Phantom orgasms, masturbation, and the female "problem"

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

Happy Valentine's Day! So I know it's all the rage to take a popular culture topic and write science-y about it. So I'm doing it to. Whatever. I like to indulge once and a while.To celebrate the love and intimacy of this beautiful day, we're gonna talk about some nice, classic, sex studies from days gone by. There've been some... interesting hypotheses and theories about sex, sexuality, and orgasm over the years, which have produced some good, chuckle-worthy studies (and quite a few serious ones........ Read more »

Measuring the Cupertino Effect in the amygdale and cingulated cortex

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

The "Cupertino effect" is the bane of anyone who's used a digital word processor, iPhone, whatever.Let me explain myself.Imaging you're sending a text to your beautiful pregnant wife to let her know you'll be heading home soon. However, automatic text replacement ("autocorrect") fails you horribly:While the appearance of this phenomenon in texting is relatively new, this problem has been around for quite a while. According to the Oxford University Press:Some older spellcheckers had wordlists con........ Read more »

An ode to Mike, the headless chicken

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

(This post amuses me. This is the strangest juxtaposition of research papers and topics I've written about. You'll see.)An ode to Mike, by Bradley VoytekThere once was a farmer from FruitaWhose chicken caused quite a hoopla.     For what happened next,     Made farmer Olsen quite perplexed!And as for the chicken, no "clucks", just some "ooh-aahs".For that farmer had wanted a snack.So he went and grabbed his old axe.     H........ Read more »

Cognitive enhancement goes Hollywood

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

My pals Kevin and m1k3y over at grinding.be recently posted about a little viral-intent video for the upcoming movie starring Bradley Cooper: Limitless.I'm intentionally trying to not read too much about this movie beforehand, so I can't really give a plot synopsis beyond what I've gathered from the YouTube video and Wikipedia write-up. But from what I've gleaned, apparently Bradley Cooper's character gets hold of an experimental drug ("NZT"), and quickly finds that it greatly enhances his cogni........ Read more »

Voytek Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience paper: "Hemicraniectomy: A new model for human electrophysiology with high spatio-temporal resolution"

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

(Note: this is a repost of my original post from 2009 Dec. I'm reposting some old posts to work within the ResearchBlogging.org framework.)This paper grew out of an interesting collaboration with some physicians at the University of California, San Francisco and San Francisco General Hospital, initially through a meeting between Dr. Geoffrey Manley, Dr. Robert Knight, and I. Dr. Manley has recently published several papers on the clinical benefits of performing a decompressive hemicraniectomy on........ Read more »

Thank you Mario! But your methods are in another field!

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

My love for video games is no secret. I just finished Mass Effect 2 and started Dragon Age 2 (I'm a sucker for Bioware RGPs).One of the first true peer-review papers I remember reading was Green & Bavelier's 2003 Nature paper "Action video game modifies visual selective attention". In that study the authors performed a series of experiments showing that people who had a lot of experience playing "action video games" performed better than non-video game players on a variety of attention tasks. Pa........ Read more »

Scientific acupunture

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

Have you ever pointed at something with a pin? I mean, really? Because if not, you're probably not a scientist.You see, as a scientist, I do a lot of pointing at things: I point at screens with laser pointers, at whiteboards with my finger, or even at other scientists when I'm laughing at their terrible hypotheses.But that pales in comparison to how often I point with pins. So. Many. Pins. And as a neuroscientist, most of my pinpointing is at the brain:Usually, we're pinpointing where in the bra........ Read more »

Endogenous Electric Fields May Guide Neocortical Network Activity

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

(Note: this is a repost of my original post from 2010 Jul. I'm reposting some old posts to work within the ResearchBlogging.org framework.)I’ve been geeking out about this paper for a week or so now, so I just finally decided to put together a post about it to explain why I think it’s so awesome.I’ve been thinking about the foundations of electrophysiological research in neuroscience. The earliest experiments on the electrical properties of neurons were performed on giant squid axons becau........ Read more »

The 10 most cited neuroscience papers

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

Over on Quora someone asked, "What are the most-cited works in neuroscience?"As some of you may know, I love literature mining. I started brainSCANr with my wife to look at how neuroscience research is conducted. I've been talking with Neuroskeptic about looking at biases in how different neuroscience topics are studied.This question on Quora piqued my interest, so I decided to try and work out the answer. I had to do some digging.(source)My first thought was of a retrospective published in Natu........ Read more »

Can brain trauma cause cognitive enhancement?

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

Another post inspired by Quora. Someone asked the question: "Can brain trauma cause cognitive enhancement?".Obviously this topic is dear to me, so I felt compelled to answer.(Read previously on my TEDx talk, my Neuron paper on functional recovery after stroke, my PNAS paper on working memory network deficits after stroke, why we don't need a brain, and my discussion of Rep. Grabrielle Giffords' brain surgery).The full response to the Quora question is below.*****Maybe! But most likely only in ve........ Read more »

Gabrielle Giffords' brain surgery: Decompressive hemicraniectomy

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

Description of Congresswoman Giffords' neurosurgery... Read more »

How to be a neuroscientist

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

In this post, I will teach you all how to be proper, skeptical neuroscientists. By the end of this post, not only will you be able to spot "neuro nonsense" statements, but you'll also be able to spot nonsense neuroscience questions.I implore my journalist friends to take note of what I say in this post.Much has already been said on the topic of modern neuroimaging masquerading as "new phrenology". A lot of these arguments and conversations are hidden from the lay public, however, so I'm going to........ Read more »

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

<Introduction>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Aliquam elementum iaculis lectus, id placerat diam ultrices scelerisque. Aenean eu varius eros. Maecenas rhoncus odio eu nunc pharetra ut luctus tellus consectetur. Cras venenatis condimentum sollicitudin.<Methods>Duis mollis malesuada ipsum, et interdum felis blandit eu. Vestibulum id purus odio, vitae bibendum mauris. Aliquam tristique, quam et pellentesque commodo, nunc lacus porta nisi, id faucibus urna nisi q........ Read more »

Rectal ballon inflation

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

In my previous neuroscience life I worked as a radioactive urine cleaner at UCLA.The lab I worked in did some really cool research on the long-term neurological and behavioral effects of methamphetamine abuse. One of the researchers I worked with in that lab, Dr. Berman, was a great guy who had a pretty esoteric research specialty.A few years ago he published an interesting, unique paper in The Journal of Neuroscience titled "Reduced brainstem inhibition during anticipated pelvic visceral pain c........ Read more »

Self-stimulating the brain for heterosexual sex with a prostitute. Seriously.

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

Deep brain stimulation is such a cool, successful, amazing piece of technology, that I was excited to read a little more about its historical roots. But man. I don't even know what to say now.I've written about a lot of crazy neuroscience stuff on this blog over the last 20 months:rectal ballons
psychic powers
penis burning
sperm injections
phantom orgasms
and, of course, zombies
But this... is the weirdest, most shocking research I've read, bar none. Literally, the litany of crazy shit in this ........ Read more »

Real-time Q&As are intense

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

Sorry for the self-promotional nature of this post, but I wanted to talk about a novel, interesting experience.A little over a week ago, my research examining how people with prefrontal stroke compensate for brain damage was profiled in a piece in the Washington Post. As with all my research, I did a lay post explaining that work here before.The whole media experience happened very quickly, but was pretty cool. You'll notice that the Washington Post article is actually focused on Rep. Gabrielle ........ Read more »

The Zombie Brain: Insatiable Hunger

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

This is the last symptom of the multi-day series on The Zombie Brain between Oscillatory Thoughts and The Cognitive Axon.Be sure to check out our last post tomorrow in which we wrap everything up.Symptom 9: Insatiable HungerWhat drives the zombie’s insatiable hunger for human flesh? In the last post we discussed the role of addiction in the zombie’s craving for your skin, but why are they never satisfied? Why, after having eating your entire family, will the zombie continue on to consume you........ Read more »

We are all inattentive superheroes

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

One of the more interesting parts about being a neuroscientist is when I'm suddenly struck by how absolutely weird our brains are.And I'm not even talking about the super trippy stuff like free-will; even the mundane things are really mind-boggling.For example: what does it mean to experience the world around us? We "see" things because photons that manage to pass through the inside-out design of our retinal cells cause a molecular change in the photoreceptors such that 11-cis-retinal isomerizes........ Read more »

Something ghoti with science citations

by Bradley Voytek in Oscillatory Thoughts

Science has a lot of problems. Or rather, scientometrics has a lot of problems. Scientific careers are built off the publish or perish foundation of citation counts. Journals are ranked by impact factors. There are serious problems with this system, and many ideas have been offered on how to change it, but so far little has actually been affected. Many journals, including the PLoS and Frontiers series, are making efforts to bring about change, but they are mostly taking a social tactic: ranking ........ Read more »