Spearing the Brain

Well, I've been slow to update this blog, and meaning to post this story since I came across it: Docs Reveal Stunning Images Of Teen With Spear Through Head In brief: Doctors remove a spear (accidentally deployed from a speargun in what the story calls a "freak accident") that entered just above a teenage boy's right eye, and then penetrated the back of his skull. The pictures are amazing, as is the boy's expected recovery.

Trepanation kit

Just came across a lovely trepanation kit, featured on BoingBoing. David Pescovitz writes:

Over the years, I've spotted many trephination tools at various antique scientifica dealers. But this complete set is by far the most stately I've ever seen. No wonder it's in London's Wellcome Collection on display as part of their current Brains exhibition.

To see a picture of the kit and read more about it, see Skull drill set from the 18th century.

Love and the Brain

Last night, I watched a fabulous short film called "The Love Competition" by Brett Hoff. I saw it on Wholphin (which I subscribe to and love), but the piece can be viewed *right now* on Vimeo: http://vimeo.com/33698394, and I recommend you check it out asap.

The premise? A team of Stanford neuroscientists scans the brains of a half-dozen or so competitors (aged 10-75) as they love as hard as they can for five minutes. MRI scans reveal the winners! The brain reveals all, perhaps.

Is that your brainwaves talking?

The brain may not be able to speak quite yet, but researchers at the University of California, Berkeley are working to correlate speech to the brain's neural activity.
Using algorithms to interpret the neural activity, they created a graphical representation of the data, which they later converted back to audible speech.

"People listening to the audio replays may be able to pull out coarse similarities between the real word and the constructed words," says Pasley. When New Scientist listened to the words, they could just about make out "Waldo" and "structure". However, its fidelity was sufficient for the team to identify individual words using computer analysis.

Is reading minds just around the bend? Not likely, but researchers hope to help people like Erik Ramsey, who is paralysed.

To read the full story, see Telepathy machine reconstructs speech from brainwaves by Helen Thomson

Old Brains and Mental Illness

Just came across this very interesting piece by Virginia Hughes in Scientific American about the Indiana Medical History Museum, formerly the pathology department of the Central Indiana Hospital for the Insane, and now back in the news because of a frustrating "dearth of postmortem brain donations from people with mental illness." The solution? Mining genetic information from "old, often forgotten tissue archives".

Though studying old brains is not without challenges, the tissue is free from modern psychiatric drugs, and is, in the words of John Allman, a professor of biology at the California Institute of Technology, "an untapped resource."

To read the entire story, see Shelf-Preservation: Researchers Tap Century-Old Brain Tissue for Clues to Mental Illness

If someone slipped you valium...

This week's New Yorker contains an article by Michael Specter that I was compelled to read at once. The topic? Placebos. In this fascinating piece, Specter offers important details such as:

In most cases, the larger the pill, the stronger the plecebo effect. Two pills are better than one, and brand-name pills trump generics. Capsules are generally more effective than pills, and injections produce a more pronounced effect than either.

And:

Thomas Jefferson... noted that 'one of the most successful physicians I have ever known has assured me that he used more bread pills, drops of coloured water, and powders of hickory ashes, than of all other medicines put together.'

And, perhaps my favorite, that doctors have found:

...that diazepam--more commonly known as Valium--has no discernible effect on anxiety unless a person knows he is taking it.

To read the article, see The Power of Nothing.

This is your brain on ayahuasca. Or is it?

Reporting for New Scientist, Arran Frood brings us the results of a Brazilian study that looked at the brain activity of frequent users of ayahuasca, a tea prepared from a jungle vine and traditionally used by shamans. Researchers scanned the brains of subjects as they looked at images of people or animals, as they closed their eyes and imagined the object, and as they closed their eyes and imagined the objects after a dose of ayahuasca. The results?

...researchers found that neural activity in the primary visual cortex dropped off when volunteers imagined seeing the image rather than actually viewing it.

But when the team then gave the volunteers a dose of ayahuasca and repeated the experiment, they found that the level of activity in the primary visual cortex was virtually indistinguishable when the volunteers were really viewing an image and when they were imagining it. This means visions seen have a real, neurological basis, says de Araujo – they are not made up or imagined.

Evidently, the pharmacology of ayahuasca resembles that of some more conventional drugs for treating addiction, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Perhaps this Amazon concoction will join the ranks of LSD in tomorrow's medicine cabinet.
To read the entire story, see Drug hallucinations look real in the brain