• Researchers are using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to try to understand what dogs are thinking. Two dogs have been trained to stand completely still while their brains are scanned, and one of the dogs is a squirrel-hunting dog -- so maybe these neuroscientists will be able to see what part of a dog's brain activates when someone says, "Squirrel!" [url]
• Doggelganger is a fun way to match up people and dogs that are up for adoption. Dogs and their owners are supposed to grow to look like each other, but what if facial recognition software made it possible for you to adopt a dog that already looked like you from the start? [url]
• Does neutering pets cause any kind of depression for our beloved domesticated animals? Vets may want to change the way they make pets sterile if enough pet owners are convinced that there's even a possibility of post-neutering depression. [url]

• People with superior autobiographical memory can remember an amazing amount, but they're not savants, nor do they have photographic memories or use common memory tricks. Many of them also exhibit obsessive-compulsive tendencies, but researchers have only extensively studied about a dozen subjects with this ability so far. [url]
• Currently, implanting false memories in lab mice involves some combination of genetic engineering, boxes, electrical shocks, brain implants and drug injections, and these procedures aren't recommended for humans (yet). Ten points for re-writing that sentence as a Tom Swifty. [url]
• Erasing painful memories could be helpful for some people, but if reliable techniques are developed to make people forget certain events, what would people choose to remove? Therapeutic forgetting has some obvious benefits, but there could be unintended consequences for criminal trials and witness testimonies. [url]

• Lee Hadwin is somewhat productive while he sleeps and becomes a decent sketch artist while he's unconscious. He started sleep-drawing while he was 4 years old, and he got better and better at it over the years. So apparently, the 10,000 hour rule for mastery also applies to unconscious learning. [url]
• Swiss researchers are studying how sleeping in a hammock changes people's unconscious brain activity. Gentle rocking motions seem to induce a different kind of sleep -- measurable with scalp electrodes. [url]
• Scientists at UC Berkeley have found that Rapid Eye Movement (REM) sleep can help relieve painful memories. Memories seem to be reactivated during REM sleep, and understanding this phenomenon may help treat post-traumatic stress disorder and depression. [url]
• To discover more interesting articles on the human mind, check out what's currently floating around the StumbleUpon universe. [url]  

His management's pre-interview list of guidelines insisted, "Please do not discuss his views on the internet," but perhaps Prince hasn't read them. "I personally can't stand digital music," he says. "You're getting sound in bits. It affects a different place in your brain. When you play it back, you can't feel anything. We're analogue people, not digital." He's warming to his theme. "Ringtones!" he exclaims. "Have you ever been in a room where there's 17 ringtones going off at once?"

Does he have a ringtone?

"No," he says, looking as offended as if I'd asked him if he drove a clown car. "I don't have a phone."

"We made money [online] before piracy was real crazy. Nobody's making money now except phone companies, Apple and Google. I'm supposed to go to the White House to talk about copyright protection. It's like the gold rush out there. Or a carjacking. There's no boundaries. I've been in meetings and they'll tell you, Prince, you don't understand, it's dog-eat-dog out there. So I'll just hold off on recording."

With his research stymied, "all the money has shifted from the lab to the lawyers," said Schwartz, who said he believes the cells may hold deep secrets to such devastating conditions as autism, brain cancer and neurological disease.