It’s going to be an interesting year.
Come funziona l’occhio, “Il secolo illustrato”, 1936
May 19th, 2013
Here is a reference for Syndromes and Associated Neuroanatomic Localization of Lesions
September 29th, 2010
Stories of interest for September 28th
- Video gaming prepares brain for bigger tasks – It all paid off 🙂
- Inception Spinning Top – Very useful if one needs to tell if one is currently in a dream within a dream 🙂
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 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 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 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.”