Scientists are a fractious lot. Near the end of a long discussion (in his study “Retinal ganglion cells responding selectively to direction and speed of image motion in the rabbit,” Horace B. Barlow, R.M. Hill, and W.R. Levick, The Journal of Physiology, vol. 173, no. 3, 1964, pp. 377-407.), Horace Barlow writes: “Much of this discussion […]
Tag: brain
A most emotionally colorful study (plus eye blinks & nude bodies)
This study appears to combine the brightest aspects of phrenology, Jungian psychology, painting-by-numbers, and numerous other disciplines: “Bodily maps of emotions,” Lauri Nummenmaa [pictured here], Enrico Glerean, Riitta Hari and Jari K. Hietanen, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 111 no. 2, January 14, 2014, pp. 646–651. The authors, at Aalto University, the […]
Winter/Summer Suggestion that Contagious Yawners are Cooling Their Brains
Another attempt to explain the mystery of why people yawn: “A thermal window for yawning in humans: Yawning as a brain cooling mechanism,” Jorg J.M. Massen [pictured here], Kim Dusch, Omar Tonsi Eldakar, Andrew C. Gallup, Physiology & Behavior, epub 2014. (Thanks to @ThatNeilMartin for bringing this to our attention.) The authors, at the University […]
Examining Bits from the Brains of Jugglers
The international effort to see what, if anything, special might happen to, in, or with the brains of jugglers continues. Jugglers in Germany are the subject of this study. At the time of the study, each juggler stopped juggling and instead clambered into an imaging machine: “Juggling revisited – a voxel based morphometry study with […]