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Encephalon #3 is online now!
5 years ago
Thinking Meat has just published a brand new edition of Encephalon, the Encephalon #3.
One of the postings, from the neurophilosopher, is a review of Eric Kandel’s book-cum-autobiography. In the review , the neurophilosopher draws an analogy with Steven Rose’s book Making Memory. I have that book by Rose and had started reading it sometime back, so can appreciate how deftly some people can mix personal memory with the supposedly-dry-academic memory research. If I manage to read Rose’s book sometime soon, expect a review here.
Neurotopia has an article on ALS. I was introduced to ALS as part of reading “Tuesdays with Morrie“. It is interesting to note that microglia play an important part on prognosis and the study helps differentiate between onset and progression.
Talking of diseases, Neurocritic has a post in which about spindle neurons, which seem to be implicated to greater degree in Alzhiemer’s and to a slightly lesser degree in Autism. What is interesting is that they are mostly found in ACC (anterior cingulate cortex) and are exclusive to humans. Thus focus on them, Neurocrtic suggests may be of much better use, then on Mirror Neurons. There are some posts about mirror neurons too as part of the carnival.
There is a post by Developing Intelligence, regarding noise and information theory, which seemed to go over my head in first go. Will have to read the original articles more keenly to make more sense.
Finally, there are other posts like Binaulral beats or how robots can get a Theory of Mind or atleast a ‘shared world’.
And of course, there are articles from this blog – mostly on Color vision.
More cool stuff there. Have a nice read.
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Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the most blogged of them all!
5 years ago
Mirror Neurons seems to be the answer as per the Neurotopia’s post encouraging all bloggers to come together and raise a toast for the mirror neurons (though Neurotopia’s article is more of a critical tone lamenting the fact that mirror neurons get so much attention in the blogosphere) !
Small Grey Matters too has taken the gauntlet and responded to some of the concerns raised by Mixing Memory regarding Mirror neuron research and attention. The defense is mostly on procedural concerns and does not tackle the defense of the more ‘speculative’ research in the filed for eg. related to language evolution.
Frontal Cortex speculates on the importance of mirror neurons in areas as diverse as sports, autism and movies.
It is interesting to observe that the debate on how much focus mirror neurons are getting has come full circle. My first, and I believe the most authoritative , encounter with the reason for focusing on Mirror Neurons was due to this Edge lecture by V S Ramachandran in which he laments the fact that mirror neurons is one of the most underrated discovery of our times (it was 1995 then). This Edge discussion is a must read for anyone interested in the topic.
I will discuss the mirror neurons in some detail in a later post, but what I encourage is that some edition of an online carnival like Encephalon or Synapse be focused on Mirror Neuron related contributions, so that one can clear the aura surrounding the matter for once and for all.
Before I part a few observations.
Neurotopia has a figure of a Brain Scan that shows that pars opercularis is activated differently in controls and autistic people indulging in imitation behavior. It is instructive to note that pars opercularis (along with ACC) has elsewhere been implicated in executive tasks like set-shifting tasks . This set shifting may be involved in going from concrete to abstract sets for a problem or from human to non-human set shift -this set-shifting would occur in normals and would not occur in autistics as autistics treat humans and non-humans alike.
Also, it is instructive to note, that by their very nature, mirror neurons have a strong role to play in empathy and social evolution as well as the observational learning that Albert Bandura proposed.
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Synapse #3 is up at the Nurophilosopher
5 years ago
The third edition of Synapse is up at the Neurophilosopher. It contains a witty article on mosquito songs, some other on Hypnosis and wakeful-yogic states , and some others on topics like the Mozart effect and neuron-Gila synapses. 2 posts from this blog, the mouse trap, are also included. Go ahead and have a good read.
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Encephalon second edition has been published
5 years ago
Pure Pedantry had published the Encephalon 2nd edition last Monday. The link to the second edition is here and I have been fortunate enough to be featured in that carnival. Couldn’t post the link earlier as blogspot was blocked by Indian ISP for the major part of the week. I will be hosting an Encephalon edition sometime in December. Check out this blog later for details.
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