Success and setbacks for cocaine vaccine

February 12, 2010

Cocaine addicts take cocaine vaccine, then go broke – “After the vaccine, doing cocaine was a very disappointing experience for them,” said Kosten, a professor of psychiatry and neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Nobody overdosed, but some of them had 10 times more cocaine coursing through their systems than researchers had encountered [...]

Read the full article →

Ultricle and saccule (collectively “otoliths”) found to affect brain blood flow

February 9, 2010

BBC News – Minute organs in the ear can alter brain blood flow – “Minute organs hidden deep within the ear appear to directly alter blood flow to the brain, scientists have revealed. Until now, experts thought the inner ear’s job was to control balance alone. [...] Dr Jorge Serrador and his team from Harvard [...]

Read the full article →

Neuro Vocab Word of the Day: Derealization

February 6, 2010

Derealization – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia – Derealization (DR) is an alteration in the perception or experience of the external world so that it seems strange or unreal. Other symptoms include feeling as though one’s environment is lacking in spontaneity, emotional colouring and depth.[1] It is a dissociative symptom of many conditions, such as psychiatric [...]

Read the full article →

Neural Plasticity and “Training” The Aging Brain

February 3, 2010

How to Train the Aging Brain – An article on neural plasticity from NY Times – “While it’s tempting to focus on the flaws in older brains, that inducement overlooks how capable they’ve become. Over the past several years, scientists have looked deeper into how brains age and confirmed that they continue to develop through [...]

Read the full article →

Characteristics of Hallucinated Voices in Deaf People

January 29, 2010

What do hallucinated voices sound like… to deaf people? This post on Mind Hacks was just the right combination of funky weird, and insightful, here’s the blurb: Mind Hacks: More on hallucinated “voices” in deaf people – “Voices were reported to be nonauditory, clear, and easy to understand. Participants were certain that they did not [...]

Read the full article →

Heavy Metal Correlates of Mental Disorders

January 26, 2010

Blood Lead Levels and Major Depressive Disorder, Panic Disorder, and Generalized Anxiety Disorder – It appears lead may cause, or greatly increase the risk of developing depression and/or panic disorder: “Persons with blood lead levels in the highest quintile had 2.3 times the odds of major depressive disorder (95% confidence interval [CI], 1.13-4.75) and 4.9 [...]

Read the full article →

Alzheimer’s and cancer: an inverse correlation

January 23, 2010

Alzheimer’s disease may protect against cancer and vice versa – “People who have Alzheimer’s disease may be less likely to develop cancer, and people who have cancer may be less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new study published in the December 23, 2009, online issue of Neurology®, the medical journal of the [...]

Read the full article →

Tylenol eases social anxiety too? Paint me surprised.

January 20, 2010

This just in, from the turbo-weird category: Could acetaminophen (tylenol) ease social pain? – “[They] investigated this connection through two experiments. In the first experiment, 62 volunteers took [1 gram] daily of either acetaminophen or a placebo. Each evening, participants reported how much they experienced social pain using a ‘Hurt Feelings Scale’ — a measurement [...]

Read the full article →

Alcohol substitute that avoids hangovers in the works

January 17, 2010

Alcohol substitute that avoids drunkenness and hangovers in development – Telegraph – “An alcohol substitute that mimics its pleasant buzz without leading to drunkenness and hangovers is being developed by scientists. The new substance could have the added bonus of being “switched off” instantaneously with a pill, to allow drinkers to drive home or return [...]

Read the full article →

Is Psychology Animal Research Offensive?

January 5, 2010

Would the idea that the disciplining techniques your parents used on you, or you may have used on your own children was first developed on animals such as rats bother you? Why, or why not? It just so happens that techniques like the timeout in fact were based on animal studies. Psychologists who work with [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →