Marc Egeth

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Press: Mosquitoes

Press: Headless fruitflies

Press: Tongue illusions

Selected paper - if you read just one

• What if we fed mosquitoes from artificial feeders so that a) they wouldn't feed from people so much and b) they wouldn't evolve resistance to the method of control? Good idea? This paper addresses concerns that may come to mind about whether this would be an effective way to control malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases on a global scale.

Human factors

• Hospitals are not safe, not the way air travel is safe. Here is an explanation of one attempt to engineer one small part of one hospital using principles derived from aviation safety.

• Here is a description of from another part of that project: this paper is about how we helped a children's hospital place patient status monitors in the family waiting room.

• In this poster, we explore the different sorts of errors made by injection-experienced and injection-inexperienced users as they start to use a new injection device.

• HE:75 is a document that is accepted as a standard reference on how to design usable medical devices. We find that the standard itself is not always especially usable. In this poster, we show how a designer can be misled by the HE:75 document into producing less usable designs. We offer suggestions for improvement, which we expect to be reflected in the next edition of HE:75.

Perception

• Fruit fly bodies - that is to say, the bodies of decapitated fruit flies - can do all sorts of things, including walking, flying, tasting, and learning. Now, it turns out, they respond to a light turning on, too.

• Human tongue illusions: you might experience these if your tongue is flexible enough.

• How can you tell if a perceptual illusion that you think you have discovered is real? Here is a method for verifying the existence of a newly discovered perceptual illusion (say, a new tongue illusion).

• It turns out that children diagnosed with autism have unusual neural responses to rapidly presented tones. Can this be used to identify autism in pre-linguistic children? My contribution to this paper is the data on simultaneous MEG/EEG, a technical challenge to use two forms of neuroimaging at the same time.

Consciousness

• Is thinking about another person's memory like thinking about a photograph or a photograph of a photograph? This is the paper that came out of my dissertation research. (And here is my dissertation on the same topic.)

• Here are ways to go about using neuroimaging to tell where an uncommunicative patient, such as a young child, is in pain.

• A fruit fly consciousness experiment: if you give anesthetics to a fruit fly at night and it doesn't move, how can you tell if the fly is anesthetized or just asleep?

• Here is how to communicate with, and detect consciousness in, children or adults who cannot move.

• Here is a new way to detect anesthesia awareness, the unfortunate situation that arises when a patient "wakes up" during surgery but cannot move or communicate.

• Here is one way to use magnetoencephalography to tell if a person who cannot move is conscious. This is the paper that accompanies a poster I presented at the 2008 Biomagnetisim conference in Sapporo, Japan.

  • Update! The Coma Science Group cited and used the methods described in the previous papers to try detecting consciousness in a man diagnosed as vegetative. They got him to answer yes/no questions by asking him to change his mental state in ways that are detectable using neuroimaging, with one of these mental states meaning "yes," and the diagnosis was revised.

Evolution

• Do females prefer males because they were healthy juveniles? Read all about parasites, sexual selection, and the Hamilton-Zuk model in bowerbirds.

• Here is a way to get parasites to evolve into into less-harmful forms.

• Applying the same idea as above more specifically to mosquitoes: what if we fed mosquitoes from artificial feeders, so that a) they wouldn't feed from people so much, and b) they wouldn't evolve resistance to the method of control? Good idea?

• And here is my review of Susan Oyama's book The Ontogeny of Information, apologies it is behind a paywall.

Etc.

• Cold viruses and other viruses are transmitted by sneezes and sex. Vaccines are also viruses. Could vaccines also be transmitted by sneezes and sex?

• An experiment in mood regulation: What happens when people think sad thoughts ... and then try to think themselves out of that mood?

• I think Hebrew might be an invented language.

• And I've been brainstorming a new cryptocurrency.

• VanDeventer asked, Can a placebo still create a beneficial placebo effect even if the patient knows it is a placebo? Subsequent research suggests the answer is "yes." In this paper, I speculate that, to feel better, you might not even need the placebo. Perhaps, to feel better it is enough just to know that indeed you can feel better without actual medicine. So, read the paper and see if you feel better.

• Email me at marc.egeth@gmail.com.