The body swap illusion

The rise & fall of the prefrontal lobotomy

Wilder Penfield, Neural Cartographer

The illusion of time: Perceiving the effect before the cause
A novel temporal illusion, in which the cause of an event is perceived to occur after the event itself, provides some insight into the brain mechanisms underlying conscious perception. The illusion, described in the journal Current Biology by a team of researchers from France, suggests that the unconscious representation of a visual object is processed for around one tenth of a second before it enters conscious awareness. Chien-Te Wu and his colleagues at the Brain and Cognition Research Centre in Toulouse used a visual phenomenon called motion-induced blindness, in whic

Phantom limbs can contort into impossible configurations
FOLLOWING the surgical removal of a body part, amputees often report sensations which seem to originate from the missing limb. This is thought to occur because the brain's model of the body (sometimes referred to as the body image) still contains a representation of the limb, and this leads to the experience that their missing limb is still attached to their body. Occasionally, amputees say that they cannot move their phantom limbs. They are perceived to be frozen in space, apparently because they cannot be seen.

A pictorial history of neurotechniques
THE latest issue of MIT Technology Review contains a photo essay by yours truly, called Time Travel Through the Brain, in which I look at how techniques used to investigate the brain have evolved during the 100 year history of modern neuroscience. The essay begins with a drawing by the great Spanish neuroanatomist

Lasers used to write false memories onto the fruit fly brain
THE humble fruit fly (Drosophila melanogaster) has the ability to learn and remember, and to make predictions about the outcome of its behaviours on the basis of past experience. Compared to a human brain, that of the fruit fly  is relatively simple, containing approximately 250,000 cells. Even so, little is known about the anatomical basis of memory formation. The neural circuitry underlying memories in these insects has now been dissected. In an elegant new study published in the journal Cell,  researchers from the University of Oxford show that aversive memories are dependent o

Mice navigate a virtual reality environment
USING an inventive new method in which mice run through a virtual reality environment based on the video game Quake, researchers from Princeton University have made the first direct measurements of the cellular activity associated with spatial navigation. The method will allow for investigations of the neural circuitry underlying navigation, and  to a better understanding of how spatial information is encoded at the cellular level. Read the rest of this post... |