By: John Priest,
on 9/10/2016
The traditional view puts forward the idea that the vast majority of what there is in the universe is mindless. Panpsychism however claims that mental features are ubiquitous in the cosmos.
The post Is the mind just an accident of the universe? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Simon Turley,
on 2/26/2016
Who has never been embarrassed by a close other? Imagine you and your best friend dress up for the opera, both of you very excited about this spectacular event taking place in your home town. It is the premiere with the mayor and significant others attending. You have a perfect view on the stage and it seems a wonderful night.
The post Keep your friends close… Really? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Emily Gorney,
on 11/27/2015
Are we at the birth of a new culture in the western world? Are we on the verge of a new way of thinking? Both humanistic and scientific thinkers suggest as much.
The post Is neuroculture a new cultural revolution? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 11/13/2015
Beginnings are tough. But if we’d only get started, our marks and words on the page can bootstrap our next moves. Marks and words out there, on the page, feed what in neuroscience is called our brain’s “perception-action” cycle. Through this built-in and biologically fundamental mechanism, we repeatedly act on the world, and then look to see what our actions have wrought in the world.
The post Seven ways to start and keep your writing going appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Sarah McKenna,
on 11/5/2015
Long excluded from serious consideration within psychology and the neurosciences, consciousness is back in business. A new journal Neuroscience of Consciousness will catalyse this new understanding by publishing the best new research, review, and opinion on how our "inner universe" comes to be.
The post Can neuroscience explain consciousness? appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Amelia Carruthers,
on 10/21/2015
To mark this month’s release of Martin R. Turner and Matthew C. Kiernan’s Landmark Papers in Neurology, we spoke with the two editors, to discuss their thoughts on neurology – past and present. We asked about the origins of neurology, the understanding of neurological diseases, milestones in the field, why historical context is so important – and their predictions for the future…
The post Q & A: Neurology’s past, present, and future appeared first on OUPblog.
By: JulieF,
on 10/18/2015
Sometimes, what your brain wants is not always good for your body. Donuts are a good example. It’s early morning and you’re driving to work after a nice breakfast of black coffee and two eggs, easy-over, with bacon. Yet, you’re still hungry and having difficulty paying attention to the traffic. Why? Your brain is not cooperating because it is not satisfied with that breakfast because it lacked one critical ingredient that your brain urgently needs: sugar.
The post Why you must stop for coffee and donuts this morning appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Simon Turley,
on 10/9/2015
It was midnight and I had just slumped into bed, exhausted after one of my first days on-call as a new intern, and still adjusting to life in a new apartment. As my nagging reflections on the day were just beginning to subside, insistent knocking at my door jolted me back to alertness. Dragging myself out of bed to open the door, I was surprised to see a diminutive elderly lady who appeared quite perturbed.
The post The music next door appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 9/11/2015
In the wake of the development of advanced neonatal intensive medical care, more and more children born very preterm manage to beat the previously tough odds and survive the perils of infections and respiratory distress that are some of the common problems in the group. While this is one of the success stories of modern medicine, long-term follow-up of premature-born pediatric cohorts show that the obstacles don’t cease with the need of intensive medical care.
The post Predicting future cognition in preterm children with MRI appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Simon Turley,
on 9/6/2015
How would we know if a medieval person had a neurological disorder? If we did know, would it be possible to pinpoint the type of condition? What insight can we gain about the practical impact of disorders on medieval life? Fortunately, a physical record survives that provides a reliable window into the health of medieval people—or, at least, those who were able to write.
The post Scrutinizing the script of the medieval ‘Tremulous Hand of Worcester’ appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Helena Palmer,
on 8/22/2015
If you’ve worked in an office, you’re probably familiar with “honor box” coffee service. Everyone helps themselves to stewed coffee, adds to the lounge’s growing filth, and deposits a nominal sum in the honor box, with the accumulated proceeds being used to replenish supplies. Notoriously, this system often devolves into a tragedy of the commons, where too many people drink without paying.
The post Moral responsibility and the ‘honor box’ system appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Alice,
on 8/20/2015
The brain is a product of its complex and multi-million year history of solving the problems of survival for its host, you, in an ever-changing environment. Overall, your brain is fairly fast but not too efficient, which is probably why so many of us utilize stimulants such as coffee and nicotine to perform tasks more efficiently. Thus far, no one has been able to design a therapy that can make a person truly smarter.
The post A magical elixir for the mind appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Connie Ngo,
on 8/14/2015
When trying to gauge someone's personality, a few well-phrased questions are sometimes all it takes to light the fire of passions within someone. We had the pleasure of speaking with Darra Goldstein, Editor-in-Chief of The Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, and asked her a number of questions that reveal what "bakes her cake."
The post Neuroscience, Botticelli, and marizpan: Darra Goldstein on sugar and sweets appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Joe Hitchcock,
on 7/23/2015
Can you imagine a concert hall full of chimpanzees sitting, concentrated, and feeling 'transported' by the beauty of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony? Even harder would be to imagine a chimpanzee feeling a certain pleasure when standing in front of a beautiful sculpture. The appreciation of beauty and its qualities, according to Aristotle’s definition, from his Poetics (order, symmetry, and clear delineation and definiteness), is uniquely human.
The post Beauty and the brain appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Simon Turley,
on 7/16/2015
Imagine the unimaginable. Suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), the person with whom you shared most of your life has forgotten who you are, and even worse, can no longer remember their own experiences, their relationships, and how to behave appropriately in everyday situations. But although most of their long-term memory is heavily impaired, they may continue to relate astonishingly well to autobiographically relevant pieces of music.
The post What stays when everything goes appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Joe Hitchcock,
on 6/17/2015
Disgusting or delighting, exciting or boring, sensual or expected, no matter what you think about it, 50 Shades of Grey is certainly not a movie that passes by without leaving a mark on your skin. Based on E.L. James’ novel (honestly, somehow even more breathtaking than the movie), it tells the story of the complicated relationship between the dominant multi-millionaire Christian Grey, and the newly graduated, inexperienced, and shy, Ana Steele.
The post 50 shades of touch appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Elizabeth Gorney,
on 6/17/2015
Over the past forty years, many of my students have shared their personal experiences with hallucinogenic drugs. They are typically more fascinated, than frightened, by the experience. About sixty years ago the scientist C.H.W. Horne commented that "It is remarkable that one characteristic which seems to separate man from the allegedly lower animals is a recurring desire to escape from reality.”
The post What 4,000 years of hallucinations have taught us about our brain appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Elizabeth Gorney,
on 5/7/2015
Does coffee enhance marijuana? A study published recently in the Journal of Neuroscience (Vol 34 (19):6480-6484, 2014) by neuroscientists from the Integrative Neurobiology Section of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, a branch of the National Institutes of Health, has finally provided a definitive answer: Yes, No, and it depends.
The post The role of marijuana in your coffee addiction appeared first on OUPblog.
In a recent neuroscience study, researchers focused on the visual side of the brain and concluded that volunteers saw words and pictures and not individual letters. This research could prove very helpful in understanding how struggling readers process words, and improve tactics for teaching.
Arbordale truly believes that reading, and being read to, is a very important part of growing up. So, we are closing out the work with a Friday Reads Giveaway! Comment on this post to be entered to win these three Arbordale books!
Learn more about the Journal of Neuroscience article on Science News.
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By: Ella Sharp,
on 3/19/2015
Why are we conscious? How can it be that physical processes in the brain seem to be accompanied with subjective experience? As technology has advanced, psychologists and neuroscientists have been able to observe brain activity. But with an explosion in experiments, methods, and measurements, there has also been great confusion.
The post Morten Overgaard on consciousness appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Joe Hitchcock,
on 1/16/2015
“Sorry mate, I didn’t see you.” It’s a common refrain heard after many a road-traffic collision. So common, in fact, that if you say “SMIDSY” to a UK motorcyclist, they’ll most likely wince and offer a story of how they or a colleague came to grief. Perhaps you’ve had SMIDSY said to you, or even had to utter those words yourself?
SMIDSY describes the all-too-common type of motorbike accident when a car pulls out at an intersection. The driver’s sure that the road is clear, but discovers too late that something is coming. Even if you haven’t been involved in such an incident, you can probably recall some occasion on which you were driving and had a near miss with a car or bike you’d swear wasn’t there a moment ago.
It turns out that these sorts of events might be more complicated than first appear. It’s quite possible for you to look right at the other vehicle, but for your brain to fail to process the information associated with it. These sorts of situational awareness failures may in fact result from a well-described, but not well-known, psychological phenomenon called “inattentional blindness”.
Most people believe their senses work a bit like a video camera. You direct attention towards an object and your brain automatically and reliably records. Although this is our day-to-day experience, perception is in reality a much more active process, with a number of filters operating between information arriving, and you becoming consciously aware of it.
A potentially limitless amount of information exists in the environment around you, but little of it is relevant from moment to moment. Rather than ‘clutter up’ consciousness with a surfeit of useless information, the subconscious monitors these unnecessary items and only ‘alerts’ the consciousness when something relevant occurs.
Under normal circumstances your brain is fairly efficient at subconsciously monitoring events around you. Imagine holding a conversation in a noisy restaurant: you are probably only consciously aware of the conversation you are directly involved in (your primary task), but if your name is mentioned elsewhere, you will turn around to find out why. Your brain has been subconsciously monitoring that stream of conversation, and when something personally relevant occurs (your name is a very powerful trigger, carrying a high degree of ‘cognitive saliency’) you can devote your attention to it.
Problems occur when you have to concentrate harder on a primary task. The more cognitive demands placed on you, the narrower your focus becomes. It’s surprising how big an event you might miss: the classic demonstration of this effect is known as the “Invisible Gorilla” and was devised by Harvard psychologists Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris in 1999. Observers were asked to follow two teams of basketball players, counting the passes made by one of the teams. Caught up in the counting task, 50% of the participants failed to notice as a collaborator, dressed in a gorilla costume, marched between the players and stopped to beat her chest before marching out again. Making the primary task more difficult, by asking the observers to count bounce- and aerial-passes separately, caused the noticing rate to fall to 33%. Most observers were inattentionally blind to the gorilla and many expressed shock when shown their error, some even accusing the experimenters of showing two different videos. Although these perceptual errors are an innate and universal feature of human cognitive architecture, it’s a common finding that insight into their effects is very poor. Almost everyone significantly overestimates their ability to notice the unexpected.
Increasing workload has been well described as a risk for this form of perceptual error. Interestingly, people with professional basketball experience are much more likely to notice the gorilla in the Simons video, but athletes from other disciplines perform much as the general public does. Whilst expertise is certainly protective to a degree (although does not eliminate the risk altogether), it does seem to be very task-specific.
How does inattentional blindness affect medical practice? The short answer is that no-one really knows. High-profile disasters such as the case of Elaine Bromiley make vivid reminders of the devastating consequences of medical errors, however, it is well recognized that daily errors occur in every institution around the world. In the UK, errors account for 2.5% of the national health budget annually.
Loss of situational awareness is thought to be the leading cause of error in time-critical situations, and there can be no doubt that clinicians labor under mentally taxing circumstances. Of course, doctors are well trained. Training brings expertise, and surely expertise protects against perceptual error? Possibly, but perhaps not to the extent that you might expect.
A few studies have looked into inattentional blindness in medical personnel, mainly by showing people items such as radiographs with a gorilla superimposed. These experiments showed large numbers of even experienced staff miss the anomaly. Our group in Oxford took this a little further, creating a recording of an adult resuscitation scenario into which we inserted a series of events, designed to test for the presence of different types of perceptual error. We showed this video to a more than 140 people and demonstrated that overall, more than seven people in ten missed events that would contribute to poor patient outcome (were they to be missed in ‘real life’). As one might expect, experts in the group (all experienced, accredited instructors of adult resuscitation) did perform better. In their case around six in ten missed it…
So does this prove that inattentional blindess is a problem for us, as experienced clinicians? Not yet, but it does raise some questions about how reliably individuals can maintain situational awareness, and offers some insight into the mechanisms by which even highly trained personnel might make mistakes. By research, using tools such as high-fidelity simulation, we can start to investigate how frequently perceptual errors actually do contribute to loss of situational awareness, who is most vulnerable to these effects, and most importantly, how can we mitigate them.
Heading image: Optics: page to a partwork on science, with pictures of optical phenomena. Coloured lithograph by J. Emslie, 1850. CC BY 4.0 via Wellcome Images.
The post “Sorry mate, I didn’t see you”: perceptual errors and inattentional blindness appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Beth Kephart ,
on 1/6/2015
Kephart at her poetic and powerful best. ONE THING STOLEN is a masterwork—a nest of beauty and loss, a flood of passion so sweet one can taste it. This is no ordinary book. It fits into no box. It is its own box—its own language.
ONE THING STOLEN is a tapestry of family, friendship, Florence, and neuroscience. I’ve never read anything like it. Kephart brings the reader so deep inside Nadia we can feel her breathe, and yet her story leaves us without breath.
A.S. King is the author of Glory O’Brien’s History of the Future, Reality Boy, Ask the Passengers, Everybody Sees the Ants, Please Ignore Vera Dietz, and The Dust of 100 Dogs
By: Julie Fergus,
on 11/17/2014
Biologically-produced toxins include some of the most interesting substances in nature. As advanced as the chemical sciences are, nothing beats nature in terms of the wide variety of structures with specific biochemical properties. Toxins are one of the most effective mechanisms of defense or predation, generally used by organisms lacking traits like sheer size, strength, fast speed, agility, the ability to fly, or the capacity of technological intelligence (yes, this last one is us). I find this one of the most fascinating aspects of biology. As I said in the very first paragraph of my PhD dissertation:
“Nature is the best chemist. During the course of evolution, through literally millions of years, a wide variety of organisms have developed substances used for defense against predators, or to become predators themselves. As part of the evolutionary process, chemical structures beneficial for the survival of the organism are conserved; many of these molecules include small organic toxins.”
If you think about it, it is amazing how many different organisms use chemical compounds as a survival strategy. Such compounds represent the difference between survival and death in these organisms. Once we realize the true extent of chemical diversity in nature, it is no wonder that this embarrassment of riches is used by life. For example, plants and microorganisms account for about half a million unique compounds. According to Richard Firn in Nature’s Chemicals, plants alone are estimated to produce about a million tons (!) of chemical compounds every year.
One of the best-known, and paradoxically least understood toxins is called tetrodotoxin (TTX). This is a rather mysterious molecule. It was originally discovered in a species of pufferfish, of fugu fame (a delicacy in Japan) in 1909, but the toxic properties of pufferfish have been known since at least the 1700s. Its mechanism of action entails the blocking of certain ion channels that control neuromuscular function. There is no antidote. TTX is present in quite a few other types of marine organisms, including the blue-ringed octopus, several crab species as well as a variety of worms (including polyclad flatworms), snails and starfish among many others. Remarkably, amphibians like certain frogs and newts also possess TTX. The most likely mechanism through which organisms acquire this toxin seems to be symbiotic bacteria, but this has not been demonstrated in every single case, especially in terrestrial species. To add more complexity to the matter, there are at least twelve “versions” of tetrodotoxin.
Up until very recently, despite the widespread distribution of TTX in nature, it was never observed in any known invertebrate species. Here’s where flatworms come in.
Some of the most interesting invertebrates include land planarians, many of which display a distinctive “hammerhead” morphology. All known species of land planarians are predators and many land planarians are considered invasive species and agricultural pests because one of their preferred prey are earthworms.
Like many planarians, the land variety displays rather sophisticated “hunting” behaviors. Upon encountering an earthworm, the flatworm performs a maneuver called “capping” where it covers the earthworm’s head region, minimizing its escape behavior, even in individuals significantly larger than the flatworm. In fact, upon capping, the earthworm frequently seems to be paralyzed, which hinted at the presence of a toxin.
These observations ignited the curiosity of Dr. Amber N. Stokes, of the Department of Biology at California State University and collaborators, who hypothesized that the toxin in question was TTX, based on the behavioral response of salamanders that were fed with certain land planarians. In a recent paper, they reported that the planarian toxin seems to be TTX in the two species of land planarians studied, Bipalium adventitium and Bipalium kewense. Their results suggest that these flatworms use tetrodotoxin for both predation and defense. In addition to the documented paralysis-like state that the planarians induced in earthworms, the authors observed that salamanders offered these planarians as food tended to reject them and that in the case of B. adventitium, TTX accumulates in their egg capsules. Research is underway to conclusively demonstrate that tetrodotoxin is the actual toxic agent in these flatworms.
This is just one example of the usefulness of planarians as experimental organisms beyond their traditional use in regeneration and developmental biology research. These fascinating worms are experiencing a “scientific renaissance”, particularly in the areas of pharmacology, toxicology, and the neurosciences. They are ideal, tractable subjects to investigate aspects of these disciplines in an integrated way, as they can be easily examined from the molecular to the behavioral level.
These are exciting times in planarian research!
The post Chemical warfare in terrestrial flatworms appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Mickelle Kelly,
on 11/12/2014
Neuroanatomical Terminology by Larry Swanson supplies the first global, historically documented, hierarchically organized human nervous system parts list. This defined vocabulary accurately and systematically describes every human nervous system structural feature that can be observed with current imaging methods, and provides a framework for describing accurately the nervous system in all animals including invertebrates and vertebrates alike. Just how well do you know your neuroanatomical terminology? Test your knowledge!
Heading image: An anatomical illustration from Sobotta’s Human Anatomy 1908 by Dr. Johannes Sobotta. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The post Test your knowledge of neuroanatomical terminology appeared first on OUPblog.
By: Ella Sharp,
on 10/30/2014
Where kissing is concerned, there is an entire categorization of this most human of impulses that necessitates taking into account setting, relationship health and the emotional context in which the kiss occurs. A relationship’s condition might be predicted and its trajectory timeline plotted by observing and understanding how the couple kiss. For instance, viewed through the lens of a couple’s dynamic, a peck on the cheek can convey cold, hard rejection or simply signify that a loving couple are pressed for time.
A kiss communicates a myriad of meanings, its reception and perception can alter dramatically depending on the couple’s state of mind. A wife suffering from depression may interpret her husband’s kiss entirely differently should her symptoms be alleviated. Similarly, a jealous, insecure lover may receive his girlfriend’s kiss of greeting utterly at odds to how she intends it to be perceived.
So if the mind can translate the meaning of a kiss to fit with its reading of the world, what can a kiss between a couple tell us? Does this intimate act mark out territory and ownership, a hands-off-he’s-mine nod to those around? Perhaps an unspoken negotiation of power between a couple that covers a whole range of feelings and intentions; how does a kiss-and-make-up kiss differ from a flirtatious kiss or an apologetic one? What of a furtive kiss; an adulterous kiss; a hungry kiss; a brutal kiss? How does a first kiss distinguish itself from a final kiss? When the husband complains to his wife that after 15 years of marriage, “we don’t kiss like we used to”, is he yearning for the adolescent ‘snog’ of his youth?
Engulfed by techno culture, where every text message ends with a ‘X’, couples must carve out space in their busy schedules to merely glimpse one another over the edge of their laptops. There isn’t psychic space for such an old-fashioned concept as a simple kiss. In a time-impoverished, stress-burdened world, we need our kisses to communicate more. Kisses should be able to multi-task. It would be an extravagance in the 21st-century for a kiss not to mean anything.
And there’s the cultural context of kissing to consider. Do you go French, Latin or Eskimo? Add to this each family’s own customs, classifications and codes around how to kiss. For a couple, these differences necessitate accepting the way that your parents embraced may strike your new partner as odd, even perverse. For the northern lass whose family offer to ‘brew up’ instead of a warm embrace, the European preamble of two or three kisses at the breakfast table between her southern softie of a husband and his family, can seem baffling.
The context of a kiss between a couple correlates to the store of positive feeling they have between them; the amount of love in the bank of their relationship. Take 1: a kiss on the way out in the morning can be a reminder of the intimacy that has just been. Take 2: in an acrimonious coupling, this same gesture perhaps signposts a dash for freedom, a “thank God I don’t have to see you for 11 hours”. The kiss on the way back in through the front door can be a chance to reconnect after a day spent operating in different spheres or, less benignly, to assuage and disguise feelings of guilt at not wanting to be back at all.
While on the subject of lip-to-lip contact, the place where a kiss lands expresses meaning. The peck on the forehead may herald a relationship where one partner distances themselves as a parental figure. A forensic ritualized pattern of kisses destined for the cheeks carries a different message to the gentle nip on the earlobe. Lips, cheek, neck, it seems all receptors convey significance to both kisser and ‘kissee’ and could indicate relationship dynamics such as a conservative-rebellious pairing or a babes-in-the-wood coupling.
Like Emperor Tiberius, who banned kissing because he thought it helped spread fungal disease, Bert Bacarach asks, ‘What do you get when you kiss a guy? You get enough germs to catch pneumonia…’ Conceivably the nature of kissing and the unhygienic potential it carries is the ultimate symbol of trust between two lovers and raises the question of whether kissing is a prelude or an end in itself, ergo the long-suffering wife who doesn’t like kissing anymore “because I know what it’ll lead to…”
The twenty-first century has witnessed the proliferation of orthodontistry with its penchant for full mental braces. Modern mouths are habitually adorned with lip and tongue piercings as fetish wear or armour. Is this straying away from what a kiss means or a consideration of how modern mores can begin to create a new language around this oldest of greetings? There is an entire generation maturing whose first kiss was accompanied by the clashing of metal, casting a distinct shadow over their ideas around later couple intimacy.
Throughout history, from Judas to Marilyn Monroe, a kiss has communicated submission, domination, status, sexual desire, affection, friendship, betrayal, sealed a pact of peace or the giving of life. There is public kissing and private kissing. Kissing signposts good or bad manners. It is both a conscious and unconscious coded communication and can betray the instigator’s character; from the inhibited introvert to the narcissistic exhibitionist. The 16th-century theologian Erasmus described kissing as ‘a most attractive custom’. Rodin immortalized doomed, illicit lovers in his marble sculpture, and Chekhov wrote of the transformative power of a mistaken kiss. The history and meaning of the kiss evolves and shifts and yet remains steadfastly the same: a distinctly human, intimate and complex gesture, instantly recognizable despite its infinite variety of uses. I’ve a feeling Sam’s ‘You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss’ may never sound quite the same again.
Headline image credit: Conquered with a kiss, by .craig. CC-BY-NC-2.0 via Flickr.
The post A taxonomy of kisses appeared first on OUPblog.
What is the future of academic publishing? We’re celebrating University Press Week and Academic Book Week with a series of blog posts on scholarly publishing from staff and partner presses. Following on from our list of academic books that changed the world, we're looking to the future and how our current publishing could change lives and attitudes in years to come.
The post 5 academic books that will shape the future appeared first on OUPblog.
Although most historians of the French Revolution assign the French queen Marie-Antoinette a minor role in bringing about that great event, a good case can be made for her importance if we look more deeply into her politics than most scholars have.
The post Marie-Antoinette and the French Revolution appeared first on OUPblog.
In his 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. expressed keen disappointment in white church leaders, whom he had hoped “would be among our strongest allies” and “would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure.”
The post “Did I do what I should have done?”: white clergy in 1960s Mississippi appeared first on OUPblog.
November 2015 marks the 100th anniversary of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity. This theory is one of many pivotal scientific discoveries that would drastically influence our understanding of the world around us.
The post How and why are scientific theories accepted? appeared first on OUPblog.
The selection of emoji by Oxford Dictionaries as its Word of the Year recognises the huge increase in the use of these digital pictograms in electronic communication. While 2015 may have witnessed their proliferation, emoji are not new. They were originally developed in Japan in the 1990s for use by teenagers on their pagers; the word emoji derives from the Japanese e 'picture' + moji 'character, letter'.
The post Emojis and ambiguity in the digital medium appeared first on OUPblog.