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Tag Archives: neuroscience

It’s brain awareness week

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 [...]

Posted 16 March 2009 † nickyp § Brain science § Learning ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: , ,

Tuesday in New York

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, [...]

Posted 26 February 2009 † nickyp § Brain science ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: ,

Encephalon 64 is up

The Neurocritic plays host to Encephalon 64, the latest brain-blog carnival. We didn’t make the cut this time (someone may have sent the e-mail too late), but it’s still chock-full of goodies. Highlights for me this time were the images: Jane Mackay’s painting “Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto,” a synesthetic composition bridging the gap between sight [...]

Posted 20 February 2009 † nickyp § Brain science ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged:

Seeking dementia’s triggers

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.

Posted 07 February 2009 † nickyp § Brain science ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: ,

Truth telling on lie detection

How should we take companies’ claims that their functional magnetic resonance imagers (fMRI) can tell if we are telling lies? With a mighty grain of salt, said panelists during the second day of the Neuroethics Society’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C.  The idea of using fMRIs as a lie detector already has permeated society, said [...]

Posted 15 November 2008 † nickyp § Brain science § Marketing ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: , , ,

Check out Encephalon #58

We made the biweekly Encephalon parade, with two blogs by Dana writer Aalok Mehta. One follows his story on neuroblastoma; the other reviews the first three lectures in the Music & the Brain series, including a report on playing a keyboard while inside an fMRI. Encephalon highlights “some of the best neuroscience and psychology blog [...]

Posted 10 November 2008 † nickyp § Brain science ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged:

Benefiting from basic science

Last year when I interviewed Mark Bear, a researcher and teacher at MIT, on his work on the neurobiology of fragile X, he was giddy with the possibility that the basic research he and others were doing might quickly translate to drugs that could reduce the genetic damage.  “I would have never dared to dream [...]

Posted 23 September 2008 † nickyp § Brain science ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: ,

Economic decisions come from the heart

While the rules of economics (goodbye Lehman Brothers) assume that we all will act rationally and in our own best interest, truth is we’re a fickle and flighty people. So recent neuroscience research would argue (and it has long been so, as I’m reading in David Copperfield—poor Aunt Betsey!—right now).   A bevy of brain [...]

Posted 19 September 2008 † nickyp § Brain science ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: ,

Seeking spirit by scanning brains

We did a cool out-of-the ordinary science story this week—”The ‘Search’ for God: Growing field of neurotheology explores the biology of religion.” More researchers are trying to find “spirituality” in brain scans the way we’ve been trying to find language and visual processing, and it seems like the tools we have (fMRI, EEG, etc.) may [...]

Posted 11 September 2008 † nickyp § Brain science § Thinking ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: ,

Easy listening

One of my favorite monthly podcasts is Nature NeuroPod, done by Kerri Smith for Nature.com. (dana.org sponsors the podcasts, wisely leaving the hard work to the experts.) The only drawback for me had been the length of the podcast: Finding 30 straight minutes to pay close attention to scientists talking can be a challenge. But [...]

Posted 03 September 2008 † nickyp § Brain science ‡ Comments (0) ° Also tagged: ,