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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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...

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...

Reaction times (RTs) - what to do with them?

I t's raining today, and I've just emerged from reading a selection of articles on time memory in animals with a view to answering the question "can animals experience episodic memory?" Turns out that's a pain to answer since there are plenty of mechanisms that can masquerade as reliving an event including learning semantic rules and intervals . The upshot is we still don't know. The nice thing about my field however is that when theory tends towards the nebulous - and it frequently does, I can focus on methods for a while to take my mind off things... So, I've run an experiment and have a whole set of reaction times that I'm itching to analyze. What are my options? Any good statistician will tell you to plot your data first. In fact, should you go to see them for advice, they will, with a vague air of distressed incredulity, tell you to go off and plot your data. Usually I feel slightly ashamed for not having done this already, ...

Appraisals of Cognitive Neuropsychology

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