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Neuroscience and Neurobiology

Selected Works

2016

Articles 1 - 4 of 4

Full-Text Articles in Psychology

Animal Suffering In China, Peter J. Li Jul 2016

Animal Suffering In China, Peter J. Li

Peter J. Li, PhD

Chinese policy has been aimed at maximizing GDP; it is time to focus also on minimizing animal suffering.

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Fish Pain: An Inconvenient Truth, Culum Brown May 2016

Fish Pain: An Inconvenient Truth, Culum Brown

Culum Brown, PhD

Whether fish feel pain is a hot political topic. The consequences of our denial are huge given the billions of fish that are slaughtered annually for human consumption. The economic costs of changing our commercial fishery harvest practices are also likely to be great. Key outlines a structure-function analogy of pain in humans, tries to force that template on the rest of the vertebrate kingdom, and fails. His target article has so far elicited 34 commentaries from scientific experts from a broad range of disciplines; only three of these support his position. The broad consensus from the scientific community is …

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Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Damage Is Associated With Decreased Ventral Striatum Volume And Response To Reward, Maia S. Pujara, Carissa L. Philippi, Julian C. Motzkin, Mustafa K. Baskaya, Michael Koenigs May 2016

Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex Damage Is Associated With Decreased Ventral Striatum Volume And Response To Reward, Maia S. Pujara, Carissa L. Philippi, Julian C. Motzkin, Mustafa K. Baskaya, Michael Koenigs

Carissa Philippi

The ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) are two central nodes of the “reward circuit” of the brain. Human neuroimaging studies have demonstrated coincident activation and functional connectivity between these brain regions, and animal studies have demonstrated that the vmPFC modulates ventral striatum activity. However, there have been no comparable data in humans to address whether the vmPFC may be critical for the reward-related response properties of the ventral striatum. In this study, we used fMRI in five neurosurgical patients with focal vmPFC lesions to test the hypothesis that the vmPFC is necessary for enhancing ventral striatum responses to …

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Cognitive Evidence Of Fish Sentience, Jonathan Balcombe Apr 2016

Cognitive Evidence Of Fish Sentience, Jonathan Balcombe

Jonathan Balcombe, PhD

I present a little-known example of flexible, opportunistic behavior by a species of fish to undermine Key’s (2016) thesis that fish are unconscious and unable to feel. Lack of a cortex is flimsy grounds for denying pain to fish, for on that criterion we must also then deny it to all non-mammals, including birds, which goes against scientific consensus. Notwithstanding science’s fundamental inability to prove anything, the precautionary principal dictates that we should give the benefit of the doubt to fish, and the state of the oceans dictates that we act on it now.

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