Vote for Shibley Rahman - Total Politics Blog Awards 2011

Hi,

I would be very grateful if you could vote for my main blog 'Shibley Rahman' in the Total Politics Blog Awards 2011. I am a loyal suppporter of the Labour Party, even if I do not always agree with their policies or their leadership. For example, I am strongly opposed to a commodification of public services which does not put as a priority quality of service compared to shareholder dividend; I think the policies proposed by New Labour were naive at their best.

This blog is only one year old. In its old form, it received zero votes. I do not feel that it had reached its full potential at that stage.

To read more about my application for 'Total Politics Blog Awards 2011', please go to this link.

Many thanks.

Shibley Rahman

Shibley Rahman on Twitter

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Decision-making, mental illness and the law

In 2001, I wrote a commentary on decision-making and mental illness. Should lawyers listen much more carefully to what neuroscientists have to say, or should they let evolution of the law take its natural course, whatever that is?

Abnormal decision making is a central feature of neuropsychiatric disorders. Recent investigations of the neural substrates underlying decision making have involved qualitative assessment of the cognition of decision making in clinical lesion studies (in patients with frontal lobe dementia) and neuropsychiatric disorders such as mania, substance abuse and personality disorders. A neural network involving the orbitofrontal cortex, ventral striatum and modulatory ascending neurotransmitter systems has been identified as having a fundamental role in decision making and in the neural basis of neuropsychiatric diseases. This network accounts for the dissociations among decision-making deficits in different clinical populations. Ultimately, a more refined and sophisticated characterization of such deficits might guide the early diagnosis and cognitive and therapeutic rehabilitation of these patients.

Read the article here.


As the old saying goes..

Shibley's Question : Why do people become alcoholics?

Are we born with dodgy genes, or is there something in the environment that makes some of us prone to be alcoholics? I used to be an alcoholic, and, after three years, I feel very confident about my recovery. However, other alcoholics in recovery do not share the same confidence. Why are some people safe to have a drink? Are other people 'born' alcoholics?

Please post, even if you're using a 'nom de plume'.

Welcome to Shibley's Contemporary CNS Blog

My background was in medicine, via doing a Ph.D. Then I became interested in the functions of the central nervous system, and I have always wished to learn about this more. I keep up-to-date with all the neuroscience news, and feel free to follow this blog if you would like to share with me some of the great stuff that is happing in neuroscience research.