A long expected blog post

I'm back & am hoping to be posting more regularly (once a week is my current goal). My previous posts were done two years ago when I was taking a course on neuroethics. While I found it very thought provoking, likely the content of this blog will be changing a bit. For the past six months I've been reviewing articles for f1000.com, and really enjoyed the process - it's also part of the motivation to start blogging more as f1000 is reserved for articles that are truly commendable.

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Video games allow for multitasking? A review of "Improving multi-tasking ability through action videogames"

W ould you believe that playing video games could make you more likely to succeed as a pilot? There's been quite a bit of colloquial evidence on multitasking and task-switching floating around the internet recently, thanks in no small part to work by Ophir et al., (2009) who showed that people who are habitual media-multitaskers (i.e. those annoying people who text while watching a movie or even worse while driving) tend to perform worse on a wide variety of cognitive measures of attention. They concluded that people who are chronic media multitaskers have a "leaky filter", and as such cannot block out irrelevant (and distracting) information. This agrees nicely other theories of attention, and particularly inhibitory theory (Hasher & Zacks, Michael C. Anderson, Gazzaley). One reason that multitasking has come under such scrutiny is that it is now encouraged and even expected in many professions and by many employers. Even in situations where multitasking...

Dopamine helps the brain change gears: A review of "Dopamine-supports coupling of attention-related networks."

Before we begin, some background information... It seems that networks and the idea of connectivity is on everybody's minds these days (pardon the pun). It's a fairly safe bet to say that nearly everyone affiliated with neuroscience has more than a passing familiarity with the default mode and dorsal attention networks (i.e. see Raichle et al., 2001). These networks are anticorrelated which is to say that when one is being more heavily accessed, the activity in the other is suppressed. Broadly, the default mode is active at rest, during mind wandering and when thinking about the autobiographical past - it has been described as being related to internally directed attention. The dorsal attention or task positive network on the other hand is engaged when attention needs to be directed outwards at a cognitively demanding task or situation. From Dang et al., 2012 What about the frontoparietal cognitive control network? This network was discove...

On the use and abuse of Hairballs. What might graph-theory mean for cognitive neuroscience?

Olaf Sporns Discovering the Human Connectome H aving just returned from the OHBM (Organization for Human Brain Mapping) it's not hard to be phenomenally ecstatic about the state of research and raring to apply new techniques and theories to my data. There is much to be hopeful for; I encountered many brilliant people who are excited about their research and how neuroscience is helping to unlock the secrets of the mind. That said, there did seem to be a great deal of research that was following the coat-tails of last year's big ideas. This year the "big thing" was graph theory - the branch of mathematics and computer science that was previously applied to other fields such as social network visualization and biology by Olaf Sporns and applied to brain networks. Graph theory works on the notion that you can reduce a matrix (normally a correlation matrix) to a set of nodes (which represent specific brain regions) and edges (which represent either phys...

Appraisals of Cognitive Neuropsychology

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