Small Gray Matters

I’m in New York for the 2007 annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. CNS alternates between San Francisco and New York; this year it’s in the latter city. I suppose if you have to pick two cities to have a conference in, those are pretty good ones. Still, one of the things I like […]

The New York Times has an interesting article in today’s paper by Mary Jenkins covering a new federal program set to provide substantial raises in funding for a minority of graduate students in the sciences. The Pell-Mell Grants, a joint venture of the Federal Government, Pell Grant program, and Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is projected […]

Following in the footsteps several other science blogs, here’s a library card for smallgraymatters.com:

Select a few neuroimaging papers at random and you’re likely to come across a handful of statements in the introduction to the effect that the topic under study is of “increasing interest”. At conferences and research talks, you’ll sometimes see speakers invoke a familiar kind of figure that looks something like this:

That’s the number of […]

Mind Hacks offers up this humorous vignette for your entertainment:
There’s a lovely typo in a 1976 paper from the Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery, and Psychiatry that reports on a study about epilepsy after surgery. Check out the last sentence of the abstract …
I’ll spare you the suspense (but read the abstract anyway!): an undisclosed subset […]

I’d like to title this post “a power primer,” but that’s the title of a 1992 Psychological Bulletin article by Jacob Cohen (the god of power analysis, now deceased). So instead I’ve titled it “a primer on power.” By changing a few words around I’ve very cleverly gone from academic plagiarism to paying homage. (And […]

The PLoS blog has an interesting entry by Richard Cave, PLoS’s IT director, on the topic of unique author identification. If you’ve done more than a couple dozen literature searches, odds are you’ve run into cases where you’ve asked yourself “is I. Niedebeternaym the I. Niedebeternaym I’m looking for?” Sometimes authors share names; sometimes individual […]

The latest issue of Science has a really impressive article by Papassotiropoulos et al. probing the genetic basis of episodic memory. In it, the authors identify for the first time a link between a polymorphism in a gene called Kibra and individual variability in performance on delayed episodic memory tasks.
In brief, Papassotiropoulos and colleagues conducted […]

Many undergraduate students in the social and life sciences go through 4 or more years of university education utterly convinced that multiple choice exams are Satan’s favorite testing format. Drawn up by diabolical, sadistic demons (sometimes termed “professors”), questions on multiple choice exams are invariably ambiguous, unfair, and out for (the student’s) blood. Personally, […]

Jonah Lehrer has a post over at Frontal Cortex today that follows up on his article in Seed a couple of weeks ago arguing that exceptional abilities are the result of extensive practice rather than genetic predisposition. My own view is that they’re probably not; or at least, I’m not sure the question is a […]