A lot of medication gets misused, as is the right expression, meaning not used for the intention or indication it was developed for in the first place. This reminded me of one of my first publications on the abuse of anticholinergics. From case reports it appears that quetiapine is sought after for recreational use and inappropriate use such as intranasal and intravenous administration. Quetiapine is also for sale on the street, symptom malingering to obtain the drug and higher dosage requests. It's always important to recognize such misuse of medication because in the case of quetiapine it can induce weight gain, .....read more »

Presentation about new developments with maps by Microsoft. In this presentation you can see how they integrated even the sky and moon into the location on the map besides the 3D representation. Other possibilities are time traveling, flickr integration, and showing areas before and after earthquakes, just to name a few. It becomes an an interactive three-dimensional space. The technology is based on Seadragon, the visualization technology that gives it an amazingly smooth digital rendering and zoom capabilities. Blaise Aguera y Arcas demos new augmented-reality mapping technology from Microsoft. Related posts: Augmented reality made easy Augmented Reality Machine Turns You into Third Person .....read more »

Personally I like online shopping mainly because it's easy, fast and convenient, you can shop when you want to anywhere you want to. There's a gender gap in online shopping. More men than women engage in online shopping and make online purchases while in the offline world women love to shop. Until recent very few studies were done on gender differences in online shopping and gender differences in online shopping attitude. From recent research we learn that online shopping is not as attractive or appealing to women as it is towards men. Women have more positive attitude towards conventional shopping .....read more »

it asks for your birth year and slowly fades out as it counts backwards through the years. Finally the page background goes to black, and a white line of text begins printing out. What it starts with depends on what year you were born but generally you’ll get a note about what movie was popular that year, and then a narrative that combines time-based facts with philosophical questions and reflections on life. This is just an small example of everything that happened in my birth year: In ####, the world was a different place. There was no Google yet. Or Yahoo. Or Researchbuzz.org, .....read more »

Sharing powerful stories from his anti-obesity project in Huntington, W. Va., TED Prize winner Jamie Oliver makes the case for an all-out assault on our ignorance of food. Important lecture about how we lost touch with what we eat. The most shocking part of this video is after 12 minutes were he shows kids trying to name vegetables. They really don't know what they are. Related posts: Food and Depression, how healthy eating can help Food for the Brain Twitter Revolution, A Book Review ..read more »

Meditation is different from rest or sleep. It's a wakeful hypometabolic state with lowered sympathetic activity as opposed to the fight and flight reactions which requires an active sympathetic system. Parasympathetic activity is increased which is important for relaxation and rest. This increase of parasympathetic state is characterized by reduced heart rate, lower systolic blood pressure, lower oxygen metabolism, and an increase of skin resistance. So it's not only a rest state but also physiological relaxation related to to stress relief. But what is the effect of meditation on the brain? During meditation not only general relaxation is experienced but also .....read more »

This video is about mirror neurons. These mirror neurons are the key to many aspects of social interaction. It allows us to understand the actions, feelings of others. In a way to "read their minds". Possibly mirror neurons play an important role in empathy , an important asset for physicians. But were do they come from these motor neurons? One explanation could be that mirror neurons are an adaptation: an adaptation for action understanding concerns the origins, rather than the current utility, of mirror neurons. It asserts that a certain process – genetic evolution – produced mirror neurons, and that they were .....read more »

The strongest evidence exists for Broadman Area 25 in the subcallosal cingulate gyrus (SCG) as target for deep brain stimulation in treatment resistant depression. This area in the brain is depicted in the figure above and is from the most important publication about DBS and depression in Neuron march 2005 by Helen Mayberg. Functional neuroimaging as well as antidepressant treatment effects suggest that this area plays an important role in modulating negative mood states. A decrease in activity is reported with clinical response to antidepressants and electroconvulsive therapy (ECT). But depression is not a disease of a single brain region nor .....read more »

Both the hidden and informal curriculum take place after or next to the theoretical teaching, the formal teaching and has an important part in the shaping of the medical students' professionalism and professional values. Moreover, these forms of the curriculum have a major impact on the learning potential of med students. Yet little is known about this subject. A lot has been written but only from a theoretical stand point. The hidden curriculum is the physical and workforce organizational infrastructure in the academic health center that influences the learning process and the socialization to professional norms and rituals. The informal curriculum is .....read more »

Bluebrain | Year One from Couple 3 Films on Vimeo. The Blue Brain Project is the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, in order to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations. More on the Bleu Brain Project here.... Thanks Boing Boing Related posts: Human Computer Interfaces Better Matched to our Brains and Body Brain Power: Brain Only Computer Interface 2 Fun Sites for Brain and Human Anatomy ..read more »