The patient is a 23-year old woman, condemned to a vegetative state following a tragic automobile accident in 2005. Her sleep-waking cycles remain normal, but her eyes cannot focus or follow a person around the room. Adrian Owen and his colleagues [1] conducted fMRIs of the patient and 12 healthy Read more…
Pier Ferrari and his colleagues at the University of Parma in Italy just published an article titled Neonatal Imitation in Rhesus Macaques in PLOS–Biology. The authors demonstrated imitation of actions such as lip smacking and tongue protrusion on the infant monkeys’ first day of life. Imitation of this type is believed Read more…
Thomas Z. Ramsøy, a long-time member and frequent contributor to the Evolutionary Psychology listserv, and Martin Skov have a blog called Brainethics: Consequences of Brain Science. Biological psychology faculty would be particularly interested in a page of “Readings in Neuroethics.” The selection is lengthy and well-chosen. The site also features book Read more…
Every year, the kind people at Beloit College remind us boomer faculty that it’s time to update our classroom examples. When I first taught intro psychology, I could use John F. Kennedy’s assassination as my example of “flashbulb memories.” Then it was the Challenger explosion, then 9/11…. Anyway, you can Read more…
As a university professor, I must admit that I am astonished by the amount of alcohol current students consume. Most come to us with an already established pattern of heavy drinking from their high school days. Where their parents were at the time is another story…. Not only does the Read more…