neuroscience

Must Read Article on the Limits of Brain Scans

Michael Shermer, editor of Skeptic magazine, has a great article in Scientific American about the limits of interpreting fMRI scanning studies -- particularly how they are presented in the media. ...

Brain Activation during Hypothesis Generation

The scientific process is composed of generating hypotheses and testing those hypotheses through experiment. Yet we don't know a whole lot about how about hypothesis generation happens on the level...

Ecoding Diversity: What is Orthogonal Coding?

One of the problems brains must overcome to behave effectively is to discretely encode all the different responses that they can produce. Considering movement alone, you can move in a lot of...

I Want it Now! -- Temporal Discounting in the Primate Brain

Temporal discounting is our tendency to want things now rather than later. In order to encourage us to save money, banks have to offer us a reward in the form of an interest rate. In order to delay...

The Function of a Fearful Expression

Human beings use stereotyped facial expressions to identify the feelings of others. We can tell what another person is feeling in part because of how their face looks. However, this says very...

Must Read Paper on fMRI -and- The Worst fMRI Science Journalism Ever

There is a must-read paper in Nature about the limits of functional MRI as an experimental tool by one of its pioneers, Nikos Logothetis. (Also discussed by Jonah and Vaughan.) This paper is...

Acute Tryptophan Depletion increases offer rejection in the Ultimatum Game

Here is an interesting article showing the cross-over between neuropharmacology and decision making. Crockett et al. show that if you use acute tryptophan depletion to lower the levels of serotonin...

Double dissociation of sound localization and identification in the auditory cortex of cats

We have known for some time that there is a double dissociation (I will define that term in a minute) between location and identification in the visual system. Neuroscientists speak of a "where"...

Sound encoding in the rat: a lesson about sparse vs. dense encoding

How do neurons in your brain encode the diversity of stimuli present in the world? This is one of the questions that neuroscientists have to answers about how the brain works. The world holds an...

The Neurological Basis of the Runner's High

We have all heard about the runner's high, and a great many of us have felt it. When you are running a marathon, about an hour or two in you feel a feeling of euphoria right like you could run...