The politics of our emotions

Today’s Science carries a review of what appears to be an interesting book. (I haven’t read it myself, so I am relying on the reviewer here.) The book is Campaigning for Hearts and Minds by Ted Brader, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan. It deals with political advertisements, and how they work to [...]

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Neuroethics Society

The other day we got an invitation from Martha Farah to join the soon-to-be launched Neuroethics Society. Of course we’re going to join! Here is part of the email:
Why do we think it is worth forming a society at this time? As you know, people interested in neuroethics have been interacting through the occasional meeting [...]

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Dual use

The good people at the Dana Press have been kind enough to send us an advance copy of Jonathan Moreno’s forthcoming book, Mind Wars. Since it is first scheduled for publication in November (in the US; December in Europe) I will wait a few months before recording my thoughts about it here on the blog, [...]

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The punishing race

Our willingness to engage in punitive acts is a key part of our society. So claims a recent article in Science. Through the experiments of Milgram, Asch, Zimbardo, and Sherif psychologists have studied humans' engagement in costly social relationships with non-kin. With many of these experiments being done in students only, it has been hard [...]

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Nature Neuroethics

It’s a long shot, I know. We’ll never see a Nature Neuroethics or a Trends in Neuroethics. But this week’s issue of Nature caught me surprised with the release of two articles on ethical aspects of neuroscience. It really demonstrates how hot and important this issue is.
Basically, both articles are on the application of brain [...]

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See my brand new car

After being long underway, the study by Schaefer et al on how we perceive familiar car brands is finally out, in NeuroImage. Basically, they showed different car brands to subjects; some brands were culturally well-known to the (European) subjects, while other brands were less/not known. Known brands included BMW and Mercedes-Benz, unknown brands included Buick [...]

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Evo-psychiaty

The last issue of the journal Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological Psychiatry has a very interesting special issue on how evolutionary theory and psychology can be integrated into psychiatric theory about mental disease. It’s also called “evolutionary psychiatry“.
OK, you might ask; we can accept that evolutionary theory can explain why we behave as we do [...]

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Genes, brain, and cognition: Special issue of Cognition

Genetics is increasingly making itself felt in the word of neuroscience. Labs all over the world are trying to understand the role played the the genome in the development of the brain, and impressive results are published each month highlighting how genes are expressed in the working brain, influencing learning and behaviour.
The holy grail of [...]

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Monday Paper Survey, June 12

I missed the paper survey last week, but this week we are back in full effect (albeit a day late!).
English,German and Japanese language researchers led by Cathy Price demonstrates in a fMRI study published in Friday's Science that the left caudate nucleus plays an important role in monitoring and controlling which language is used by [...]

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A Roman Catholic take

Volume 13, issue 5 of the Journal of Clinical Neuroscience contains – in my opinion – a very strange article. It's called "Ethics in medical technologies: The Roman Catholic viewpoint" and is written by Joseph Życiński. I found a wiki-like version of the paper here. The article is not strange because of its topic per [...]

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