Becky Appleton Here’s the first post in a new section of my blog called ‘Brainteasers’. This section will be made up of short posts with videos which will show you things you can amaze your friends and family with. They will also fit in with the other sections of my blog, and will show the practical applications … Read more
Bit of a change from neuroscience now to look at one of the most famous areas of social psychology. This aspect was made famous by a series of highly controversial experiments by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s, which investigated why people obey authority figures. To set the scene a bit, a lot of the social … Read more
This is a neurological condition that is caused by damage to one if the hemispheres of the brain. This damage causes the patient to be unable to pay attention to one half of their visual field – they just ignore everything in it. This condition – sometimes known as unilateral neglect, is most common when … Read more
How is it that we are able to see in colour? The process starts with light hitting the photoreceptors in the retina. As you might remember from my last post, there are two different types of photoreceptors: rods and cones. Rods are used when are eyes are adapted to the dark, while cones are used … Read more
How is it that we can see the world around us? It’s quite a bit more complicated than most people think – not simply light hitting the retina and an inverted picture being turned the right way round. Here’s an overview of how we are able to see. First of all, light enters the eye … Read more
This is a topic I’ve been interested in for some time, and would love to do more research on. Here is an overview of the two restrictive types of eating disorders: anorexia nervosa and bulimia nervosa. Anorexia is thought to be a relatively modern disorder, however it has been recognised as an eating disorder since … Read more
Hi, I’m back after a break for Christmas and exams with a topic I find fascinating – phantom limbs. My interest on this topic stems from reading ‘Phantoms in the Brain’ by V.S. Ramachandran – I’f you’re at all interested in psychology and neuroscience then I really recommend it 🙂 So what is a phantom … Read more
The motor cortex is the part of the brain which controls most of our movement (a few reflexes are regulated by the spinal cord). There is a motor area on both the left and right hemispheres, with the left hemisphere motor cortex controlling the right side of our body, and vice versa. Here is a … Read more
Dyslexia is a disorder which affects a person’s ability to read fluently, despite normal intelligence and comprehension. In order for a person to read, they must be able to decode the words and understand them – both of these processes are needed. It can also affect a person’s writing – letters are likely to be written … Read more
If you think about it, it’s pretty impressive that, given the complexity of language, infants learn to speak their first word by the time they are about a year old, and are able to talk in sentences by the age of 2. It takes us years to become fluent in a second language as adults, … Read more