To be here, or not to be

by admin on March 17, 2010 · 2 comments

in Guest article, Neuroscience

The feeling that ‘I’ am ‘here’ is a central component of our personal identity and sense of self. In a recent study[1], we asked what would happen to the representation of the body if we disrupted the feeling of the body being located at a single point in space. We used an illusion [...]

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If graves could talk, Patrick Wall’s would be screaming (oh, and genes affect pain)

15 March 2010 Neuroscience

In 1986, Pat Wall and Steve McMahon commented on the folly of talking about nociception as though it is pain -
‘the labelling of nociceptors as pain fibres was not an admirable simplification but an unfortunate trivialization’ and
‘…pain is an integrated package of analysed results related to meaning, significance and imperative action’ [1]
Almost 25 years have [...]

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Searching for Descartes

12 March 2010 Pain psychology

Rene Descartes was a Philosopher Superstar in the 17th century. He was a French man living in The Netherlands, a devout catholic and a committed thinker. Descartes is famous for much – “I think therefore I am” perhaps more than others (actually – that makes me think of this scenario – Rene Descartes is sitting [...]

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Where are the rats at the cage fights

10 March 2010 Neuroscience

I sometimes wonder if we have all been hoodwinked about the whole Roman Colosseum stories of thousands of supposedly normal everyday Romans, presumably wearing sandals (not that that is important to this), cheered on as their fellow humans were slain, eaten, speared and mutilated. Then again, cage fighting, described by Senator John McCain as human [...]

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Alberto Gallace responds to Little Touches Do Mean So Much

8 March 2010 Pain psychology

The New York Times recently published an article Evidence That Little Touches Do Mean So Much
Touch is our first sense to develop, and it provides not only direct information about the objects that we manipulate (e.g., whether they are soft or hard, smooth or rough, etc), but also emotional sensations regarding those interpersonal events that [...]

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Research Blogging Awards Finalists

5 March 2010 General

Body in Mind has made the finals of the Research Blogging Awards for the Best Blog in Psychology, THANKS to all of you who nominated us.
Voting has begun, but you can only vote if you’re registered with research blogging so we thought we’d tell you about some of the outstanding blogs in the final categories and [...]

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EVEN MORE on the complex interaction between us and our environment

3 March 2010 General

Here is some more groovy stuff - Scientific American just alerted us to a new article in J Neuroscience.  It is right up Charles Spence’s alley but I am stealing his thunder by passing it on now.  Charles showed in humans that potato crisps taste better when you hear a crackling noise (I think he might have [...]

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More on the complex interaction between us and our environment….

1 March 2010 Abstracts

There is a very clever Belgian psychologist called Stefaan Van Damme.  He has done some excellent work on attentional mechanisms involved in pain.  More importantly, however, is that he is a jolly nice fellow.  Anyway, he came to Oxford and did a great little experiment (actually, we did a couple but the other one is [...]

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Six Myths About The Brain

25 February 2010 General

People get many ideas about how their brains work from entertainment or folk wisdom. But modern neuroscience has proved many of these ideas to be wrong. The facts are more fun – and more useful.
Myth 1: You only use 10 percent of your brain
Truth: You use all of your brain. The 10-percent myth became popular [...]

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Is that training diary doing anything?

22 February 2010 Abstracts

One really cool aspect of using a software program like Recognise, is that you can keep tabs on whether or not patients actually do what we ask them to do.  This is an important issue because any treatment that involves home exercises or training depends on people doing it!  Historically, clinicians have used a training [...]

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The Inaugural Body in Mind Riddle Competition

18 February 2010 General

See if you can solve this riddle.  A picture, they say, tells a thousand words. This one doesn’t tell that many but if you can work out what it is saying, we will give you are prize….
The hint: We are starting a series of new experiments, each item in this picture contributes to a description of [...]

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