"How impressive you find modern pop Bumpology depends in part on whether you believe that there are a lot of people who still think like that."

"In the same way, even the neuro-skeptics seem to agree that modern Bumpology remains an important corrective to radical anti-Bumpology: to the kind of thinking that insists that brains don’t count at all and cultures construct everything; that, given the right circumstances, there could be a human group with six or seven distinct genders, each with its own sexuality; that there is a possible human society in which very old people would be regarded as attractive and nubile eighteen-year-olds not; and still another where adolescent children would be noted for their rigorous desire to finish recently commenced tasks."

-from "Mindless: The New Neuro-Skeptics" by Adam Gopnik in the September 9th issue of the New Yorker.

Title of the Week!

"Strobing Brain Thunders: Functional Correlation of Extreme Activity Events" by F. Lombardi, D.R. Chialvo, H.J. Herrmann, and L. de Arcangelis, appears in the journal "Chaos, Solitons & Fractals."

Your functional neuroimaging update (with study questions).

1. "Graphs are the new blobs."

Discuss. How are graphs and blobs similar? How are they different?

2.  A leading search engine gives no hits on that phrase:

Do you expect this to remain true for long?

SCIENTISTS REPORT BRAIN CENTER BRAIN CENTER; ANNOUNCE CENTER CENTER CENTER.

NeuroCooking NewsService, Kensington Maryland, 1 April 2013: In an announcement of stunning importance, leading neuroscientists today reported the discovery of the brain center dedicated to subserving belief in dedicated brain centers, and the founding of a research center devoted to study of the newly-discovered brain center for brain centers.

"Those functional neuroimaging reports of dedicated brain centers for things like pinball, banjo music, and knitting? Some people believe that stuff, and some don't," said Dr. Wan Ker of Bigger University, who led the study. "We asked why only some people believe it, and used functional brain imaging to answer the question. We found, in the subicular insula, a region that 'lights up' only in people who believe that stuff, and only when they believe it. So, we have found the brain center that subserves belief in brain centers."

Capitalizing on their findings, Prof. Ker and colleagues also announced the establishment of the Center for the Study of the Center for Centers (a.k.a. the Center Center Center) as well as plans to file for related patents. They have already filed a patent on using fMRI to select people with especially active center centers for journal editorial boards. No word on whether Center Center Center candidates will have their own center centers assessed.


[first reported here on April 1, 2010]

Title of the Week!

The article "The dilemmas of the gourmet fly: the molecular and neuronal mechanisms of feeding and nutrient decision making in Drosophila" appears in the journal "Frontiers in Decision Neuroscience."

Thank you for giving me control of your brain!

Understatement of the Week?

"In setting the nation on a course to map the active human brain, President Obama may have picked a challenge even more daunting than ending the war in Afghanistan or finding common ground with his Republican opponents."

–The opening sentence of the article "Connecting the Neural Dots" by John Markoff in today's New York Times.

Another succinct alternative to another dualism.

If you liked our succinct alternatives to Cartesian dualism, then you might like this sentence – the text of a slide –  from Prof. Luiz Pessoa's compelling presentation at today's stimulating Maryland Neuroimaging Retreat, hosted by the University of Maryland School of Medicine:

"There are no cognitive or emotional brain regions, per se."

In what sense is it true that, had the past been in some way different, an aspect of the present would be more substantial?

Counterfactual history is a literary genre, not a mode of scientific argument, so it was a (pleasant) surprise to come upon the following in a thoughtful and provocative article entitled "Default positions: how neuroscience's historical legacy has hampered investigation of the resting mind" by F. Callard, J. Smallwood, and D.S. Margulies, which appears in Frontiers in Psychology:

"... a compelling body of literature – largely unknown or disregarded ... – ... documents various methods to investigate the processes characterizing activities pursued during so-called “idle time” ... what we now refer to as self-generated mental activity including daydreaming, fantasy, mind-wandering, and dissociation. It is not difficult to see that if these research domains had flourished ... rather than been neglected, our vocabulary for describing self-generated thought would have been richer; our methods to investigate such thought more creative; and hence our capacities to interpret the psychological meaning of different forms of spontaneous neural activity in different systems, including the mental life and associated neural systems of the [Default Mode Network], more substantial."

Title of the week!

"'Doctor' or 'darling'? Decoding the communication partner from ECoG* of the anterior temporal lobe during non-experimental, real-life social interaction" appears in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.

________
*"ECoG" (pronounced "ee-cog" = Electrocorticography or intracranial EEG)

"Finally, SUPEREGO-related neural activity was localized to lateral prefrontal and parietal cortex."

"A Triple Dissociation of Neural Systems Supporting ID, EGO, and SUPEREGO" (because "... Social Neuroscience, Neuroeconomics, and Developmental Social Cognitive Affective Clinical Neuroscience are just not cutting edge enough anymore...") appears in Psyence.

How would you design a brain?

"Oscillatory Synchrony Is Energetically Cheap"

- A section heading from (page 168 of the 2011 paperback edition of) Prof. György Buzsáki's 2006 book "Rhythms of the Brain".

Inhibition is key.

Two sentences* from the third chapter of Prof. György Buzsáki's 2006 book "Rhythms of the Brain":

"In the absence of inhibition, any external input, weak or strong, would generate more or less the same one-way pattern, an avalanche of excitation involving the whole population."

"Without inhibition and dedicated interneurons, excitatory circuits cannot accomplish anything useful."

_____

*from pages 61 & 78, respectively, of the 2011 paperback edition.

Title of the week!

"No Need to Talk, I Know You: Familiarity Influences Early Multisensory Integration in a Songbird's Brain" by Isabelle George, Jean-Pierre Richard, Hugo Cousillas, and Martine Hausberger, appears in Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience.

"Integrated brain activity forms the neural basis for the unity of mind and experience."

Just one sentence (another titles this post) from the first paragraph of the twelfth chapter ("Dynamics: Stability and Diversity") of Prof. Olaf Sporn's book "Networks of the Brain":

"The brain's ability to self-organize and undergo transient state dynamics is crucial for its capability to simultaneously satisfy momentary demands posed by the environment and integrate these exogenous signals with the endogenous activity of brain and body."

A really big head.

Our brain's neurons are connected up in "small world" networks, with many local connections, and relatively few long-range connections that mostly connect "hubs". What if that were not the case? What if every neuron were connected to every other neuron? How big would our head have to be then? Well, “...a rough calculation shows that if cortical neurons were arranged on the surface of a sphere and fully connected by connections 0.1 μm in diameter, the sphere would have to be 20 km in diameter.”

stranger in your bed

"Your synapses are consistently adjusting to take in your experiences over time: the brain you went to bed with is not the brain with which you woke up."

Carl Schoonover, at the New York Academy of Sciences, talking about his new book, Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century