The results of a number of research studies over the past 2 or 3 decades suggest that breastfeeding, particularly for more than four months, improves the cognitive performance of children. This is a difficult research question to answer, due to the many confounding variables. Breastfeeding mothers tend to be more educated Read more…
An alert student forwarded to me an article in the BBC that relates to our class discussion about the brain’s reward circuitry. The author notes the classic studies of Olds and Milner in rats and Heath in human participants, and updates us on the potential use of brain stimulation. Tipu Aziz Read more…
Philanthropists Paul G. Allen and Jody Patton funded the non-profit Allen Institute for Brain Science, located in Seattle, WA, to “identify and address key issues in neuroscience.” One of the Institute’s first achievements is the Allen Brain Atlas, a publicly available and free resource that shows which of 21,000 genes Read more…
Check out the new link in the blogroll to the Neurophilosopher. I found a lot of innovative content on the site, including an article about one of my favorite neuroscientists, Santiago Ramon y Cajal. I’m going to log off my blog and go watch the neurosurgery webcast on the site. Read more…
Contemporary diagnostic criteria for autism have not changed much from the original descriptions offered by Leo Kanner in 1943 [1]. The three core features, which all individuals with autism must exhibit in order to be formally diagnosed, are impairments in social interaction, impairments in communication, and restricted and repetitive Read more…