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This is a little more homespun and combines several different approaches but:
Pretend that after every lecture you must give your own lecture to the class on the same topic. You may merge topics together, condense the information to a shorter form (no less than a TED Talk's length of time) but the holy rule is that you must be able to teach what you just learned to someone within 48 hours.
You will find that you will tend to invent your own metaphors, find strange connections between different courses you are taking and (hopefully) feel more inspired by the material when your task becomes "Explain what you just learned and why it matters." While I can't attest to a specific study done and while I'm but one data point, it has worked quite well in the past.
EDIT: A few further points: between textbooks, online lectures and other free or previously purchased resource it is possible and indeed preferable to never be surprised by a lecture. By previewing what is about to be formally learned you can anticipate sticking points, invent plausible explanations on why what you are learning is true and generate intelligent questions to ask in or after class. If you are caught up, it can help to try to get further ahead of the class. I have a certain amount I am committed to studying my core classes every week Proof so if I already got a firm grasp of the material I'll find lectures on courses I haven't taken just yet. That way I have a birds eye view of the road ahead and I'm not so nerveous about the unknown
Apologies for any typos the edit was done via smart phone
Dale Purves et al, Neuroscience, 6th edition. This is a good overview of neuro. I've seen it used in grad courses but it was also was a mainstay of undergrad.
After that, the latest edition of Principles of Neural Science, Eric Kandel et al. This is more involved and is often used as a reference for labs and grad students. Some might say this is a grad level book; however, I personally needed it for both undergrad and grad.
You might want to get both of them at the same time, so Kandel can be used if needed for further information whilst reading Purves. Both of these books can likely be found as pdfs on libgen.io.
Neuroanatomy: I used a book called The Human Brain in Photographs and Diagrams by John Nolte but there are many resources out there. She might want to get some free software to examine the brain in 3d. The Allen institute comes to mind.
I imagine this program is not research based, but she should still get used to reading papers, and also keep an eye on current neuro news. Science Daily, Neuroscience News, and New Scientist are good places to start. That said, reading papers can be hard if you don't have the background (neuro, stats, lab techniques).
I'm not sure how much time she has, so realistically speaking I would focus on reading Purves front to back and use everything else I've listed as supplementary first, and then dig deeper into them if she has the time.
I'm not sure if this is exactly the kind of book you're looking for, but The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat has always been one of my favorites. I think it does a good job of walking through a lot of history and basic neuroscience in the context of some pretty bizarre neurological disorders. Here's a full text if you wanna give it a look.
Here's a link to my notes for my Neural Implant Engineering class. There's audio recordings as well (not the clearest thing). https://onedrive.live.com/redir?page=view&resid=2030C747BAF341BA!227&authkey=!AGzssPbT8dZahw8
Buy the latest edition of Kalat's "Biological Psychology" that you can afford. I got the 7th edition for like $5 on abebooks.com. In fact a quick search shows that they are even cheaper than that. Gazzaniga's "Cognitive Neuroscience" is also a great text.
Read either and you should have a good foundation to start understanding neuroscience research.
It is not known how plasticity works in the brain and even under what circumstances new synapses are formed. There are many hypothesis out there. This is probably a good start. But if you know Hebbian learning it's unclear whether knowledge about spike timing dependent plasticity (STDP) will give you any more insight into how neurons work.
Hi,
Could you be more specific? Assuming you mean in a general intro sense:
Not molecular neuro per se but Drugs and the Brain is an okay introduction to neuropharmacological principles that are fairly generic. It includes some structural/molecular bio, some physiology (inter and intra-focussing on ionotropic channels and metabotropic GPCR pathways), some physical chemistry, and applied pharmacology.
I'd also recommend Kandel's Principles of Neural Science and Boron's Medical Physiology (mainly its chapters on electrophysiology, synaptic transmission and neuronal function) (these may be obtainable on libgen) as textbook resources.
Oh boy.
What you're describing is, indeed, a standard task that is commonly automated with software. See this link for details.
What you need to do is get the data into a format that is readable by some piece of software that can be used for spike sorting. Your best bet will probably be MatLab. There are myriad user-created spike sorting packages for MatLab. Do you have access to MatLab? I do not think this is something you can do using 'labchart.'
Leonard Mlodinow's Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior is a very interesting take on perception from the perspective of all that we *don't* perceive consciously, yet are acting on for any action or thought. He also writes in a very easy-to-comprehend way and has a good sense of humor with it.
I recommend "The Power of Habit" for taking control of your subconscious processes, or at least, the ones you care about. You'll still use subconscious processes (they're very efficient and free up conscious thought for other stuff), but ones that you've chosen to install as automated processes.
Read the associated papers' abstracts and view a few graphs at:
The Age of Olfactory Bulb Neurons in Humans
and
Human Adult Olfactory Bulb Neurogenesis? Novelty Is the Best Policy
If anyone could provide the full texts I'd be quite appreciative. I've already requested two articles over on /r/scholar today so I'd feel akward requesting these too.
Interesting followup:
Basically, there seems to be largely separate systems for deciding what is alive/has agency and what is human based on our mirroring of movements and association with existing internal emotional states.
As a thought, the weight which is placed between these concepts in the individual could be reflective of their "socialization". Those "socialized" with humans have a strong motor-emotive connection when observing humans, those "socialized" with animals have strong motor-emotive connections with animals, etc. If this is separate from the executive/planning associations, it could explain how "sociopaths" can so accurately predict and manipulate without empathy.
This is only my amateur postulation for the sake of discussion. Thoughts?
Sources, but no free fulltext:
EEG evidence for mirror neuron activity during the observation of human and robot actions: Toward an analysis of the human qualities of interactive robots
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092523120600511X
The anthropomorphic brain: The mirror neuron system responds to human and robotic actions
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811907000961
I heard someone "in the know" recently describe a new paper that claims to demonstrate differences in resting state between young and elderly can be entirely ascribed to differences in movement artifacts. Anyone else heard this recently?
EDIT: I think it's this one. This does look damning: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811911011815
Speaking of paradigm-shift-related books for general science, Chaos by James Gleick, and The Selfish Gene by Dawkins are of course a required reading.
Well I would highly suggest the carlson "Physiology of Behaviour" and the Gazzaniga textbook of cognitive neuroscience for some basic knowledge about long term potentiation and the hippocampal structures as well as memory in general. I am certain that you can download them through torrents or something (although I do not endorse such a thing ! :P ). Also if your university has access to Sci Direct you might want to login there and search for Review articles which usually sum up most research about a specific topic. If you don't have access just find the article through the search bar and request it on /r/Scholar . Hope this helps :) .
I strongly suggest you to start from general textbooks that can give you a broad introduction to the field: the most classic and famous is "Principle of Neural Science" by Eric Kandel. If you want to get a little bit more quantitative, I suggest you to take a look at "Theoretical Neuroscience", by Peter Dayan and Larry Abbott.
Finally, Wikipedia is a surprisingly good source of information. In addition, you can also take a look at Scholarpedia, which is another wiki but it is written by the major experts in the field.
Don't waste your money on a personal MATLAB license before you've even started lab work - GNU Octave is a free analysis package whose syntax is close enough to MATLAB's that most MATLAB programs can be easily ported to Octave. If you do join a lab that uses MATLAB then you'll certainly gain access to an academic license, which will in most cases allow you to install MATLAB on a personal machine so that you can use it at home.
Having said that, I personally recommend Python as an environment for data analysis. Like many other neuroscientists, I started out using MATLAB then switched to Python partway through my PhD. Python is a much more well thought-out programming language, and there are now Python modules available that cover pretty much all of MATLAB's functionality, as well as a huge number of other applications. The Anaconda Python distribution from Continuum Analytics is probably the easiest way for a beginner to get set up.
Eye and Brain: The Psychology of Seeing by RL Gregory is written for a lay or intro undergraduate audience, isn’t too long, and explains lots of different perceptual phenomena.
Hey,
I know this is not what you're looking for, as it's method-based not specifically MATLAB and you may be familiar with the content already but in case it's helpful: https://www.coursera.org/course/fmri
As for the license: can you get a free/temporary license from your institution (if you're attached to one where you're using it)? Otherwise: can you afford the license? At least in AU, it's quite cheap (at least compared to the average textbook) and if you're going to do computational you might as well get it, since you'll be using MATLAB a lot and apparently Octave isn't great.
Is there a reason you don't want to use or modify Anki? https://apps.ankiweb.net/ It's based on the SM-2 algorithm by the same authors as that PDF and it has been extended by many people.
There are apps for desktop computers and phones, many plugins, and stats and so forth.
What you described is very unlike how the brain operates, so it's hard to answer your question. You might want to look into computational neuroscience and neural network modeling which have some interesting things to say not just about the brain in general but about color vision in particular. This came to mind immediately:
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Hyperacuity
Anyway, one can test a population of cells that are afferent to light sensors for reliable discrimination among different colors but in practice this is a lot more involved than it seems. To start with, animals that can see in color segregate color recognition with different photoreceptors, each of which responds optimally to a certain range of wavelengths. And some species of animals have six types of photoreceptors compared against our three ... in fact this isn't even strictly a scientific question; it has philosophical dimensions as well...
No. That's not the extent of what we know.
Everyone in all of the labs at my university (both theoretical/computational and experimental) use matlab. I took a theory class and used matlab for everything for modelling everything from single compartment conductances to network dynamics. Psychophysics experiments widely use the psychophysics toolbox for matlab to program stimuli. I also use matlab for data analysis and statistics (calcium imaging and patch-clamp electrophysiology). The worst thing about matlab is the cost/availability. For this reason, you might want to use something like octave. I am a novice and spend far too much time writing simple programs to offer advice but I wish I would've started in high school.
R for biostats is still used by some but many programs are switching to python for genomics etc. (my roomate is a genomics person and prefers to use numpy when dealing with matrix manipulations).
You can present a PTB window across a multi-monitor display, albeit it's an absolute pain the butt. On a Mac multi-monitor arrangement, you can call Screen() and request a resolution spanning the whole 'virtual' display (e.g. two 1280×800 monitors arranged horizontally means a virtual display resolution of 2560x800). See here for a Windows solution.
Psychopy should also be able to handle multiple monitors, although I haven't tested myself.
I'm reminded of a Dorothy Parker quote: “If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re happy.”
Everyone should be interested in the brain, a better question to ask yourself is, "do i have enough interest in this topic to sustain whatever adversity it meets?" You have to deal with a lot of rejection, pressure, and ego bruising. Its a great life, but only if you love it.
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/sebastian_seung.html
I am a PhD student in neuroscience, and this has to be one of the coolest things that I have seen. Mainly, because of the insane amount of work that goes into it, and that the histology (individual brain slices that they are re-creating 3 dimensionally) must be damn near perfect for the computer to recreate the images. I think this is at the forefront of neuroscience and will open many doors.
Otherwise, definitely Jill Bolte Taylor's stroke of insight or VS Ramachandran on your mind. Both are amazing scientists and have a gift for being able to translate scientific dialect into a language the general public can understand.
uh... a bAP starts where an AP usually starts, and propagates through the dendrites. see every paper here:
Edit: I kinda mis-read your question. I'm going to leave this here anyway since I still think it's interesting.
Cool question. The answer is yes! The more general term for this is lateralization or laterality. It's not just language and vision, but motor and sensory regions are on the contralateral side. I don't do primate research, but I can tell you that even rodents show handedness (preference of one paw or another for certain tasks). FYI, most rats are right-pawed.
If you can't provide any details for us to work with, we're kind of stuck.
My best advice would be to look up the name (chemical, not brand) of the medication on something like wikipedia and see if you can find anything there. If you want to dive in headfirst, you can try google scholar, and look for studies that investigate side effects of that medication. Try adding terms like "side effects, toxicity, poisoning" etc. to your search to get more specific.
If you do find something, you'll see it explained in terms you probably will not be familiar with. If you'd like, you can provide key words here to have us translate (but it comes to mind somebody could just google what you paste, find the original source, and deduce the medication you've been taking, if you're seriously concerned about privacy).
I can't imagine any sort of litigation that would keep somebody from discussing prescribed medication, however. Why are you legally prevented from doing so?
Absolutely incredible. Not only is it beautiful artwork, but this gives any visual researcher the perfect set of stimuli. THIS video is of an image of sky literally becoming more MEANINGFUL over time. Imagine presenting this to an animal, while probing changing activity levels down the visual stream.
Try this on grid cells and this on hippocampal place cells.
And then realize that Scholarpedia is awesome for (computational) neuroscience even though it's nowhere near comprehensive yet and despair of ever understanding the brain as you would like to.
As with all things in the brain, the visual system is amazing. Close your eyes, then open them. Whoa! All that light comes into your eyes and lets you know what is out there!
Check out Handwritten tutorials, there's a neuroscience section which has some information on vision: http://www.handwrittentutorials.com/videos.php
Khan academy also has some videos on neuroscience: http://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/human-biology/v/anatomy-of-a-neuron
I was coming here to say Jill Bolte Taylor's stoke of insight but ajaxanon beat me to it!
I was also enjoying some Oliver Sacks the other day.
If you're into mentla health I strongly recommend this one. It is very science heavy and a very academic, but had great information. http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/neuroscience-for-the-mental-health-clinician-first-edition-steven-r-pliszka-md/1122628502?ean=9781593850784&pcta=n&st=PLA&sid=BNB_DRS_Core+Shopping+Textbooks_00000000&2sid=Google_&sourceId=PLGoP1...
According to psychiatric research, paranoia is most closely related to the release of dopamine. Schizophrenic patients have been shown to have overactive dopaminergic neurons, as well as a larger number of D2 and D3 receptors, in the mesocorticolimbic system (source).
In this article, the authors cite research suggesting that cannabinoid (CB1) receptors up-regulate the transmission of dopamine in the mesocorticolimbic system. As such, high doses of THC, which acts as a CB1 agonist, would indirectly stimulate a large release of dopamine in this system and lead to feelings of paranoia.
Marijuana abuse has been linked to the onset of Schizophrenia as well as to the exacerbation of psychotic symptoms after the initial onset (references in article above).
This explanation likely only covers part of what's happening in your brain with the intake of a large dose of THC, but it provides at least one piece of the picture.
Are you looking in sections of the hippocampus or elsewhere?
PCNA is another marker for cell proliferation like Ki67 (not yet a neuron - could become other cell types like glia). See figure 10: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Murine-Features-of-Neurogenesis-in-the-Human-across-Knoth-Singe%C3%A7/3b854a23cffd8c1faf2fdd1ad67016742cfb2833
Two of my favorites:
My experience is mostly in python, but I'm also not an experienced AI developer. Udacity has a great free introduction to computer science course that polishes your basic python skills. After you are comfortable with that I would look into the intro to AI course. Here are links to both courses
Intro to CS: https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-computer-science--cs101
Intro to AI: https://www.udacity.com/course/intro-to-artificial-intelligence--cs271
I doubt that the time to generate a potential is a factor. The driver of the action potential is the field generated by voltage stimulation. This directly and instantly interacts with the axon afferents. Perhaps maybe a similar idea but for synaptic potentials at the motor neuron might make sense.
​
Perhaps the blood vessels constricting due to the action of ketamine might result in the axonal diameter expanding. since peripheral nerve fibers are enclosed in an endoneurium there might be extra space available. However, the only papers I found suggest a vasodilation.
​
Here's a great online resource run by McGill that gives overviews on just about any neuroscience topic you are likely to encounter in your courses:
http://thebrain.mcgill.ca/avance.php
At a more scholarly/advanced level, definitely check out scholarpedia. It's a wikipedia-like site, but all of the articles are written by experts in the field, and are peer-reviewed.
http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Encyclopedia:Neuroscience
Scholarpedia is especially useful when you have to write papers, because not only are the articles very comprehensive but they're also full of citations to relevant papers.
Found it! I was only aware of this idea through a sort of throwaway sentence in a review, but I thought it was interesting enough to remember. The referenced article is:
Ahissar, E. and David Kleinfeld (2003). Closed-loop Neuronal Computations: Focus on Vibrissa Somatosensation in Rat. Cerebral Cortex 13: 53–62.
I have not actually read the article. The review that mentions it is on Scholarpedia:
Models of Thalamocortical System
...in the first sentence of the section on Oscillation-Assisted Processing.
Extracellular recordings of multiple single-units: http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v7/n5/pdf/nn1233.pdf
Intracellular recordings: http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Intracellular_recording
Here is the link to the pdf of the paper.
Like most people have said here, MATLAB is really popular in computational, cognitive, developmental and systems neuroscience.
It is a good language to get started with, as it will give you the foundational blocks and most labs in said fields use it anyway.
If you don't have access to a copy of MATLAB via your institution and don't want to shell out some serious cash, you can get started with the GNU open source alternative: Octave.
I enjoyed Musicophilia. Loved the work that he did with stroke patients and the ability to communicate through singing.
A book from my very first introduction to psych course, it's not very deep (aimed towards lay people), and mostly on the biological side, but highly entertaining: Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing - Livingstone & Hubel
EDIT: Visual perception only
I read it from beginning to end. It is the most common one, but is more confusing than anything. It jumps from topic to topic, without explaining each system in a comprehensive way. Also, there are no citation in the chapters themselves, which makes it difficult to actually use the info when you write a paper. A Much better book is cited below. Me and my adviser used to call it our bible.
https://www.amazon.com/Human-Central-Nervous-System-Synopsis/dp/3540346848
I do agree that it doesn't appear to make sense. The only thing that would appear to prevent hard determinism here is quantum mechanics (although not the many-worlds interpretation). While I think Penrose's microtubule theory sounds ridiculuous, there have been plenty of groundbreaking discoveries in quantum biology, as laid out in Life on the Edge. Who would've thought photosynthesis and enzymatic activity involved quantum weirdness?
And even if this was the case, quantum randomness doesn't exactly seem compatible with free will either.
It's of course the biggest cop-out of all time--attempting to rescue free will with quantum mechanics--but I don't mind it.
If I don't have free will and we live in hard deterministic universe, I couldn't have thought or written anything other than what I'm thinking and writing right now. And if I have to believe in free will, so be it. And you have no choice but to consider my arguments in exactly the way you are doing right now. It couldn't be any other way. If, that is, hard determinism is true.
If you can choose to believe in free will, you are right. If you can't, it doesn't matter. The only possibility for error is to choose not to believe in free will.
Check out Blank Slate book, it has a ton of material on personality traits are inherited (dna dependent) - probably most of them.
https://www.amazon.com/Blank-Slate-Modern-Denial-Nature/dp/0142003344
Having said that - some of the brain development is environment-based, and a lot of brain function has to do with macro structures of the brain - those are based on dna, but changing dna once the brain is fully grown wouldn’t change the structure.
​
My personal bet: intelligence-related stuff wouldn’t change much. Everything else like emotionality, empathy, reasoning - a lot. A simple proof: try feeding a homophobe with MDMA :)
Anything by Oliver Sacks for a good read.
If you're looking for textbooks this is what I bought to teach myself basic neuroscience when my PhD thesis took a turn into neuroscience from biophysics. I thought it was appropriate for advanced high school to average sophomore/junior level. For textbooks, I'd buy the second most recent edition of whatever as it's $10 as opposed to $250 and will be obsolete by the time you take a neuro class anyways.
There's a great book about how we use two different systems in our brain to make decisions, one fast one that makes snap decisions based off gut feeling and is prone to cognitive biases, and a slower one that makes calculated and rational decisions. http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Fast-Slow-Daniel-Kahneman/dp/0374533555
A case study shows the importance of the oribitalfrontal cortex in mediating emotion and rationality in decision making. This young man suffered damage to that area and was no longer able to make decisions through emotion. His "fast system 1" was essentially damaged and could not be accessed, and the consequences of this was striking. Even making the simplest decisions such as having a doctor's appointment on a Tuesday or a Wednesday can take hours of weighing the pros and cons of each option.
My guess would be that system 1 has a lot to do with implicit learning through the cerebellum and basal ganglia. This is where we make associations through repeated experiences that habitualize our thoughts and actions. There is a lot of research on how these systems work. The cerebellum is perhaps one of the best understood systems in terms of how a biologically plausible algorithm can give rise to its implicit learning due to its relatively simple and repeated structure. Supervised learning is a machine learning algorithm that fits very well with this.
Here is an additional paper about the basal ganglia. http://papers.cnl.salk.edu/PDFs/How%20the%20Basal%20Ganglia%20Make%20Decisions%201996-2876.pdf
I wish I could give you a better answer, but this is what I have for your very thought-provoking question.
Edit: The thread says 4 comments but I only see 3. Is it just me or is everyone else seeing 4? Maybe someone actually blocked me. o_O
I've been struggling with free will for a few weeks since I read Joseph LeDoux's Synaptic Self. It's a great book. You should read it if you are interested in the subject.
During my undergraduate research, I worked with Fragile X model mice with the fmr1 knockout gene. The way to test for the disorder is with anxiety tests such as radial arm test, open field test, marble burying test.
The gene knockout results in immature spine formation on the dendrites.
If you're okay with doing a course that includes tests I would highly recommend Dr Mason's Understanding the Brain: The Neurobiology of Everyday Life. It's a good primer for a lot of the fundamentals of neurobiology and Dr Mason is excellent at distilling and explaining the concepts in a relevant and easy to understand manner. The test questions however are all application-based and will require a solid understanding of the content being taught (ie. it won't require outside learning but it's no pushover). Definitely keep a lookout for any future sessions of it: https://www.coursera.org/course/neurobio
Basically any animal can have its behavior modified by operant conditioning. The neuroscientist you talked to sound like they haven't trained animals before because we don't use a behavior as reward to train animals. I've trained mice, cats, and monkeys and all of their training used some sort of food as a reward. Mice liked Ensure, cats liked pureed beef or chicken baby food, monkeys like water or juice. That's not to say animals can't find their behavior rewarding - I've heard stories from colleagues about the rare monkey that would do their experimental behaviors "for free" without any reward, but it's rare.
You do need to find something that is motivating and preferably you need to enhance that motivation. We would food and water restrict our behavior animals so that they got the majority of their food/water during training/experiments. So if you reeeeallly like candy, I'd say it can work if you only allow yourself to have candy immediately after completing a small unit of whatever task you need to do. And only then. Importantly, you need to reward often and consistently and only when you complete something successfully. In my experience with monkeys and cats, consistency is key. You have to do this nearly every day - monkeys are noticeably worse at their tasks on Mondays after a weekend off. Break down bigger tasks into smaller segments so you can reward more often. Rewards should be relatively small so you don't get sated too quickly and your reward becomes less motivating. For example, you might have a small piece of chocolate for every 5-10 pages you read.
Don't Shoot the Dog is a great book about animal (and human) training and is required reading for nearly every animal lab I've been affiliated with.
Thanks, I'll keep an eye on this one. Probably irrelevant here, but if I had the time I would really love to create a method to do contact follow up on any medical study which had dropouts over ~10% of initial pool.
With regard to your experience, unfortunately no one really knows how to help because this is all pretty unexplored territory. Doctors will try what they know, but this falls outside of the what they know territory. And if they treat outside of what they know, they run a pretty significant chance of making it worse.
If it's in your budget, tDCS devices like this have a very safe profile and I've personally seen pretty good results with them. I checked on the .se amazon and it looks like they only have TENS devices, but they may be available on other stores.
tDCS basically sends a tiny electric current over the top of your skull/skin, and this tiny electric current increases underlying metabolic processes. Working under the assumption that there's some type of insult to the raphe nuclei or other ARAS structures, the hypothesis is that this will increase glial activity around the insult and speed up the healing process.
I'll update if I think of another option that's safe enough to try at home, but unfortunately this is a tough one because it's unexplored for the most part.
I built my own circuits because I couldn't find any HD-TDCS devices that supported the current levels I was targeting (at that point wanted to see if tolerability improved over time) and cheap enough I could hand them out.
I've tested this Apex device and it actually gets to about 5.5mA, however they screwed up the ramp on it so it's logarithmic instead of linear (meaning it doesn't really start ramping until it's turned all the way up, then it goes up fast). I've heard decent things about this neuromyst device (amazon link) as well, but haven't personally had experience with it.
Most of the research I've seen and my own personal experience indicate that it if there is a deactivating effect it's pretty small. I'm not sure why the "snap" method is effective from a physiology standpoint, my assumption is not that it depolarizes or depresses activity so much as resets the circuit to resting state.
Mind Fixers: Psychiatry's Troubled Search for the Biology of Mental Illness by Anne Harrington is a very informative and readable book on this topic.
>In Mind Fixers, “the preeminent historian of neuroscience” (Science magazine) Anne Harrington explores psychiatry’s repeatedly frustrated efforts to understand mental disorder.
I suspect that is way too vague of a question to have an answer (murder vs jaywalking, the person's individual biology and environment, etc).
You may be interested in the book Behave by Robert Sapolsky, as he looks at behavior in general from one second before you do something, up to months before you do something.
I'm using chrome and having no problems opening it. It's just the cover and table of contents though.
How about this? Clicking 'download pdf' should give you a document with a list of all the chapters in the book, along with brief descriptions of each chapter, making it more useful than the link originally posted. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/265226734_23_Problems_in_Systems_Neuroscience
Classic papers. The relevant authors here are Britten and Movshon, and more recently, Shadlen and Newsome.
Representation of stimuli: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=1959251457679630736&hl=en&as_sdt=0,14 Effect on behavior: http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=1919749533565018782&hl=en&as_sdt=0,14
A common method used by medical students to create long term memories is "spaced repetition." Basically flash cards you do every day and the frequency you see a given card is based on how many times in a row you got it right or not. I suggest the app anki. https://apps.ankiweb.net/
You can make your own cards or look to see if someone has made a deck based on the content or textbook you're interested in.
This may help if your ability to form declarative memories is impaired but partially intact.
Other things like working on physical and mental health certainly help. The importance of sleep in memory cannot be understated. Pneumonics and things like that may help you as well- good pneumonics can let you remember five+ things by really just remembering one.
Goodluck
Sadly, it's a bit outside the 5 year requirement since it was published in 2014, but "Do Zombies Dream of Undead Sheep" is a decent primer for general audiences while being entertaining enough for people who already know most of the information presented.
There are a lot of open datasets out there.
For instance https://www.kaggle.com/datasets?tagids=13207
Maps: https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=3/38.01/-95.84
Also, some govt sites have open datasets(Fed, state, local)
I would start by searching for "open datasets".
Or for example if you are looking for climate studies, "open source climate datasets".
You can train your brain just like you train your body.
Read, listen to audiobooks, podcasts. Talk to people.
Think of things that are important to you and that you want to know more about, and focus on those. Maybe even read or listen to this book:
Just like training your body, training your brain takes time, and is not always easy, but you can do it and it will give you satisfaction.
I recently bought the book An introduction to the Mathematics of Neurons - modeling in the frequency domain. Maybe the topics in this book can serve as a start to look for papers on open problems.
A quick search on recent publications about VCON networks turns up an article like Network of phase-locking oscillators and a possible model for neural synchronization.
>Considering models for time signal processing and transmission, this article is an attempt on giving an integrative approach to the following problems:
> * (1) modeling neural activity as phase-locking oscillations depending on connections and local free-running frequencies; > * (2) establishing a full-connected three-node phase locking network with different free-running frequencies, showing the emergence of a synchronous state depending on the delays signal transmission. > > This kind of system is able to process and organize experiences and events, seen as stochastic inputs, providing a structure with some kind of subjectivity given by time sensations depending on the inputs and the internal structure of the network.
Yes, I remember about this wonderful publication =) But thank you for your answer!
It may be a good idea indeed to include some really sloppy paper; one of those where some unrelated weirdly abbreviated areas light up in a random fashion when some complicated stimuli are provided... And then show the Salmon.
But it would make a necessity of showing some good fMRI studies even greater. I am aware of some obvious dream reading and mind-reading studies, but is not quite enough =)
Clinical Efficacy of a New Automated Hemoencefalographic Neurofeedback Protocol
Short answer I'm not sure. Elaboration and speculation follow:
Consider four hypothetical groups of people, clustered based on whether they have Alzheimer's (AD) and whether they have plaques (AB): AD+/AB+; AD+/AB-; AD-/AB+; AD-/AB-
The current dogma in the field is that the groups AD+/AB- and AD-/AB+ don't exist. That's it because it predicts plaques cause Alzheimer's in all cases.
For the strong version of the "plaques are beneficial" hypothesis to be true, you need to implant plaques in someone who is AD+/AB- and it would turn them into an AD-/AB+ individual. I can't find anything suggesting this is possible. But I haven't looked very hard and this isn't my field of expertise.
But see this discussion I found after a Google search asking basically the same question. The two replies suggest that plaques may be less toxic than AB oligomers while still toxic in themselves. So this supports a weaker version of the "plaques are beneficial" hypothesis where it's worse than normal but better than oligomers.
Furthermore they suggest that plaques promote aggregation of oligomers, thus reducing the concentration of the more harmful substance.
The implication is interesting. Removing plaques may be harmful (which I concede is different than being purely beneficial), because it would promote dispersal of more toxic AB oligomers. This therapies that target removal of plaques may actually accelerate progression of AD.
Food for thought!
I searched for mindfulness vigilance and found this.
Does Mindfulness Meditation Enhance Attention? A Randomized Controlled Trial >After training and 4 weeks of twice-daily practice, the mindfulness group demonstrated significantly greater discriminability on a signal detection task than did the other groups. Significant improvements in sustained attention were found following mindfulness meditation, which did not appear to be mediated by relaxation or practice effects. Performances on measures of concentration and inhibition of distraction did not support the hypothesis. These results partially support current considerations of mindfulness meditation to enhance attention.
Someone over at /r/Scholar was kind enough to furnish me with a copy of the paper and the supplementary materials.
https://zapier.com/blog/better-memory/
I think to a degree you can just straight up improve to your memory to an extent, but using some different techniques can make a much bigger difference if you practice enough. There are some pretty good starting points on that link. The chunking thing and the memory palace thing are a couple of good examples of techniques you can learn and improve on to greater effect than brain training. There are some other key techniques that I cannot remember, I'm sure there's a forum or something somewhere dedicated to them but I don't know where to look.
<em>Neuropsychiatry, Neuropsychology, and Clinical Neuroscience</em> by R. Joseph has a few great chapters on the early evolutionary development of the human brain.
I have some ideas. I know a professor at UC Davis who is working with patients with acquired brain damage to places such as the hippocampus, trying to improve their spatial memory and attention. The "intervention" they are testing and researching is a simple videogame that trains your spatial memory abilities. It isn't directly going to help you with rotating 3d objects in space, but there may be some overlap. Maybe (if I'm lucky) I could get him to look at this thread and offer some advice to you.
On google I found a 2D mental rotation game/test on one of Cambridge's Brain Science websites... Maybe this could help you? http://www.cambridgebrainsciences.com/browse/concentration/test/rotation-task
Here's another 2D rotation game/test. http://bjornson.inhb.de/?p=55 I wonder where all the 3D rotation tests are... I am sure they are out there somewhere.
Best of luck my friend.
You're welcome. Honestly, regarding the nature of the program, Purves might be enough. I took some IONM grad courses myself, and I would focus on the sensory, motor and auditory systems, the brain stem and cranial nerves, and neural signaling and things like evoked potentials.
Here's a link to a pdf for an IONM book although it's quite old. I would think there are newer ones available by different authors.
Purves is available on libgen.io, the last one is the latest and the second mirror is functional. I would google libgen before you use it for informational purposes.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0304395908004211 this is a link to the abstract to one of the studies they conducted. the abstract is free, should anyone be interested in the full article let me know, i will pass it on, after getting a permission
I don't mean perfectly silence the LFP, just render it insignificant for entrainment. I don't quite see how that isn't possible. The LFP is naturally attenuated as it propogates to adjacent neurons from wherever its source is. If I could control the conductivity and permittivity of the extracellular space while holding the local environment around neurons relatively the same, it should be possible to adjust the degree of attenuation.
I guess I'm glad to provide a clear example of something! Although it feels more like an inversion of the ignorance fallacy: I resist, rather than invoke, a god-of-the-gaps for qualia, because I think they can be explained with existing science. In any case, I take comfort in the fallacy fallacy, which lets me commit fallacies without necessarily being wrong ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.
For what it's worth, I was poking at OP's phrasing of "numerous simultaneous neural connections forming a complex pattern," which is so broad it covers any materialist view of consciousness, when OP probably meant to get a little more granular. Every model on this page — The Koch/Tononi IIT, Global Workspace, EM Field, etc., is a "complex pattern" related to neural activity, so the only way to answer "no" would require some sort of dualism.
Yes, there is a huge literature on how we determine the similarity and category of objects/concepts etc. This scholarpedia article provides a nice and well referenced overview.
To give you an overview, our visual system is organized hierarchically such that as you go up the visual hierarchy, brain regions become increasingly more invariant to changes. For example, in lower-level regions (e.g., primary visual cortex; V1) a small change in object size might lead to a big change in neural response. However, a higher-level regions (e.c., lateral occipital complex; LOC) might exhibit the same pattern of response across changes in size, viewpoint etc. At the most anterior regions of the temporal lobe (e.g., hippocampus) neurons exhibit the same response to vastly different examples of the same thing, such as different jack chan scenes.
Perception as an active process is not really a surprise. For example Haken modeled it as a self organizing process. Selective top down attention has been modeled which is also a top down process.
I believe that the brain generates images like GANs do. Differences between the predicted image and the actually perceived image drive behavior. In this sense perceptions are controlled illusions. However without the feedback from the environment they become psychotic or schizophrenic.
This isn't my area of expertise but I can point you in the right direction.
There are a couple of related search terms you can look into, "Homeostatic Regulation of Neuronal Excitability" is one, and the link discusses the more specific "homeostatic intrinsic plasticity" and "homeostatic synaptic plasticity".
You seem to be asking about homeostatic synaptic plasticity but the mechanism I can explain best is homeostatic intrinsic plasticity.
Homeostatic intrinsic plasticity is a negative feedback mechanism that offsets excessive activity. Understood from the perspective of control theory this requires a few things and you've already pointed one of them out: the homeostatic balance level decider. This is the reference that the cell uses to decide when to stop downregulating receptors.
In response to the first part of your question, the decider could be internal calcium levels. High levels of calcium kill the cell and so there is evolutionary pressure to have negative feedback mechanisms to preserve a set level of calcium. If a critical concentration of calcium is reached, calcium-sensitive proteins in the cell initiate the death cycle.
So in a situation where a neuron receives more neurotransmitter-induced activity than usual-- such as in the presence of a serotonin reuptake blocker-- calcium levels go up, and a negative feedback loop does what it can to reduce calcium levels. (Note that I am being vague about what exactly is happening mechanistically. This is partly due to my ignorance, but is also because the literature was vague too.)
In response to the second part of your question, apparently this negative feedback mechanism ends up acting on receptor trafficking pathways, and this could be through a number of ways: it could prevent transcription, it could actively remove existing receptors from the cell membrane, it could do it a less obvious way.
Hope I helped?
PS2: Here are good starting points for current serious consciousness theories:
Scholarpedia on Models of Consciousness (made by Izhikevich, which made famous contributions to computational neuroscience, this website is your de facto route if you want to learn more about a neuroscience topic).
Francis Crick Memorial Conference 2012, focused solely on consciousness with lots of very interesting talks and famous consciousness researchers.
Any ideas about what?
Anyway, further reading http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Interneurons http://homes.mpimf-heidelberg.mpg.de/~mhelmsta/pdf/1998%20Somogyi%20Tamas%20Lujan%20Buhl%20BrainResRev.pdf
But if you're doing a masters and you want to be an academic (heaven help you) then this is what you do: Go and work in the lab with the most high impact publications. End of discussion.
Is there any further reading on this research? The only related publication I could find is this article by Brandy L. Callahan et al. from 2015, and it makes no mention of VR.
Personally, I would recommend getting experiences from both related to your program and outside your department, to see applications from different perspectives.
If you wanted to experiment with some free online courses, there are a few data analysis courses on Coursera using python, r, and matlab. If you want, check out the computational neuroscience course with Rajesh Rao, it's coming to an end, but it's really good. Also, if you're interested, another applicable class is Machine Learning with Andrew Ng. It's starting next week and he teaches the basics of matlab, advanced learning algorithms, and then makes the connection to neural networks.
Synapses, Neurons and Brains Coursera course
You should be able to access the archive and see all the videos.
If Idan Segev can't make you love neuroscience, no one can :P
PsychoPy should definitely be on there. It's primarily designed for psychophysical testing but is flexible enough to be adapted for a lot of different things. It also has compatibility with quite a large variety of hardware e.g. photometers, eyetrackers, button boxes, etc.
128 Channels is even more than a 10-10 placement, are you sure you need that many?
How are you recording 128 channels of data?
Do you already have the controllers and electrodes?
I saw an adjustable 19 channel (enough for 10-20) strap set on Amazon for $49 US, that might be an option (boo Amazon, I know I know).
Have you thought about 3D printing a headset?
Can strongly recommend this book, Experimenting with Babies.
It is very much like a Developmental Cognitive Science crash course. Each chapter provides a fun activity with your baby, an accessible explanation of the scientific study behind the activity including the metrics used, and the theories that lead to the study design. I am a researcher in cognitive neuroscience, and each time a lab member or colleague in a related field has a baby, we get them this book as a gift; it's always a massive success.
Definitely not! https://www.amazon.com/Mind-Mnemonist-Little-Memory-Foreword/dp/0674576225
> This study explores the inner world of a rare human phenomenon―a man who was endowed with virtually limitless powers of memory. From his intimate knowledge of S., the mnemonist, gained from conversations and testing over a period of almost thirty years, A. R. Luria is able to reveal in rich detail not only the obvious strengths of S.’s astonishing memory but also his surprising weaknesses: his crippling inability to forget, his pattern of reacting passively to life, and his uniquely handicapped personality.
I read Kandel's book cover to cover (4th version) and had many issues with it. It skips topics, and over focus on others. Below is the best book for beginners:
For a fun way of learning neuroanatomy, try coloring books! I know it sounds dumb but it’s great to get an introduction and overall grasp of and anatomy. I think this one is great (Netter's Neuroscience Coloring Book https://www.amazon.com/dp/0323509592/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_glc_fabc_p8gZFbZQXTPMC ). Other than that, a more interactive version is the Allen Brain Atlas Brain Explorer 2 (https://human.brain-map.org/static/brainexplorer). Good luck!
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing. It’s currently $14.99USD on Amazon for the kindle edition
Thanks :) I will look into that. May I suggest to you the book Behave by Robert Stapolsky. He's professor of biology, neurology and neurological sciences and, by courtesy, neurosurgery, at Stanford. His book takes an interdisciplinary approach to explain behavior. In a nutshell, he asks the following question: "Alright, a behavior has occured.. what happened in the brain during / prior to that event? What happened seconds before that in the environment, what sensory information what the organism exposed to? What happens hours before; hormones? What happened months before, during adolescence and childhood? What happend when you were still a fetus / the influence of prenatal environment? What happened when you were just a fertilized egg, your genes and gene/environment interactions? What happened certuries ago in your culture, how did evolution shaped behavior?"
I think you get the point, he takes an impressive interdisciplinary approach to explaining behavior.
Exactly. I have that book already, and read his other book: The Brain's Way of Healing. I find it rather difficult to convey these ideas of neuroplasticity to him in a way that he won't feel attacked by it or drop out the conversation because it's hard to follow. Which seems to be an issue I encounter in general. Neuroscience is so complex it's often hard to talk about the implications to people who are in no way familiar with it.
A good start for a layman, or indeed anyone interested, would be A Very Short Introduction To The Brain.
It’s a small handbook that introduces the reader to a lot of aspects of neurology. Would recommend!
Thank you for sharing your opinion and beliefs. Real freethinkers read EVERYTHING, including research papers and books. Some might call it challenging, I suppose, because I agree that there are no shortcuts. Have a nice day.
"It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine"
Dr. Marcia Angell, “Drug companies & doctors: a story of corruption," NY Review of Books, 56 #1, 15 Jan
Also, in response to your suggestion about buying one of Tufte's book. I've actually been looking into getting something like this for a bit now. Which book are you referencing specifically? I did an Amazon search and found a few: Envisioning Information, Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Beautiful Evidence. There were also a few other authors that had a few interesting looking texts.
This is very similar to what I'm doing. I have a BSEE and currently transitioning to a research career in computational neuroscience. Some books I'd recommend checking out are Brain-Computer Interfacing and Theoretical Neuroscience.
You don't have to necessarily buy them or read them, but perusing the table of contents and searching for courses that used either of the textbooks can give you more clarity about some of the crossovers between EE and neuroscience that can at least the bridge the gap, even if not your final destination.