From time to time, I will try to put some interesting neuroscience
tidbits here. They may be references to journals or books, or images,
but usually they will be World Wide Web links. If you find a WWW link
that is no longer active, please notify me (bklein@vt.edu).
Here is an incredibly cool and useful resource. It is an on-line,
color-image dissection guide for the sheep brain. It shows you external
surface features of the brain, a mid-sagittal view and it shows you
coronal slices as well. This is all stuff we will be looking at in lab.
You can view the images
with or without labels and text is provided as well.
*Hint: When you view the brain slices, which are
referred to as coronal sections, if you initially see only the plane of
section
where the slice was taken from, click on the "Show/Hide" button and the
actual coronal slice will appear.
Here's another very useful site to supplement the printed atlas of
transverse brain sections that you have in the back of the lab
section of your course notes. The sections can be viewed as
labeled or unlabeled,
and as you view a section, you can see the rostrocaudal position within
the brain. The sections can be viewed with a cell stain (cells
appearing
dark purple and fibers appearing light purple) or a fiber stain
(fibers
appearing black and cell regions appearing light). It also shows
you
gross images of the brain, as well as specimens from human and dolphin.
To
access, click below:
Sheep
Brain Atlas
Hey, don't laugh. There's some really great instructional information here, as well as other brain-related amusements. After all, aren't we really all still kids at heart! (Wow, that's corny).
Here's a link from the Neuroscience for Kids web site that I think you'll enjoy. It's got all kinds of trivia and interesting statistics about the brain, including relative sizes and weights in different species, ways the brain has appeared in advertising and movies, brain jokes and coloring books. There's even a link where you can use a virtual probe to stimulate the brain surface and see the resulting action.
This is an incredible site for neuroanatomy as
well as general anatomy of the human. There are gross structures,
sections, illustrations, animations, tutorials, etc. To explore it,
click below:
Here is an MRI atlas of the human brain that also shows you what
different pathologies look like on an MRI scan in addition to normal
stuff. There
are also images of brain vasculature and some of the things can be
viewed
as movies.
This is series of publications by
The Society for Neuroscience (see below) that gives you some insight
into the practical and clinical applications of discoveries in
basic neuroscience.
If you want to
know what's on the forefront of the field of neuroscience, check out
the premier journal in the field, The Journal of Neuroscience, on-line.
In this on-line version, you can
get the index and abstracts of the current and past issues.
The Journal of Neuroscience is an
official publication of the Society for Neuroscience, which, believe it
or not has about 37,500 members. If you are really interested in the
field, you might want to join as a student member in the future and
attend one of the meetings. It is quite an overwhelming experience to
be bathed in neuroscience for
five days straight. Sometimes the meetings are in pretty cool places
and you get to see some pretty bizarre people (not
me of course!!).
Yes, the neurological disease menu
is finally here. At this site, just click on your favorite nervous
system disorder to learn more about it. It also gives you organizations
to contact for help and more information about the disease. There's also PodCasts and other trendy media-type stuff. If you click on Home, you can also get information about normal brain function and on other cool stuff like Neuroethics. You will see there's also an Immunology link to explore.
HAPPY SURFING!!!
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