Posts tagged with "Neuroscience"
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I was a teenager when I first read Oliver Sacks. I was enchanted, and I read him whenever possible in college and afterward. Sacks could take a simple compound, a patient, a hospital, an island, a situation, or a human condition and could draw out of each wider inferences that felt true. What’s more, his…
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Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction
Judith GriselPodcast Neuroscience
PODCAST: Q&A with Judith Grisel, author of Never Enough
For neuroscientist Judith Grisel, addiction is more than a professional interest. A former addict herself, in her new book she integrates the latest research on addiction with candid insights about her own past drug and alcohol abuse. This week on the Science podcast, Grisel discusses the opioid epidemic, risk factors for addiction, and what an… -
The New Mind Readers: What Neuroimaging Can and Cannot Reveal About Our Thoughts
Russell A. PoldrackBook Neuroscience
The New Mind Readers
Mind reading is usually thought of as a magician’s party trick. Yet advances in brain imaging have revived interest in this seemingly fictional feat. Can neuroimaging be used in court to show that a person is telling the truth or is in pain? What can neuroimaging tell us about what people think or how a… -
The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist
Ben BarresBook Neuroscience, Science lives
The Autobiography of a Transgender Scientist
In 2007, Stanford University neuroscientist Ben Barres published an essay comparing the experiences of female and male scientists. What made this essay noteworthy was that he wrote from personal experience. Barres, an accomplished researcher, was assigned female at birth and transitioned to male in 1997 at the age of 43. He lived openly as a… -
Book Neuroscience, Physiology, Sleep Science
From groggy teenagers to fatal insomnia, two tomes tackle the science of slumber
Many of us have an ambivalent relationship with sleep. Although acknowledging its necessity, we begrudge these stolen hours of existence. Two new books provide a fresh perspective on this poorly understood phenomenon. Rather than being an “imperfection of our nature,” as extolled by physician Wilson Phillip in 1833, sleep emerges as critical to healthy bodily… -
Book Case Studies, Neuroscience
In the tradition of Oliver Sacks, two tomes investigate rare brain conditions
The case report is dead. At least, it seems all but so in the realm of evidence-based medicine. It is thus thoroughly refreshing to read Helen Thomson’s Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World’s Strangest Brains and Eric R. Kandel’s The Disordered Mind: What Unusual Brains Tell Us About Ourselves, two ambitious books that draw… -
The Neuroscience of Emotion: A New Synthesis
Ralph Adolphs and David J. AndersonBook Neuroscience
A pair of neuroscientists finds that investigating emotions is easier done than said
Ask a roomful of neuroscientists to define the term “emotion” and you will trigger a lively discussion. Some will argue that emotions involve conscious experiences that can be studied only in humans. Others might counter that insects and other invertebrates exhibit some of the emotion building blocks seen in mammals. Some will contend that different… -
Finding Einstein’s Brain
Frederick E. LeporeBook Einstein, Neuroanatomy, Neuroscience
Finding Einstein’s Brain
On the day of Albert Einstein’s death, an April morning in 1955, the pathologist Thomas Harvey performed an autopsy and, controversially, took possession of the physicist’s brain. Days later, Harvey convinced Einstein’s closest relatives of his purpose: to retain the brain for scientific research. Three decades passed, however, until the first work on Einstein’s brain… -
Inventing Ourselves: The Secret Life of the Teenage Brain
Sarah-Jayne BlakemoreBook Neuroscience
PODCAST: Q&A with Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, author of Inventing Ourselves
Elusive, evasive, and uncommunicative, the human adolescent is among the most enigmatic subjects ever to be studied. This week on the Science podcast, Sarah-Jayne Blakemore delves into the teenage brain, revealing the extraordinary features that define this transitional state in human development. To hear the rest of the show, visit the Science podcast page. -
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
Michael PollanBook Consciousness, Neuroscience, Psychopharmacology
A revival in the scientific study of psychedelics prompts a journalist to take a trip
Known for his writing on plants and food, Michael Pollan, in his latest book, How to Change Your Mind, brings all the curiosity and skepticism for which he is well known to a decidedly different topic: the psychedelic drugs d-lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin. In addition to being a balanced piece of journalistic science…