Vertebrate Physiology

Summer love is in the air. When Bob went out to the beach, he couldn’t stop oogling Hilda in the yellow polka dot bikini. They were both attending a steamy neurobiology conference. With his heart beating rapidly, he decided to ask her out to a gourmet meal at Chipotle. Lucky for Bob, she was hungry [...]

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The placebo effect has been observed for centuries. Patients given nothing more than sugar pills are able to alleviate their own pain, anxiety and depression. In one case, a terminal cancer patient shrunk his own tumors when he believed in the power of a sham treatment. This is a very well-written article that links the [...]

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Has someone just been watching too many sci-fi movies on Hulu? Doctors at Geneva University Hospital disagree. This is a special case of a supernumerary phantom limb. After suffering a stroke, the 64-year old woman says she can see and feel the “presence of a pale, milky-white and translucent third arm.” More surprisingly, she even [...]

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A recent article in Scientific American describes one of the treatments for patients experiencing phantom limb pain. One solution mentioned was to thrust a screw driver into the apparent trouble spot. The amputee would place his prosthetic leg where his own leg used to be, and stab at it with his screwdriver. The claim is [...]

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Here is a short NPR broadcast in which AJ describes her experiences with her near “perfect” memory. She can remember near everything that has happened to her, but has a poor capacity to remember facts and even historical events. A key component to her memory is the emotional content in her memories, and recall of [...]

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Years ago, scientists were able to link a monkey sitting in North Carolina with a robotic arm situated at MIT’s Touch Lab. This doesn’t seem all that remarkable until you notice that the control is entirely by thought. The monkey is manipulating the arm using a brain wave-machine interface that could be used to design [...]

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Neuroimaging is a rapidly growing aspect of neuroscience with lots of new toys to view the active structures of the brain during as a result of different stimuli. But this new technique takes it to a new level. There are great pictures of hippocampal neurons from the “brainbow” mouse. Stanford’s online-medical ezine has a nice [...]

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Music and the Brain Here are an amazing number of stories that deal with the notion of music and language. Diana Deutch from UCSD discusses her studies how infants that are raised in different language context will have differing abilities to acquire perfect pitch. She demonstrates that children that have a tonal language (such as [...]

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With our final topic of the basal ganglia: those centres that direct repeated and refined motions, this is a relevant story on their role in habit formation. Researchers at MIT found that repeated learned tasks are stored in the basal ganglia. Once the cues that drive the habitual behaviour are removed, test animals would return [...]

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Something to consider over the Harvest Feast Holiday is cuddling up with a good book. A couple suggestions to fuel your mind would be Oliver Sacks’ new book on music-mind connections. The NYTimes wrote a nice review. Another set of essays to prepare you for the third unit of the course are: The Trouble with [...]

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