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SCIENCE & CONSCIOUSNESS REVIEW
SCI-CON.ORG NEWSLETTER
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August 4, 2004

ARTICLES IN THIS ISSUE
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1. SCR Feature - The Scientific Consciousness Community Mourns the
Loss of Francis Crick
2. How the brain can be fooled into feeling a fake limb
3. Neuroscience: Change of mind
4. Why do we sleep?
5. VR Tool Re-Creates Hallucinations
6. Self-recognition in everyday life
7. New Issue of NeuroImage
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1. The Scientific Consciousness Community Mourns the Loss of Francis Crick
Original to SCR
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**The scientific consciousness community mourns the loss of Francis
Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, who devoted the last several decades
of his life to the quest for understanding consciousness and its brain
basis. Crick successfully encouraged new experimental research, and in
collaboration with Christof Koch, developed testable hypotheses about
the brain basis of conscious experience. He helped rescue the topic
from an undeserved negative reputation and did much to return it to
the forefront of scientific interest. His quick and penetrating mind,
kindness to others and leadership in the field will be sorely missed.**

Read More: http://www.sci-con.org/news/articles/20040703.html
<http://www.sci-con.org/articles/20040601.html>
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2. How the brain can be fooled into feeling a fake limb
EurekAlert
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Stories of amputees feeling phantom limbs is common place, however
Henrik Ehrsson of University College London identify fake limbs as
part of their own body. The study argues that distinguishing the self
from non-self is done by comparing information from multiple senses
and that this distinction is merely an illusion created by the brain.

Read More:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2004-07/ucl-tnm062904.php
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3. Neuroscience: Change of mind
Nature.com
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Report of a case of a Liverpool patient who after a cerebral hemorage
turned from violent convict to a compulsive and creative artist.

Read More:
http://www.nature.com/cgitaf/Dynapage.taf?file=/nature/journal/v430/n6995/f=
ull/430014a_fs.html

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4. Why do we sleep?
Nature.com
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The July issue of Nature has a special focus on sleep and cites two
articles as shedding light on the issue.

Local sleep and learning
Human sleep is a global state whose functions remain unclear. During
much of sleep, cortical neurons undergo slow oscillations in membrane
potential, which appear in electroencephalograms as slow wave activity
(SWA) of <4 Hz. The amount of SWA is homeostatically regulated,
increasing after wakefulness and returning to baseline during sleep.
It has been suggested that SWA homeostasis may reflect synaptic
changes underlying a cellular need for sleep. If this were so,
inducing local synaptic changes should induce local SWA changes, and
these should benefit neural function. Here we show that sleep
homeostasis indeed has a local component, which can be triggered by a
learning task involving specific brain regions. Furthermore, we show
that the local increase in SWA after learning correlates with improved
performance of the task after sleep. Thus, sleep homeostasis can be
induced on a local level and can benefit performance.

http://phy.ucsf.edu/~idl/pdf_articles/Tonini_Nature_2004.pdf


Neurobiology: Sleep on it
Is the function of sleep to replenish energy resources or to modify
neural connections in the brain? Recordings of the brain's
'reverberating circuits' evident during sleep shed light on the question.

http://phy.ucsf.edu/~idl/pdf_articles/Tononi_Nature_NV_2004_files/DynaPage_=
002.htm


Read More:
http://www.nature.com/nature/links/040701/040701-1.html

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5. VR Tool Re-Creates Hallucinations
Technology Research News
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Based on patient interviews, researchers from University of Queensland
in Australia have created a virtual reality environment to allow
psychiatrists to understand what it is like to have hallucinations.
Descriptions of the hallucinations are gained from the patients, and
then recreated in software.

Read More:
http://www.trnmag.com/Stories/2004/061604/VR_tool_re-creates_hallucinations=
_061604.html

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6. Self-recognition in everyday life
Serge Brédart & Andrew Young
University of Liège Belgium, University of York UK
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Introduction: A sample of everyday difficulties was collected,
encompassing errors and unusual experiences participants had
encountered when recognising their own faces in everyday life, with
the aim of characterising similarities and differences between the
reported difficulties and the major forms of self-recognition
impairments described in the neuropsychological and neuropsychiatric
literatures (prosopagnosia, mirrored-self misidentification, and
Capgras delusion).

Method. A total of 70 participants recalled experiences from memory.
Incidents (n = 51) were recorded on questionnaire sheets that were
filled out at home. Reports of three categories of incidents were
analysed: misidentifications (the participant misidentified her/his
own face as being that of another familiar person; n = 5), recognition
failures (the participant judged that his/her own face was that of an
unfamiliar person; n = 20) and perception of unusual aspects (the
participant confidently recognised his/her own face but found that the
seen face did not fit well the representation she/he had of his/her
own face; n = 26).

Results and discussion. In the reported incidents, experiences showing
some similarities to those of patients with prosopagnosia, Capgras
delusion or mirrored self misidentification were noted. However,
across the whole study, no incident involved a failure of reality
testing; in contrast to pathological forms of error, in all of the
reported incidents from our study the participant realised that a
mistake had been made. The importance of decision processes in
pathological forms of own-face misrecognition is discussed.

Read More:
http://tinyurl.com/6zzgm [Ingenta.com]

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7. New Issue of NeuroImage, April 2004
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Contents of this Issue:

The neural substrates of conscious color perception demonstrated using
fMRI
Tomoyo Morita, Takanori Kochiyama, Tomohisa Okada, Yoshiharu Yonekura,
Michikazu Matsumura and Norihiro Sadato

Human MT+ mediates perceptual filling-in during apparent motion
Taosheng Liu, Scott D. Slotnick and Steven Yantis

Brain areas and time course of emotional processing
M. Esslen, R. D. Pascual-Marqui, D. Hell, K. Kochi and D. Lehmann

Activation of the amygdala and anterior cingulate during
nonconscious\processing of sad versus happy faces
William D. S. Killgore and Deborah A. Yurgelun-Todd

Functional-anatomic correlates of remembering and knowing
Mark E. Wheeler and Randy L. Buckner

Willed action and attention to the selection of action
H. C. Lau, R. D. Rogers, N. Ramnani and R. E. Passingham

Differential neural responses to overt and covert presentations of
facial expressions of fear and disgust
Mary L. Phillips, Leanne M. Williams, Maike Heining, Catherine M. Herba,
Tamara Russell, Christopher Andrew, Ed T. Bullmore, Michael J. Brammer

Read More:
http://tinyurl.com/5sho6 [ScienceDirect]

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Science and Consciousness Review <http://www.sci-con.org>