Disclaimer: This post is quite lenghty. To prevent out of context interpretations I kindly request either reading it in its entirety or not reading it at all. Thank you. Why am I writing this? I've been active on the Stack Exchange (SE) network for over a year on a wide variety of different sit...

Activity has an hierarchical structure, and can be analyzed at different levels: activities, actions and operations. (Leontiev 1974) (source: interaction-design.org) The top level is activity itself, oriented towards its motive. At a lower level lie conscious goal-directed actions that must be...

I've recently started using my trackball left-handed after being right-handed my whole life. The motivation is partly to balance out wrist strain, and partly to see how much my brain rejects the idea. Since I am at the computer for a good portion of the day, this is a fundamental change. I start...

This issue is something I have noticed with myself, people in my surroundings and random people on the internet. Their lives are perfectly fine, but yet they feel depressed. In my specific case it's a feeling that lasts for a few days typically and then magically disappears. Only to reappear a co...

According to Shall we have MathJax?, to enable MathJax would require a demonstrable need. How can we demonstrate this need? Perhaps by creating a CW list of questions that would benefit from proper notation? To what extent is this a catch-22, in that the absence of MathJax restricts the ability...

When modeling selective sweeps as a micro-building block in models of macroevolution (not to be confused with misuses of this in creationist arguments), I use the fittest-win model of selection as a first approximation, or Moran process model when I want a more reasonable approximation. In the ...

Dickinson (2005) has a good review of insect flight, including behavior, biomechanics, electrophysiology, and neural control with links to more of the primary literature. What follows is a general summary thereof. The jagged trajectories you mention are called saccades in the insect flight liter...

Can asaccadia (i.e., lack of saccades, due to neuronal or muscular damage) be overcome? Do other muscles (e.g., neck) compensate? Are the resulting gaze patterns the same as for saccades, and are they involuntary the way saccades are? Conversely, in normal vision, is the saccade-fixation system ...

Is there any evolutionary advantage to finding melodies or harmonies pleasurable? Does the ear pick up these particular oscillating waves differently from other sounds, and if so, how does that affect our perception of pleasure? I'm looking for some sort of signalling pathway (most likely involvi...

The part of neuroscience that is ontopic here on Biology.SE is anything related to the molecular basis of neural processes or illnesses. Anything that goes more into the directions of psychology or psychriatry would be off-topic here. There is a certain overlap between the sites for sure, but t...

I saw something deeply disturbing today: A completely sarcastic answer that went right to the heart of the question and eviscerated it with the clean precision of an exacto knife. But it was deleted by the owner! Presumably because they wanted to be nice -insert eyeroll here-. What was disturb...

I would first like to discuss the concept of lateralization and clear up a common misconception about hemispheric dominance. "A brain is considered to be asymmetrical (or lateralized) if one side (hemisphere or other brain region) is structurally different from the other and/or performs a di...

For example, there have been numerous studies from Jeffery Schwartz about deactivating different parts of the brain in OCD patients by relabeling actions as they are happening. They find that parts of the brain actually become calm and the repetitive behavior is stopped, when doing this. Anothe...

Has there been any research proving, disproving, or exploring the concept of conscious activation of specific brain regions? To elaborate on this: I've read that performing processing tasks causes the brain to reinforce that type/kind of processing or thinking. For example, visualizing perform...

I am creating an iPhone app where I need to show transient confirmation messages. For example, when a user submits a comment, I pop up a message saying "thanks for submitting your comment". Shortly after, the message will fade away. There exist many such transient messages all over my iPhone app....