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Use of Anti-Inflammatories Associated with Threefold Increase in Homicides
Scene from Elephant, a fictional film by Gus Van SantRegular use of over-the-counter pain relievers like aspirin, ibuprofen, naproxen, and acetaminophen was associated with three times the risk of...
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8 1/2 Reward Prediction Errors: #MovieDirectorNeuroscientistMashup
Fellini/Schultz: 8½ Reward Prediction ErrorsOn Twitter, movie/brain buff My Cousin Amygdala issued the #MovieDirectorNeuroscientistMashup challenge using the following selections:I made a few movie...
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The Future of Depression Treatment
2014Jessica is depressed again. After six straight weeks of overtime, her boss blandly praised her teamwork at the product launch party. And the following week she was passed over for a promotion in...
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Who Will Pay for All the New DBS Implants?
Recently, Science and Nature had news features on big BRAIN funding for the development of deep brain stimulation technologies. The ultimate aim of this research is to treat and correct malfunctioning...
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Can Tetris Reduce Intrusive Memories of a Trauma Film?
For some inexplicable reason, you watched the torture gore horror film Hostel over the weekend. On Monday, you're having trouble concentrating at work. Images of severed limbs and bludgeoned heads keep...
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Scary Brains and the Garden of Earthly Deep Dreams
In case you've been living under a rock the past few weeks, Google's foray into artificial neural networkshas yielded hundreds of thousands of phantasmagoric images. The company has an obvious interest...
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The Idiosyncratic Side of Diagnosis by Brain Scan and Machine Learning
R2D3R2D3 recently had a fantastic Visual Introduction to Machine Learning, using the classification of homes in San Francisco vs. New York as their example. As they explain quite simply: In machine...
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Will machine learning create new diagnostic categories, or just refine the...
How do we classify and diagnose mental disorders?In the coming era of Precision Medicine, we'll all want customized treatments that “take into account individual differences in people’s genes,...
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Cats on Treadmills (and the plasticity of biological motion perception)
Cats on a treadmill. From Treadmill Kittens.It's been an eventful week. The 10th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. The 10th Anniversary of Optogenetics (with commentary from the neuroscience community...
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Mind Reading in the Red Room of "Listening"
"How am I supposed to work knowing that guy is listening to every thought that's going through my head? This is insane..."David Thorogood and Ryan Cates are poor but brilliant Cal Tech grad students in...
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Neurohackers Gone Wild!
Scene from Listening, a new neuro science fiction film by writer-director Khalil Sullins. What are some of the goals of research in human neuroscience?To explain how the mind works.To unravel the...
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Good Brain / Bad Brain
'Wiring diagrams' link lifestyle to brain functionHuman Connectome Project finds surprising correlations between brain architecture and behavioural or demographic influences.The brain’s wiring patterns...
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A few more words about good brains and bad brains
My previous Good Brain / Bad Brain post may have been a little out there, so here are four brief comments.(1) HCP database. The entire Human Connectome Project database (ConnectomeDB) is an amazing...
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On the Long Way Down: The Neurophenomenology of Ketamine
Is ketamine a destructive club drug that damages the brain and bladder? With psychosis-like effects widely used as a model of schizophrenia? Or is ketamine an exciting new antidepressant, the “most...
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Ophidianthropy: The Delusion of Being Transformed into a Snake
Scene from Sssssss (1973).“When Dr. Stoner needs a new research assistant for his herpetological research, he recruits David Blake from the local college. Oh, and he turns him into a snake for sh*ts...
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Buried Alive! The Immersive Experience
Ryan Reynolds in Buried (2010)The pathological fear of being buried alive is called taphophobia.1 This seems like a perfectly rational fear to me, especially if one is claustrophobic and enjoys horror...
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Obesity Is Not Like Being "Addicted to Food"
Credit: Image courtesy of Aalto UniversityIs it possible to be “addicted” to food, much like an addiction to substances (e.g., alcohol, cocaine, opiates) or behaviors (gambling, shopping, Facebook)? An...
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The Neuroscience of Social Media: An Unofficial History
There's a new article in Trends in Cognitive Sciences about how neuroscientists can incorporate social media into their research on the neural correlates of social cognition (Meshi et al., 2015). The...
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Happiness Is a Large Precuneus
What is happiness, and how do we find it? There are 93,290 books on happiness at Amazon.com. Happiness is Life's Most Important Skill, an Advantage and a Project and a Hypothesis that we can Stumble On...
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Carving Up Brain Disorders
Neurology and Psychiatry are two distinct specialties within medicine, both of which treat disorders of the brain. It's completely uncontroversial to say that neurologists treat patients with brain...
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