Re-localizing Broca

Nature is running a nice news article on the re-localization of Broca’s language area in the brain, and has as feature about it in their latest podcast.
Pierre Paul Broca originally described patient cases in which the patient suffered speech production deficits following injury to the left frontal hemisphere. However, a revisit to Broca’s original papers [...]

Read Full Post »

Levy publishes book on neuroethics

Most of the neuroethics literature is written by neuroscientists, but now Cambridge University Press has published a book on neuroethics by philosopher Neil Levy: Neuroethics. Challenges for the 21st Century. Philosophers are famously opposed to anything coming from the neurosciences so it will interesting to see what Levy has to say! Actually, Levy has [...]

Read Full Post »

Brain reading conference

Back in February, BBC ran a story about fMRI researchers – shock, horror! – now being able to read people’s minds. In actual fact, the story was a bit more benign. Using a fairly new (and little used) type of fMRI analysis called “multivariate analysis” researchers such as Geraint Rees and John-Dylan Haynes are presently [...]

Read Full Post »

Radio interviews in Denmark

And while we’re in the talk of media coverage, I should mention to those who understand Danish that the Danish Broadcast Company, or DR, has a documentary series on their primary radio channels, P1. The series is called “Hjernerejsen” (loosely translated to “The brain travel”) and it covers topics such as emotions and bonding, brain [...]

Read Full Post »

Canadian tv program on brain plasticity

Living in Denmak I had never heard of The Agenda, a tv program broadcasted by Canadian network TV Ontario, undtil Wodek Szemberg, one of the program’s producers, contacted me last week. However, as it turns out, from time to time The Agenda covers topics of interest to those of us interested in neuroscience and [...]

Read Full Post »

Want the job? Pass our OCD scan first, please

Is it possible to identify a psychiatric disorder using a structural brain scan? According to a team of researchers from Europe and Australia this can indeed be the case. In a recently published study in NeuroImage, researchers Carles Soriano-Mas et al. demonstrate that structural brain scans can identify subjects suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) with [...]

Read Full Post »