May 2012
23 posts
5 tags
Hear to see: New method for the treatment of...
neurosciencestuff:
May 30, 2012
Patients who are blind in one side of their visual field benefit from presentation of sounds on the affected side. After passively hearing sounds for an hour, their visual detection of light stimuli in the blind half of their visual field improved significantly. Neural pathways that simultaneously process information from different senses are responsible for this...
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Zombie Ants →
by TheCellularScale
Zombie ant controlled by fungus (source)The fungus-controlled zombie ant is one of nature’s greatest wonders. A fungus (e.g.O. Unilateralis) is inhaled by an ant (e.g.Camponotus Leonardi), and begins to grow inside its body. Eventually the fungus infests the brain of the ant, causing it to drunkenly wander, periodically convulse, climb up a leaf and clamp down on...
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Hypnic Jerks →
by Tom Stafford
As we give up our bodies to sleep, sudden twitches escape our brains, causing our arms and legs to jerk. Some people are startled by them, others are embarrassed. Me, I am fascinated by these twitches, known as hypnic jerks. Nobody knows for sure what causes them, but to me they represent the side effects of a hidden battle for control in the brain that happens each night on the...
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What can the conjoined (at the brain) twins tell... →
Although I’ve cut out a decent amount of the article, this post is much longer than usual - I just had to include the phenomenal examples of how these twins operate in the world.
thoughtfulcynic:
I have been curious about so many things with these two girls. Their dream life, for example; Memory processing for another; Unconscious processing which takes place during the sleep state,...
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Synchronized Brains: Feeling Strong Emotions Makes...
neurosciencestuff:
ScienceDaily (May 24, 2012) — Experiencing strong emotions synchronizes brain activity across individuals, a research team at Aalto University and Turku PET Centre in Finland has revealed.
Experiencing strong emotions synchronizes brain activity across individuals. (Credit: Image courtesy of Aalto University)
Human emotions are highly contagious. Seeing others’ emotional...
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Neurons are like equations →
by TheCellularScale
Here’s a brief intro to three of the basic levels [of computational neuroscience]. There are other types of computational models in neuroscience, but these three make up most of them. The Whole Brain If you know how the thalamus, hippocampus, amygdala, and cortex all work together, you can simulate how inputs into one structure might influence the others. In this case...
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Seeing where our brains think about our thinking →
by Deric Bownds
More fascinating work from Ray Dolan’s group at the Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging at University College, London:
Neuroscience has made considerable progress in understanding the neural substrates supporting cognitive performance in a number of domains, including memory, perception, and decision making. In contrast, how the human brain generates metacognitive...
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Eureka! When a Blow to the Head Creates a Sudden... →
jtotheizzoe:
Could a brain injury unlock an unknown talent? A look at the phenomenon of the “acquired savant”:
There’s Orlando Serrell, who was struck in the head with a baseball as a 10-year-old and found he could remember the weather for each day following his accident. There’s Derek Amato, who woke up after hitting his head at the bottom of a pool and became a master pianist at...
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Adaptation: Why your brain loves to tune out →
by Tom Stafford
(Copyright: Thinkstock)
The constant whir of a fan. The sensation of the clothes against your skin. The chair pressing against your legs. Chances are that you were not acutely aware of these until I pointed them out. The reason you had somehow forgotten about their existence? A fundamental brain process that we call adaptation.
Our brains are remarkably good at cancelling out...
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Emotion reversed in the brains of left handers. →
by Deric Bownds
Fascinating observations from Brookshire and Casasanto:
According to decades of research on affective motivation in the human brain, approach motivational states are supported primarily by the left hemisphere and avoidance states by the right hemisphere. The underlying cause of this specialization, however, has remained unknown. Here we conducted a first test of the Sword and...
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Is the Purpose of Sleep to Let Our Brains... →
by Neuroskeptic
Recently, some neuroscientists have proposed that the function of sleep is to reorganize connections and “prune” synapses—the connections between brain cells. Last year, one group of researchers, led by Gordon Wang of Stanford University reviewed the evidence for this idea in a paper called Synaptic plasticity in sleep: learning, homeostasis and disease.
This illustration, taken...
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The role of consciousness in cognitive control and... →
This is a fantastic review by Simon van Gaal, Floris Lange, and Michael Cohen of research done on consciousness and cognitive control. I highly recommend reading the whole thing (it’s free for anyone) but here is the conclusion:
In this article, we have reviewed recent studies that have focused on the complexity and strength of unconscious information processing in relation to cognitive...
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Brain oscillations reveal that our senses do not...
neurosciencestuff:
May 14, 2012
(Medical Xpress) — It has long been suspected that humans do not experience the world continuously, but rather in rapid snapshots.
Now, researchers at the University of Glasgow have demonstrated this is indeed the case. Just as the body goes through a 24-hour sleep-wake cycle controlled by a circadian clock, brain function undergoes such cyclic activity – albeit...
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Eat, Smoke, Meditate: Why Your Brain Cares How You... →
mindfulwellness:
Great article!
Most people do what they have to do to get through the day. Though this may sound dire, let’s face it, it’s the human condition. Given the number of people who are depressed or anxious, it’s not surprising that big pharma is doing as well as it is. But for millennia before we turned to government-approved drugs, humans devised clever ways of coping: Taking a...
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Power of self-directed speech →
by Janet Kwasniak
If we look at how communication works we find that words and phrases have a great influence on attention. They bring into the consciousness of the listener the concepts that are uttered. This is what meaning is – the concepts that a word or phrase can steer attention towards. This is what communication is – the sharing of attention by two (or more) brains on a sequence of...
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Scientists identify neurotranmitters that lead to...
neurosciencestuff:
May 9, 2012
While we often think of memory as a way of preserving the essential idea of who we are, little thought is given to the importance of forgetting to our wellbeing, whether what we forget belongs in the “horrible memories department” or just reflects the minutia of day-to-day living.
Despite the fact that forgetting is normal, exactly how we forget—the molecular,...
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Neural correlates of beauty →
by Janet Kwasniak
“What exactly is beauty?”, is an old and unanswered question. It is one of those fringe qualia of consciousness – not a perception but a feeling, like familiarity or certainty, which is attached to a perception. But the criteria for this feeling has never been settled. A recent paper by Ishizu and Zeti (citation below) looks for the traces of beauty in the brain. Here is the...
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On the Perception of Probable Things: Neural... →
Perception is influenced both by the immediate pattern of sensory inputs and by memories acquired through prior experiences with the world. Throughout much of its illustrious history, however, study of the cellular basis of perception has focused on neuronal structures and events that underlie the detection and discrimination of sensory stimuli. Relatively little attention has been paid to the...
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The delightful science of laughter →
by vaughanbell
Neuroscientist Sophie Scott gave a fantastic talk on the science of laughter for a recent TEDx event that you can now watch online.
Talks on the science of humour are famously humourless (usually made all the more dire by the desperate inclusion of some not very funny ‘funny cartoons’) but this discussion of laughter is appropriately delightful.
Scottdescribes a study her team...
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Synesthesia May Explain Healers Claims of Seeing...
neurosciencestuff:
ScienceDaily (May 4, 2012) — Researchers in Spain have found that at least some of the individuals claiming to see the so-called aura of people actually have the neuropsychological phenomenon known as “synesthesia” (specifically, “emotional synesthesia”). This might be a scientific explanation of their alleged ability.
(Credit: © Nikki Zalewski / Fotolia)
In synesthetes,...
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Metaphors are the tip of the mind's iceberg. →
by Deric Bownds
An essay by Benjamin Bergen does a nice summary of the importance of ideas in Lakoff and Johnson’s 1980 book, “Metaphors We Live By.” (I remember being completely awed and fascinated by this book when it appeared.) They established the point that metaphor is not linguistic window-dressing, it reveals fundamental operations of mind.
…Lakoff and Johnson...
