Dear Mr or Mrs Next US President,

We are glad to wel­come you to our blog car­ni­val. After a short hia­tus, Encephalon is back and gath­er­ing steam. We have pre­pared this “revival” edi­tion just for you, so you can be well informed and impress us all dur­ing the upcom­ing Sci­encede­bate 2008.

With­out fur­ther ado, let’s pro­ceed to the ques­tions posed by 24 blog­gers on neu­ro­science and psy­chol­ogy issues. We hope they pro­vide, at the very least, good men­tal stim­u­la­tion for you and your advisors.

Big Ques­tions

Do I deserve to vote even if I don’t have Free Will? (Marc at Neu­ro­sci­en­tif­i­cally Challenged).

If cul­ture sculpts our brains, what can our brains do to refine our cul­ture first? (Stephanie at Brains On Purpose).

Is God more than a fly­ing brain? (Jes­sica at bioephemera).

Is Your brain really read­ing This? (Pete at Brain Hammer).

A Few Intru­sive Questions

Do you play any musi­cal instru­ment? (Megan at SharpBrains).

Read the rest of this entry »

A cou­ple of quick links

• DISCOVER Mag­a­zine, May 2007 issue, brings a great arti­cle titled “The Elas­tic Brain: Michael Merzenich believes you can tone your mind and stave off mem­ory loss. All it takes is time in his men­tal gym”. The arti­cle (which is not avail­able online) pro­vides a great overview of the amaz­ing work of Prof. Merzenich (a UCSF neu­ro­sci­en­tist) with Sci­en­tific Learn­ing and Posit Sci­ence, pio­neers in the field. The writer’s tone is pos­i­tive over­all but adds a note of skep­ti­cism, say­ing that “Yet despite the enthu­si­as­tic tes­ti­mony I heard from senior cit­i­zens who have tried the pro­gram, there are no for­mal stud­ies pub­lished in peer-reviewed jour­nals that demon­strate the program’s effects” and gath­er­ing crit­i­cisms out­lined by other researchers. Hav­ing said so, in our opin­ion, Posit Sci­ence offers the best pro­gram we have seen focused on improv­ing audi­tory pro­cess­ing, and we expect to see more clear stud­ies soon-the field is rel­a­tively new.
• Slate Mag­a­zine presents a spe­cial issue on the brain. We will review and com­ment on it soon, includ­ing a neu­ro­bic club/ brain gym.

You can see here an inter­view with inter­view with Dr. Michael Merzenich