Deep in your brain there are probably several thousand neurons that will respond only to the sight of Lady Gaga. Several thousand others probably only crackle to the sight of Justin Bieber. It might be nice to reassign those neurons to loftier thoughts. For now, though, neurology can’t help you. What neurology can do for you (if you’re up for a little invasive brain surgery) is let you use those Gaga and Bieber neurons to control a computer.
Okay, if scientists won’t listen to me tell them they have to learn how to speak in plain English, maybe another scientist can drive the point home. From the intriguing blog The Plainspoken Scientist, via Colin Schultz.
Originally published October 27, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
A few months ago a neuroscientist named Carl Schoonover sent me the galleys of a coffee table book made for my kind of coffee table. It’s a visual history of the brain, using images to tell the story of neuroscience from its earliest roots to today’s awesome brain scans and micrographs. The book, called Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century is just out. So rather than just blurb and run, I thought I’d share a peek into it with you.
Originally published October 26, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
One of my favorite discoveries in the blogoverse is the Evolutionary Psychology blog, by Rob Kurzban of the University of Pennsylvania. Evolutionary psychology had an explosive debut in the 1990s, becoming the subject of best-sellers and well-attended conferences. In recent years, a backlash has emerged, and while some criticisms have been justified, a lot of critics either attack straw men or make counterarguments that have serious flaws of their own. Evolutionary psychologists have been defending themselves, but in a relatively scattershot way. Kurzban started his blog in September, and seems to be blogging pretty consistently, and is offering some cogent and entertaining take-downs of the shabbier examples of evo-psycho backlash. I hope the backlashers jump into the comment threads!
PS–Someone has to fix the formatting on Kurzban’s blog. The excerpts look like one-sentence posts….
PPS–Talk about throwing stones from a glass house. Sorry about the headline typo. Now fixed.
Originally published October 26, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.
Discover, October 26, 2010
In some of the world’s oldest medical texts — papyrus scrolls from ancient Egypt, clay tablets from Assyria — people complain about noise in their ears. Some of them call it a buzzing. Others describe it as whispering or even singing. Today we call such conditions tinnitus. In the distant past, doctors offered all sorts of strange cures for it. The Assyrians poured rose extract into the ear through a bronze tube. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder suggested that earthworms boiled in goose grease be put in the ear. Medieval Welsh physicians in the town of Myddfai recommended that their patients take a freshly baked loaf of bread out of the oven, cut it in two, “and apply to both ears as hot as can be borne, bind and thus produce perspiration, and by the help of god you will be cured.”
Continue reading ““Ringing in the Ears” Actually Goes Much Deeper Than That”