Archive for the ‘CogNeuro’ Category
Dissertation: Defended
It has been a very long road to get to this day, but after five years at Dartmouth College I have successfully defended my dissertation and completed my PhD. [whoa!] My public talk went rather well despite the anxiety that was welling up inside. I may have stuttered a big more than average, but not […]
Can you see the faces?
I was knee-deep in dissertation drudgery today, making 28 tables of data for the final thesis. Not my idea of a good time. Still, you come across things that lighten your day as you work. For instance, the above axial slice was taken at z=68.5mm of the MNI 0.5mm ICBM-152 template included in FSL. As […]
Twas the night before Christmas
I am aware of how cliché it is to parody this poem. Still, in the wee hours this Christmas morning I was too weak to resist the temptation. Please to enjoy… —————————————————————- ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, Everyone was sleeping, as I left-clicked my mouse. The data was organized hierarchically […]
Data Collection Complete!
I just wrapped up data collection for my dissertation. It has been a long road, taking 8 months to recruit and scan 80 participants. Scanning was completed in two waves of adults and adolescents across four fMRI experiments. Along the way we also picked up some excellent T1 anatomical images and diffusion tensor (DTI) data. […]
Political Pseudoscience
Marco Iacoboni, Joshua Freedman and Jonas Kaplan recently authored an op-ed piece for the New York Times entitled “This Is Your Brain on Politics”. The authors describe a new study where they put 20 swing voters through an fMRI session designed to reveal their true thoughts and feelings regarding the current field of political candidates. […]
Quote of the Week – Shakespeare
“I would that there were no age between ten and three and twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest. For there is nothing in between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing and fighting” – Shakespeare, “Winter’s Tale”, 1565
Liberal vs Conservative Brains (ugh)
Last week I managed to get mixed up in a huge debate on Slate.com regarding the recent Amodio, Jost, Master, and Yee paper in Nature Neuroscience. The paper was a brief report on the ‘Neurocognitive correlates of liberalism and conservatism’ where the authors reported that liberals possessed a greater error-related negativity (ERN) wave during a […]
This is a brain scanner
Don’t even think of asking if the brains ‘light up’…
Brain Camp Review – Von Economo Neurons
While at UCLA we had the pleasure of a lecture by Dr. John Allman of Caltech. Dr. Allman is a worldwide leader in the investigation of Von Economo neurons (VEN) or ‘spindle’ cells. While he was originally slated to give an introductory neuroanatomy lecture, he ended up spending much of the time discussing this very […]
Advanced Neuroimaging Summer School Wrapup
I have just returned from the UCLA Advanced Neuroimaging Summer School and, seriously, it was one of the best things I have done in graduate school. The funny part is that it wasn’t the classes or the labs that really made the course great, it was the people. From the informal imaging discussions over dinner […]