If you read this blog in August, you know that I raved about my experience at Penn's Neuroscience Boot Camp. Now it's your chance to experience the same 9-day Neuro thrill ride. The 2010 edition of Neuroscience Boot Camp, run by the Univ. of Pennsylvania's Center for Neuroscience and Society, is now accepting applications. The deadline to submit an application is February 1, 2010. I highly recommend this program! Continue reading

The NeuroThinker: the gift given to Martha Farah in gratitude for such a tremendous 10 days! (click to see larger image). A little weary (okay, probably a lot weary), we climbed up to the fourth floor of the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science this morning for our final day of boot camp. It turned into a day of big-idea questions, culminating in a wide-ranging discussion this afternoon of the implications of neuroscience for the law and society. Where did the conversation end up? To borrow a phrase from my constitutional law professor, it appears that both the law and... Continue reading

Today we heard from Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, and he started our day by asking a simple, yet sobering question: How many of you know someone with a degenerative cognitive disorder? Almost all hands went up, and for those that didn’t, it’s probably just a matter of time as friends and relatives get older (age is the number one risk factor for all of these diseases). With rising life expectancy, Anjan suggested that dementia disorders may become the scourge of the first half of this century. Neuroscientists join an army of clinicians, behavioral researchers, and care providers in trying to find... Continue reading

Dr. Seth Gillihan talks with Martha Farah and Sita Kotnis (both sporting the new Penn Neuro Boot Camp t-shirts!) T-shirts! It’s not boot camp until you’re all wearing the same thing, and today we were outfitted with our very own camouflage uniforms. It’s another one of the thoughtful details that have made this week not only informative, but truly fun. It was a good moment for something light-hearted, as our topic for the day was more serious: social and affective disorders. Clinical psychologist Seth Gillihan presented us with the most consistent findings from the neuroscience literature on six different types... Continue reading

Above: Dr. Joe Kable lecturing on applied neuroscience. T G I … fMRI. It’s Friday at Penn, and that means we’ve completed five days of boot camp. I think most participants felt the week flew by, and I also think most of us are happy that we’re about to get a day and a half to rest. Today we heard a series of lectures on social-affective neuroscience from Dr. Joe Kable. Neuroscience, he showed us, has been applied in a number of creative ways, including the Coke vs. Pepsi debate, how couples feel each other’s pain, and the perception of... Continue reading