Corny Matters

Philosophy matters in brain matters

PURPOSE Although most neuroscientists and physicians would argue against Cartesian dualism, Descartes's version of the psyche/soma divide, which has been controversial since he proposed it in the seventeenth century, continues to haunt contemporary neurological diagnoses through terms such as functional, organic, and psychogenic. Drawing on my own experiences as a person with medically unexplai...

Matters of sex: sex matters.

Despite the popular concept that heart disease preferentially affects the male population, in every year for the past 16 years, cardiovascular disease has killed more women than men.1 Unfortunately, a disparity still exists between men and women in the diagnosis and aggressive treatment of heart disease. The perception that women are relatively protected is reflected by the fact that women are ...

A corny cause of cerebrospinal fluid ascites: A case report and review of literature

OBJECTIVE To report a rare cause of cerebrospinal fluid ascites. METHODS A 37-year-old female with history of intracranial hypertension and a ventriculo-peritoneal shunt was referred to liver clinic for evaluation of newly developed ascites. RESULTS Initially, the cause of ascites was thought to be secondary to a liver etiology. However, this was excluded after a comprehensive evaluation in...

Politics Matters: A Response to Recent Commentaries

Context Matters

Midbrain dopamine neurons are thought to encode the difference between predicted and actual reward on conditioning tasks. Successful models assumed a simple form of prediction that depended only on currently available information. In this issue of Neuron, Nakahara and colleagues record from dopamine neurons in alert monkeys and show that the neurons can encode predictions that are not so restri...