Screen time poll

I've come to the realization that I spend more time interacting with a screen than I do interacting with real human faces...I wonder if others feel the same way? If this is true for the most of us out there what does it mean for the evolution of our brains? What does it mean for the future of humanity? Wall-E in the making?

The curious case of H.M.

Recently, I watched a lecture by the renown neuroscientist, Eric Kandel, on Youtube. In his talk he unsurprisingly made mention of the famous patient H.M. in which most of us are familiar with. I've always been curious as to who the person was behind the famous initials. What did he/she look like? What were some of his/her hobbies? To those who were also curious but never had a chance to find out, here he is...the man, the myth, the legend.

Optogenetics FTMFW!

Optogenetics is an emerging field combining optical and genetic techniques to probe neural circuits within intact mammals and other animals, at the high speeds (millisecond-timescale) needed to understand brain information processing.

All your brain are belong to us.

Learn more about optogenetics with these links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optogenetics

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/tag/optogenetic/

http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/News-remote-control-flies-101909.aspx?xmlmenuid=51

http://biox.stanford.edu/biox/optogenetics.html

More or less conscious

Are Alzheimer patients less conscious than healthy individuals? This would be true if we were to assume Chalmer's suggestion, that functional organization determines higher levels of consciousness, was correct. Just a thought...

Are they conscious or not?

I apologize for the lack of posts as of late. I've been putting in ridiculous hours over at school.

In any case, I recently stumbled upon Joshua Knobes' blog entry over at Experimental Philosophy summarizing Felipe De Brigard's fascinating paper forthcoming in the Journal of Consciousness Studies. De Brigard found that simply framing a question in a certain way can determine whether a person is perceived to be conscious or not. The link can be found here.

Aaah...the power of questions...back to the dungeon I go.

Children recruit higher-order brain mechanisms during a numerical comparison task

I've been endlessly scoring digit-symbol coding protocols (fun...), a subtest of the WAIS-IV measuring working memory, for the past few weeks at my new neuropsych externship so the following article seems particularly relevant.

In a recent study by Cantlon and colleagues published in the latest Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, they decided to measure the brain activity of 6-7 year-old children during numerical comparison tasks using fMRI.