Neuroscience and psychology tricks to find out what's going on inside your brain.
How cannabis makes thoughts tumble
9 Mar 2010 at 1:00 pm
Cannabis smokers often report that when stoned, their thoughts have a free-wheeling quality and concepts seem connected in unusual and playful ways. A study just published online in Psychiatry Research suggests that this effect may be due to the drug causing 'fast and loose' patterns of spreading activity in memory, something known as 'hyper-priming'.
Priming is a well studied effect in psycholog
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Tracking the unborn brain into childhood
9 Mar 2010 at 7:00 am
A brain scanning technology called MEG is being used to track the function of unborn babies' brains as they grow inside the womb until after they've been born.
The full name for MEG is magnetoencephalography and it works by reading the magnetic fields created by the electrical signalling in the brain.
One of the advantages is that it can be used at various angles, doesn't require the person to b
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A man with virtually no serotonin or dopamine
9 Mar 2010 at 3:00 am
Neuroskeptic covers a fascinating case of a man born with a genetic mutation meaning he had a severe lifelong deficiency of both serotonin and dopamine.
The case report concerns a gentleman with sepiapterin reductase deficiency, a genetic condition which prevents the production of the enzyme sepiapterin reductase which is essential in the synthesis of both dopamine and serotonin.
The most widely
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The disembodied tic
8 Mar 2010 at 7:00 am
There are numerous forms of body distortions and out-of-body experiences reported in the neurological literature but this is the first case I've found of someone who experienced tics that seemed to occur in external objects.
The report was published in the journal Neurology in 1997 and concerns a man with Tourette's syndrome, a condition of persistent tics.
These more commonly appear as almost i
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Go Cognitive guide to the brain
8 Mar 2010 at 3:00 am
Go Cognitive is an awesome free video archive of interviews and discussion that aims to explain some of the core topics in cognitive neuroscience.
It's a project of the University of Idaho who've managed to convince some of the leaders in the science of the brain to talk about their work.
There are videos on fMRI, neuroplasticity, attention and neurological problems to name but a few, and there'
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Future neuro-cognitive warfare
7 Mar 2010 at 3:00 am
Every year the US Army holds an annual conference called the "Mad Scientist Future Technology Seminar" that considers blue sky ideas for the future of warfare. Wired's Danger Room discusses the conference and links to an unclassified pdf summary of the meeting which contains this interesting paragraph about 'neuro-cognitive warfare':
In the far term, beyond 2030, developments in neuro-cognitive
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In the blood
6 Mar 2010 at 3:00 am
Wikipedia has a page on the idea that blood type predicts personality, a discredited theory that nevertheless remains widespread in Japanese and Korean popular culture.
The idea seems to hold a similar cultural position as star signs and astrology and is used as a platform for discussing relationship compatibility and vague personality characteristics.
This is from a 1998 article from the Journa
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Skate deck neuroscience
5 Mar 2010 at 7:00 am
Designer Emilio Garcia has created a series of skate decks decorated with fantastic cortex graphics.
It means every time you boardslide, you can see exactly how your brain has been lesioned.
Garcia is the same designer we've featured before on Mind Hacks, where we discussed his unusual jumping brain model.
Link to Garcia's brain pattern skate decks.
2010-03-05 Spike activity
5 Mar 2010 at 3:00 amQuick links from the past week in mind and brain news:
Time magazine reports on how darkness can encourage dishonest acts even when anonymity is accounted for.
A study finding a link with aversion to inequality an activity in the ventral striatum is brilliantly covered by The Frontal Cortex.
The Point of Inquiry podcast has an excellent discussion on the psychology of cold reading.
A preview
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How reliable are fMRI results?
4 Mar 2010 at 1:00 pm
A new study has looked at the reliability of fMRI brain scanning results over time, finding that the same experiment will only only be moderately reproducible when conducted at two different times, suggesting that fMRI is much less reliable than most researchers assume.
The authors of the paper are the same ones who brought us the study showing that it's possible to find 'brain activity' in a dea
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In Our Time on the Infant Brain
4 Mar 2010 at 7:00 am
This morning's edition of BBC Radio 4's brilliant In Our Time was dedicated to the infant brain and has a wide ranging discussion about how ideas about the early development of the child developed into the modern age of neuroscience.
The streamed version will be available on the website permanently, but if you want to download the podcast you only have a week to do so from this page.
Melvyn Br
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Cocaine, surgery and an experiment too far
4 Mar 2010 at 3:00 am
William Stewart Halsted is known as the 'father of American surgery' and was widely-known to have been addicted to both cocaine and morphine for large stretches of his life. I always assumed this was due to recreational sampling of the medicine cabinet but it turns out it was the rather unfortunate result of some initially serious scientific experimentation.
I just found this article on Halsted f
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All aboard the baby brain
3 Mar 2010 at 1:00 pm
The March edition of The Psychologist has just appeared online and has two freely available articles: one article investigates whether women really suffer a reduction in mental sharpness during pregnancy, and another interviews baby psychologist Alison Gopnik about her work.
This idea that pregnancy causes a slight reduction in mental sharpness, sometimes known as 'baby brain' or 'pregnesia', is
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Tipsy thinking
3 Mar 2010 at 7:00 am
Seed Magazine has a great short article on misperceptions and counter-intuitive findings concerning alcohol and drinking.
The piece covers whether alcohol break-down product acetaldehyde plays as much a part in drunkenness as alcohol itself, misperceptions about the chances of women having their drink spiked to facilitate sexual assault, and mothers' perceptions about their kids future drinking p
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Violent video games: small causal link with aggression
3 Mar 2010 at 3:00 am
A new study just published in Psychological Bulletin has reviewed studies on the effects of violent video games and concludes that they cause a small but reliable increase in aggressive behaviour and anti-social thinking.
The study, led by psychologist Craig Anderson, is a type of meta-analysis which attempts to mathematically aggregate the results of past studies to see what the overall effect i
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