The body swap illusion

The rise & fall of the prefrontal lobotomy

Wilder Penfield, Neural Cartographer

The cognitive benefits of time-space synaesthesia
SYNAESTHESIA is a neurological condition in which there is a merging of the senses, so that activity in one sensory modality elicits sensations in another. Although first described by Francis Galton in the 1880s, little was known about this condition until recently. A rennaissance in synaesthesia research began about a decade ago; since then, three previously unrecognized forms of the condition have been described, and hypotheses for how it arises have been put forward. Two new studies now provi

Dyslexia and the Cocktail Party effect
IMAGINE sitting in a noisy restaurant, across the table from a friend, and having a conversation with them as you eat your meal. To communicate effectively in this situation, you have to extract the relevant information from the noise in the background, as well as from other voices. To do so, your brain somehow "tags" the predictable, repeating elements of the target signal, such as the pitch of your friend's voice, and segregates them from other signals in the surroundings, which fluctuate randomly. The ability to focus on your friend's voice while excluding other noises is commonly referred to as the cocktail party effect. Although first describe

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