How the Mind Works book notes

This is perhaps Pinker’s most famous book, and it encompasses a broad range of topics, touching on lots of evolutionary psychology to explain a plethora of cultural phenomena. I enjoyed it, but I thought that the chapters on vision and the last part about music were a tad too long and probably could have been [...]

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Applying single wall carbon nanotubes to the brain

If you aren’t excited about the prospects of nanotechnology, go get excited. Although its potential applications to neuroscience are less discussed, Mazzatenta et al’s study of single-wall carbon nanotubes (SWNT) last year is still interesting.
The researchers were testing to see whether rat hippocampal cells could adhere and grow axons and dendrites of typical sizes on [...]

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The effect of seizures on hippocampal neurogenesis

Some of the factors that are known to affect the extent of neurogenesis in the subgranular zone of the hippocampus are exercise (enhances), exposure to enriched environment (ie, more ways for rats to be active in their cages; enhances), and seizures. Seizures are perhaps the most interesting of the three, because the way that they [...]

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Why is retrodiction so shunned?

That is one of the questions that L.F. Abbott brings up in his recent Neuron opinion paper. He tackles the current dogma that it is only through prediction and testing that one can conduct science,
To apply prediction as the ultimate test of a theory is a distortion of history. Many of the most celebrated moments [...]

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