In defense of grandmother cells
I’m a big fan of grandmother cells, myself… doi:10.1037/a0014462
Category: Neuroscience
Temporal Compartmentalization, Declarative Memory, and Consciousness
I recently read a very interesting opinion in Nature by Tu & Knight titled “Metabolic cycles as an underlying basis for biological oscillations” (2006). The main idea of the paper is that many periodic processes in organisms, specifically, the circadian cycle, hibernation cycle, and sleep-wake cycle, can be partially explained in terms …
Creationists discover consciousness
I’m writing up a series of posts at my neuroscience blog on the creationists’ recent discovery of consciousness. The first post is here. I’ll be looking at consciousness from many angles, but always through a neuropsychological lens. Since this is a philosophy forum, I’ll quote the bit that offended my …
Human trichromatic vision may be a lot less common that previously thought
This may be old news to those who are up on the vision neuroscience literature, but I found it interesting and surprising so I thought I would share. It appears that within the human population, individuals vary in the number of red-cone genes (from 1 to 4) and green-cone genes …
HBO’s Addiction Project Online
In a previous post, I wrote about HBO’s 14-part documentary series on addiction, which is set to premiere on March 15. What if you don’t have cable? HBO has set up a website where, immediately after the premiere, all 14 films will be made available for free. Apparently this is …
My Kitchen Experiment with Olfactory Attention
Many theories of attention postulate a mechanism involving the thalamus. Roughly, the idea is that the thalamus can enhance certain sensory signals going to the cortex at the expense of others, and this is what constitutes (sensory) attention. (The mechanism may depend in part on recurrent signals from cortex to …
Edelman’s Second Nature
Gerald Edelman has written yet another book about consciousness, whose title is Second Nature. There is a fairly entertaining review of it by neuroscientist Steven Rose in The Guardian.