How neuroscience interfaces with evolutionary psychology

Given that evolutionary psychology and molecular neuroscience are both relatively recent fields and that both study what is going on in our head, there seems to be fairly little interplay between the two subjects. In their review article, Pankseep et al. attempt to rectify this dearth of collaboration.
The authors concede two crucial points that evolutionary [...]

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How magic informs neuroscience

Although neuroscience has been empirically studied for more than a century, there are certain human traditions that have been studied for even longer. Among these are magic and other sleights of the hand.
Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research, a recent article in Nature Reviews Neuroscience, attempts to elucidate a few ways [...]

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A primate choice experiment for category-based inference

There is a wealth of literature describing how dopamine is used in reinforcement learning as a proxy of the value for a particular stimulus in conditioning tasks. These cues are context-dependent, and the plasticity is clearly adaptive. For example, attacking a lone animal may yield a food reward, but if that animal is in a [...]

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The Moral Animal book notes

Robert Wright’s The Moral Animal is considered a “popular” introduction to evolutionary psychology. But contrary to expectations based on most “popular” literature, Wright’s foray is balanced, detailed, and funny. Here are some of my notes:

The naturalistic fallacy is when people attempt to derive basic moral values from natural selection, or any of nature’s workings. Indeed, [...]

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Reliable spike-time coding in theory and practice

Although neurons are known to transmit messages through action potentials, the specific coding mechanism of these action potentials is a tad murky. Since the degree voltage of action potential is not thought to matter (and since it is generally the same), the obligation of encoding a message is falls upon the frequency and timing of [...]

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Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid book notes

Some books excel at presenting information, and some books excel at telling a story, but it is rare to find a book that is able to do both. Douglas Hofstatder’s book is one of those rare cases, and the fact that he was able to do it with such an important topic as intelligence makes [...]

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Linking pre-saccadic to post-saccadic stimuli in the visual field

Saccadic eye motion evolved in early vertebrates as an adaptive mechanism to view more areas of a visual scene with the central fovea, and therefore increase overall resolution. Theoretically, it should come at the cost of making it more difficult to link a sequence of objects together, since these saccades would confuse you as to [...]

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Highly responsive flourescent protein voltage sensor

One of the best ways to track the voltage of an ion channel is to insert a green flouroscent protein. When the voltage in the ion channel changes, the wavelength emitted (color, in nanometers) will also change, making voltage tracking much easier.
With potassium channels, this has been more challenging. The natural interaction of nearby subunits [...]

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An ideal observer model for grating illusions

Weiss, Simoncelli, and Aldeson’s 2002 paper Motion Illusion as Optimal Percepts sets out a useful model to explain a few of the inconsistencies in human vision. First, some background on a couple of these inconsistencies.
The aperture problem results when parallel lines move along a two dimensional slit. You can view an animation of it here. [...]

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Individual over group bias

The claim that individuals believe themselves to be better drivers than average is one of the common pieces of evidence used to show the effect of overconfidence bias. The BPS Research Digest reports that the experimental method of these results may be slightly flawed.
Instead of asking students to compare themselves to the overall group (or [...]

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