19 posts tagged with biology and brain (View popular tags)

Mapping the Structural Core of Human Cerebral Cortex. A new study of the connections in the brain has identified the brain's central hub.
posted on Jul 4, 2008 - View this thread

"The Guardian has been granted exclusive and unfettered access to one of the most controversial research facilities at a British university." Caring or cruel? Inside the primate laboratory. Audio slideshow. A necessary evil - Colin Blakemore. Wise monkeys - Gill Langley.
posted on May 31, 2008 - View this thread

Interactive Features at the Children's Hospital Boston's Website. [Via Mind Hacks.]
posted on Dec 17, 2007 - View this thread

Virtual Out-of-Body Experience. Using two procedures to deliberately scramble a person's visual and tactile senses, neuroscientists are able to induce "out-of-body" experiences in people. The effect is the same as the 'rubber hand illusion', but extends the effect to the whole body instead of just one limb (you can try the hand illusion for yourself).
posted on Aug 24, 2007 - View this thread

Do You Taste What I Taste? - The first of Slate's 3-part series on the physiology of taste [parts 2, 3]
posted on Jul 15, 2007 - View this thread

Body Symmetry and Intelligence
posted on Apr 18, 2007 - View this thread

Sea Squirt Regrows Entire Body from One Blood Vessel. Most famous as the creature that settles down and eats its own brain (though that is not exactly correct), it appears the humble sea squirt has spectacular regenerative abilities as well, thanks to regeneration niches packed with stem cells. All glory to the sea squirt!
posted on Mar 6, 2007 - View this thread

Dictionary of Disorder - shaping the DSM
posted on Jan 13, 2007 - View this thread

Psychiatry by Prescription - Do psychotropic drugs blur the boundaries between illness and health?
posted on Aug 26, 2006 - View this thread

Living with half a brain - hemispherectomy, probably the most radical procedure in neurosurgery
posted on Jun 29, 2006 - View this thread

Blue Gene bears Blue Brain beats Deep Blue. Dr. Henry Markram answers questions in the FAQ. Neurons are beautiful. Blue Gene/L is now the fastest supercomputer in the world. IBM Research rocks. Deep Blue beat Kasparov almost a decade ago. Feeling Blue?
posted on Jan 29, 2006 - View this thread

The first Transhuman Conference On the Law of Transhuman Persons: Whether or not you believe humans are set to evolve into gods, or AI is destined to achieve self-awareness the idea of the Transhuman is a thought provoking concept. Philosophers have debated the nature of the self, of the human for millennia. Is it time to start drafting new laws to govern all possible sentient beings on this planet? or is it all just a science of fiction? a comfortable humanist illusion?
posted on Dec 13, 2005 - View this thread

Serotonin and Depression: A Disconnect between the Advertisements and the Scientific Literature
posted on Nov 8, 2005 - View this thread

Nature has a somewhat technical but free supplement on sleep
posted on Oct 29, 2005 - View this thread

Dr Hugo's Museum of the Mind - Synaesthesia
posted on Jan 20, 2005 - View this thread

The maps of perception.
2nd link: java applet.
posted on Apr 25, 2004 - View this thread

We are because of others. We are born into this world with minds as naked as our bodies and we have to rely on others to feed, clothe us, and to teach us to think of ourselves as selves. The key is language -- grammatical speech and human culture build upon the brain's biological capacities to create a mind that is something different again than that with which we are born. We are conscious because we can speak to others and ourselves, because we can speak of ourselves to others and ourselves. Language gives us as individuals, memory, and as groups, culture, the social memory. Or so thought Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky, among others. Welcome to the the neuronaut's guide to the science of consciousness.
posted on Jul 11, 2003 - View this thread

Gene Prevents 'Brains Everywhere' The human version of the gene probably is not involved in keeping the human brain inside the skull, but likely plays some other role in nervous system development in human embryos, says Alejandro Sanchez Alvarado, a developmental biologist at the University of Utah School of Medicine. Cool.
posted on Oct 11, 2002 - View this thread

The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution — which I speculate on in this essay — is the single most important "unreported" (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.

--V.S. Ramachandran

(after you read the essay, you might be interested in the responses.)
posted on Jun 8, 2000 - View this thread