New Phineas Gage Photo Released

In my chapter INSIDE THE BRAIN I mention the case of the railroad foreman, Phineas Gage, who, in the 19th century, had a hole blown through his skull when he accidentally received a huge metal tamping iron in the face. The iron shot straight through his skull damaging his left orbitofrontal cortex as it went. Received wisdom to date on Phineas's fate has it that he underwent marked personality change after the accident and turned into a profane boor who constantly made disastrous decisions in his social life. All this matches with what we now think we know about the role of this part of the brain in advanced social intelligence. However this article, containing the reversed daguarreotype of a new portrait of Gage, contains suggestions from the Australian expert on Gage, Malcolm Macmillan, that he must have recovered from his injuries and the personality changes they caused, because it shows a confident young man posing with the tamping iron that caused the injury. Hmmm.....

Oxytocin Promotes Social Behaviour in Autistics

The hormone oxytocin is known to promote mother-offspring bonds and social relationships and is often deficient in people with autism. This group of French researchers administered inhalant oxytocin to a number of high-functioning autistics and Aspergers Syndrome individuals and measured increases in their ability to react partially to cooperative individuals in a ball-throwing game and to greatly improve their attention to faces, and especially eyes, when given pictures of faces to look at. All fits very nicely with the social intelligence/mind-blindness theories of autism.

Our Brains Were Built For Empathy

Here's a nice little essay in the Huff Post from Richard Restak. It leans heavily on the idea of mirror neurons - which not everybody agrees with - and is a good take on the idea of the "empathic civilisation".

Cafe Scientifique

I have just completed two speaking gigs at particularly keen and flourishing UK branches of the Cafe Scientifique organisation - at Cockermouth in Cumbria, and, last night, in Reading. In both talks I castigated scientists like Jane Goodall and Frans de Waal, and their fellow travellers, for over-egging the genetic and cognitive proximity of chimpanzees to humans - the better to goad us into action to grant them watered-down versions of human rights as a prelude to conservation efforts. Both Cafes produced a wealth of good questions and, interestingly, no-one stood up and defended the "human rights for chimps" idea, whether argued on scientific or cultural grounds. In the weeks before this I gave talks to a similar UK debating organisation - Salon - at Leeds and Manchester. I have come away greatly impressed by the commitment, keenness and aura of friendly enquiry that pervades these branches and urge all my readers to join a Cafe Science or Salon if you can find one in your town or city. And if you can't - start one!