I was fortunate enough to experience what neurology is like at the cutting edge recently, when I completed an away rotation in the United States. As should be obvious to anyone, this represented a markedly different practice to the one I usually partake in as a medical student in Africa. But whilst the incomparable economies [...]
My previous post got sidelined by an enormous (albeit not really that great) review article I’m writing on dopamine. Hence the silence. Unfortunately, some of the more interesting aspects of conscious visual processing got dragged intro that article and, as such, I didn’t feel it was appropriate to make the same argument in a blog [...]
In trying to tie up a few loose ends and combining it with a very interesting video, I created a monster of a blog post, which I have subsequently split into various parts, some of which have been put on hold. Having previously posted an essay on consciousness, I thought I’d just clarify one or [...]
It seems like something too obvious to question – surely all animals sleep? Perhaps not exactly like we do, but they must have some sort of ‘shut down’ state! Right? Well… Jerome Siegel is a Professor at the Brain Research Institute at UCLA, and he has contributed tremendously to our understanding of sleep and dreaming. [...]
We spend about 30% of our lives sleeping. Thirty. Percent. Given this enormous investment, it seems safe to assume that sleeping is a vitally important part of our existence, that it serves a valuable purpose, that our ancestors didn’t sacrifice a third of our lifetimes on a whim. We’d hope, certainly, but it would be [...]
A 48 year-old woman presented with an 18 month history of bizarre and complex delusions that involved intruders in her house. The patient believed that she had become pregnant following a 2 week sexual relationship with one of these intruders. Furthermore, she could hear the other intruders attempting to harass her by tapping their penises on the ceiling, and she could also smell semen in the house.
—- For our electives at my medical school we set our own outcomes and have to prove we met them. A ’bonus’ outcome of mine was to write the following essay. It is very long and probably not great, and the links to the references don’t work in WordPress, but it did take REALLY long, and involved a lot of [...]
Here are some random thoughts about Inception. For a nice article by a fully qualified neuroscientist, click here. For a nice recent review of dreams from a more technical viewpoint, follow this link. (Although, actually, that review is perhaps far too speculative and controversial) If you haven’t seen the film yet, stop reading now. _____________
I’m sure that the proposition of differential awareness doesn’t go down well with everyone. To suggest that a professor of physics at Oxford University is more ‘consciousness’ than a young hunter in a Khoi-San tribe is surely going too far, you might exclaim. But why wouldn’t this be the case?