Misfits, Together
By:
December 23, 2010
How is everybody doing this holiday season? One big, happy family? How’s your stress level? How are your issues? All that interconnectedness bringing out the best in you, is it?
Well here’s a new toy whether you’ve been good or not: brainSCANr beta! An interactive database created by Bradley and Jessica Voytek, whose interests span neuroscience, networks, and information systems, brainSCANr scans scientific papers in the PubMed database to find phrases that co-occur, and represents them as an interactive data visualization. Type in your condition, either yours or, you know, “for a friend,” and up springs a tensegrity ball of everything else nearby: related conditions, triggers, relevant parts of the brain or nervous system, and other things “your friend” probably has too.
Better yet, each node is connected to a database of relevant articles from the scientific literature that populate in a list below, on the site. Want to read about how stress might relate to anxiety, or anxiety to happiness? Mouseover nodes for probabilities, and link to abstracts from white papers. Go here to try it for yourself.
You may be stuck on the Island of Misfit Toys, but you’re not stuck there alone. We can all be misfits, together. And really, isn’t that what it’s all about?