It’s been a slow few days for good science stories. Here are a few good ones on brain function: Researchers at Berkley have discovered that bursts of spectral power in the frequency range of 70-170 Hz correlate with the activity of the underlying cortex during attention. Researcher Robert Knight said it had once been thought that the highest frequency in the human neocortex was 40 Hz. The first project conducted by Edwards and Soltani presented the patient with a standard tone 85 percent of the time and a deviant tone the rest. “We were interested in examining how the brain automatically allocates attention to the deviant tone,” Soltani said. “In short, by examining the brain’s response to deviancy we can get some insight into attention and orienting.”

Meanwhile, over in England they’re about to embark on a project called Lucy To Language: The Archaeology Of The Social Brain. It is being funding to the tune of one million pounds by the British Academy, the largest single research grant the organisation has ever handed out. The project will bring together archaeologists, evolutionary psychologists, social anthropologists, sociologists and linguists. They will attempt to reconstruct the social lives of our ancestors – to work out precisely how they behaved using archaeological evidence of their bones and tools and making comparisons with modern humans and other primates.