Biopsychology - Letter to my Professor

I spent quite a while compiling all the resources to post this email to my professor and figured some of you might find the content intriguing or entertaining. In any case here it is:

Hello Steven,

I am not sure how busy you are but if you have a moment you might find this of interest. I was the student who had to leave early today and brought up the use of tongue stimulation as a method of therapy for "wobblers". You asked me at the time if someone was involved in the project and I cannot remember who you named so I found the relevant articles.



The article about the woman involved in the experiment can be found here: http://scienceblogs.com/neurophilosophy/2008/07/perpetually_falling_woman_learns_to_balance_with_her_tongue.php

A video of her improving her balance can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?gl=US&feature=related&hl=iw&v=Z36LxkWt0Dk

I hope that clears up the question of whether or not the researcher you mentioned was involved.



As well as a tack on bonus considering we are doing a unit on vision I thought these two articles might be of interest:

A new imaging technique allows for imaging of rods and cones in great detail (published yesterday): http://www.opticsinfobase.org/boe/abstract.cfm?uri=boe-2-7-1864

The images are found from page 6 onwards if you wish to skip the reading.



As a final note the idea of using a 500x500 array of electrodes for recording or inducing vision got me thinking back to an older article I read that deals with facial hallucinations (sort of along the lines of the person/fire hydrant/car image you showed us), the article can be found here and the upscaling images are found on page 4: http://www.iipl.fudan.edu.cn/~zhangjp/publications/ICME2009.pdf



If you do not have time to bother with these I fully understand,

Thank you for your time,

Stowdashay

I doubt this will be of interest to many but the video showing the woman's ability to balance with the help of electrodes on her tongue is awesome.

Summer School - Psych 304

So I am attending a summer course at UBC, Psych 304, entitled "Brain and Behaviour". The instructor is Steven Barnes and I would highly recommend it to anyone looking to pick up a difficult but straightforward credit. Steven is exceptional at explaining concepts and really takes the time to help students out (for example he held two extra lectures outside class time that were student driven to prepare for the midterm). He is also a phenomenal artist, his website is located here.

The course so far has been very interesting, with the text accompanying the lectures well. The textbook is very well written, it can be found here. Steven mentioned at the beginning of the course that it has a very low sellback rate, meaning a lot of students either choose to keep it or burn it. Either way I would never burn this book, not only because I hate the loss of information, but also because I am beginning to develop a personal affinity for the way the author, Pinel, structures the material. Hopefully I do well in this course, I will keep the updates flowing.