Every week I look back at what caught my eye in the neuro world. This is for those of you who hate/are scared of/don’t understand/can’t be bothered by/had a bad experience with/never heard of/simply avoid reading my feed (please circle only one) on Twitter, because these stories were all listed there. If you are coming from Twitter, consider this a refresher on the tweets that got away.

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Candidate roles for the motor cortex in speech perception
This is one of those fields I find interesting. It is also quite controversial. The article is an opinion piece that provides a survey of the literature not quite on the scale of a review, but excellent for a newcomer to this area. The authors argue that motor cortex is not a necessity for speech perception per se, but does perform a role in more specialized speech contexts, like in a conversation.

Brain wave education from the brain wave guru
Mo Costandi pointed me towards this Washington Post story describing how the D.C. Council honored March 16 as “Brain Education Day”, except I can’t find a single educated thing about this day. The declaration stemmed from a call by Ilchi Lee to mark the day. Lee is the developer of a brain education program and oversees an international brain education organization headquartered in Sedona, AZ, the self-reported “New Age Capital” of the world. Essentially, a good portion of the “education” involves shaking and therefore mechanically stimulating the brain. As quoted by one of the participants: “It’s so new-agey!” Wha…? Sounds like regular old aerobics to me…

A fast Na/Ca²-based action potential in a marine diatom
Action potentials are all-or-none regenerative events fired by neurons to produce a digital communication code. In general, electrical impulses are important for a variety of physiological functions in a different cell-types and organism families, but very few of these electrical events have exhibited anything close to the properties of the regenerative action potential. This paper in PLoSONE describes a channel-dependent action potential-like event in marine diatoms. The functional role of these potentials are unknown, but this is cool none-the-less from a biophysical standpoint. If you like these kind of detailed discussions about action potentials, then most definitely check out the debate on whether C. elegans neurons display action potentials.

The attentional spotlight
A really cool blog post from PsyBlog discussing how although our eyes can be fixed, we still scan around a scene with our “mind’s eye”. This has been demonstrated from classic fantastic experiments. This was part of a series of posts on attention including a discussion about the cocktail party effect.

The neural correlates of doing nothing
Researchers have studied the correlates of decision-making and taking actions for decades, in an attempt to understand how the mind evaluates and integrates data in many forms and from many sources prior to committing to one particular response or behavior. These authors were interested in what happens in our brains when we decided not to act. Perhaps not surprisingly, a free choice act to not do something looked very similar to actually doing something since, in effect, even not taking action is still a willed choice. Of course, they did find a few subtle differences for a non-action that took the place of event-related potentials representing the decision to take action.

The Mystery and Magic of Glia:
A Perspective on Their Roles in Health and Disease [PDF]
A really great review from a top-notch scientist imploring researchers to think more about glia. A quote from the review: “…until the roles of non-neuronal cells are more fully understood and considered, neurobiology as a whole will progress only slowly.” Those are strong words, but considering we have known for quite some time that glia are not simply the glue for which they were originally named, it does seem surprising that we still need to emphasize their importance.

The Neurobiology of Reference-Dependent Value Computation
the general population is learning more and more about the term “neuroeconomics”, and in turn, the research underlying this fascinating field is getting more and more attention. Here, the authors explore a confusing aspect of our value determination in that we seem to calculate and estimate value based on a relative scale rather than one of absolutes. As a quick example, if a subject was playing a game of chance alone, valuation follows a scale of absolutes, for the most part. However, if we play the same game with an opponent, and we lose the same amount, as long as the opponent loses more, we react as if we actually had a net gain. The data here propose that the ventral striatum may be the seat of this reference-dependent value & utility estimation, leading to what neuroeconomists call the “endowment effect”.