syrinx

National Geographic has an excellent show Drain The Ocean that starts at the surface and peels away the depths of the ocean's layers to reveal the topography and biodiversity that lies beneath. It is being shown again this evening August 11, so if you missed it the first time, here's a chance to miss it again.

tags: science nationalgeographic ocean deep

fellow reports over on this psychology blog that studies trying to replicate the message of the book "blink" - that we make better decisions if we don't think about them - have come up short in the "scientific process results are replicable and generalizable" department."
Take-away message: you might want to take notes and think about your decisions if they are important.

tags: science universe life blink replicability

Those wacky scientists and their functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machines are at it again! Now they're using them to locate the parts of the brain that light up when you think about religious beliefs.
Of course, this will be reported in Fox News as Finding God in the Brain. You Betcha! Awesome!
Jordan Grafman and his team write in their abstract:

We propose an integrative cognitive neuroscience framework for understanding the cognitive and neural foundations of religious belief. Our analysis reveals 3 principle psychological dimensions of religious belief (God's perceived level of involvement, God's perceived emotion, and doctrinal/experiential religious knowledge), which functional MRI localizes within networks processing Theory of Mind regarding intent and emotion, abstract semantics, and imagery. Our results are unique in demonstrating that specific components of religious belief are mediated by well-known brain networks, and support contemporary psychological theories that ground religious belief within evolutionary adaptive cognitive functions.

So belief in God evolved as a useful adaptation through natural selection...hmmmmmmm. That's what I thought, too.
Read all about it: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/03/06/.abstract

tags: science evolution religion fmri

Cortisol, caffeine, and hallucinations apparently go together like cream and sugar with your coffee, according to a recent study at Durham University. However, as the writers of the Mind Hacks point out at the link above, correlation is not causation, and bad science reporting is pretty funny when it isn't scary:

Coffee addicts see dead people
Caffeine, Responsible For Hallucinations
Did You See That Pink Elephant?
Too Much Coffee Can Cause You To Freak Out, Man
Coffee may make you see ghosts
Coffee linked to 'visions'
'Coffeeholics wake the dead'

Which just goes to show that there aren't too many Ernest Hemingways editing the headline writers. The study is not bad, for what it is. The headlines would be good in the garden to promote healthy growth, as long as you didn't put too much of it on or piled in on too deep.

tags: science caffeine hallucinations reportage

Geriatric computer users with prior internet experience can take heart with this newly published report on the findings of what happens when you put together some people between the ages of 55 and 76, tasks related to reading books and searching the internet, match the participants into groups with the studied variable being prior internet experience, and stick them into the latest favorite toy of brain researchers, the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) device.

"Our most striking finding was that Internet searching appears to engage a greater extent of neural circuitry that is not activated during reading — but only in those with prior Internet experience," said Small, who is also the director of UCLA's Memory and Aging Research Center.

tags: science research internet brain fmri search geriatrics voxels star trek reference