injury rehabilitation and assessment
August 7th, 2010
- The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!
- Verbing weirds language.
- That’s the whole problem with science. You’ve got a bunch of empiricists trying to describe things of unimaginable wonder.
- If you do the job badly enough, sometimes you don’t get asked to do it again.
- The only skills I have the patience to learn are those that have no real application in life.
- Calvin: I’m a genius, but I’m a misunderstood genius.
Hobbes: What’s misunderstood about you?
Calvin: Nobody thinks I’m a genius.
August 6th, 2010
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.
August 6th, 2010
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.
August 6th, 2010
Stories of interest for August 5th
- Microemboli Study – This is one of the research projects I'm involved in; I'm continuing work with this lab at Stanford and the Veteran's Administration, Palo Alto, to further explore the effects of micrembolization on cognition. There is great debate regarding the neurocognitive effects of CEA and CAS procedures. (It's funny when something you worked on is published and then you don't realize it for a year).
August 5th, 2010
Stories of interest for August 4th
- The Hardest Science – Nice blog I found about all things "scientific" in the world of academic psychology. I'll have to contact the owner once I finish my dissertation proposal! (X_X)
August 3rd, 2010
Stories of interest for August 2nd
- 1 Night Of Recovery Sleep May Not Be Sufficient To Recover From The Negative Effects Of Sleep Restriction – A study in the Aug. 1 issue of the journal Sleep suggests that a dose of extra sleep on the weekend may be good medicine for adults who repeatedly stay up too late or wake up too early during the workweek. However, even a night of 10 hours in bed may not be enough to cure the negative effects of chronic sleep restriction.
- Human Induced Rotation and Reorganization of the Brain of Domestic Dogs – I’m loving this open source journal PlosOne. I found research about how the domestication of dogs (i.e humans breeding them and training them) has led to changes in their brain organization–a ground breaking study because this is the first time any evidence of reorganization of the brain has been studied.
- Dogs Automatically Imitate People : Discovery News –
- Mental hygiene – Doing a literature review for my dissertation brought me to interesting work of Adolf Meyer who wrote “Outlines of Examinations” in 1918. He was a founding father of the mental status examination and brought the concept of mental hygiene to the stage of psychology.
- “Securing the record of the subjective complaints and the physical examination of the patient are arts, the systematic method of sorting and classifying the data and the making of a diagnosis from the facts secured is a science, and treatment is a combination of science and art. Errors in judgment,errors in analysis, errors in data, and above all errors in technique are among the reasons or sources of a mistaken diagnosis.”
August 1st, 2010
- iPad Peek – If you develop web content this site will be of use to you; it allows you to see how an ipad user would see your site. The ipad is one impressive media consumption device that is taking the world by storm so it would be wise to design content with that in mind. A caveat about ipad peek: there is no flash on ipad so be sure to disable it if you want to see how your site really looks.
July 31st, 2010
- 10 Unsolved Mysteries Of The Brain – Of all the objects in the universe, the human brain is the most complex: There are as many neurons in the brain as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy. So it is no surprise that, Âdespite the glow from recent advances in the science of the brain and mind, we still find ourselves squinting in the dark somewhat. But we are at least beginning to grasp the crucial mysteries of neuroscience and starting to make headway in addressing them. Even partial answers to these 10 questions could restructure our understanding of the roughly three-pound mass of gray and white matter that defines who we are.
July 31st, 2010
Stories of interest for July 31st from 13:29 to 13:29:
- Mind Mapping, 11 resources and free web-based services to get started. – A mind map is a diagram used to represent words, ideas, tasks, or other items linked to and arranged around a central key word or idea. Mind maps are used to generate, visualize, structure, and classify ideas, and as an aid in study, organization, problem solving, decision making, and writing.
By presenting ideas in a radial, graphical, non-linear manner, mind maps encourage a brainstorming approach to planning and organizational tasks. Though the branches of a mindmap represent hierarchical tree structures, their radial arrangement disrupts the prioritizing of concepts typically associated with hierarchies presented with more linear visual cues. This orientation towards brainstorming encourages users to enumerate and connect concepts without a tendency to begin within a particular conceptual framework.