16 July 2010
12 July 2010
Reward, Addiction, and Emotion Regulation Systems Associated With Rejection in Love
This article explains the study, which originally was published in the Journal of Neurophysiology.
[via:Maarit Piippo]
4 January 2010
Machine Translates Thoughts into Speech in Real Time
“By implanting an electrode into the brain of a person with locked-in syndrome, scientists have demonstrated how to wirelessly transmit neural signals to a speech synthesizer. The “thought-to-speech” process takes about 50 milliseconds – the same amount of time for a non-paralyzed, neurologically intact person to speak their thoughts. The study marks the first successful demonstration of a permanently installed, wireless implant for real-time control of an external device.”
28 October 2009
Brain scanners can tell what you’re thinking about
“Yet despite – or perhaps because of – the recent progress in the field, most researchers are wary of calling their work mind-reading. Emphasising its limitations, they call it neural decoding.”
[via:Trent]
21 September 2009
1 December 2008
Creating false memories: exposure to misinformation induces memory distortion
From Scientific American September 1997, vol 277 #3, pages 70-75.
“The Author: Elizabeth F. Loftus is professor of psychology and adjunct professor of law at the University of Washington. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from Stanford University in 1970. Her research has focused on human memory, eyewitness testimony and courtroom procedure.”
13 August 2008
30 July 2008
Undermining certainty and conviction as products of reason
“On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You’re Not” by Robert A. Burton seems to provide an interesting scientific summary on why you as soon as possible should forget the traditional concepts of objective thought and free will.
The book’s concepts are summarized in an easy to understand way on a recent episode of Brain Science Podcast.
24 July 2008
Patient HM: real life “Memento”
“When twenty-seven year old Henry M. entered the hospital in 1953 for radical brain surgery that was supposed to cure his epilepsy, he was hopeful that the procedure would change his life for the better. Instead, it trapped him in a mental time warp where TV is always a new invention and Truman is forever president. The removal of large sections of his temporal lobes left Henry unable to form any new personal memories”
Reading about HM’s anterograde amnesia is like seeing Memento again.
5 July 2008
Dissection of early 20th century racist neuroscience paper
The article provides a look into some arguments used in lousy 19th and early 20th century science papers produced with the goal to produce evidence to support racial segregation.
“Some racial peculiarities of the Negro brain is the title of a long and technical paper by the anthropologist Robert Bennett Bean, published in the American Journal of Anatomy in 1906. It is one of a series of scientific papers written by Bean in the early 20th Century, in which he tried to provide scientific evidence of the inferiority of black people. … between the years of 1905-1907,[Bean] was an instructor in anatomy at the University of Michigan. It is during this period of his life that Bean began his investigations into “the Negro brain”.”