Physicians at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, MO surgically applied a grid of electrodes on the surface of a 14 year old boy’s brain in order to locate the focus of his troubling seizures. While waiting to observe a seizure in action, the docs tried something Read more…
We are not surprised to find that aggression is a trait that is easily bred in animals. Spanish fighting bulls and pit bulls are the end result of careful selection of the most aggressive members of their species. Back in 1983, Lagerspetz and Lagerspetz bred the most aggressive mice in Read more…
An alert student forwarded me a rather bizarre report from MSNBC about a discussion among British psychiatrists about the use of the label “schizophrenia.” According to these psychiatrists, schizophrenia “has no scientific validity, is imprecise and stigmatizing.” Labeling is always an issue in psychopathology. We have to have some agreement that 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…