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