Encephalon 7th Edition

Welcome to the 7th edition of Encephalon!
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I figured we should start with the usual topics of the Omni Brain blog - sex, drugs, and rock and roll!

Sex...
Our first entry into the sex category is a post from The Frontal Cortex that looks at the action of mirror neurons during the viewing of pornography. But of course no one can talk about mirror neurons without some criticism - and who better to do that than The Neurocritic.
I've seen a number of studies about human pheromones and some commercially available (what I assume are bogus) sprays - Here's a post looking at pheromones in humans.
And finally on the sex topic, here's a grab bag of links from here at Omni Brain.

Drugs...
Okay... perhaps this doesn't reallly count as drugs but Tom Stafford at mindhacks.com is addicted to email, and thinks that some very old behaviourist psychology might be able to help him out.
Talk of drugs always brings out some speculation of course, check out this post about hallucinogenics from Paws full of Devious Cretins.

Rock and Roll...
Cognitive Daily presents some interesting data collected from all you readers about musical taste and expertise. This is a three part series, all of which is worth reading, so here they are in order: Post 1 | Post 2 | Post 3.

Now that we're finished with the three most important aspects of neuroscience... we can get to the other submissions - ooooK perhaps they aren't the most important ;)

Technology/Methods...
As anyone who does cognitive neuroscience research knows - MRI is expensive - flakey - not really portable - requires lots of mantenence - has limited temporal resolution - and well.. lots of other problems. These posts from the A Blog Around the Clock and the Neurophilosopher's blog explore new advances in both data analysis and technology which may improve the technique in years to come.

The Uncategorized...
Here's a post from the Mouse Trap regarding how the concept of Framing as applied to linguistics may also be relevant to Moral Issues and the underlying concpet of Universal Moral Grammar, and another post about the common cognitive mecahnisms underlying causal reasoning and the normal learning.
If you'd like to see some great antique neuroanatomy drawing go to the Neurophilosopher's blog.And finally, since I'm watching football right now, (wow the bears/vikings game is ridiculous!) here's a post from the Frontal Cortex on risk taking by coaches on 4th down. Evidently 90% of the time NFL coaches do the statistically wrong thing by not going for it on 4th down at the goal line.