Se acaba de publicar en España el libro Confesiones de un médico, cuyo autor, Alfred Tauber, fué durante años director del Centro de Filosofía e Historia de la Ciencia de la Universidad de Boston. A una edad ya madura, Tauber ofrece al lector en sus reflexiones una equilibrada mezcla de introspección personal, referencias biográficas y argumentación racional. Sólo por eso, por el ejercicio reflexivo que conlleva y que todo médico debiera hacer acerca de su profesión y de la forma de (...) llevarla a cabo, la lectura del libro mereceria la pena. (shrink)

The neural correlates of software programming skills have been the target of an increasing number of studies in the past few years. Those studies focused on error-monitoring during software code inspection. Others have studied task-related cognitive load as measured by distinct neurophysiological measures. Most studies addressed only syntax errors. However, a recent functional MRI study suggested a pivotal role of the insula during error-monitoring when challenging deep-level analysis of code inspection was required. This raised the hypothesis that the insula is (...) causally involved in deep error-monitoring. To confirm this hypothesis, we carried out a new fMRI study where participants performed a deep source-code comprehension task that included error-monitoring to detect bugs in the code. The generality of our paradigm was enhanced by comparison with a variety of tasks related to text reading and bugless source-code understanding. Healthy adult programmers participated in this 3T fMRI experiment. The activation maps evoked by error-related events confirmed significant activations in the insula [p < 0.05]. Importantly, a posterior-to-anterior causality shift was observed concerning the role of the insula: in the absence of error, causal directions were mainly bottom-up, whereas, in their presence, the strong causal top-down effects from frontal regions, in particular, the anterior cingulate cortex was observed. (shrink)