The Art Neuro Weblog

13 Unexplainable Phenomena
This is a good read. Sometime reader GK sent this along.
Here's just one of them:

1 The placebo effect
DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution.

Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.This is the placebo effect:
somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.

Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease (Nature Neuroscience, vol 7, p 587). He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's. The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.

We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know.

That should whet your appetite for the rest. :)

Groundhog-Day Sort Of Universe
It must be a confluence sort of day as Pleiades sent in this one, which also a good little read.

Professor Steinhardt explained that what happens in the future could also have happened in our past. The big bang may not have been the beginning of space and
time. Instead, the evolution of the universe could be cyclic, with regularly repeating periods of expansion and contraction. If this theory is correct, it could help to explain one of the puzzles of cosmology – how the galaxies, stars and planets came into being.

The big bang should leave a boring, featureless universe, but not if it was preceded by a big crunch. The random quantum fluctuations in the collapsing universe might be the very ripples which seed the galaxies in the subsequent expansion.

Sort of like the Mandala. What did the Esoteric Budhists know? Must ask the Dalai Lama! :)

- Art Neuro