Unhinged Nazi controls US government   UPDATE (Feb 6 2025): U.S. District Judge George O'Toole Jr. has temporarily blocked the Fork in the Road fraud. However, I haven't yet been notified by the Musk youth who illegally infiltrated the computer systems at OPM. I am a federal employee. And I will not comply with a series of illegal demands and threats, including the Fork in the Road “deferred resignation” program. It's an unenforceable sham, with no money allocated for these payouts. Everything I write is old news by the time I finish the paragraph An unelected oligarch has seized con ..read more

 image from Google Scholar Mahendra Kumar Trivedi is the founder of Trivedi Global, Inc., a provider of health and wellness products and services. His Google Scholar profile lists 795 publications with a collective citation count of 12,032 (as of July 31, 2024). This prolific output reached its peak in 2015, with 268 papers. “How is this possible?” you may ask. Here's the reason. Only 17 of 795 articles are indexed in PubMed. All the others were published in journals that do not meet the quality standards of MEDLINE. {This is a fact.}1 The National Library of Medicine decides whether ..read more

  Guruji Mahendra Kumar Trivedi is an “Enlightened and miraculous being” with a Google Scholar page, an h-index1 of 62, and 12,031 citations of his work. Most of these are self-citations from a tangled collection of predatory journals that publish questionable papers without proper peer review (e.g., Science Publishing Group). Guruji Trivedi claims to have the ability to harness his own... ...biofield energy to change the behaviour and characteristics of living organisms including soil, seeds, plants, trees, animals, microbes, and humans, along with non-living materials including metals ..read more

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