mssv

  • The Death of Cyber

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    3–4 minutes

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    I’m becoming increasingly irritated by the lack of quality of writing in newspapers these days, and specifically, newspaper supplements. I have no problem with the main reporting, but the ‘lifestyle’ sections are just awful. Maybe they’ve always been this dull and boring, or maybe my standards have been risen by culling the best of the…

  • Hit the Big Time

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    1–2 minutes

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    My old Experimental Psychology supervisor at Cambridge, Prof. Simon Baron Cohen, has hit the big time with his new book on autism, and his work is featured on the cover of the current Newsweek in an article called Girls, Boys and Autism. I should probably get around to buying his book some time (The Essential…

  • A Love of Memory

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    6–9 minutes

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    Why Kim Stanley Robinson loves the science of memory

  • Intelligence enhancing drugs

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    1–2 minutes

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    Creatine ‘boosts brain power’ perhaps by regulating brain energy levels. Since meat is a source of creatine, it’s not known whether meat-eaters could actually gain any intelligence advantage by taking supplementary creatine, but along with modafinil it’s yet another step along the road to the widespread use of intelligence enhancing drugs.

  • Lucid

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    3–4 minutes

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    3 comments on Lucid

    I arrived back in the UK yesterday morning after a 24 hour journey from Sydney. Predictably, it was raining. What I tried to do during the flights back home was to time my eating and sleeping so that I could reduce any jetlag I’d have caused by the ten hour time difference. The easiest way…

  • Recursive

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    2–3 minutes

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    During dinner yesterday, I mentioned to Andrew Paul and The Official Bear Of The Third Millennium that I’d recently had an MRI scan done of my brain. Someone then said how strange it must be to see the activity of your brain in real time. I was just in the middle of replying that the…

  • What are you thinking?

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    1–2 minutes

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    2 comments on What are you thinking?

    Following on from my fMRI scan a while ago, I’ve just received a image of a structural MRI scan of my brain; in other words, a picture of my brain! It’s quite neat (thanks Bhisma!)

  • Biononsense

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    2–3 minutes

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    After reading this article about human genetic engineering, I have to comment on something that’s been bugging me for a while now. The article is inoffensive enough, but it uses the term ‘biogenetics’. I’m sorry, but there is no such field as biogenetics; it’s either genetics or nothing, and there’s no use in trying to…

  • They just can’t help it

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    1–2 minutes

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    1 comment on They just can’t help it

    They just can’t help it – an article about the differences between the male and female brain by my old university psychology supervisor, Prof. Simon Baron-Cohen. Interesting and controversial stuff; I saw a lecture that he gave about this topic a few months ago (not via Metafilter – I read it in the Guardian myself…

  • Artificial hippocampus

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    2–3 minutes

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    There’s a fair amount of excitement on the Internet about efforts to make an artifical rat hippocampus. This idea strikes me as, well, pretty weird. I am a little doubtful as to whether it could work (I can think of a lot of reasons why it wouldn’t) but to be honest, it doesn’t matter whether…