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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

“Disease of knowledge”

Beloved British satirist Terry Pratchett, 60, discusses his early-onset Alzheimers and the culture he finds himself in: It occurred to me that at one point it was like I had two diseases – one was Alzheimer’s and the other was knowing I had Alzheimer’s. There were times when I thought I’d have been much happier [...]

The coloring of perception by expectation

Esther-Ingless Arkell breaks down a Journal of Neuroscience paper: Common sense holds that your brain sees an object, and then recognizes it. But a new study shows that the reality may be the reverse. Your expectations shape what you see.There is an area of every person’s brain, the fusiform face area, that is in charge [...]

Let the soothing yet authoritative voice of Morgan Freeman walk you through the neurology of religious experience

“Warmth” and “warmth”

The body, apparently, confuses the personable-metaphorical and physical-literal concepts of the term. Johan Lehrer passes along a study by the Bargh lab which showed subjects displaying more trust in strangers after handling a squishy warm object: Trust lies at the heart of person perception and interpersonal decision making. In two studies, we investigated physical temperature as [...]