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Neuralink in a Dozen Pigs
In a far-ranging chat with Kara Swisher, Elon Musk talked about sustainable energy, brain implants, the stupidity of the press, and more. He gave a casual update on the “Three Little Pigs” demo of...
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COVID-19, Predictive Coding, and Terror Management
Pandemics have a way of bringing death into sharper focus in our everyday lives. As of this writing, 1,188,259 people around the world have died from COVID-19, including 234,218 in the United States....
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The Neurohumanities: a new interdisciplinary paradigm or just another neuroword?
The latest issue of Neuron has published five thematic “NeuroView” papers proposing that neuroscience can augment our understanding of classically brain-free fields like art, literature, and theology....
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How the Brain Works
Every now and then, it's refreshing to remember how little we know about “how the brain works.” I put that phrase in quotes because the search for the Holy Grail of [spike trains, network generative...
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Thoughts of Blue Brains and GABA Interneurons
An unsuccessful planto create a computer simulation of a human brain within 10 years. An exhaustive catalog of cell types comprising a specific class of inhibitory neurons within mouse visual cortex....
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Overview of 'The Spike': an epic journey through failure, darkness, meaning,...
from Princeton University Press (March 9, 2021)THE SPIKE is a marvelously unique popular neuroscience book by Professor Mark Humphries, Chair of Computational Neuroscience at the University of...
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Overinterpreting Computational Models of Decision-Making
Bell (1985)Can a set of equations predict and quantify complex emotions resulting from financial decisions made in an uncertain environment? An influential paper by David E. Bell considered the...
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Hoarders and Collectors
Andy Warhol's collection of dental models Pop artist Andy Warhol excelled in turning the everyday and the mundane into art. During the last 13 years of his life, Warhol put thousands of collected...
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Did dreams evolve to transcend overfitting?
A fascinating new paper proposes that dreams evolved to help the brain generalize, which improves its performance on day to day tasks. Incorporating a concept from deep learning, Erik Hoel...
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The rs-FC fMRI Law of Attraction (i.e., Resting-State Functional...
Feeling starved for affection after 15 months of pandemic-mandated social distancing? Ready to look for a suitable romantic partner by attending an in-person speed dating event? Just recline inside...
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Why would nasally-transferred coronavirus only affect the left side of the...
WE GET QUESTIONS!Q– “I survived a mild case of COVID. Should I be worried about the volume of gray matter in olfactory-related structures in the left hemisphere of my brain?”A– Most of what you've read...
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Reading Aloud without a Mask, Olfactory Bulbs, Omega Variant
Here's the latest alarming COVID news to distract you from fires and hurricanes. {I'm very sorry if you are experiencing either of these disasters personally. Donations ideas: El Dorado Community...
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A Curious Case of Auditory-Gustatory Synesthesia... in someone who can't smell
A fascinating case study from 1907 describes the self-reported sensory “taste” experiences evoked by hearing specific words, names, or sounds (Pierce, 1907). The subject was a young woman about to...
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Xylological Delusions of Being a Tree
The mythology surrounding reverse inter-metamorphosis, a delusional syndrome that involves transformation into a beast, has frightened and fascinated for hundreds of years. A special instance of...
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Is Precision Psychiatry Realistic?
Fig. 1 (Fernandes et al., 2017). Domains related to ‘precision psychiatry’.“The right drug for the right patient” was a catch phrase in the early years of the personalized medicine movement (2000),...
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Your Own Personal DBS
The second calendar year of COVID surges to a close, and hospital personnel continue their frenetic pace of caring for the infected (most of whom are defiantly unvaccinated). For the rest of us,...
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Vortioxetine for Post-COVID Brain Fog
If you're relatively young and healthy, is a mild case of COVID-19 really “mild”, like a cold or the flu? Are you still at risk for long COVID— a persistent state of fatigue, anxiety, insomnia,...
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The Ongoing Debate about Hippocampal Neurogenesis in Adult Humans is over.
modified from Franjic et al. (2022). Cross-species comparison shows transcriptomic signatures of neurogenesis in the hippocampus of adult mouse, pig, and monkey — but not human.Does the adult brain...
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Machine Yearning - Sad Robots and Prolonged Grief
Crying Robot, by Mr.A What is 'machine yearning'?Intense longing exhibited by cartoon robots? Or a clever pun that describes a network analysis of prolonged grief symptoms? (Malgaroli et al., 2022). My...
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Nostalgia and Its Analgesia
“Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy. Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. A cinematic image of nostalgia is a...
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