Barley’s forgotten her food again. Hemispatial neglect symptoms in dog continue.

More images of Barley eating, these are from the 6th September, this time she didn’t eat her whole bowl and again ate only from the right hand side.

So the left hemispace neglect symptoms seem to still be present. I’m working on getting a video and mom has said she’ll try to get the vet to maybe get a scan of barley’s brain so will post those if/when they happen.

Have been in touch with a researcher in my dept at Royal Holloway who forwarded the info on to a researcher at UCL’s NIC. He seems very interested in it, and pointed out that Balint induced neglect symptoms in a dog in his early studies on neglect.

Again, anyone with any information that might be useful please get in touch with me. I should get back to writing up my research project, draft is due in next week and I’ve not written a great deal so far.

Insert [Mindblowing sounding claim from ‘Science’ with a hint of something more sinister] Here.

‘Scientists have found’, is my least favourite opening to any newspaper report about recent findings, or proposed research plans. This very sentence just sets my mind a whir, which scientists? who are they? where are they? why? and you can usually guarantee that they will get little mention by first name, unless they’re mothers all called them ‘Researchers’. You can also be pretty sure that if the wild claim in the headline has the words ‘brain scans reveal’… there will undoubtedly be a generic image of a brain scan showing nothing at all but random activations. Sometimes these images from scans don’t even match the method being used, for example a random PET scan image is used when the article is about fMRI! This infuriates me beyond belief. Why also do they insist on always asking for the opinion  of ‘an expert’ who is just some other random researcher from a completely different University who doesn’t know the study being reported or hasn’t even heard of the people conducting it.

Also a lot of the time the results of graduate/nae even some undergraduates studies are used and written about as if they are real actual science. I don’t know about anyone else and their experience of undergraduate research projects but they are far from the stringent approach you’d get with say a PHd or actual researchers work. Half the time we rely on our mates to be test subjects and when they run out, its not unheard of to just re test the same people, or even yourself! Also you can’t always guarantee that another undergrad student taking your test is of sound mind and body that morning, particularly if it’s following a heavy union night! I know of at least one case where a girl turned up to do a sensory based experiment and admitted after she was high! Cause that won’t impede the results at all… sure.

Not to mention the fact that these projects are far from the peer reviewed quality you’d see in any journal.

And one final gripe I have about the way the news report scientific findings is that it is nearly impossible to find the original source of the information because they don’t include any references to the paper they are reporting, and sometimes won’t even mention the researchers names!

Just something to try to rectify I guess, but I fear it means changing the public perception of what is a newsworthy scientific finding, cause if it’s not going to make me rich, live longer, cure cancer, cause cancer, read my mind or invade my privacy, apparently I don’t want to know about it.