Ninth and Prospect will be Avenged!

I live in a suburb of Cleveland, and work in the city proper–that’s probably the first time I’ve mentioned that in this blog. Anyway, parts of downtown are blocked off because a director of whom I have formed an opinion is shooting a quirky little indie film called (checks IMDB) “The Avengers.” Today, I ducked [...]

Monday Morning Surrealism

Thinking with your gut

Via Science Daily: For the first time, researchers at McMaster University have conclusive evidence that bacteria residing in the gut influence brain chemistry and behaviour. The findings are important because several common types of gastrointestinal disease, including irritable bowel syndrome, are frequently associated with anxiety or depression. In addition there has been speculation that some [...]

Thinking in pictures?

Rearchers at the University of Montreal claim to have demonstrated via MRI what many ASD people have known from phenomenology forever: People with autism use their brains differently from other people, which may explain why some have extraordinary abilities to remember and draw objects in detail, according to new research. University of Montreal scientists say [...]

The material soul

The body confuses its ideas for sensations, and confuses its sensations for ideas.

An Asperger Geiger?

Via Futurity: [A]n MRI scanner [is used] to take pictures of the brain’s grey matter. A separate imaging technique was then used to reconstruct these scans into 3-D images that could be assessed for structure, shape, and thickness—all intricate measurements that reveal autism spectrum disorder (ASD) at its root. Details are reported in the Journal [...]

Monkeys reason about their own thoughts, know self-doubt

Via HuffPo’s Joanna Zelman: Apparently humans aren’t the only ones filled with self-doubt and uncertainty. A recent study found that certain monkeys question their own thinking as well. Professor John David Smith and Michael Beran trained macaques, which are of the Old World group (native to Africa, Asia, and Europe), to play a computer game [...]

Study claims testosterone dysfunction may cause autism, prevalence of ASD in males

There’s a lot of controversy on basically every aspect of autism research. Just 68 years ago, “autism” didn’t exist as a diagnosis. It would be another few decades before the condition was fully differentiated from schizophrenia. The full diversity of its expression and functionality was not be recognized until the 1980′s when Asperger syndrome was taxonomized. And ten years ago, it was believed [...]

Not just bad science; fradulence

Via the NY Times: The first study to link a childhood vaccine to autism was based on doctored information about the children involved, according to a new report on the widely discredited research.The conclusions of the 1998 paper by Andrew Wakefield and colleagues was renounced by 10 of its 13 authors and later retracted by [...]

Giffords’ prognosis

Via MSNBC’s  JoNel Aleccia: “She’s still critically ill,” said Dr. Alex Valadka, a neurosurgeon and spokesman for the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. “We get excited when people hold up a couple of fingers, but that’s a long way from higher functioning.” Doctors at University Medical Center in Tucson, Ariz., said they were cautiously optimistic [...]