Archived Content- Thoughts on Thinking

Name that star!...

Posted by connolly in Archived Content, Media, Research Techniques on December 14, 2009 | 2 Comments

A good friend of mine recently gave birth to a beautiful baby girl. In searching for an appropriate gift, I came across a book by Michael Sherrod and Matthew Rayback called Bad Baby Names. The book trawls through 40 years of U.S. census data to catalog some of the most disastrous names bestowed upon...

Autism and Marijuana...

Posted by williams in Archived Content, Disorders, Media, Medication on November 30, 2009 | 1 Comment

This morning, “Good Morning America,” a popular morning news program in the U.S. told the story of a mother with an autistic child who was “treating” him with marijuana. I use quotation marks, and will make other cautionary notes here, because this blog is not meant to represent...

Your teacher was wrong!...

Posted by connolly in Archived Content, Neuroscience, Research Techniques on November 12, 2009 | 5 Comments

I studied neuroscience in college and subsequently taught it for three years at university. One of the central tenants of the course I studied and taught was the dogma of synaptic transmission. The basic tenant of this dogma is that neurons communicate exclusively by sending chemical signals across the...

SNP Snoop: BDNF and driving ability; fai...

Posted by williams in Archived Content, Neuroscience on November 2, 2009 | 2 Comments

Could an alternative version of your brain-derived neurotropic factor be an excuse for your failed road test? According to research published in the Journal, Cerebral Cortex, by Stephanie McHughen et.al., a key SNP in BDNF (valine 66 mutated to methionine) impacts learning and memory functions, cognitive...

White Matter Matters!...

Posted by connolly in Archived Content, Neuroscience, Research Techniques on October 19, 2009 | 1 Comment

Can you change the structure of your brain with practice? A slew of papers in the last decade affirm that yes, you very much can. Probably the best known is a study by Maguire and colleagues, who found structural differences in the hippocampi of London taxi drivers — presumably the result of having...

Defining the Enemy, Advances in Autsim R...

Posted by connolly in Archived Content, Disorders on October 5, 2009 | No Comments

For most people the ideas of genes and traits recall a few scattered facts from their primary schooling on Mendel and his pea plants; short ones, tall ones, Punnett squares and the like. When it comes it comes to simple traits, like eye color, people may think that it is only a matter of some combination...

Smart Drugs and Should We Take Them...

Posted by connolly in Archived Content, Medication, Neuroscience on September 21, 2009 | 10 Comments

I was looking back through the ADHD section of G2C Online this week, namely the interview with Philip Shaw on ADHD and medication. According to Dr. Shaw, up to 90% of children with ADHD who take Ritalin, Adderall or Strattera show improvements on cognitive tasks . This is quite an impressive statistic...

Copy number variation in Schizophrenia...

Posted by williams in Archived Content, Disorders, Neuroscience on September 1, 2009 | 4 Comments

Ever had the feeling you have lost your marbles? According to the Phrase Finder that expression has conveyed a sense of loss, anger, and more recently a lack of common sense or sanity. As it turns out it may be the loss of certain segments of DNA (rather than simple mutations like SNPs) that may have...

Heath Ledger’s Joker and the Hollywood...

Posted by connolly in Archived Content, Disorders, Media, Neuroscience on August 19, 2009 | 1 Comment

A report released this week by Dr. Peter Byrne of Newham University Hospital in London takes issue with the portrayal of mental health in Hollywood. Dr. Byrne highlights a number of characters, including Heath Ledger’s Joker from the Batman series and Jim Carrey’s character(s) in Me, Myself and Irene,...

Depression Genetics Suffer Major Setback...

Posted by connolly in Archived Content, Disorders, Neuroscience on July 6, 2009 | 5 Comments

A 2003, a paper by Caspi and colleagues offered tantalizing clues about the genetics of depression, in what was widely-acclaimed as a breakthrough paper for psychiatric genetics as a whole. Now, new research by Katleeen Merikangas at the National Institute of Mental Health queries the results taking...