Art and Neurosciences

People have been kind enough to mention my bioaesthetics primer on various other blogs. On AlphaPsy, a new blog dedicated to cognitive and evolutionary anthropology, a short discussion even broke out, provoked by this comment to my post. (I will post my “defence” of neuroaesthetic here in a couple of days!) Through this discussion I [...]

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Neuroethics conference in Heidelberg, Germany

Heidelberg hosts the first big neuroethics conference on European soil Friday, November 3, and Saturday, November 4. You can see the programme here. It looks very promising. Among the speakers is not only people who have already published several papers on neuroethics – Judy Illes, Turhan Canli, Erik Parens, Adina Roskies, and Paul Root Wolpe, [...]

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Dawkins gets the Colbert treatment!

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The gene genie

When it was announced in Nature in 2001 that the linguistic disorder displayed by members of an English family known as KE could be traced back to a mutation of a certain gene, FOXP2, Steven Pinker heralded this result as “the dawn of cognitive genetics”. While we are still a long way from being able [...]

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Quote of the day — Kristan on decisions

William B. Kristan at UCSD gave a very interesting talk today about decision making in the leech (!), but instead of providing you with a review of this talk, which is a little bit outside my own domain (put mildly), I’ll quote Kristan in a way that kind of captures his presentation style: present and [...]

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More debate on consciousness, evolution, and religion

While Thomas is getting his kicks off at the SfN meeting in Atlanta I am toiling away at a number of long overdue papers here in the increasingly cold Denmark. I have several longer blog posts planned, but no time to write them. So, here’s three things to read in the meantime at other venues [...]

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SfN 2006 (1) – Illes on neuroethics and incidental findings

We are about half way through the Society for Neuroscience 2006 in Atlanta, and it’s time for some general impressions and notes for future reports. Some of the lectures and symposia have been interesting and revealing, others have required too much previous knowledge for me to fully appreciate.
Illes lecture
But let’s start with today’s lectue by [...]

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New feature — read more

We’re adding a new feature on the blog. Very simple, yet helpful for those who are going through our blog’s archive etc. We are adding the “Read more” function which will give you only the introductory paragraphs on the BrainEthics screen. If you press the “Read more” link, you will go to the full story.
-Thomas

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Congrats, Pamuk!

A lot of our fellow science bloggers covered this year’s Nobel Prizes in medicine, physics, and economics. So, let me take the opportunity to congratulate Orhan Pamuk, the recipient of this year’s literary prize. The literary prize is often critized for being controversial, and most people agree that not all the recipients over the years [...]

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Trends in the loop

I need a break! Working on posters, crashing batch jobs and data pipelines, travels etc etc for the SfN is a neck-breaking experience. So is almost every conference for me. So every once in a while, I take a break and peek deep into the secrets of forthcoming articles, or prepublications as they might be [...]

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