The Human Brain: Still A Mystery

Some say the ocean depths are the "last frontier;" some say outer space is, and still others contend the last frontier will actually be the human brain itself. Another article lending some support to that notion:


http://tinyurl.com/yf4bwnj

Anti-depressants: Still Controversial

Anti-depressants: neurochemically effective or just placebos? after all these years, controversy continues:


http://www.newsweek.com/id/232781

Music and Neuro-expectations

"Music has a grammar, which, like language, consists of rules that specify which notes can follow which other notes in a piece of music. According to Pearce: "the question is whether the rules are hard-wired into the auditory system or learned through experience of listening to music and recording, unconsciously, which notes tend to follow others."




Read the rest of the piece from ScienceDaily on the brain's processing of music and expectations here:


http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100115204704.htm

Geometric Patterns in the Mind

Math and hallucinations of the psychedelic sort:


http://plus.maths.org/issue53/features/hallucinations/index.html

Recursion...

In the following sentence, the number of occurrences of 0 is 1, of 1 is 7, of 2 is 4, of 3 is 1, of 4 is 1, of 5 is 1,of 6 is 1, of 7 is 1, of 8 is 2, and of 9 is 1.

In the prior sentence, the number of occurrences of 0 is 1, of 1 is 8, of 2 is 2, of 3 is 1, of 4 is 2, of 5 is 1,of 6 is 1, of 7 is 2, of 8 is 1, and of 9 is 1.

Music - Speech Linked

Research finding underlying link between human speech and music reported here:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/12/091202205627.htm

The Science of Reading

Jonah Lehrer reviews Stanislas Dehaene's fascinating new book "Reading In the Brain," on how the human brain pulls off the amazing (yet routine) practice of rapidly and systematically acquiring meaning from squiggles on pages.

New Ideas On Consciousness

Consciousness and the brain, from John Brockman's "Edge" site:

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/dehaene09/dehaene09_index.html#dk

Neuroscience Breakthrough

In a major brain chemistry finding, Nature reports that the glutamate receptor in the brain has now been characterized:

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/091129/full/news.2009.1114.html?s=news_rss

Neuronal Wiring

Friday video:

The human brain -- machine... or miracle:

Blindness and Hallucinations

Do blind people experience visual hallucinations on LSD:

http://www.mindhacks.com/blog/2009/11/do_blind_people_hall.html

Insect Brains

Pinhead-sized brains still allow for complexity:

http://news.discovery.com/animals/tiny-insect-brains-intelligence.html

Be Careful What You Wish For

 'Brain diseases' that someone says he wishes he had!:

http://www.autoadviceoffl.com/Braindisease.htm

Musical Minds

PBS's "Nova" and neurologist/writer Oliver Sacks explore music and the human brain here:


http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/musicminds/

Elucidating Glial Cells

Jonah Lehrer interviews neuroscientist Andrew Koob, author of "The Root of Thought," HERE on the subject of the brain's glial cells, which make up 90% of the brain's cells, yet were long ignored, or relegated to a mere supportive role, by scientists more fixated on neurons.

Better Visions Through Chemistry?

Clifford Pickover on brain chemistry and transcendence here:

http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/Pickover/pc/dmt.html

Jill Bolte Taylor Redux

For a Friday video, a Charlie Rose interview with neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, author of "My Stroke of Insight" :

http://charlierose.http.internapcdn.net/charlierose/090409taylor.wmv

The interview covers very much the same ground that was part of the inspirational 2008 TED talk Taylor gave that went viral on the Net. For anyone left on the planet who hasn't seen it, it's here:

http://tinyurl.com/3l9h9y

Taylor's homepage is HERE.

I Don't Believe It

A Swiss neuroscientist says we may be able to "replicate" the human brain within 10 years, calling it "technically and biologically possible." Others in the field have made similar predictions, and I'm sure they're a whole lot smarter than I am, but I'll still flat out say I don't believe any sort of thorough human brain replication is on the horizon in the next century; mimicking certain isolated functions of course may be accomplished, but not true replication of overall in-depth, inter-connected neural operation (just as we don't 'fly like birds' yet even though we've developed some mechanical forms of flight):

http://blogs.discovery.com/news_animal/2009/09/human-brain-could-be-replicated-in-10-years.html

Hopefully, I'll still be around in 10 years to see if he's wrong, but neither of us will be around in 100 years to see if I'm right.

Ants and Neurons

Organization, intelligence, decision-making... what ant colonies may have to tell us about the workings of the human brain:

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/ants_and_neurons/

The Brain and the Internet

Is the internet warping our brains? Evolution of a new human brain in the works?? One man's thoughts here:

http://www.livescience.com/culture/090224-internet-brain.html