The Neuro Week 19th June

Here's The Neuro Week.

Image of the week is this adorable, if anatomically not quite accurate, model of the brain which you can buy. It even has little eyes! This is not new, but what did come out this week was Google's image recognition search, which is how I found out about it.

You've probably heard of Bipolar 1 and 2, but 4 and 6? They're the next big thing, says a guy who's published no fewer than 155 papers in a journal he edits, as The Neurocritic reports.

What if autism Isn't a Neurodevelopmental Disorder? but rather a disorder caused by ongoing neurobiological processes in later life?

According to the BBC, children tend to be similar to their parents, presumably due to shared genes and/or environments. OK, they said that parents influence teenage drinking habits, but this is all the study showed. And maybe not even that. Not a great piece of journalism.

Two books about ethics are reviewed: Patricia Churchland's Braintrust is reviewed here while Blind Spots is covered here. I'm currently working on a joint review of both books so I won't comment further at this stage.

European neuroscientists including David Nutt warned this week that mental health research faces funding cuts, as pharmaceutical companies pull out of the psych market. It's certainly true that Pharma currently funds much of this research, however whether this has helped or hindered the progress of neuroscience and psychiatry is debatable.

"For the first time researchers have monitored the brain as it slips into unconsciousness", apparantly. Actually, people have been doing that for over 60 years, but this time around they did use an interesting new neuroimaging method.

Psych Your Mind blog has a list of psychology-based songs. Kind of. But it doesn't include any songs from the classic "The Mind's I", the only melodic death metal album named after a book about the nature of conciousness. Well, so far the only one. Rumours that In Flames are working on "Consciousness lost and found: A neuropsychological exploration" remain unconfirmed.

I can't read everything. So any tipoffs will be gratefully received. Either leave them in a comment or drop me an email.

The Neuro Week 12th June

Image of the week is this rather striking picture showing that slime moulds love to digest herbal sleeping tablets. This makes sense, because slime moulds are well known to experience severe insomnia. Because they're moulds, and moulds don't sleep.

Story of the week is that evolutionary biologist and writer Steven J. Gould relied on dodgy statistics in his classic book about race, science and intelligence, The Mismeasure of Man. That's according to a new paper, and there are excellent blog discussions here and here. Gould's to my mind the greatest science writer of all time. But you can write well without always being right.

Many neuroscience and psychology studies could be flawed because the "healthy controls" are just too healthy. This is a serious issue which doesn't get discussed enough.

Did dinosaurs sleep during the day, or the night? Until we get a working time machine, we'll never know for sure, but by examining the shapes of the eyes of different species, a new study has shed light on this question.

Studying psychology at university is not a good idea if you want to get a high salary, according to an upcoming paper.

An interesting legal case from the U.S: judge overturns federal law to impose less than the minimum sentence in a child pornography case. According to Forensic Psychologist blog, the ruling contains discussions of everything from neuroimaging to the arguments over DSM-V.

Psych Your Mind blogger posts his 'favourite' anonymous peer review judgements, along with the suggestion that psychology reviewers seem to be especially vicious compared to those in other fields.

British doctors, charities, and politicians all agreed that antipsychotic drugs are being over-used in dementia this week. Which is something, because they don't agree about anything else right now. I previously blogged about how an earthquake in Italy caused a spike in local elderly people getting these drugs.

The LA Times has an excellent piece on the attempts to build prosthetic limbs with a sense of touch. We've already got artificial retinas, but an artificial sense of touch is even harder, because it requires implanting electrodes directly into the brain.

Mind Hacks discusses a major study into Alzheimer's disease, conducted with the help of a Columbian family with a hereditary form of the disorder.

I can't read everything. So any tipoffs will be gratefully received. Either leave them in a comment or drop me an email.

The Neuro Week 5th June 2011

A couple of months back Mind Hacks stopped doing their weekly "Spike Activity" round-up of neuroscience and psychology news. That's a pity because it was really handy. So I've decided to step in and fill the gap.

So...


Image of the week is this, which looks like some kind of delicious glazed doughnut covered in sprinkles. Mmm. It's actually a disk on which mouse hippocampal neurons are growing thanks to some clever work at Pittsburgh.

The big story this week is that Science asked for the retraction of the famous 2009 paper implicating a virus, XMRV, in chronic fatigue syndrome. The authors are holding fast, for now, but there's growing evidence that the results may have been caused by contaminated lab products. Mind Hacks has a good overview and there's a detailed discussion going on at VirologyBlog.

Acupuncture has minimal benefits for "medically unexplained symptoms", according to a new trial. Despite flawed methods that mean it's the kind of study that gives big placebo effects, it still barely worked, say skeptics.

Horrific undercover footage of serious abuse at a British hospital for people with autism and learning disabilities was shown on British TV. Not for the faint-hearted, at all.

Mobile phones "possibly" cause brain cancer, said a group of experts at the World Health Organization, who reviewed all the evidence. But they also found that the literature was poor. Skeptics say it's implausible.

Jonah "Proust Was A Neuroscientist" Lehrer is not a neuroscientist... and he's quoted some dodgy data on the 'wisdom of crowds', says new blog Neuroself in a blistering critique. Lehrer replies in the comments. I haven't read Lehrer's books so I'm staying out of this one.

There's a review of three books critical of modern psychiatry over at the NYROB. One of them is Daniel Carlat's Unhinged which I praised in my review a while back.

I'm sure more happened, but I can't read everything. So any tipoffs will be gratefully received, and ought to help make next week's round-up a bit bigger. Either leave them in a comment or drop me an email.