Neuroamer

LATEST ARTICLES ( 84 )

• Songbird Lectures and Podcasts Compiled into One Place

  I’m trying to collect all of the lectures relevant to songbirds into one place. I’m going to start by combing  through some sources I’m already familiar with... Read more

  Posted on 26 March 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Summary of D1 and D2 DA-Receptor Modulation of Striatal Glutamatergic Signaling...

  IntroductionDifferences between direct an indirect MSNs are not obvious from morphology or electrophysiology. However, the two cell types and pathways can be... Read more

  Posted on 17 February 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Is Human Irrationality Due to Irregularities in Dopaminergic Neuron Firing? Note...

  

  People and animals do not always make ‘rational’ choices that maximize the amount of reward they receive. For example, deviations from ‘rational’ economic... Read more

  Posted on 13 February 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Cool Optical Illusion–cross Your Eyes and Try to Align These Circles

  

  Try and cross your eyes to make the top gridded circles overlap. Give up? Try doing it on the bottom ones that are surrounded by the border.A lot easier, right? Read more

  Posted on 23 January 2015 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Notes from James Davies’ “Cracked, the Unhappy Truth About Psychiatry”

  

  Found this book at a bookstore and was hooked after reading the first few pages, based on it’s topic and clear and well-written prose. Read more

  Posted on 06 December 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Striatal Time Cells, Transgenic Birdsongs, Stuttering Mice and More – Birdsong4...

  

  Joe Paton from the Saltzman lab – Time encoding cells in the rodent striatum.You can use an operant conditioning train animals to press a lever and get a reward. Read more

  Posted on 21 November 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why the Brain Uses “sparse Codes”

  

  Gabor Filter showing a receptive field of a hypothetical simple-cell in the visual cortex (Wikipedia)In 1972, Horace Barlow, great-grandson of Darwin, wrote an... Read more

  Posted on 30 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Is the Songbird Vocal Learning Pathway Specialized for Song and Independent...

  

  First off, I wanted to say I’m working in a songbird lab now, so while I’m keeping this a general neuroscience blog, you’re probably going to start seeing more... Read more

  Posted on 25 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Of Mice and Birds – What is a Zebra Finch, Really?

  

  Zebra finch geneticsThe zebra finch, Taeniopygia guttata, is an Australian songbird with a black and white striped breast, used by neuroscientists as a model... Read more

  Posted on 16 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• The Coming Alzheimer’s Epidemic, the Cholinergic Hypothesis, and Nerve Growth...

  

  Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is by far the number one cause of dementia, and the number one risk factor for AD is age–with almost 50% of people above the age of 85... Read more

  Posted on 07 October 2014 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• From Tasting Urine to Metabolome-Wide Association Studies–Advances Towards...

  

  Metabolomics has come a long way since the days of tasting urine. Now techniques like high-throughput mass spectrometry can provide us detailed information abou... Read more

  Posted on 12 October 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Single Base Sequencing of 5-hydroxy-methyl CpGs is Now Possible

  

  5-hydroxy-methyl CpGs (5-hmCs) were first discovered in 2009 and shown to be enriched in the brain, but remain a mysterious epigenetic mark, despite intriguing... Read more

  Posted on 13 July 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Why Conspiracy Thinks He’s Possessed by Two Intergalactic Space Demons

  

  You may have seen my tweet about the upcoming documentary Mars Project, which tackles complex issues such as mental illness, drug use, psychiatry, race, and... Read more

  Posted on 11 July 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Top 10 Most Prescribed Psychiatric Drugs, Top 10 Overall, and the 10 We Spend th...

  

  What prescription drugs do we take and why are we taking them? Get a glass of water, choke down your horse pills, and take a look at the 10 most prescribed... Read more

  Posted on 06 July 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Card Sorting, Pot Smoking, Pleasure and One Gene: COMT

  

  COMT, Catechol-O-methyl transferase, is an enzyme that degrades catecholamines–such as dopamine, epinephrine, and norepinephrine (or adrenaline and noradrenalin... Read more

  Posted on 29 June 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Beyond Blogs – Keep up with Neuroscience Through Podcasts

  

  Get those multimodal neurons firing! This is a followup to my post on the most popular neuroscience blogs. I realized that I left out some of my own favorite... Read more

  Posted on 23 June 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Smartest Mouse in the World? – Amazing Mouse Agility Tests Show How Intelligent...

  

  Despite having cared for laboratory mice for years, I’m wowed by the complexity of this task! The trainer’s site: http://mouse-agility.com/ describes the animal... Read more

  Posted on 13 June 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Connectome: How the Brain’s Wiring Makes Us Who We Are – Sebastian Seung’s New...

  

  The connectome is a map of all neural connections in a brain, which I believe only currently exists for the flatworm C. Elegans. Read more

  Posted on 08 June 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• Most Popular Neuroscience Blogs

  

  I’m curious about what are the most popular blogs for neuroscience right now because I want to see what people are interested in, and learn how to write an... Read more

  Posted on 07 June 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE

• How Many Neurons Do We Really Have? (And Why We Might Have 10x Fewer Glia Than W...

  

  This article is my translation of this Brazilian article by RICARDO ZORZETTO (with lots of help from google translate) Revising the Numbers Get to know the... Read more

  Posted on 19 May 2012 PSYCHOLOGY, SCIENCE