Making teachers use science

Ever heard about evidence-based medicine? Now we should all start talking about evidence-based teaching (or paedagogics), too. Usha Goswami has a nice article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience about the way that (neuro-)science should be communicated to teachers, who again should implement these ideas in schools. I'm all in for it, although I think we should [...]

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Ageing trajectories and paedagogics

What happens to the brain as we age? Today, we know that the brain as a whole becomes smaller, it atrophies. As the brain develops, we know from studies like the ones performed by Sowell et al. that regions such as the primary sensory and motor areas mature early in the lifespan, while areas such [...]

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Logothetis doesn’t like to be BOLD … alone

Yesterday, Nikos Logothetis gave a great talk at the annual keynote lecture for the Copenhagen University Research Priority Area "Body and Mind". In the lecture, Logothetis touched upon several issues on the workings of the brain – from his perspective. But at the later Master-class where it was possible to have a one-to-one discussion with [...]

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Monday Paper Survey, April 24, 2006

Another Monday, another round of interesting papers from the world of neuroscience.
Today, I only have a few, but all are worth checking out!
In relation to my post yesterday about the evolutionary origins of language I want to direct your attention to another interesting paper forthcoming in Brain and Language. Its topic is pretty well captured [...]

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Genetics and the evolution of language

Let me point you to a nice article, by Simon Fisher and Gary Marcus, in the January issue of Nature Reviews Genetics. Fisher was one of the co-discovers of the link between a verbal dyspraxia disorder in an English family and a point mutation on the FOXP2 gene. Marcus, a former student of Steven Pinker, [...]

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Proof of a visual word form area?

The visual word form area (VWFA) is one of the most contested concepts of modern neuroscience. Its proponents claim that a dedicated slice of cortex in the occipitotemporal region of the brain – probably centered on the fusiform gyrus – underlie the ability to read. The most radical version of this hypothesis states that the [...]

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Stapp replies to Koch

Update. If you haven't already noticed it, yesterday a reader posted a reply by Henry Stapp to Christof Koch's recent Nature article in the comments-section to my post on Koch's paper. I don't know if it is Dr Stapp himself who has graced our blog with a visit, but you should take the time to [...]

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Consciousness article now up

Our forthcoming article in NeuroImage is now available as an in press paper. Here is the info:
An fMRI study of the neural correlates of graded visual perception • ARTICLE
In Press, Corrected Proof, Available online 19 April 2006
Mark S. Christensen, Thomas Z. Ramsøy, Torben E. [...]

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Monday Paper Survey, April 18

I'll follow up on Martin's post last week and add my first MPS here. As you probably know, there is today an abundancy in the number of papers appearing in the media, even though you take one small niche of interest area. My own interest in the medial temporal lobe, especially the perirhinal cortex (see [...]

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Monday Paper Survey, April 10

New feature here on BrainEthics. In the spirit of the great Mind Hacks‘ “Spike Activity” posts, in the future, every Monday we are going to list interesting new papers that we can’t find the time to write more elaborate posts about. So, without further ado, here’s the first batch of papers:
Vaughan Bell is not only [...]

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