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‘Tis the Season for Giving!
It’s that time of year again, where malls and websites (and hopefully some local businesses, too!) are overrun with holiday shoppers hoping to score the perfect gift to give a loved one. But why are we so obsessed with finding that perfect present? Recent research by Tristen Inagaki, a fourth year graduate student in the…
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Decision Making: Biology, Free-Will and Accountability
The concept of decision making, has been a central focus of intellectual pursuit since the dawn of man. Previously a philosophical and theological discussion, in recent years this task has been taken up by neuroscientists and biological psychologists. This blog entry will consist of two sections. The first is a brief overview of some of…
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fMRI: “The Wonder Machine”? Common Questions and Misconceptions about fMRI Research
I am a big fan of the guys on the Stuff You Should Know podcast. In case you don’t know them, they give 30-45 minute talks on all sorts of interesting topics, from historical, to scientific, to current events. In quite a few of these podcasts they have brought up research that used fMRI (functional…
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“…the difference between significant and not significant is not itself necessarily significant.”
The quote above comes from a perspective published in Nature Neuroscience this past summer by Nieuwenhuis and colleagues. They detail a surprisingly common mistake in the statistical analyses carried out by some studies published in prominent journals. It might be easier to first illustrate the mistake with an example. Let’s say I give a control…
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Emotional Control: Strategies we use for regulating our emotions
Emotions are a central component of the human experience. They facilitate social interactions, allow us to both appreciate and create powerful works in arts and literature, and guide us in achieving personal goals. These are only a few of the myriad ways that demonstrate the important role emotions play in our lives. In a letter…
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Conventional wisdom upset? Persistent action potential firing in distal axons
Here’s some really interesting information that may change our traditional views about information flow in the nervous system. Neuroscience students learn early on about the mechanics of nerve impulses. It’s important because it’s how neurons, the cells of the nervous system, convey information to each other. Feel free to start reading after the figure to…
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I got chills, they’re multiplying
Many of us have experienced chills when listening to music, those weird, almost indescribable sensations sometimes likened to shivers down the spine. If you’re very meta, the line serving as this post’s title might even do it for you (but probably not—chills don’t tend to occur until later on in a song). Despite our inability…
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Is ADHD a real disorder?
Despite overwhelming scientific evidence that approximately 5 percent of children have a specific deficit in attention compared to children of their same age and sex, many people still question whether ADHD (and some still call it it’s former name: ADD) is a real disorder. A recent article in the New York Times takes on this…
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People, places, and things – How important are drug-related triggers for addiction relapse?
In cognitive behavioral therapy they’re a big part of the “Five W’s” = When, Where, Why, With, and What. In the various 12-step programs they’re simply referred to as “People, places, and things.” But no matter how you refer to them, drug-associated cues, or “triggers” as they are more commonly known, obviously play a big…