Why neuroscience matters

From time to time I receive emails from people who have relatives or other loved ones that suffer from a neurological or psychiatric condition. I respond to these the best that I can. Today, I'd like to share with you one such response. This is why neuroscience is important; it opens up a better understanding [...]

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Special issue on synaesthesia

Synaesthesia is a rare condition where people experience some percepts as a different sensory modality than the one they normally belong to – e.g., numbers as colours, or tones as shapes. It is, thus, a positive (and rather bizarre!) syndrome, where an abnormal trait is present, not absent, in the affected person.
Synaesthetes clearly posses brains [...]

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Law and science incommunicado

Neuroscience affects the way we think about ourselves. It affects how we think of normal and abnormal minds. It has influence on how people are judged according to law, whether they have been acting willfully or under the effect of psychoactive drugs, sleep disturbance, brain injury or psychiatric disease. But how do our scientific models [...]

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Grades of consciousness in the brain

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What happens in the brain when we become conscious of something? What processes and structures are responsible for becoming aware? Is consciousness an either-or process or can we have in-between forms of perception?
We have recently attempted to put those questions into empirical terms. In a study that is [...]

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Putting the blog where the brain is

I thought it would be a good thing as a host to welcome you to this new blog. We discovered it while travelling through the blogosphere. So why take the chance and change the host now? Well, why not? Any time would be a bad time, so the sooner the better. But given the better [...]

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Oh no, I’m going to get in trouble!

As discussed before here on the blog, imaging studies by Josh Greene, Jorge Moll and others have demonstrated that emotional responses play a pivotal role in forming moral judgments. A new study by Sylvie Berthoz adds further information to this growing story.
Berthoz and her colleagues had subjects read short stories describing transgressions of social rules. [...]

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Hariri review in TICS

If you have read Thomas’ fine introduction to Ahmad Hariri’s work on the link between gene expression, serotonin re-uptake and emotion, you may be interested in hearing more about the story from the horse’s own mouth. If so, check out this new review, in press for publication in the April issue of Trends in Cognitive [...]

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Genes, brain/mind and behaviour

This is a new conference on combining the knowledge from genetics, neuroimaging and behavioural science. A brief look at the program is enough: I’m going!
7th [...]

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Normative brains and group studies

In a NeuroImage article this February, Krishnan et al. demonstrate how poor spatial normalization can be for the hippocampus. Spatial normalization is an image processing step applied in neuroimaging when typically you are doing group studies. As it says on Wikipedia.com:
Human brains differ in size and shape, and one goal of spatial normalization is to [...]

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How genes make up your mind

I have written a small piece about imaging genetics (IG) in Science & Consciousness Review. IG is IMHO really going to revolutionize cognitive science, hopefully even philosophy of mind. The findings made here point altogether to how tightly coupled the mind is to its physical brain, and how our minds are made by our brains.
Just [...]

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