synesthesia
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The Pentagon of Neuroscience — A Listicle for Understanding the Neuroculture
Neuroscience has hit the big time. Every day, popular newspapers, websites and blogs offer up a heady stew of brain-related self-help (neuro-snake oil?) and gee wiz science reporting (neuro-wow?). Some scientists and journalists — perhaps caught up in the neuro-fervor — throw caution to the wind, promising imminent brain-based answers to the kinds of…
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Synesthesia — secret passageways in the mansion of memory?
This post is a slightly modified version of my answer to a Quora question: Is there a link between synesthetia and involuntary memory? This is a very interesting question. I can add some neuroscientific flesh to the skeleton you have already laid out. Involuntary memory seems to involve the ability for memories to be accessed…
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How is depression (and other mental disorders) addressed with computational neuroscience?
Nowadays there are broadly two sorts of computational neuroscientist: those who analyze experimental data using statistical methods, and those who propose computational models aimed at a theoretical understanding. I belong to the latter category, so what I say doesn’t really apply to data analysis issues. Computational or mathematical modeling/theory is still at a very rudimentary…
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What do neuroscientists think of depression?
(Trying out cross-posting an answer I wrote on Quora to this blog.) This is a very long and complicated story, and the science is at a rudimentary stage. I think the best thing you can do is read Siddhartha Mukherjee’s masterful piece on depression in the New York Times: The Science and History of Treating…
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Do mirror neurons explain understanding, or is it the other way round?
(Alternate title: In Soviet Russia, Mirror Neurons Explain YOU!) A draft of this post has been sitting around for a few weeks, and while I’m happy with today’s sanity check, I still can’t help but suspect that I am missing something in the debate on “action understanding”. So I am happy to be convinced that…