dewarrn1

Or, if you're a myopic glasses-wearer, simply try on-off. I love this trick for images of all kinds because it allows me to apply a uniform blur, no computation required.

Briefly, the authors repeatedly, transiently opened the blood-brain barrier (BBB) of an animal model of AD using scanning ultrasound. They observed that AD-like behavioral and brain symptomology was reduced in the treated animals. They suggest that the effects may be related to potentiating bloodflow to the brain and thereby enhancing clean-up of AD-related pathology.

The challenges going forward are described in their limitations section:

"At this stage, several hurdles have to be faced for SUS to be considered for application in human patients. In addition to the limitation presented by the animal model used in our study, it needs to be considered that the human brain is much larger than that of a mouse. Also, the thicker human skull presents an obstacle that needs to be factored in when parameters are defined that have the envisaged biological effect in the absence of tissue damage. There may also be the necessity to use one of several cranial windows to access the human brain. Also, if one were to apply SUS in humans at the prodromal stage before overt symptoms of AD were present, the safety of this approach would need to be monitored in real time. This could be facilitated by the recent development of advanced methods, such as passive cavitation detection, which is currently being evaluated in both rodents and primates (29). To avoid potentially excessive immune activation in a clinical setting (30), the ultrasound treatment regimen could possibly be done stepwise, covering one brain area at a time.Whereas we only coupled ultrasound with microbubbles, previous studies in rodents evaluated ultrasound for the delivery of therapeutic agents, such as antibodies (31, 32), viral vectors (33), and dextran of different sizes (9, 10). One study targeted Ab using a few entry points for delivery and only a single treatment (34). Because the effect on Ab plaques was very modest, the authors of this study suggested that focused ultrasound would best be suited as a delivery tool, for example, to boost the uptake of peripherally administered anti-Ab antibodies (34). Our results, however, demonstrated that repeated SUS treatment of the entire mouse brain was sufficient to markedly ameliorate the pathology of Ab-depositing mice as analyzed histologically, biochemically, and behaviorally.Our study highlights the potential of SUS treatment as a therapeutic approach for AD and possibly other diseases involving protein aggregation. However, this does not rule out the possibility that it could also be used as a vehicle for drug or gene delivery, given that the BBB remains themajor obstacle for the uptake by brain tissue of therapeutic agents from the circulation (9)."

In summary, it's an interesting approach, but I'm not holding my breath.

Coincidentally, this is exactly how Minds from Iain M. Banks's Culture books spend much of their free time: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mind_(The_Cultu...

It's a great reference that I always come back to when setting up new boxes. Thanks for putting it together!

Both valid points, but this failure-to-replicate does erode some confidence in the general notion of embodied cognition (and I believe deservedly so because these phenomena have always seemed rather incredible). Much of Kahneman's other work has a more solid empirical foundation.

Like you, I learned Logo on an Apple ][ in the '80s. Apart from some dabbling in between, I wouldn't pick up programming in a serious way until grad school. Despite the long gap, that early start made a huge difference for me, and I'll never forget the simple pleasures that Logo afforded me as a child.

Thank you for mentioning this — my podcast app didn't notify me that Season 2 was underway.

Title annotated for general clarity as Dr. Nichols's original (in parentheses) is a bit opaque. Also, that should be a lower-case "f" on "fMRI"; I believe that the title was the victim of autocapitalization.

Sort of. The rebuttal (by Flandin and Friston) suggests that properly-applied parametric statistics of the kind they favor are valid. Eklund et al. wouldn't disagree with that because their own findings support it, but they would point out that not all researchers necessarily adhered to the conservative statistical approach that F&F discuss. More specifically, both sets of authors describe the importance of using a conservative "cluster defining threshold" to identify spatially contiguous 3D blobs of brain activation. Eklund et al. use their findings to raise the question of whether the bulk of fMRI reports were conservative in this regard.

I completely agree that this can be frustrating. For what it's worth, the data from a research study aren't necessarily going to be clinically informative to a GP or even to a radiologist. Structural MRI data could potentially be interpreted, but the sequences collected for research are still different than what you'd get if you went in for a clinical scan.

And if you're interested in having the data for your own purposes, there may still be some liability concerns for the researchers. There's always an agreement to keep MRI data under strict supervision to avoid leaks of personal health information, so providing those data to participants (safeguards or no) could potentially count as a breach of protocol.

Flaundin & Friston's response is interesting because it essentially endorses the findings of Eklund et al. (except for one element of the Eklund analysis that they suggest is a modest error). F&F believe that by setting one parameter correctly (i.e., using a conservative cluster forming threshold) the validity of their preferred parametric statistical approach is upheld. Eklund et al. might quibble because their take-home message is that non-parametric methods should be used instead, but their findings are not misrepresented by F&F.

Regardless, an open and important question is how often other authors used a sufficiently conservative cluster forming threshold for their fMRI analyses. If nothing else, Eklund et al. will cause future reports to be more cautious in this regard.

The dead salmon article is a bit of a red herring here. It's a clear demonstration that a shoddy statistical approach can undermine fMRI findings. Critically, the implications of the current paper extend to even research that has been rigorously analyzed using field-standard software. Statistical issues are at the heart of both papers, but the newer paper identifies problems that are subtle and ubiquitous.

This is right and wrong: AFNI's 3dClustStim did contain a specific bug (since corrected) and is used for fMRI analysis, but the problem that the authors identified is more general than that and encompasses all of the tested packages.

You're correct that the main finding reflects flawed statistical assumptions made by the major neuroimaging packages (or so these authors contend), but they did uncover a specific bug in one of the three packages (AFNI):

"... a 15-year-old bug was found in 3dClustSim while testing the three software packages (the bug was fixed by the AFNI group as of May 2015, during preparation of this manuscript). The bug essentially reduced the size of the image searched for clusters, underestimating the severity of the multiplicity correction and overestimating significance ..."

Nice guide, better comments, leaving this here for later reference.

Very cool! I've always been fascinated by lighter-than-air vehicles, and I'm excited to see that the technology is still being developed. For anyone who's interested, the history of the field is littered with odd false starts, such as the US Navy's (now long defunct) LAV fleet circa 1920 [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Shenandoah_%28ZR-1%29

Seconded — Miguel's blog is terrific! Major chunks of my (very simple) website's code bear a suspicious resemblance to his examples.

Striking, isn't it? I ran across his work when taking cog psych/cog neuro courses. Arcimbaldo's paintings provide a great demonstration of face perception and — one could argue — face-seeking that our brains perform with no conscious effort.

Not bad, but not quite Arcimbaldo [0].

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giuseppe_Arcimboldo#/media/F...

I have not and will not peek at the DICOM, but anyone else thinking about doing something like this should heed the preceding comments and be aware that stripping PHI headers is critical to deidentifying medical imaging data. Also, the imaging data itself can also be identifying — best practice for sharing deidentified neuroimaging data involves face-stripping.

Robert Lustig, first author on this paper, has written a very accessible book on the same topic titled "Fat Chance" [0]. I enjoyed it, although I can't vouch for all of the science.

Full disclosure: I did stop eating sugary food after reading and watching some of Lustig's presentations, and I'm generally pleased with the results.

[0] http://amzn.to/1S7LmQY

I can't vouch for dolphin sonar resolving fine anatomical detail /in vivo/, but dolphins can recognize visually obscured objects using the ability [0].

[0] http://www.dolphin-institute.org/our_research/dolphin_resear...

Happily, a Python port of ggplot is underway [0], although it's still very much a work in progress.

[0] https://github.com/yhat/ggplot/

I've tried remapping Caps Lock, but I find that the stretch to hit that key eventually irritates my ulnar nerve. I'll stick with "jk" (or "ii" on Colemak).

Another endorsement for Gelman's books — they're some of the best instructional statistics work that I've read.

Or about 10% of their full-time workforce [0].

[0] http://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=HPQ+Profile

Great example of catastrophic interference [0] in the brain! And I like Destin's stuff, but disregard the pop-neuroscience.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catastrophic_interference

Here's my terribly hackish version for BSD userlands (briefly tested on FreeBSD, may work on OS X):

    #!/bin/sh
    eg () {
        man $1 | grep '^E.EX.XA' -A 1000 | grep '^[A-Z]' -m 2 -B 1000 -A 0 | sed '$d' | $PAGER
    }
    eg $1

Interesting idea. Before Shai Agassi's electric car company (Better Place) folded there was talk of a similar motorized arm [0]. I don't know whether that ever got past the discussion stage at BP, and they're out of business in any event.

[0] http://archive.wired.com/cars/futuretransport/magazine/16-09...

I wouldn't be in cognitive neuroscience if I thought our methods held no promise, but there's a vast gap between reconstructing images from visual cortex responses and accurately determining whether a person is lying. Farah et al. [0] recently summarized the best available evidence and concluded as follows (emphasis mine):

"... different policies should be considered for different applications of fMRI-based lie detection. We do not join calls to ban fMRI-based lie detection across the board. Despite the enormous shortcomings of the current evidence ... we suggest that restrictions should be proportional to the outcomes and principles at stake. Risk reduction in dating calls for different standards of certainty and different protections of individual rights than the interrogation of terrorist suspects."

[0] http://www.nature.com/nrn/journal/v15/n2/abs/nrn3665.html