I joined an online dating site a few months ago.1 Besides being asked about my sun, moon, and rising signs (?), I was puzzled by the following question.2 My love language? I'm supposed to choose only one answer?  Gary Chapman has been a pastor at Calvary Baptist Church in Winston-Salem, NC for 50 years. In 1992, he published a book based on his experience of advising heterosexual couples on the best ways to have a harmonious marriage. His notion of 5 Love Languages is based on conservative Christian gender roles, although subsequent editions are “less blatantly misogynistic.” Nonethe ..read more

 ...to another platform.   Hi, it's been a while. I haven't written anything this year. My last post was December 31, 2022. The main reason is that I've had to deal with more loss and grief in my life. Someone close to me was diagnosed with cancer, endured months of radiation and chemotherapy, and died anyway.1 I've also had some deflating garbage to wade through at work. My enthusiasm for doing anything has been rather low. Besides all that, Blogger is a terrible platform for blogging. The interface changed a while a back and ever since then, composing in the little box has been ..read more

As 2022 draws to a close, the SNL Trend Forecasters have agreed to divulge their predictions for the most — and the least — exciting research fads for the New Year. The Neurocritic: How do you guys predict today's most popular neuroscience trends?  Trend Forecasters: Oh, well we have 4,000 computers, they're all big they all make charts and they beep LOUD. TN: Let's get started! In: posterior cingulate cortex Hey Posterior Cingulate — we see you! You're fresh, you're mysterious, you're misunderstood. But we know you exist far beyond the default fashion mode. The new tripartite view p ..read more

Just in time for Halloween, I had a hideous surgery to repair a fractured elbow. This entailed receiving a nerve block that made my hand feel like a dead appendage, which was quite spooky indeed.    Spooky Dead Hand    I'm supposed to keep the arm elevated above my heart (which isn't conducive to sitting here and typing), so that is all for now.   Happy Halloween! Actual e-mail sent to the post-op contact person the night of my surgery:     OMFG, WHAT DID THEY DO TO ME WITH THIS DAMN TORTURE SLING ..read more

 “I am dead.”   In terms of possible delusions in living human beings, Le délire des négations — the nihilistic delusion that one is dead — evokes the most harrowing existence imaginable. The French neurologist Jules Cotard first described the syndrome that bears his name (1882, English translation): I hazard the name of delirium of negations to designate the state of the patients ... in whom the negative disposition is carried to the highest degree. [They are] asked their name – they have no name; their age – they are ageless; where were they born – they were not born; ... if t ..read more

The more you study the brain, the more unknowable it becomes. The level of complexity is baffling, and this is true whether the brain belongs to a human or a crab.1 The latest uptick in human brain complexity was revealed from analysis of postmortem tissue in 17 subregions of prefrontal cortex (PFC). Zhong and colleagues (2022) found that 60 neuropeptides and 60 neuropeptide receptors are expressed in at least one of the PFC subregions.   All the data are freely available (links are in the open access article) and incorporated into the Human Protein Atlas — which has about 15 million in ..read more

"The self is the psychological counterpart of the default mode functionality of the brain." (Scalabrini et al., 2021). The self studying how "The Self" is represented and constructed by the brain is apex meta-neuroscience.1 We can say that the self is a manifestation (or an illusory byproduct) of activity in the default mode network (medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus, and angular gyrus), but what does this really mean? How do we relate specific neural states to aspects of a changeable self? In a field increasingly focused on remote control of genetically-defin ..read more

It's 2022, and the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapies (ABCT) has just issued a belated apology because two of their past Presidents published papers on “aversion therapies” for “converting” gay and transgender individuals to the socially prescribed norms of sexuality and gender identity.  Well, they didn't actually say this, nor did they name the prominent and distinguished clinical psychologists who authored these papers. Although these luminaries signed on to the mea culpa, there was no direct admission of the harm caused by these ill-advised practices. Instead, the do ..read more

The Washington Post used this picture of a saline-filled 280-channel Geodesic Head Web1 to illustrate a new wearable device that aims to enhance slow wave sleep (SWS). The device delivers low-level current (0.5 mA) at 0.5 Hz to mimic the frequency of EEG naturally recorded during SWS (0.5-1 Hz). However, this is impossible with saline sensors, which would also dry out well before the night is over.    The WaPo article accurately showed different stages of applying the net, including measuring the head, checking impedences, and filling sensors with saline (above). A publ ..read more

“Nostalgia is a sentiment of loss and displacement, but it is also a romance with one’s own fantasy. Nostalgic love can only survive in a long-distance relationship. A cinematic image of nostalgia is a double exposure, or a superimposition of two images—of home and abroad, of past and present, of dream and everyday life. The moment we try to force it into a single image, it breaks the frame or burns the surface.” –Svetlana Boym, Nostalgia and Its Discontents Nostalgia means different things to different groups of scholars. To historians, nostalgia is bad, “...essentially history without gui ..read more