We are in final edits on a cute little video showing some of the fun stuff people do to celebrate Brain Awareness Week, which this year will be March 15–21. It’s my first foray into video-making since the early 1980s, and I am quite a bit rusty, so this will be an “unauthorized” version, but [...]
It’s time for Neuroscience 2009, the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, Oct. 15-22 in Chicago. I arrived last night, and swung up to the Hancock Building’s 95th floor for a reception for members and friends of the Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives tonight. The hostess commiserated with me that it wasn’t sunny enough to see [...]
Over at the Dana Foundation site, there’s a package of news and commentaries (with more coming) on “neuro-education,” the effects of arts training on the brain and the use of what we know about the brain to improve how we teach. Stories include: NEWS: Attention May Link Arts and Intelligence Arts education causes “profound changes” [...]
Check out The White Museum, by George Bilgere. I was tipped to it by a friend who reads The Writer’s Almanac on American Public Media’s site. Last week I stayed on the outside of someone’s white museum, and just that was wonderous strange.
Go ahead, celebrate your brain—it’s certainly a writer’s best tool. Brain Awareness Week, this year from today through Sunday (March 16–23) is organized and promoted by The Dana Foundation, whose Web pages I edit. Well into its second decade, BAW can boast more than 2,200 partners offering lectures, lab tours, movies, “brain fairs” and other [...]
A few in the audience for Steven Brown’s lecture “From Mode to Emotion in Musical Communication” here in Washington, D.C., last night weren’t quite ready to receive the conclusions he pitched. Instead of reinforcing our idea that music induces great emotion in the listener, he said, well, maybe we only think it does. “Briefly stated, [...]
update: see video from the event at TheScientist.com (you may have to register) Next Tuesday, March 3, neuroscientists including Dan Levitin (“This is Your Brain on Music) and Joseph LeDoux (“Synaptic Self”) will burn up the Highline Ballroom in New York City along with Rufus Wainwright, Dee Snyder, Lenny Kaye, The Kennedys, Dream Syndicate, and, [...]
Might the beta-amyloid plaques and tau tangles of Alzheimer’s be symptoms and not causes? Some scientists are coming around to that idea, according to a story on the Dana site this week. This is a follow-on from earlier stories on the series of failed amyloid drug trials this past year.
Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel sees promise in a new strain of genetics and psychotherapy, if not new drugs, for psychiatric illnesses, in a transcript we posted on the Dana site this week of a conversation during the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting this year. If we get markers for most psychiatric illnesses, and we [...]
This fortnight’s version of the Encephalon carnival is at Ionian Enchantment. My Dana Press blog on the big business potential of neurotechnology and Ben’s on dancing for Parkinson’s patients made the cut this time. Ben extended his reporting on the dance events at Society for Neuroscience into a full-length story, too. I attended that “conversation” event with choreographer [...]
November is National Novel Writing Month! More at nanowrimo.org