neurodudes

This study shows that if you give someone auditory instructions to use their mouse to click on a “candle”, and there are two pictures on a computer screen, candle and candy, then the subject’s mouse pointer describes a smooth, curved trajectory with the curvature indicating competition between the two choices. This argues that competition and parallelism go all the way through the cognitive system; as opposed to a model in which there are discrete stages of processing, in which the conflict would be resolved at an earlier stage of processing without impacting the mouse trajectory.

An author argues that this support continuous, dynamical systems models.

Press release

Michael J. Spivey, Marc Grosjean, and Günther Knoblich. Continuous attraction toward phonological competitors.. PNAS published June 28, 2005, 10.1073/pnas.0503903102

For the latest news and information on traumatic brain injury check out www.braininjury.blog.com hosted by Michael Kaplen, Esq., President of the Brain Injury Association of New York State and a leading advocate for the brain injured. He is a a member of the New York State Traumatic Brain Injury Services Coordinating Council and the past chair of the Association of Trial Lawyers of America Traumatic Brain Injury Litigation Group.

An area of the hippocampal formation (dMEC, dorsocaudal medial entorhinal cortex) contains neurons which fire when the animal is in a particular location (like hippocampal place cells), but which have a strikingly regular mapping from neurons to locations (that is, the “place field” to which each cell responds is very regular and geometric).

Torkel Hafting, Marianne Fyhn, Sturla Molden, May-Britt Moser and Edvard I. Moser. Microstructure of a spatial map in the entorhinal cortex. Nature, doi: 10.1038/nature03721.

Check out figure 1 from the paper, particularly the two rightmost columns in section (b):

The caption for parts (a) and (b) of this figure is: “a, Sagittal Nissl-stained section indicating the recording location (red dot) in layer II of the dMEC. Red line indicates border to postrhinal cortex. b, Firing fields of three simultaneously recorded cells at the dot in a during 30 min of running in a large circular enclosure. Cell names refer to tetrode (t) and cell (c). Left, trajectory of the rat (black) with superimposed spike locations (red). Middle, colour-coded rate map with the peak rate indicated. Red is maximum, dark blue is zero. Right, spatial autocorrelation for each rate map (see Supplementary Methods). The colour scale is from blue (r = -1) through green (r = 0) to red (r = 1). ”

The doctor pulled out the four main nerves that used to connect to the patient’s damaged arm and put them beneath the skin in his chest. The prosthetic has a device that presses on the chest to communicate information from the prosthetic.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0506230208jun23,1,7950510.story

This article, by the famous economist authors of the well-received book Freakonomics, talks about Keith Chen which seems to show that monkeys behave a lot like people if trained to use currency:

http://nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05FREAK.html

Way off topic, but too cool not to post. New Scientist article on “13 areas in which observations do not line up with current theory”

An interesting article in J Neurosci from Eve Marder’s group on the variability of a neural system (in this case, lobster stomatogastric ganglion) between individuals. In the STG, they found no difference between adults and juvenile. (In lobsters, the adult is about 10X the size of the juvenile.) Also, between different adults, the waveforms displayed variability in frequency and bursts per peak but the phase relationships between specific neurons was the same.

To me, this work seems very exciting as I am not aware of much literature on saying *what* biological/neurophysiological phenomena are important in determining behavior (eg. individual spikes, synchronicity, Ca, dendritic effects, etc.) Of course, I don’t really know this literature in great depth…

Read on for the abstract.
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http://www.citeulike.org is a free service that lets you bookmark papers online as you browse them, categorize them with keywords, share your lists with others, and export lists of citations into other formats such as BibTeX.
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Seems like applied neuroscience has reached another milestone: A company called BrightHouse in Atlanta is already selling neuroimaging-based consulting services for marketing and has apparently been doing so since 2001. Of course, as is often the case with fMRI and other imaging studies, the proof is in the interpretation and it’s debatable how much insight a company can gain from seeing some prefrontal activation with their products.

Here’s a recent New Scientist article on this new area:
They know what you want
New Scientist vol 183 issue 2458 - 31 July 2004, page 36
If neuromarketers can find the key to our consumer desires, will they
be able to manipulate what we buy, asks Emily Singer
http://archive.newscientist.com/secure/article/article.jsp?rp=1&id=mg18324585.700

WHY DO people who prefer the taste of Pepsi faithfully buy Coke? Will
the Catwoman movie trailer make you want to see the film? And are women
subconsciously drawn to the sight of a bikini-clad model hawking beer
on television?
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This software displays related articles from PubMed as a network.

http://www.touchgraph.com/TGPubMedBrowser.html

Another PubMed tool is HubMed