REWIRING NEUROSCIENCE

REWIRING NEUROSCIENCE

In the early 1990s, our long accepted (cc 1926) understanding of how a nerve encodes and conveys information was unexpectedly overturned by experiments on fast flying bats and insects. Around 1995, we began to realize we no longer knew what neurons actually do.In the decade since, many competing hypotheses have been advanced, suggesting various alternate neural encoding schemes. But the question of how a nerve communicates remains unanswered. It is a huge, gaping hole, at the most basic level, in our understanding of how the nervous system works.

This blog is about what would happen if, as a thought experiment, we were to rewire the human nervous system using a multichannel neuron. It explores the impact of this hypothetical "smarter" neuron on vision, memory and the brain.

New Year's Resolution: Blog My Surfing Procrastination

I resolve to get something out of my Web surfing by blogging each item I read online.

I reported the news professionally for five years and writing came easy and fast for me then. I've since gotten rusty. I hope forcing myself to write a least a sentence possibly dozens of time a day will improve things, and possibly motivate me to get more work and less surfing done.

I leave the irony of a New Year's resolution resolved on January 13 for you to savor.

tdaxp

A colleague of mine impresses me daily, but never more so than when I learned he writes
tdaxp, which features well-informed opinion on the Middle East along with book reviews like this:

Evolutionary Cognitivism, Introduction: Race of Man, Races of MenThis series is a companion to Biopsychological Development. What that series focused on my reaction to The Scientist in the Crib and The Emperor's New Clothes, this series centers on The Origins of Human Nature: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology. Of the three books assigned for the class, Origins is by far the most academic. It is a very competent synthesis of Cognitive Psychology's concepts of working memory, cognitive load, and the like with Evolutionary Psychology's era of evolutionary adaption, massive modularity, and such.

Political Psychology Syllabi

ISPP--Political Psychology Courses Syllabi
ISPP has a large number of political psychology syllabi online by the leading lights. Browsing through is a good way to find articles you haven't read.

Resource for Public Policy Teaching: UT's "American Politics" Site

The University of Texas at Austin's American Politics site has a wealth of charts and graphs that illustrate key concepts useful for teaching a public policy course, such as Money Spent on Lobbying of Congress by Industry (2000) and Congress Reelection Rates 1966-2004. The resources are organized into 12 categories (plus a separate site for Texas politics, natch), and each category has a glossary of terms.

Watch Those Page Counts in Lecture Notes!

So I'm clacking away on my lecture notes for class and just writing and writing and writing and the page count just isn't going up; I target five pages for an hour and 15-minute lecture, and I've still got just two pages.

I do a Print Preview in Word to see why my seemingly bulbous lecture is so slim and it reports I'm at four pages. That many, and I haven't even covered one of the two chapters I want to talk about.

I switch back to the standard view, and the page count is now miraculously correct. Word must have been so overwhelmed by my genius prose that it got distracted.

Resource for Public Policy Teaching: Think Tank Town

The Washington Post has a feature/blog/something called Think Tank Town that solicits weekly columns from D.C. policy research shops, aka think tanks. I'm going to point my public policy students toward this as a source for ideas when they write policy proposal papers.

(Via Daniel W. Drezner)