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 - Interesting Facts

On my last post about my summer course icey posted:

"post some things you've learned if that's legally ok please. behaviour is a very interesting topic."

I have decided to detail some of the interesting things I have learned thus far and don't worry icey, it is legal.

1. Eye Movement

How your brain interprets movement is quite extraordinary. Consider these four cases and try it out for yourself!

1. Both object being viewed and eye are stationary. (Hold out a pencil, is it moving?)
   Result: Object appears to not be moving.
2. Object is stationary but eye is moving. (Scan from the top to the bottom of the pencil, is it moving?)
   Result: Object appears to not be moving.
3. Object is moving down but eye is stationary. (Move pencil downwards while keeping eye focused straight ahead, is it moving?)
   Result: Object appears to be moving.

Now here is where it gets a little bit complicated. Consider case two and three. In both of these the pencil changes its place on the back of the retina. When you move your eyes up the pencil but the pencil is stationary, the retinal image ends up hitting higher on the back of your eye. Yet the same thing occurs when the pencil moves down but your eye stays staring straight ahead (the focus ends up on the eraser in both cases). Why then does your brain interpret one of these as movement and the other as not movement. Well let us make a hypothesis and then test it. Perhaps when your brain moves your eye it subtracts this movement from the change in retinal image and so even though you move your eyes, your brain can tell the world is stationary. How then could we test this? Well try this:

1. Stare off into the distance as far away as possible.
2. Close your right eye.
3. With your left finger gently push on your bottom eyelid to push your eye upwards.
4. Continue to apply pressure, then release it in an alternating pattern.
5. With enough pressure applied you should see the world tilt downwards!

It can be tricky to get this effect to work as people aren't usually comfortable with prodding their own eyeballs. I find that alternating pressure/no pressure helps you to better visualize the downward movement (it can be quite blurry). So what does this mean? Well you tilted your eyeball up, just like you did when you looked at the tip of the pencil. This time though, your brain did not initiate the movement of the eyeball so it was unable to subtract this movement, thus your brain said "The world is tilting down!".

I just realized this does not have much to do with behaviour so I will have to do another post tomorrow about behaviour. Dangit. Hope this is interesting icey!

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.