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Neuroscience

At Mind Matters News: Study: Eight-week mindfulness courses do not change the brain

O'Leary: Eight-week courses don't provide enough time. Tibetan monks can control metabolism and even brain waves through meditation but they devote their lives to it. It would be more surprising if that fact had no effect on their brains than if it does. Read More ›

Researcher: Stinging cells evolved by repurposing a neuron from an older form of life

Researcher: "These harpoons are made of a protein that is also found only in cnidarians, so cnidocytes seem to be one of the clearest examples of how the origin of a new gene (that encodes a unique protein) could drive the evolution of a new cell type." (It’s hard to avoid the sense of design here.) Read More ›

The secret world in the gaps between brain cells

Neuroscientist: It’s now known that every cell in the brain is separated from its neighbor by a fluid-filled extracellular space (ECS), which forms sheets and tunnels, as shown on page 26 in a computer reconstruction of the ECS in a rat’s brain. Read More ›

At Evolution News: Silence around Cambrian Brains

This was bound to come up eventually: First, notice the quote marks around “Cambrian explosion,” a subtle hint that the term is controversial. It’s not. They state clearly that it is “marked by the appearance of most major animal phyla.” Panarthropoda is a taxon that combines arthropods with tardigrades and onycophorans. The sentence means that yes, lots of different arthropods appear throughout the fossil record, revealing “extreme morphological disparities,” i.e. outward differences. Yet these Chinese specimens show that the brains are conservative — not that they vote Republican, but that CNS structures throughout the panarthropod collection are similar, not showing extensive evolution. They’re not just conservative; they are “remarkably conservative.” In terms of general body plan, it’s a picture of Read More ›

David Coppedge: Brain neurons “comparable to a library”

David Coppedge: Researchers at Max Planck, Rockefeller, and Duke Universities examined the connections in brain tissue from the visual cortex, the first stop for information coming in from the retina. It was a tall order. A news item from Max Planck, “No cable spaghetti in the brain,” describes the cabling nightmare... Read More ›

So now there are two brains in our bodies that “just somehow evolved”

The gut nervous system has come to be called a “second brain.” No wonder that, in order to account for all this specified complexity, evolutionary biologists must elevate natural selection into some form of magic, then persecute non-believers. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Memory leans more on the brain’s electric field than on neurons

The neurons associated with our memories may change; it’s the electric field that holds the memories together, the neuroscientists say. That’s a very different picture of memories than the idea that memories are “stored” in the brain. It’s not quite like that … It's closer to the quantum world. Read More ›

At Mind Matters News: Imaging studies fail badly at linking brain and behavior

Aha! news stories about what brain imaging reveals about human behavior are probably based on studies whose findings would not be confirmed by further research. Such studies, often of psychiatric conditions, were the Next Step for brain imaging: showing that human behavior is based on simple, identifiable brain states. Read More ›

New use for “junk DNA”: Controlling fear

Okay, why, until recently, did researchers think that “the majority of our genes were made up of junk DNA, which essentially didn't do anything”? Because that vast sunken library of dead information (sheer randomness and waste) was a slam dunk for Darwinism, as politically powerful theistic evolutionist Francis Collins was quick to point out in The Language of God. (2007). If that’s not true, an argument for Darwinism is disconfirmed. Read More ›