Here is a review that, if you are interested in how the brain controls muscles, and you are prepared to put in some hard yards, you should read. Simon Gandevia works down the corridor from me, so do Janet Taylor and Jane Butler. Nicholas Peterson doesn't but I once had a cup of tea from the same pot. So, I am, everyday, in the presence of … [Read more...]
Searching for Rene Descartes or just ‘knowing’ he is there
June 18, 2010 by 4 Comments
Thanks to Daniel Hawes at twenty2five.blogspot, we were alerted to a recent paper in Psychological Science that investigated how easily people correct their beliefs[1]. Now, you have to know that the angle you are about to hear is speculative, although not outrageous. The researchers argued that people make two kinds of mistakes on a phrase … [Read more...]
Don’t Drink in the Dark
April 23, 2010 by 15 Comments
Mosquitoes, or mozzies as we would call them here in Australia, come out at night. I know this in part because I have witnessed the massacre of my good friend Donaldo Becoccini on a fateful evening in Yellow Waters Kakadu -truly one of the planet's special places (we found this photo on the web - it is by Mike Jones and he has some excellent … [Read more...]
Faulty input makes you feel funny, but doesn’t hurt
April 20, 2010 by 2 Comments
There is a really attractive theory that has been used to explain why some people have chronic ongoing pain even though there is nothing wrong in the body part that hurts. The theory suggests that the pain occurs because motor commands don't match proprioceptive feedback from the body. The name often given to this theory is the sensory-motor … [Read more...]
Mirror mirror in my brain, are you the answer to every-thaing
April 13, 2010 by 1 Comment
Jeisea alerted us to what I think is a superb blog post by Greg Hickok Center for Cognitive Neuroscience University of California, Irvine on mirror neurons, inspired by a study out of UCL in London and published in the excellent journal Current Biology.The paper shows that mirror neurons undergo sensorimotor learning. This doesn't seem very … [Read more...]
Now the expert talks about SMOUNDS
April 6, 2010 by 1 Comment
The five senses are usually studied in isolation and there is no doubt that this ‘divide and conquer’ method has given us very valuable insight into the way the brain processes sensory information. However, in our daily life, we combine inputs from all sensory channels to make sure we know what’s happening around us. If there is a fire in … [Read more...]
Chronic back pain – when research comes out of the blue
March 25, 2010 by 12 Comments
Something potentially amazing just happened. I’m not being flippant, a randomised controlled trial (RCT: still the only research method that can genuinely tell whether a treatment works) from China has just produced results in chronic back pain that can only be described as amazing. The temptation is to say “unbelievable”. This trial … [Read more...]
There are side effects, and there are real side effects
March 24, 2010 by 1 Comment
The NEJM just posted this entry that clearly shows that when clinicians report side effects of the drugs that their patient is taking, their reports don't agree with what patients report. Interestingly, clinicians are doing the reporting of these side effects as part of their participation in clinical trials, and the clinical trials are almost … [Read more...]
More on the complex interaction between us and our environment….
March 1, 2010 by 2 Comments
There is a very clever Belgian psychologist called Stefaan Van Damme. He has done some excellent work on attentional mechanisms involved in pain. More importantly, however, is that he is a jolly nice fellow. Anyway, he came to Oxford and did a great little experiment (actually, we did a couple but the other one is not ready for the real world … [Read more...]
Is that training diary doing anything?
February 22, 2010 by 2 Comments
One really cool aspect of using a software program like Recognise, is that you can keep tabs on whether or not patients actually do what we ask them to do. This is an important issue because any treatment that involves home exercises or training depends on people doing it! Historically, clinicians have used a training or home exercise diary to … [Read more...]
Where is my back?
February 4, 2010 by 3 Comments
Chronic pain is associated with a loss of the normal capacity to know where your body is. Chronic pain is also associated with odd bodily feelings. To find out if people with chronic back pain had trouble 'feeling' their back, they were asked to draw on a piece of paper the outline of where they felt their back to be. This is a bit tricky to … [Read more...]
I got the word daft published in the British Medical Journal
January 21, 2010 by 1 Comment
Often, when you publish something in a reasonably posh journal, your mates write you a little email to say congratulations. However, if you write a word like 'daft' in an article that is published in a posh journal like BMJ, it is not just your mates who say congratulations! I got about 40 emails from people I have never heard of over this one. … [Read more...]
Silencing brain cells – a step towards, or away from, curing chronic pain?
January 16, 2010 by 3 Comments
Here is a very cool experiment from Ed Boyden's lab at MIT: they have used a fungus (yes, you read that right - a fungus) to turn off neurons using a proton pump that is turned on by blue-green light. Sure, the neurons were in a culture. Sure, they weren't human neurons. But this is seriously interesting because, together with the rapidly … [Read more...]
Further evidence to suggest we should learn something novel every decade
January 6, 2010 by 1 Comment
I remember sitting my folks down and sternly counselling them to make sure they learnt a completely novel skill once per decade, to ensure that their brain doesn't turn to mush. There is plenty of evidence to support such advice (well, aside from the 'mush' bit), but here is a new finding that adds to that evidence, with a whole new level of … [Read more...]
Here is fearfully and wonderfully complex for yer
We have just stumbled across a paper that is very intriguing if you are not up with this tricky little evolutionary twist. Tim Bruckner and colleagues at University of California Irvine and Berkeley, have reported that the odds of a male fetus dying - called the 'fetal death sex ratio' - were increased above the expected odds during September 2001. … [Read more...]