H.M.’s brain to be dissected live online
If you've ever heard anything about cognitive psychology, then you've probably heard about H.M.
Henry Gustav Molaison (February 26, 1926 – December 2, 2008), better known as HM or H.M., was a memory-impaired patient who was widely studied from the late 1950s until his death. His case played a very important role in the development of theories that explain the link between brain function and memory, and in the development of cognitive neuropsychology, a branch of psychology that aims to understand how the structure and function of the brain relates to specific psychological processes. (wikipedia)
Tomorrow - his brain will be dissected live online.
Dreaming in black and white
I have tried hard to substitute deer and mosquitoes for sharks and rats in my house of horrors, but it’s just not working.
Joe Queenan in the LA Times tries to justify his hatred of sharks, hyenas and anacondas:
Like most people in this country, I have long hated sharks, largely because of what they did to Robert Shaw in "Jaws." For years, I thought of sharks as mindless, demonic eating machines, an attitude reinforced by the harrowing story Shaw told Richard Dreyfuss and Roy Scheider about the 1945 Japanese torpedo attack on the U.S. cruiser Indianapolis. Although many of the 880 casualties died because of exposure or drinking saltwater, many were eaten by the tigers of the deep. So, all in all, it seemed almost unpatriotic not to hate them.
Could Nim do this?
Back in the 1970s, a chimpanzee named Nim Chimpsky took part in a Columbia University research study called "Project Nim."
Project Nim was led by Herbert Terrace, a psychologist at Columbia who was attempting to find out if a chimpanzee could learn to communicate using American Sign Language.
"Everyone knows that words are learned one at a time," but something happens when children begin to combine words and create true language, Terrace says.
The subject smugly completed the second and third runs of the three-dimensional spatial task with ease
University of Iowa neuroscientists studying spatial learning and the effects of stress on memory announced Tuesday that a little son-of-a-bitch mouse ruined an experiment on cognitive performance by effortlessly navigating a maze that researchers spent nearly a year designing and constructing.
The test subject, a common house mouse, briskly traversed the complicated wooden maze in under 30 seconds or, according to the study's final report, roughly 1/8,789,258 as long as it took the lab to secure funding for the experiment.
Shipping brains
The instructions for packing a fresh brain for shipment to the New York Brain Bank. Step 1: Put the fresh brain (A) in the first ziploc bag...
Six degrees of instant messaging
Now, I'm really skeptical of the six-degrees of freedom stuff, and mildly skeptical of small world network things in general (lots of shiny, little usefulness). However, I may be swayed by some new research coming out of Microsoft (?!) who tracked a metric crap-tonne of instant messages traveling through the MSN network:
Eric Horvitz, at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, and Jure Leskovec, who was an intern at the time, crunched through masses of data, logging a month's worth of global 'instant messaging' conversations using Microsoft Messenger — software that facilitates chat, in a similar way to e-mail, but in a more instantaneous and less formal fashion. The researchers then counted how many messages were sent and from where: in total they tallied up a whopping 255 billion messages sent in the course of 30 billion conversations among 240 million people during June 2006.
They found that the average path length is just over the Kevin Bacon gold-standard, at 6.6 nodes between any person. The full paper is available here.