On Episode 8 of the Connectome podcast, Ben talks with Oliver Sacks, renowned neuroscientist and author of such books as The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Musicophilia and Hallucinations. In particular, Sacks joins us to talk about some patients of his who’ve been hallucinating strange varieties of musical notation. But musical hallucinations [...]
Posts Tagged ‘consciousness’
Podcast 8 – Oliver Sacks
June 5th, 2013 
The Connectome 
Posted in Featured, Podcasts 
Tags: consciousness, dreams, drugs, hallucinations, neuropharmacology, psychology, senses, vision 
2 Comments »
Podcast 7 – Roundtable With David Saintloth and Wai Tsang (Part 2)
April 15th, 2013 The Connectome On Episode 7 of the Connectome podcast, we rejoin our two-part roundtable discussion on the nature of intelligence, on the differences between biological and artificial intelligence, and on the ways in which the idea of digital intelligence can inform our understanding of how our own minds work. (Here’s the link to Part 1 of this [...]
Posted in Featured, Podcasts Tags: consciousness, intelligence, learning, memory, neurophysiology, senses, technology 2 Comments »
Podcast 5 – Our Interview With David Eagleman
February 6th, 2013 The Connectome On episode 5 of the Connectome podcast, Ben chats with David Eagleman, author of the international bestseller Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain. Eagleman’s lab mainly studies the ways our brains encode sensory perceptions – but as you’ll hear, he’s also fascinated by questions on the nature of consciousness, synesthesia, meaning and representation, and [...]
Posted in Featured, Podcasts Tags: consciousness, functional networks, memory, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, psychology, senses, synesthesia, vision 1 Comment »
The Top 5 Neuroscience Breakthroughs of 2012
December 21st, 2012 The Connectome More than any year before, 2012 was the year neuroscience exploded into pop culture. From mind-controlled robot hands to cyborg animals to TV specials to triumphant books, brain breakthroughs were tearing up the airwaves and the internets. From all the thrilling neurological adventures we covered over the past year, we’ve collected five stories we want [...]
Posted in Feature Stories, Featured Tags: consciousness, neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, neurons, neurophysiology, technology, technosophy 10 Comments »
Deciphering Sleep: Our Interview with David Rye
December 17th, 2012 The Connectome Why do we need to sleep? In all of human biology, few questions are more persistent – or more mythologized – than this one. Almost as puzzling as sleep itself are sleep disorders like narcolepsy and insomnia, which make us wonder why some of us need so much more sleep than others do. David Rye, [...]
Posted in Feature Stories, Featured Tags: biochemistry, biology, consciousness, dreams, neurochemistry, neuropharmacology, sleep 1 Comment »
Q&A: Can We Preserve Our Brains After Death?
November 2nd, 2012 The Connectome As promised, here’s the first-ever official Connectome Q&A! We’ve been getting lots of incoming questions on our Facebook and Twitter pages – some of them on the technical side; others of the more “general interest” variety. Most of these questions require pretty involved answers – and it’s important to me that each of them gets [...]
Posted in Featured Tags: biology, connectomics, consciousness, evolution, imaging, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, technology 2 Comments »
Whisperers in Darkness
May 31st, 2012 The Connectome Last night I awoke with my head under the covers, to the sounds of strange chitterings and scratchings in the darkness around me. For a few seconds I lay frozen, hoping the sounds would fade – but they only grew louder and drew nearer – until at last, unable to stand it any longer, I [...]
Posted in Feature Stories, Featured Tags: biology, consciousness, psychology, senses, sleep No Comments »
The Depths of Decisions
May 5th, 2012 The Connectome Our brains – and the brains of other animals – actually run through superfast replays of past experiences as we make decisions, says a new study. This process isn’t one we usually have conscious access to – but without it, we might not be able to learn from the past at all. Memory seems pretty [...]
Posted in Brain News, Featured Tags: consciousness, learning, memory, neuroanatomy, neurons, neurophysiology, senses No Comments »
Science, Pseudoscience, and Souls
April 24th, 2012 The Connectome This article, Near Death Explained by Mario Beauregard, doesn’t actually explain what out-of-body experiences are. What it does is propose non-scientific answers derived from fallacious reasoning. Which is intensely frustrating, because Beauregard is writing about an awesome topic: What happens in our brains when we have out-of-body experiences (OBEs)? I mean, who wouldn’t want to know that? What makes [...]
Posted in Feature Stories, Featured Tags: consciousness, dreams, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, psychology, science to the rescue! No Comments »
Into the Labyrinth
April 16th, 2012 The Connectome Have you ever found that the more obsessed you become with a certain topic, the more references to it keep spontaneously appearing in your life? That’s what’s been happening to me over the past few weeks, as I’ve spent just about every free moment preparing and polishing my TED talk. The talk is a celebration of one of [...]
