Small Gray Matters

I’ve been too busy writing manuscripts and teaching to blog much lately, but since The Evil Monkey over at Neurotopia insists everyone should post about mirror neurons, I feel compelled to oblige. Mirror neurons seem to be getting the short end of the stick, so I’ll play devil’s advocate and try to convince you they’re […]

On a lark, I googled the phrase “cognitive neuroscience of religion”. I’m not really sure what I expected to find; maybe a few press articles on Michael Persinger’s “God machine” (a fancy name for TMS applied over the temporal lobes). As it turns out, Google returns only 3 hits for the phrase, which surprised me, […]

Developing Intelligence has a nice post today summarizing last week’s flurry of posts on the utility of functional neuroimaging. I should point out that while these posts offer a nice introduction to some of the issues involved, they by no means offer a comprehensive assessment of the pros and cons of fMRI. For one thing, […]

Update 08/01: Harry Collins left a comment below (be sure to read it!) noting some inaccuracies in this post, on the basis of which I’ve made some changes.

Remember the Sokal affair? Back in 1996, physicist Alan Sokal submitted a paper full of clever-sounding gibberish to Social Text, a leading postmodern journal. Shortly after the paper […]

The latest issue of Neuron has a fantastic article on visual attention from Maurizio Corbetta’s group at Washington University in St. Louis. In it, Jack and colleagues report finding a novel signal in V1 independent of other, relatively well-characterized signals.
V1 is the primary visual cortex–essentially, the first cortical stop for incoming visual information. The traditional […]

Mixing Memory has an excellent post today reviewing some recent empirical work on patriotism. The post discusses a paper by Schatz, Staub, and Lavine, in which the authors distinguish between ‘blind’ and ‘constructive’ patriotism, with the argument being (as you can imagine from the names) that one is constructive and the other is… less constructive. […]

A fascinating article in Science this week provides evidence that purports to show mice are capable of experiencing empathy. Langford, Mogil and colleagues found that mice administered a painful injection displayed increased writhing behavior (a reflexive response to pain) in the presence of cagemates who had also been injected than in the presence of either […]

No, this isn’t a post about the incidence of anxiety disorders among scientists. The question I want to ask is more circumscribed: how much do scientists need worry about the possibility of the assumptions that make their research possible failing?
Here’s how this question came up. In response to my last post, in which I argued […]

As a tangential follow-up the Bloom article and my post yesterday, Jonah Lehrer has a post today noting that Bloom failed to discuss the technical limitations of fMRI as another factor that should curb people’s enthusiasm for neuroimaging. While fMRI certainly has important technical limitations people should be aware of (low spatial and temporal resolution, […]

Paul Bloom has an article in Seed today lamenting the sway brain imaging research holds over the public and media compared compared to other less-feted areas of psychology. The response in the blogosphere has been passively favorable, so I thought I’d try to provide a spirited defense of the opposite view. I should […]