Now at http://neuromancy.southerfriedscience.com
January 14, 2011
I’ve moved house! I’ve just seen that I’ve been officially launched over at the Southern Fried Science blogging network. So ladies and gentlemen, update your bookmarks and adjust your RSS readers. I can now be found at http://neuromancy.southernfriedscience.com
I’ve locked comments on all the articles here, but everything’s been transferred over to SFS, comments and all, so you can carry on any discussions over there.
Go forth and comment!
Craig
October 29, 2010
I can now blog from my phone! Hopefully this will mean more posts as I have the odd thought, probably of the short and badly spelled variety.
October 24, 2010
A collection of links for your consideration:
Cat cognition! Anne Corwin at Existence is Wonderful tests the mental abilities of her cats, with full experimental method and videos!
I’ve had a drafted post on what optical illusions teach us about how our vision works knocking around for some time now, but in the meantime I encourage UK readers to go watch the recent episode of Horizon on what we think we see isn’t necessarily what is there, and how our traditional senses could be augmented and expanded (summary on MindHacks). It’s on BBC iPlayer, so it will disappear soon, but it’s probably available on your local popular video hosting website.
A little bit of inspirational blogging: Not Exactly Rocket Science shares the influences and experiences of 130 (and counting) science writers, including Ivan Oransky of EmbargoWatch, neuro-writers Carl Zimmer, Jonah Lehrer, physicists, archeologists, climatologists, biologists from molecular to behavioural, and everything in between.
Speaking of Carl Zimmer, he has a new e-book out – Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind. Vaughan Bell provides a review at Mind Hacks.
Speaking of e-books and Mind Hacks (these links don’t write themselves you know) Tom Stafford has a new e-book – The Narrative Escape, which is, in the author’s words “a long essay about morality, psychology and stories.” Also in Italian, and coming soon in Portuguese!
I promise this isn’t the start of a foray into political blogging. FiveThirtyEight.com debunks the concept of poll momentum.
Although previous research has suggested that caffeine consumption doesn’t improve alertness in habitual users, two recent studies found evidence that a cup of joe improves vigilance and control of visual attention in regular drinkers, and that it enhances working memory in extroverts. Abstracts are available, but articles are behind a paywall.
October 23, 2010 2 Comments
OK, so I’m probably not going to keep up with my promise. It’s a busy old time at the moment, lots going on. Trying to fit real life stuff around finishing off my thesis (which requires more finishing that I would have liked) and trying to find a job! It’s probably a little unreasonable of me to expect a department who has no knowledge of me to take me on as a research assistant/associate when I haven’t submitted my thesis, and even more of a stretch when I’m applying for places which would prefer a slightly different skill set (making cultures of neurons then doing in vitro electrophys), but I’m enthusiastic, more than willing to learn, and above all optomistic. I’ve applied for a few lab technician jobs too, which, if I get them, would provide some valuable experience in a slightly broader range of techniques. Plus, they pay the bills.
For some reason, I seem to be on my way to being a statistics geek. Maybe I’m just not happy with being a regular science geek… I’m trying to learn the R language to do some of my thesis analysis, and I’ve applied for some data entry/analyst jobs. I’m also on the Civil Service Fast Stream scheme for Assistant Statistican! Erk, it’s all a little bit scary. I’m down in London on the 11th of November for an assessment day, don’t really know what to expect.
So that’s it. Now that I’ve said I won’t be around, I’ll probably end up being around more than when I said I was going to try and make the effort to blog more…
Bye for now!
October 6, 2010
So, I’ve been away for some time. About a month now. It’s all been a bit busy recently; I’ve come to the end of the third year of my PhD, which is the end of the experimental phase, and now pretty much all I have to do is analyse my data and write it up. Unfortunately, my third year was also my last, so I’ve got to do it in my spare time. Admittedly, I have lots of spare time seeing as I haven’t found myself a job yet, but it means I don’t really feel like I can spend time blogging when I’ve got other things that I should be doing. However, this attitude is one that has always killed my productivity. Even when I’m doing absolutely nothing – not work, not blogging, not reading, not playing games, not relaxing, nothing – if I have work to do, I feel like I should be doing it and I find it really hard to move on.
Seeing as I was spending the evening waiting for people twitter to mention something other than the Apprentice, I thought I’d blog instead. Firstly, I’m sorry it’s been a little while. You might not care, I don’t think I have some dedicated fanbase hanging on my every word, but I know it’s disappointing when a blogger stops posting without a word. Second, I’m going to promise to try and write /something/ every fortnight or so, even if it’s just more small posts. Finally, here are some links I’ve been storing for a Sunday links post. Enjoy.
SciCurious reviews the new book by Mary Roach (author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers, and Bonk: The Curious Coupling of Science and Sex): Packing for Mars, about life in space.
Scientopia is a science blogging network which grew out of the ScienceBlogs diaspora.
Science, how the hell does that work? Code for Life presents a video relating three different views.
Times Higher Education ponders whether science journalism has had it’s day, and what it could do to change.
What other monoliths do people think are broken? Science 2.0 asks “Can Wikipedia be fixed?”
I love cephalopod videos, and I love neuroscience videos. Cephalove unites the two with a link to the first of a series of videos of researchers including J. Z. Young and A. L. Hodgkin preparing a squid giant axon for electrophysiological study and demonstrating experimental techniques.
September 5, 2010
A post at NeuroLogica Blog describes recent research that suggests that while mental activity may delay the onset of dementia, it progress is more rapid once it starts.
When do normal personality traits become a problem?Mind Hacks reports on a study in the British Journal of Psychiatry which reported that only 23% percent of the UK population has no symptoms of personality disorder.
On a related note, after it was reported that the trapped Chilean miners are being sent anti-depressants, Frontier Psychiatrist asks “what is the normal state of mind for a miner?”.
Talkin’ Brains. Moheb Costandi (@mocost) talks about neuroscience communication at the Dana Foundation website.
This is your brain. This is your brain on drugs. This is your brain multi-tasking in a digital world. This is the New York Times extrapolating from animal research and drawing connections with unrelated research to scare readers about multi-tasking in a digital world. BE AFRAID. Or not…
Developmental Biologist PZ Myers criticises the claims of futurist and transhumanist Ray Kurzweil that we will be able to reverse engineer the brain in 20 years, arguing Kurzweil “does not understand the brain”. Kurzweil responded, but Myers stands by his arguments.
And a quartet of interesting posts I’ve found recently from Research Blogging.org:
When to blame your parents and for what – Wiring the Brain talks about research which attempts to disentangle the developmental effects of nature and nuture.
Schizophrenia and genes – The fantastic Neuroskeptic looks at a study of schizophrenia in children raised by adoptive parents in Sweden.
Octopus connectomics – My newest discovery, a sealife/neuroscience blog called Cephalove, talks about mapping the circuitry of the octopus brain.
Explaining temporal resolution in vision with water works – Alex Holcombe at ceptional provides a clear summary of how we perceive time.
August 22, 2010 4 Comments
Apparently it was SharkWeek on the Discovery channel recently. C6H12O6 has a guest spot about the biology of sharks, which is quite frankly amazing. If you can find Channel 4′s Inside Nature’s Giants, I recommend you watch the shark episode of that too (as well as all the others). For starters, a sharks’ jaw bones evolved from their ribs, and they lunge forward when they bite. The footage of the goblin shark has to be seen to be believed.
Zombies+science=WIN. In so much as you can apply science to animated corpses, Cracked.com details 7 reasons why a zombie outbreak would quickly fail. (Specific zombie franchise not specified)
Colin Schultz at CMBR provides tips for young science journalists. Ideally, I guess it should be tips for all science journalists, but they tend to be quite stuck in their ways. It includes such unfortunately necessary science journalistic tips as “don’t just accept what your told, be a journalist”.
On a related note SEEDMagazine asks how do you avoid scientific miscommunication?
Following on from my discovery of the concept of open lab books, a 15 minute video explaining what they’re all about.
What is the social impact of science? A post at Sciencebase about a paper on how it has changed over history. The paper itself is unfortunately behind a paywall.
Can dogs and humans communicate? Thoughtful Animal reviews a recent paper from the journal Animal Behaviour. Unfortunately also behind a paywall.
And finally, something light to finish on (!). Sam at Skepchick reviews The Nature of Existence, a documentary by Roger Nygard exploring people’s ideas about why we’re here and what we should be doing while we are “at an enjoyable lay level”. There’s a trailer to watch too.
August 9, 2010 5 Comments
I’ve got lots of one-off referrals from unrelated junk blogs, advertising sites and sites that just seem to trawl the web for new posts. Is there any way to filter some/all of them from by blog stats, or stop them registering as referrals? I want to see where my traffic is actually coming from.
July 31, 2010 1 Comment
An early morning Sunday Links. Enjoy!
A fantastic introduction to clinical trials at NHS Choice – what they are and why they’re important. Patients and researchers can only both benefit when they understand each other.
Loathe to pass on an opportunity to get people excited and amazed at optogenetics (check out my previous post on the subject), Neurophilosophy provides a quick summary of the field, as well as research into fear using the technique.
The ‘Cognitive Revolution‘ was a reaction to the strict behaviourism popular at the time and led to the rapid growth of cognitive psychology, and influenced approaches in the newer fields of AI and neuroscience. Cognition and Culture asks “what if the cognitive revolution never happened?” Apparently the answer is “not much would be different”…
Nature blog The Great Beyond reports on a study finding that some forms of ‘brain training’ may provide a small benefit for tasks other than those involved in the training. The study was published in PLoS ONE, so it’s freely available. Go take a look.
Two articles on mental health in the movies: Frontier Psychiatrist discusses common movie mental health patient/worker tropes, and David Cox at the guardian wonders why Hollywood’s depiction of mental illness is still “stuck in the dark ages“.
Watching ‘Lie to Me‘, the TV show in which Tim Roth’s character has an almost supernatural ability to interpret body language as evidence of perfidiousness, makes you worse at detecting lies.
William Shatner. 1970s drama. Milgram’s electric shock experiment. What’s not to love? Article and link to video on MindHacks.
And finally, 7th graders’ (11-12 years old?) drawings and descriptions of scientisits before and after a visit to Fermilab. It’s like Kids Say The Darndest Things, only if Bill Cosby was really keen to know how they felt about grad students.
July 6, 2010
Another belated links digest. I was going to save it, but it’s been a long day on the literature review with nothing concrete to show for it.
Female psych-bloggers, a call to arms! Do you have two X chromosomes and an interest in the human condition? Make yourself known in the comments on the post at Mind Hacks, get a bit of traffic, and get to know your peers.
The piece that inspired the Mind Hacks post above, the BPS interviews the blogs behind the bloggers.
Ben Goldacre at Bad Science comments on a worrying piece of research from the Journal of Applied Social Psychology that has discovered that not only does being presented with evidence that contradicts your prior mean you are more likely to dismiss the science behind the evidence, but that it also makes you more inclined to dismiss the ability of science to answer other, unrelated questions.
Our place in a small branch of the tree of life, namely our order – primates. Above order is our class, mammalia, and then our phylum – Chordata. We’re in a phylum which includes everything with a backbone. As a proportion of all animal species, Chordata are the little olive slice on this pie chart. That whole pie is the “Metazoa” branch on this tree of life. Makes you feel special, doesn’t it?
Mark Changizi on The ingredients of a good popular science book.
Traditional bastion of fuzzy thinking the Huffington Post has a pleasantly surprising article on why the left brain/right brain idea is wrong.
A little comment about statistics in research at Applied Statistics. I’d like to learn more about statistics, and be properly rigorous, but getting into it seems to equal becoming a full-blown statistician at the cost of bench science. Maybe that’s not looking sufficiently at the big picture…
The “half your age plus 7 years” relationship ‘rule’, now in graph form!
And finally, The Amygdaloids a band formed by a group of NYU brain researchers. I already have a Death in Vegas album because they have a saggital section on the liner notes, brain themed songs might be a bit much…
