The Thinking Meat Project

Encephalon- 3rd Edition

Welcome to the third edition of Encephalon. Once again there were a bunch of good posts–quite a lot about mirror neurons but also ranging over plenty of other topics–so here we go.

Sandy at The Mouse Trap explores color vision in three articles. His discussion of tetrachromancy in human females discusses the existence, in some human females, of four rather than three cone receptors, and what this might tell us about color perception in humans and how that relates to color perception in other species. He also has posted interesting articles and useful links on the role of rods in color vision, and how opponent process theory works.

A few years ago, someone told me about something called Hemi-Sync®, a technique for producing sounds that are supposed to relax you. At the time I was too anxious to remember much about why it was supposed to work (I was in the hospital awaiting minor surgery), but I filed this away in my “someday” file. So I was interested to see that Joe Kissell at Interesting Thing of the Day contributed a link to his post on binaural beats, which explains binaural beats (which occur when you feed slightly different tones to each ear; this is the basis of Hemi-Sync® products) and gives a nice catalog of available products that use this technology.

The Neurophilosopher, the force behind Encephalon, offers an excellent review of Eric Kandel’s new autobiography. Kandel is a Nobel prize winning researcher into the biological bases of memory, who evidently uses his own memories to good effect in presenting the story of his life, his groundbreaking work in the neurobiology of memory, and the politically and scientifically eventful times in which he’s lived. The review made me eager to read the book.

Chris Chatham at Developing Intelligence has a couple of relevant posts. He analyzes a recent study about the way video game violence appears to desensitize people toward real-life violence. He offers some alternative explanations for the results of the study, and also discusses the social implications of the research. In another post, he talks about the possibility that neural noise (differences in the activity of a population of neurons in the presence of the same stimulus) carries information.

The Neurocritic writes about the wondrous possibilities lurking in the melanocortin 4 receptor. OK, it’s probably not really the key to a combined weight-loss/sex-enhancement drug, but it does have interesting properties. The Neurocritic also speculates about spindle neurons, comparing the spindle neuron meme to the mirror neuron meme, with links to some of the recent blog activity about mirror neurons.

Speaking of which, Evil Monkey at Neurotopia (version 2.0) takes a skeptical look at the recent hype over mirror neurons (or perhaps it would be better to say “mirror neural systems”) in humans. And rounding out the mirror neuron offerings for this edition, Vaughan Bell at the Mind Hacks blog tried to find a balance between the hype and the backlash in a recent post.

Evil Monkey from Neurotopia also has an interesting post about some exciting work on a possible therapy for Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS).

Murky Thoughts offers some information and conjecture about a possible explanation of what gave human intelligence the boost it needed to become the unique thing it is today: maybe we have an extra reward circuit in the brain that delivers an extra shot of dopamine and gives us just a bit more satisfaction from solving problems, and a bit more incentive to do so, with a snowballing effect on our mental capabilities.

I’ll close with an item from Thinking Meat about human-robot communication, and how a robot might be given at least a physical understanding of how the world looks to someone else.

Thanks to all who contributed. If you’d like to submit something for Encephalon 4, which will be published on August 14, visit the main Encephalon page. Encephalon 4 will be hosted by The Neurocritic. You can find Encephalon 2 at Pure Pedantry.