Virtual Walking
The NESS >> Neuroscience | NeuroLogica Blog
by Steven Novella
1M ago
When I use my virtual reality gear I do practical zero virtual walking – meaning that I don’t have my avatar walk while I am not walking. I general play standing up which means I can move around the space in my office mapped by my VR software – so I am physically walking to move in the game. If I need to move beyond the limits of my physical space, I teleport – point to where I want to go and instantly move there. The reason for this is that virtual walking creates severe motion sickness for me, especially if there is even the slightest up and down movement. But researchers are working on ways ..read more
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Virtual Reality for Mice
The NESS >> Neuroscience | NeuroLogica Blog
by Steven Novella
3M ago
Scientists have developed virtual reality goggles for mice. Why would they do this? For research. The fact that it’s also adorable is just a side effect. One type of neuroscience research is to expose mice in a laboratory setting to specific tasks or stimuli while recording their brain activity. You can have an implant, for example, measure brain activity while it runs a maze. However, having the mouse run around an environment puts limits on the kind of real time brain scanning you can do. So researchers have been using VR (virtual reality) for about 15 years to simulate an environment while ..read more
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Do We Have Free Will?
The NESS >> Neuroscience | NeuroLogica Blog
by Steven Novella
4M ago
Let’s dive head first into one of the internet’s most contentious questions – do we have true free will? This comes up not infrequently whenever I write here about neuroscience, most recently when I wrote about hunger circuitry, because the notion of the brain as a physical machine tends to challenge our illusion of complete free will. Debates tend to become heated, because it is truly challenging to wrap our meat brains around such an abstract question. I always find the discussion to be enlightening, however. In the most recent discussion I detect that some commenters are using the term “fre ..read more
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Hunger Circuitry
The NESS >> Neuroscience | NeuroLogica Blog
by Steven Novella
4M ago
One of the organizing principles that govern living organisms is homeostasis. This is a key feature of being alive – maintaining homeostatic equilibrium both internally and externally. Homeostatic systems usually involve multiple feedback loops that maintain some physiological parameter within an acceptable range. For example, our bodies maintain a very narrow temperature range, our blood has a very narrow range for pH, salt content, CO2 concentration, oxygen levels, and many other parameters. Each cell maintains specific concentrations of many electrolytes across their membranes. Organisms ma ..read more
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Intuitive and Analytical Thinking
The NESS >> Neuroscience | NeuroLogica Blog
by Steven Novella
4M ago
Here is a relatively simple math problem:  A bat and a ball cost $1.10 combined. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? (I will provide the answer below the fold.) This problem is the basis of a large psychological literature on thinking systems in the human brain, discussed in Daniel Kahneman’s book: Thinking, Fast and Slow. The idea is that there are two parallel thinking systems in the brain, a fast intuitive system that provides quick answers which may or may not be strictly true, and a slow analytical system that will go through a problem systematically and ..read more
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How Substance Abuse Affects the Brain
The NESS >> Neuroscience | NeuroLogica Blog
by Steven Novella
4M ago
I will acknowledge up front that I never drink, ever. The concept of deliberately consuming a known poison to impair the functioning of your brain never appealed to me. Also, I am a bit of a supertaster, and the taste of alcohol to me is horrible – it overwhelms any other potential flavors in the drink. But I am also not judgmental. I understand that most people who consume alcohol do so in moderation without demonstrable ill effects. I also know I am in the minority when it comes to taste. But we do need to recognize that alcohol, like many other substances of abuse like cocaine, has the abil ..read more
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The Science of Gift Giving
The NESS >> Neuroscience | NeuroLogica Blog
by Steven Novella
4M ago
There is a lot of social psychology out there providing information that can inform our everyday lives, and most people are completely unaware of the research. Richard Wiseman makes this point in his book, 59 Seconds – we actually have useful scientific information, and yet we also have a vast self-help industry giving advice that is completely disconnected from this evidence. The result is that popular culture is full of information that is simply wrong. It is also ironically true that it many social situations our instincts are also wrong, probably for complicated reasons. Let’s consider gif ..read more
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How Much Do Couples Share Traits?
The NESS >> Neuroscience | NeuroLogica Blog
by Steven Novella
4M ago
Do birds of a feather flock together, or do opposites attract? These are both common aphorisms, which means that they are commonly offered as generally accepted truths, but also that they may by wrong. People like pithy phrases, so they spread prolifically, but that does not mean they contain any truth. Further, our natural instincts are not adequate to properly address whether they are true or not. Often people will resort to the “availability heuristic” when confronted with these types of claims. If they can readily think of an example that seems to support the claim, then they accept it as ..read more
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Localizing Hidden Consciousness
The NESS >> Neuroscience | NeuroLogica Blog
by Steven Novella
4M ago
What’s going on in the minds of people who appear to be comatose? This has been an enduring neurological question from the beginning of neurology as a discipline. Recent technological advances have completely changed the game in terms of evaluating comatose patients, and now a recent study takes our understanding one step further by teasing apart how different systems in the brain contribute to conscious responsiveness. This has been a story I have been following closely for years, both as a practicing neurologist and science communicator. For background, when evaluating patients who have a re ..read more
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The Alzheimer’s Revolution
The NESS >> Neuroscience | NeuroLogica Blog
by Steven Novella
4M ago
Decades of complex research and persevering through repeated disappointment appears to be finally paying off for the diagnosis and treatment of Alzheimer’s  disease (AD). In 2021 Aduhelm was the first drug approved by the FDA (granted contingent accelerated approval) that is potentially disease-modifying in AD. This year two additional drugs received FDA approval. All three drugs are monoclonal antibodies that target amyloid protein. They each seem to have overall modest clinical effect, but they are the first drugs to actually slow down progression of AD, which represents important confi ..read more
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