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the amount of actual science we do seem to keep falling.

From my perspective it seems the opposite. I'm a biologist, more powerful tools are coming out faster than I can keep up with them. When I started my PhD, the microscope we had was really nice. By the end, it was essentially obsolete. It was a laser scanning confocal, a spinning disc was installed next door that was much faster and a super-resolution microscope was on it's way. That was a few months ago.

There are potential budget cuts looming unless the tea party and republicans suddenly decide they'd rather cooperate with Obama and be rational. And that is annoying and stupid, but look at the funding for the national institute of health, which sponsors a lot of biology research. 1993-2009 and 2004 to 2012. It's up pretty significantly in the last decade.

The following is what I could dig up on the effects of multi-lingualism. It does impact the brain in many different areas and there appears to be a growing belief that learning a new language at any age will have a pronounced impact on your ability to think and reason, but that if taught young the improvements are far more dramatic still. I didn't want to clutter the submission with this stuff, especially as these studies don't have nearly the same level of rigour as the MRI scans of the taxi drivers (where a whole host of variables can now be examined directly versus the somewhat more indirect studies done on polyglots). They're also a bit more controversial, with opposing studies claiming that the benefits either don't exist or don't exist in the way that is claimed.

http://www.cal.org/resources/digest/0012brain.html
http://www.sfn.org/index.aspx?pagename=brainbriefings_thebilingualbrain
http://psychcentral.com/news/2010/11/10/cognitive-ability-improved-when-bilingual/20740.html

(Press coverage adds yet another level of indirectness and potential sources of errors, but there's still some useful info here)

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/31/science/31conversation.html
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3739690.stm
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/feb/18/bilingual-alzheimers-brain-power-multitasking

The impact of music on learning is also not very well studied - I can find press links that talk about the research, but not much actual research.

http://www.livescience.com/5327-music-memory-connection-brain.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/08/070801122226.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/3095807.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12135590

However, the story gets MUCH more complicated...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15791973
http://www.mymultiplesclerosis.co.uk/misc/amnesia.html

There IS a fascinating "reverse" case, where alteration of the brain resulted in a remarkable alteration in musical ability, but as far as I know there has been no real work done on what changes the brain has undergone as a consequence of the new obsession.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Cicoria

If anyone can add to the list, that would be great, especially for the different areas you were mentioning.

Why do think that anecdotal behavior of children who exist in the current system of social conditioning somehow proves that social conditioning does not exist? When in a large group together, all the boys do one thing and all the girls do another thing, sure seems like a strong argument for the existence of social conditioning - that girl who wants to run around and raise hell is shamed into behaving like a good little girl and that boy who wants tuck his firetruck into bed is laughed at.

If what you claimed were true, then there would be few to no scientific studies showing otherwise. At best you've got large minority of studies that show there are innate differences in a minority of areas, but math and science are rarely the areas.

You talk about "anecdotal" evidence, yet that's what you throw out.

You've never noted the marked physical differnces between men and women, and if you did you completely dismissed even to possibility that physical differences could impact mental functionality.

You're not a parent, are you? You've never seen facial expressions and actual motor habits on a sonogram of a baby three or four months before birth, much less actual elements that can only be described as personality?

You don't work with young children closely, do you? You've never seen the difference in boy's and girl's basketball? Do you really think that it's only social conditioning that allows 6-year-old boys to be aware of what's going on in the basketball game to the degree they know whether or not to dive for a ball going out of bounds because they know who touched it last? Yet on the adjacent court of 6-year-old girls, spontaneous conversations between 4 girls on both teams break out while the ball rolls slowly out of bounds? Those differences are greater at a younger age. If your wishful thinking were correct, those differences would grow greater as the children aged.

You haven't read any scientific studies that not only find differences in the brains of human males and females, but also show that human males and females actually use different parts of the brain to process data:

At this point, researchers do not know how the structural differences influence brain function. It's possible that male and female brains work at a similar capacity but process information differently. For example, one study shows that men and women perform equally well in a test that asks subjects to read a list of nonsense words and determine if they rhyme. Yet, imaging results found that women use areas on the right and left sides of the brain, while men only use areas on the left side to complete the test.
            Other research suggests that, on average, the female brain performs better on some skills while the male brain executes other tasks at a higher level. For example, tests show that women generally can recall lists of words or paragraphs of text better than men. On the other hand, men usually perform better on tests that require the ability to mentally rotate an image in order to solve a problem. Mental rotation is thought to help people find their way, according to researchers. Does that leave the majority of women lost? Obviously not. Scientists believe that women may rely on their memory advantage and recall landmarks to find a destination.

No, you obviously haven't done any of that. You're too busy shoving your PC head so far up your ass you can count your teeth from the inside.

I'm not quite sure, but I think that electrical signals from the nerves are much more difficult to record due to the size of the nerves. An EMG, for example, is relatively easy if you stick an electrode into any part of the target muscle.

I'm not really sure about the patient "feeling" the arm; there should be a lot in the literature about patients who think they can feel sensation through their implant, but it's often because of the other nerves around the implant or prosthetic, and not the implant itself.

There is another way to have "thought-controled prosthetics": implant an electrode array directly on the brain and train the user to think of movements. By mapping out the specific brain signals, they can determine which neurons fire when the user wants to move his arm, for example, and then trigger to prosthetic to move in the desired way. It's been shown to work by numerous scientists, such as here and here, among others. They seem to have good success with this method, though I don't know about its long-term efficacy, given that the brain can move.

This is not a new idea. Humans are sensitve to changing magnetic fields.

Magnetic fields have been used in medicine for a while - a large electromagnet placed on the skull would emit a breif magnetic field, and induce currents in the neurons in the brain, causing a spasm which could be used in diagnosing various problems. See this for more information.

These effects have also been used in more obscure ways: A while ago, I saw a product being tested as an aid for insomniacs. It was basically an RF emitting spoon that would be placed in the mouth and through some unknown mechanism could help to induce sleep. Trials showed it to be quite effective.

the device is mentioned here. Below is an excerpt:

"I was skeptical at first," admitted Dr. Thomas Roth, a sleep expert at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, in an interview with New Scientist. "But the indications are that it does have some biological effects and is effective in treating insomnia in some circumstances." The LEET device was tested on over a hundred chronic insomniacs at two clinics, the Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, California, and Denver's University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. Some of the insomniacs received a fully operational LEET device to help them sleep, while others received a device that looked the same -- but emitted no radio energy at all."

Its probably best to keep in mind that this was using a low frequency signal, high frequency RF (~2GHz and above) is not believed to be recitified in body tissue, and would simply cause heating rather that any direct neuronal stimulation.

Bluetooth, wifi, cellphones and passive radiators such as PCs are all incredibly useful but I think that we should be increasingly aware of the effects that EM emmisions can have on the body in an age of accelerating usage.

Glad to hear this idea goes back at least to Crick, although I presume from the your context more recently than his Nobel days.
I don't have anything definitive, but if you'ld settle for "just maybe interesting", this:

http://apu.sfn.org/content/Publications/BrainBrief ings/astrocytes.html

might qualify, or at least lead you to something deeper.

Note: if you just google for 'Glial' and 'memory', you will probably first and foremost get a lot of claims that certain Statin drugs that are known to be absorbed heavily by glial cells can also adversely affect long term memory. You'll have to wade through quite a bit of that to find links pointing to more fundamental research. Best of luck if you bother.

re. multiple connections and non-static/non-singular thresholds, that's not only interesting, but it sounds like it will apply whether glial memory applies or turns out to be a red herring.

Brain-Computer Interfaces for Communication and Control at the society for neuroscience annual meeting. There are already paralyzed people using this type of technology (electrode and even EEG(!)) on an experimental basis.

I dunno what you're trying to tell yourself, but I'm pretty sure sugar is not addictive.

That's what everyone has always assumed, but recent medical research is starting to prove otherwise.

And what soft drinks do you drink that give you a "buzz"? I don't think I've ever got a "buzz" or any kind of feeling from pepsi other than "Hey this tastes great!"

Are you trying to claim caffeine and sugar are not "uppers"? People pulling all-nighters fueled by coffee or cola will disagree with you, I guarantee it.

Let me ask you this: if you took away all the sugar or sugar-replacement in your can of pepsi, would you still like the taste? Here's another experiment: take a glass of cooled carbonated water, and start mixing sugar into it. See how it tastes at varying levels of sugar. Do you like the taste?

Brain-Computer Interfaces for Communication and Control at the society for neuroscience annual meeting. There are already paralyzed people using this type of technology (electrode and even EEG(!)) on an experimental basis.

Nicotine helps prevent Alzheimer's Disease, or at least reduce its severity. My Masters thesis was on this subject, and it seems there is a long-established correllation between smoking and lower-than-expected incidences of A.D. in the general population.

Put simply, nicotine may help because the brain cells destroyed by Alzheimer peptides respond to nicotine-like neurotransmitter; a surplus of neurotransmitter could mean that the remaining brain cells function at a higher rate, thereby offsetting the negative effect of cell death.

The socio-economic arguments against a direct effect of caffeine do not really apply to nicotine - smoking is not AFAIK limited to a particular stratum of society, quite the opposite.

What a choice: "Sanity with lung cancer, or dementia, sir?" .

Daniella is a graduate student in Richard Andersen's lab at CalTech. I don't know why the article came out now, given that the Society for Neuroscience convention was back in November.

What they are doing is indeed very cool, and yes they are not the only ones doing it (I know of about 5 academic groups with similar programs, including one at MIT which allows a monkey to control a robotic arm over the internet. One reason some studies use EEG (scalp) electrodes instead of implanted electrodes is that there are obvious restrictions on what you are allowed to do to a human. For the record, it is common to use some forms of invasive techniques on severly epileptic patients.