Neuroscience

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  • Mice with big brains provide insight into brain regeneration and developmental disorders

    ScienceDaily: Neuroscience News
    15 May 2012 | 8:41 am
    Scientists have discovered that mice that lack a gene called Snf2l have brains that are 35 percent larger than normal. The research could lead to new approaches to stimulate brain regeneration and may provide important insight into developmental disorders such as autism and Rett syndrome.

  • Dana Newsletter for May

    Dana Foundation Blog
    Dana
    14 May 2012 | 11:41 am
    Below is the latest Dana email newsletter, sent earlier this month. You can sign up to receive this (and other Dana email alerts and/or print publications) by going here. The Role of Stress in Brain Development by Claudia Buss, Ph.D., Sonja Entringer, Ph.D., James M. Swanson, Ph.D., and Pathik D. Wadhwa, M.D., Ph.D. During gestation, the fetal brain develops dramatically as structures and connections form, providing the foundation for all future development. Exposure to maternal stress can sometimes have deleterious effects on the fetus, depending on the cause, timing, duration, and…

  • Sugar Makes You Stupid: Study Shows High Fructose Diet Sabotages Learning and Memory

    Neuroscience RSS Feeds - Neuroscience News Updates
    Neuroscience News
    15 May 2012 | 5:37 pm
    This is your brain on sugar: UCLA study shows high-fructose diet sabotages learning, memory. Attention, college students cramming between midterms and finals: Binging on soda and sweets for as little as six weeks may make you stupid. A new UCLA rat study is the first to show how a diet steadily high in fructose slows [...]

  • Dr. Holly Jimison on Cognitive Health Coaching: A Home-based Approach to Cognitive Monitoring and Intervention

    SharpBrains
    SharpBrains
    16 May 2012 | 9:38 am
    Dr. Jimison will discuss latest research, tools and trends on Cognitive Health Coaching: A Home-based Approach to Cognitive Monitoring @ 2012 SharpBrains Virtual Summit (June 7-14th, 2012). Holly B. Jimi­son, PhD is an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of med­ical infor­mat­ics and clin­i­cal epi­demi­ol­ogy at Ore­gon Health & Sci­ence Uni­ver­sity, with exper­tise and research expe­ri­ence in the design and eval­u­a­tion of home mon­i­tor­ing and inter­ac­tive health man­age­ment tools for a vari­ety of con­sumer pop­u­la­tions. Most recently, Dr. Jimison’s…

  • She’s lost control

    Mind Hacks
    vaughanbell
    15 May 2012 | 7:38 am
    An article in Slate claims to have detectected a ‘logic hole’ in how much sympathy we feel for people with mental illness as both psychopathy and autism are ‘biological disorders’ that people ‘can’t help’ but we feel quite differently about people affected by them. The ‘logic hole’, however, doesn’t exist because it is based on misunderstanding of the role of neuroscience in understanding behaviour and a caricature of what it means to have ‘no control’ over a condition. Here’s what the article claims: In the piece…
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    Brains On Purpose™

  • How do you listen attentively? Well, first you grab a paint brush, a pencil, or a piece of chalk

    StephanieWestAllen
    10 May 2012 | 9:38 am
    Being able to draw well can be somewhat like attentive and complete listening. For many people, learning a certain kind of drawing helps them to be better listeners. A receptive state that enables this kind of drawing, once learned, can be transferred to listening. Good news: (Almost) anyone can master this state. Today I will recommend two books to help...

  • Is physical pain the same as social pain? Maybe for poets

    StephanieWestAllen
    9 May 2012 | 9:08 pm
    I've been reading Psychology's Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back and have recommended it to others several times. Reading the first chapter can help one become a much more critical reader of research. Jerome Kagan, the author, points out that behaviors and biological responses are influenced by properties of the brain, an individual's prior experience, and...

  • Become a Quick Draw: Let images guide you to new understanding

    StephanieWestAllen
    7 May 2012 | 1:06 pm
    In every program I present, I advocate the use of images in addition to words to facilitate communication. Last weekend at the 19th Annual Nothwest Dispute Resolution Conference, that advocacy was taken to whole new level because I was fortunate to have Nancy White graphically record my presentation. Take a look at her masterpiece above (click to enlarge). It is...

  • Dopamine related to motivation?

    StephanieWestAllen
    3 May 2012 | 2:28 pm
    After reading books such as Psychology's Ghosts: The Crisis in the Profession and the Way Back, I am even more likely to see most research studies as, at best, clues, and clues only only in the material world. That's how I view this study written about below, but I post the news release here because I can never be reminded...

  • Neuroscience and social conflict: A new interdisciplinary initiative

    StephanieWestAllen
    3 May 2012 | 10:21 am
    The first meeting of the Project on Justice in Times of Transition occurred earlier this year. Matt Armstrong, one of the attendees, blogged about it at his Mountain Runner. Excerpt: What if you put neuroscientists, social scientists, conflict resolution experts, and diplomats together in a room? Is there something to the “human dimension” of conflict that the science of the...
 
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    Neuroscience RSS Feeds - Neuroscience News Updates

  • Sugar Makes You Stupid: Study Shows High Fructose Diet Sabotages Learning and Memory

    Neuroscience News
    15 May 2012 | 5:37 pm
    This is your brain on sugar: UCLA study shows high-fructose diet sabotages learning, memory. Attention, college students cramming between midterms and finals: Binging on soda and sweets for as little as six weeks may make you stupid. A new UCLA rat study is the first to show how a diet steadily high in fructose slows [...]

  • Surgeons Restore Some Hand Function to Quadriplegic Patient

    Neuroscience News
    15 May 2012 | 12:58 pm
    Technique could help those with C6, C7 spinal cord injuries. Surgeons at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have restored some hand function in a quadriplegic patient with a spinal cord injury at the C7 vertebra, the lowest bone in the neck. Instead of operating on the spine itself, the surgeons rerouted working [...]

  • New Type of Retinal Prosthesis Could Better Restore Sight to Blind

    Neuroscience News
    14 May 2012 | 5:04 pm
    Using tiny solar-panel-like cells surgically placed underneath the retina, scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have devised a system that may someday restore sight to people who have lost vision because of certain types of degenerative eye diseases. This device — a new type of retinal prosthesis — involves a specially designed pair [...]

  • Smoked Cannabis Reduces Some Symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis

    Neuroscience News
    14 May 2012 | 1:06 pm
    Controlled trial shows improved spasticity, reduced pain after smoking medical marijuana. A clinical study of 30 adult patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine has shown that smoked cannabis may be an effective treatment for spasticity – a common and disabling symptom of this neurological disease. The [...]

  • Let There Be Light: It’s Good for Our Brains

    Neuroscience News
    14 May 2012 | 12:18 pm
    EPFL scientists have proven that light intensity influences our cognitive performance and how alert we feel, and that these positive effects last until early evening. Tests conducted in EPFL’s Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory (LESO) have confirmed the hypothesis that light influences our subjective feeling of sleepiness. The research team, led by Mirjam Münch, [...]
 
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    ScienceDaily: Neuroscience News

  • Let's get moving: Unraveling how locomotion starts

    16 May 2012 | 10:59 am
    Scientists have shed new light on one of the great unanswered questions of neuroscience: How the brain initiates rhythmic movements like walking, running and swimming.

  • This is your brain on sugar: Study in rats shows high-fructose diet sabotages learning, memory

    15 May 2012 | 2:09 pm
    A new study is the first to show how a diet steadily high in fructose slows the brain, hampering memory and learning -- and how omega-3 fatty acids can minimize the damage.

  • Mystery gene reveals new mechanism for anxiety disorders

    15 May 2012 | 12:17 pm
    A novel mechanism for anxiety behaviors, including a previously unrecognized inhibitory brain signal, may inspire new strategies for treating psychiatric disorders, researchers report. By testing the controversial role of a gene called Glo1 in anxiety, scientists uncovered a new inhibitory factor in the brain: The metabolic by-product methylglyoxal. The system offers a tantalizing new target for drugs designed to treat conditions such as anxiety disorder, epilepsy, and sleep disorders.

  • Surgeons restore some hand function to quadriplegic patient

    15 May 2012 | 9:45 am
    Surgeons have restored some hand function in a quadriplegic patient with a spinal cord injury at the C7 vertebra, the lowest bone in the neck. Instead of operating on the spine itself, the surgeons rerouted working nerves in the upper arms. These nerves still “talk” to the brain because they attach to the spine above the injury.

  • Mice with big brains provide insight into brain regeneration and developmental disorders

    15 May 2012 | 8:41 am
    Scientists have discovered that mice that lack a gene called Snf2l have brains that are 35 percent larger than normal. The research could lead to new approaches to stimulate brain regeneration and may provide important insight into developmental disorders such as autism and Rett syndrome.
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    MIT News - Topic - Neuroscience

  • Robots that reveal the inner workings of brain cells

    6 May 2012 | 11:00 pm
    Gaining access to the inner workings of a neuron in the living brain offers a wealth of useful information: its patterns of electrical activity, its shape, even a profile of which genes are turned on at a given moment. However, achieving this entry is such a painstaking task that it is considered an art form; it is so difficult to learn that only a small number of labs in the world practice it.But that could soon change: Researchers at MIT and Georgia Tech have developed a way to automate the process of finding and recording information from neurons in the living brain. The researchers have…

  • Institute faculty share prestigious neuroscience prize

    26 Apr 2012 | 11:14 am
    MIT faculty members Ed Boyden and Feng Zhang, along with Karl Deisseroth of Stanford University, have been awarded the Perl/UNC Neuroscience Prize for developing a way to control brain activity using light. The Perl prize carries a $10,000 award and is given annually to recognize a seminal achievement in neuroscience. Four of the 12 past recipients were later awarded Nobel Prizes. Boyden, Zhang and Deisseroth share the 2012 Perl prize for developing a technology known as "optogenetics," in which neurons are genetically engineered to respond to light.  This allows researchers to control the…

  • Inhibitory and excitatory synapse dynamics in the brain

    25 Apr 2012 | 2:02 pm
    The brain adapts to the environment in part by persistently modifying and rearranging the diverse synaptic connections between neurons. These changes include strengthening or weakening existing links, as well as forming and eliminating synapses — long-term adjustments that are required for learning and memory.Since excitatory synapses on excitatory neurons are localized to small protrusions called dendritic spines, earlier studies have used dendritic spine dynamics to monitor excitatory synaptic remodeling in vivo. However, the lack of a morphological surrogate for inhibitory synapses has…

  • 13 faculty members elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

    17 Apr 2012 | 12:58 pm
    Thirteen MIT faculty members are among 220 leaders from academia, business, public affairs, the humanities and the arts elected as new members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academy announced today.One of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, the Academy is also a leading center for independent policy research. Members contribute to Academy publications and studies of science and technology policy, energy and global security, social policy and American institutions, the humanities and culture, and education.Those elected from MIT this year are: Robert Guy…

  • Sensing when the brain is under pressure

    11 Apr 2012 | 1:00 pm
    Brain tumors and head trauma, including concussions, can elevate pressure inside the skull, potentially crushing brain tissue or cutting off the brain’s blood supply. Monitoring pressure in the brains of such patients could help doctors determine the best treatment, but the procedure is so invasive — it requires drilling a hole through the skull — that it is done only in the most severely injured patients. That may change with the development of a new technique that is much less risky. The method, described in the April 11 issue of Science Translational Medicine, could allow doctors to…
 
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    Deric Bownds' MindBlog

  • Compounds that increase muscle endurance also enhance cognition

    16 May 2012 | 4:30 am
    Recent experiments from Kobilo et al. build on several studies that have shown that exercise enhances cognition (in both humans and mice). They show that giving sedentary mice either of two drugs that induce the same kinds of changes in their muscles that exercise does enhances their performance in subsequent tests of memory and learning. Since these drugs do not cross the blood-brain barrier, peripheral triggers appear be activating the cellular and molecular cascades in the brain that lead to improvements in cognition. Physical activity improves learning and hippocampal neurogenesis. It is…

  • Universality of facial expressions of emotion challenged.

    15 May 2012 | 4:30 am
    This  work by Jack et al (open access to full article) comes as quite a challenge to the prevailing orthodoxy on the universality of human facial movements associated with the six basic emotional states: Since Darwin’s seminal works, the universality of facial expressions of emotion has remained one of the longest standing debates in the biological and social sciences. Briefly stated, the universality hypothesis claims that all humans communicate six basic internal emotional states (happy, surprise, fear, disgust, anger, and sad) using the same facial movements by virtue of their…

  • Linking social environment to gene expression.

    14 May 2012 | 4:30 am
    Tung et al. report work on rhesus macaque monkeys - consonant with more limited human studies - showing that dominance rank causes a plastic imprint on regulation of immune system genes. They find that social status can be predicted by gene expression data with 80% accuracy. Variation in the social environment is a fundamental component of many vertebrate societies. In humans and other primates, adverse social environments often translate into lasting physiological costs. The biological mechanisms associated with these effects are therefore of great interest, both for understanding the…

  • Egalitarian behavior and the insula.

    11 May 2012 | 4:30 am
    Fascinating work from Dawes et al.: Individuals are willing to sacrifice their own resources to promote equality in groups. These costly choices promote equality and are associated with behavior that supports cooperation in humans, but little is known about the brain processes involved. We use functional MRI to study egalitarian preferences based on behavior observed in the “random income game.” In this game, subjects decide whether to pay a cost to alter group members’ randomly allocated incomes. We specifically examine whether egalitarian behavior is associated with neural activity in…

  • Choosing whether you are anxious or chilled out - a toolkit.

    10 May 2012 | 4:30 am
    This is a followup on my May 2 post, which provided a link to a lecture that I now have given (this past Tuesday) to the Chaos and Complex Systems Seminar series here at UW Madison. Responses to that talk have been very positive. I thought I would suggest that MindBlog readers who want to get quickly to the "bottom line" click straight through the presentation to the fourth part of the talk (4. What are the regulators of calm and stress to which we have conscious access?), which describes a toolkit of "bottom-up" and "top-down" approaches or techniques that can influence whether we are calm…
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    Eide Neurolearning Blog

  • Failure School: Metacognitive Reframing Boosts Working Memory

    Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide
    7 May 2012 | 2:05 am
    What's a quick way to boost a student's working memory?  Tell them that learning is difficult and failure is common. At least that's a conclusion from a French research study that tested 111 6th graders with a series of difficult anagram puzzles. None of the 6th graders could solve them and then... "... a researcher talked to the students about the difficulty of the problems. One group was told that learning is difficult and failure is common, but practice will help, just like learning how to ride a bicycle. Children in a second group were just asked how they tried to solve the…

  • Overthinking and Creativity - Think Like Child

    Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide
    23 Apr 2012 | 2:05 am
    From Life Hacker, look at the puzzle to the left. How long does it take you to solve? Preschoolers solve in 5-10 min, whereas programmers take an hour. Overthinking is a real problem at times, and sometimes to solve certain problems, a little ignorance is bliss (the solution is at the end of this post). We see this with some of our most divergent students. They overthink questions and come up with several well-reasoned possibilities (our favorite subtest for this on the WISC-IV IQ test is 'Picture Concepts) where the answer key lists only one. The immediate practical results of over…

  • Background Noise Problems in Dyslexia

    Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide
    17 Apr 2012 | 2:02 am
    More data supporting the range of perceptual difficulties in dyslexia. In the figure below, researchers found that dyslexic subjects showed delayed responses to sounds (HP stands for Huggins Pitch, TN stands for pure tone)when played with background noise. This background noise can be a big obstacle to efficient classroom learning for dyslexic students. Larger classes sizes, murmurings and rustlings from fellow classmates, and a fuzziness about phonology or weak auditory working memory, can spell failure (or ADD misdiagnosis) for even very smart or determined dyslexic students. This study…

  • Impulsivity and Business Success

    Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide
    16 Apr 2012 | 2:05 am
    Answer - it depends. In the paper Taking More Now: The Optimality of Impulsive Choice Hinges on Environment Structure, researchers at the University of Texas found that the reward environment involving choices determined whether highly impulsive test subjects performed better or worse than their low-impulsive testing counterparts. The test involve college students who were administered a personality test that estimated trait-impulsivity. The experiment involved planning a business investment game which varied the conditions to optimize rewards either in the short term (e.g. cut costs,…

  • Google Brain: Inductive Thinking and Curiosity

    Drs. Fernette and Brock Eide
    26 Mar 2012 | 2:05 am
    In a Scientific American blog post Deep thought is dead, Long live deep thought, a bioinformatics analyst broods on the question, ‘Where are these jobs that will require such rapid “searching, browsing, assessing quality, and synthesizing the vast quantities of information?" and decides quiet a lot of information can be gained by this type of superficial processing of large quantities of material. "Our ability to produce data is outstripping our ability to understand it. In fact, the need to make sense of these mountains of information is so great that it’s given rise to one of the…
 
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    Brain Blogger

  • Intelligence – Do You Need it to be Successful?

    Veronica Pamoukaghlian, MA
    13 May 2012 | 7:00 am
    As early as 1976, the Carnegie Institute of Technology presented a study that attributed 85% of financial success to human engineering skills, namely, self-management and relationship-management, rather than intrinsic or hereditary qualities such as IQ and analytical abilities. Over the last decade, popular culture has embraced the notion of emotional intelligence as a set of skills central to achieving happiness and attaining personal goals. However, popular belief seldom associates emotional intelligence with success in business; it is most often assumed to be connected to success in…

  • A Trip for Terminal Patients

    Jennifer Gibson, PharmD
    10 May 2012 | 7:00 am
    For patients diagnosed with a terminal illness, the end of their physical days can be wrought with anxiety, depression, and fear. Now, these patients may have more options for relieving this emotional stress, and it falls somewhere in between Nancy Reagan (“Just Say No!”) and Timothy Leary (“the most dangerous man in America” per Richard Nixon).Sixty years ago, research into the effects of psychedelic drugs was accepted — and, dare I say, frequent — among certain institutions and researchers. But, with the rise in the recreational use of drugs and the…

  • Memory Ain’t What It Used to Be – And That’s Good for Psychotherapy

    Robert A. Yourell, MA
    7 May 2012 | 6:59 am
    New insights into memory are helping to explain treatments for serious problems, and guide us to making them better. Many psychotherapies use the one-two punch of targeting (focusing on a memory or other source of anxiety, flash backs, or related symptoms) and state change (the best-known being relaxation, as in systematic desensitization, and bilateral stimulation in EMDR). Now, researchers are exploring other ways to accomplish this, and they are being guided by new insights into how memory works.The theory in play is that memories are more vulnerable to change when they are brought to…

  • The Science of Stuttering

    Jake Cunningham, BA
    3 May 2012 | 7:00 am
    A holistic examination of the condition of stuttering, particularly in young children, lends itself naturally to the science of psychology rather than biology. Stuttering is increasingly becoming recognised not as an isolated condition specific to those with an unfortunate genetic heritage but a deep psychological response to an increasingly alienated world. Stuttering affects 68 million people worldwide, with children between 3 and 8 years of age accounting for over 80% of these people. A child is incredibly sensitive and receptive to social stimulus, particularly from birth and during…

  • Are Your Friends Making You Fat?

    Jennifer Gibson, PharmD
    30 Apr 2012 | 7:00 am
    Many factors contribute to the epidemic of overweight and obesity, but new research suggests that other people’s eating habits could be influencing your food intake more than you realize.The study, published online by PLoS One, examined the eating habits of 70 pairs of female strangers sharing dinner in a lab setting made to look like a restaurant. The authors observed the meal and assigned codes to each bite taken, noting whether it was within 5 seconds of the other woman’s bite. (“Mimicked bites” were those that were taken within 5 seconds of each other, and “nonmimicked bites”…
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    Dana Foundation Blog

  • Dana Newsletter for May

    Dana
    14 May 2012 | 11:41 am
    Below is the latest Dana email newsletter, sent earlier this month. You can sign up to receive this (and other Dana email alerts and/or print publications) by going here. The Role of Stress in Brain Development by Claudia Buss, Ph.D., Sonja Entringer, Ph.D., James M. Swanson, Ph.D., and Pathik D. Wadhwa, M.D., Ph.D. During gestation, the fetal brain develops dramatically as structures and connections form, providing the foundation for all future development. Exposure to maternal stress can sometimes have deleterious effects on the fetus, depending on the cause, timing, duration, and…

  • Design a Brain Experiment Winner

    Dana
    14 May 2012 | 10:11 am
    There’s a nice write-up about our “Design a Brain Experiment” competition winner Michaela Ennis in last Friday’s issue of The Record, a New Jersey newspaper. Ennis, a senior at Pingry High school, proposed an examination of the effects of social defeat on anxious behavior, pinpointing the molecular mechanisms for that behavior. She will use her $500 cash prize to further her work on one of Pingry’s independent research projects—cloning human Huntington genes into zebra fish. This fall, Ennis will begin her freshman year at MIT. --Ann L. Whitman

  • Brain Game: Word Search

    Dana
    11 May 2012 | 1:04 pm
    Let’s be honest, it’s sometimes hard to concentrate on work on Friday afternoons. Your mind starts to wander, thinking about the fun things you’re going to do over the weekend. Well, why not take a quick break and start the fun now! The Dana Alliance for Brain Initiatives created a number of original puzzles and games, which are available online, and today seems like a Word Search kind of day. This particular puzzle is from the Top Ten Brain Awareness Week Favorite Puzzles collection. Word search puzzles can be a lot of fun. The letters look all mixed up, but hidden among them are many…

  • From the Archives: Mother’s Day

    Dana
    10 May 2012 | 1:08 pm
    With Mother’s Day just around the corner (put your cards in the mail today!), it’s a good time to revisit what articles from Dana’s archives tell us about mother-child relationships. Some of the studies highlighted on Dana.org may seem bleak, as they study parenting in situations of abuse and neglect. But they all highlight how important a supportive, caring parent is to a developing child. In 2005, the BrainWork article “Parenting Matters: Your Genes Prove It” discussed a study by Michael Meaney, McGill University, in which he determined that environmental epigenetic factors can…

  • ADHD, Multi-Tasking, and Reading

    Dana
    7 May 2012 | 9:45 am
    This weekend, more than 900 teachers, researchers, and other education experts met to share what they know about how we learn. At a session of the Learning & the Brain conference titled “The Web-Connected Generation: How Technology Transforms Their Brains, Teaching and Attention,” we heard a lot about multi-user virtual environments, enhanced reality, the myth of multitasking, and individualized web-based learning. But the tech story that most caught my attention was a slightly older one: reading. Why do many kids with ADHD “suddenly” start to lag in reading comprehension by the…
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    Mind Hacks

  • She’s lost control

    vaughanbell
    15 May 2012 | 7:38 am
    An article in Slate claims to have detectected a ‘logic hole’ in how much sympathy we feel for people with mental illness as both psychopathy and autism are ‘biological disorders’ that people ‘can’t help’ but we feel quite differently about people affected by them. The ‘logic hole’, however, doesn’t exist because it is based on misunderstanding of the role of neuroscience in understanding behaviour and a caricature of what it means to have ‘no control’ over a condition. Here’s what the article claims: In the piece…

  • A look inside digital humanity

    vaughanbell
    11 May 2012 | 7:25 am
    BBC Radio 4 has just started an excellent series called The Digital Human that looks at how we use technology and how it affects our relationship to the social world. It’s written and presented by psychologist Aleks Krotoski and the first two episodes are already online. The first discusses the tendency to capture and display personal media through sites like Flickr and YouTube but, so far, the stand-out episode has been the second which discusses the presentation of self online and how much control we have over it. I think it’s going to be a six-part series so there should be…

  • Sex survey a let down in bed

    vaughanbell
    9 May 2012 | 3:27 pm
    A ‘saucy sex survey’ has been doing the rounds in the media that claims to be one of the largest studies on the sex lives of UK citizens. Unfortunately, it seems to be a bit of a let down in bed. The study has been carried out by an unholy alliance between one of the country’s most respected relationship counselling charities, Relate, and the Ann Summers chain of sex shops but, sadly, it seems the commercial fluff has won out over the genuine insight. I’m a big fan of Relate. They provide sex and relationship counselling regardless of status, sexuality or income and do…

  • How the British missed a trip

    vaughanbell
    8 May 2012 | 8:18 am
    The first ever medical report on the effects of magic mushrooms is featured in an article in Current Biology. The excerpt is from a 1799 report entitled ‘On A Poisonous Species of Agaric’ from an issue of The London Medical and Physical Journal. The psychological effects of hallucinogenic, or ‘magic’ mushrooms were first documented in the medical literature in 1799: a forty year-old father of four, JS, collected wild mushrooms in London’s Green Park and cooked them as a stew for breakfast for himself and his four young children. The apothecary Everard Brande described…

  • As addictive as cupcakes

    vaughanbell
    7 May 2012 | 6:51 am
    If I read the phrase “as addictive as cocaine” one more time I’m going to hit the bottle. Anything that is either overused, pleasurable or has become vaguely associated with the dopamine system is compared to cocaine. In fact, here is a list of things claimed to be as addictive as the illegal nose powder in the popular press: World of Warcraft Power Nicotine Junk food High-Fructose Corn Syrup Ice cream Cannabis Love Gambling Fatty foods Porn Facebook Sugar Cupcakes Running Stories And here is a scientifically verified list of things genuinely addictive as cocaine: Cocaine In…
 
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    Neuroethics & Law Blog

  • "Neuroprediction, Violence, and the Law: Setting the Stage"

    NELB Staff
    11 May 2012 | 10:58 am
    Neuroprediction, Violence, and the Law: Setting the Stage by Thomas Nadelhoffer, Stephanos Bibas, Scott Grafton, Kent A. Kiehl and Andrew Mansfield, et al. has been published in the most recent issue of Neuroethics: Abstract In this paper, our goal is...

  • 2012 Young Scholars Informal Symposium in Pavia

    Adam Kolber
    11 May 2012 | 7:59 am
    Here is some more information about the 2012 Young Scholars Informal Symposium in Pavia, Italy coming up on May 14: Download Yss_may14th2012[1]

  • PEBS Neuroethics Roundup (JHU)

    NELB Staff
    10 May 2012 | 2:43 pm
    Last Edition's Most Popular Article: The Irrationality of Irrationality: The Paradox of Popular Psychology, Scientific American Blogs In The Popular Press: When Illness Makes a Spouse a Stranger, New York Times Health What I'm really thinking: the wife of a...

  • Postgrad Position in Neuroethics at UBC

    Adam Kolber
    9 May 2012 | 5:14 am
    Details here. I can't say for sure if the spot is still open, but even if it's not, people may want to keep an eye on it in future years.

  • "Can Science Determine Moral Values? A Reply to Sam Harris"

    NELB Staff
    8 May 2012 | 9:00 am
    Can Science Determine Moral Values? A Reply to Sam Harris by Whitley R. P. Kaufman has been published in the most recent issue of Neuroethics: Abstract Sam Harris’ new book “The Moral Landscape” is the latest in a series of...
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    Neuromarketing

  • Finally: 2012 Super Bowl Ad Neuro-Rankings

    Roger Dooley
    15 May 2012 | 10:04 am
    Every year, we look forward to how the Super Bowl ads stacked up from a neuromarketing standpoint, courtesy of Sands Research. It’s taken a little longer this year, but the results are in! Pepsi Dominates One company, Pepsi, swept the top two spots this year. Their “Kings Court” and “Pepsi Max Checkout” ranked #1 and [...]   CommentsWhich one is the “Brotherhood of Man” ad? I thought that ... by RezwanThe precision of determining an actual emotion (vs. magnitude ... by Roger DooleyI wonder if they have the ability to differentiate between ... by A.

  • Our Brains Make Facebook Worth $90 Billion

    Roger Dooley
    10 May 2012 | 1:03 pm
    Those of us involved in social media know that people love to talk about themselves. They seemingly enjoy sharing the trivial, the personal, and occasionally the weird, details of their lives. Sometimes they overshare – as a longtime online community builder, I’ve found that “poster’s remorse” is common – people post something too personal and [...]   CommentsThis reminds me of Dale Carnegie's principles, and the number ... by SamuelI've always been curious as to why people answer questions at ... by JamesNoting though that all individuals are a…

  • Does Your Domain Say “Trust Me?”

    Roger Dooley
    9 May 2012 | 6:38 am
    Do web searchers pay attention to the domain where the link in the search results leads them? A few years ago, I would have said “no.” For years, I’ve operated or advised websites that ranked at or near the top for various brand names, and found many users assumed the site WAS that brand. Even [...]   Comments[...] in No TimeBuild Trust With Your Domain NameThis week, one ... by Red Paper Clip » Build Trust With Your Domain Name » Red Paper Clip[...] on http://www.neurosciencemarketing.com Share ... by Does Your Domain Say “Trust Me?” « Things I grab,…

  • When Encouragement Can Hurt Your Child

    Roger Dooley
    2 May 2012 | 6:54 am
    Here’s another rare foray into neuro-parenting. In How to Praise Your Child, I described research that showed telling your child he/she is smart could actually backfire and have negative effects on performance. It turns out there’s another kind of encouragement that can hurt performance rather than improve it. Group vs. Individual New research published in [...]   CommentsI agree. I believe praising the effort is the better thing to ... by frivWhat's really going in a situation like this? Could telling a ... by SamuelI have found comparing a child's progress to other groups…

  • Neuromarketing Proof? UCLA Brain Scans Predict Ad Success

    Roger Dooley
    27 Apr 2012 | 6:55 am
    For years neuromarketing firms have been selling their services to help advertisers optimize TV commercials, product packaging, and other media. While these companies all claim success in helping their clients boost sales, there’s been little in the way of published academic research that demonstrates measuring consumer brain activity can reliably predict subsequent behavior. A new [...]   CommentsAmazing how little we really know about how our brains work. I ... by Samuel[...] [3] ... by Open science « Isabellemitchell's BlogRoger, exactly my point: It all depends on the…
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    SharpBrains

  • Dr. Holly Jimison on Cognitive Health Coaching: A Home-based Approach to Cognitive Monitoring and Intervention

    SharpBrains
    16 May 2012 | 9:38 am
    Dr. Jimison will discuss latest research, tools and trends on Cognitive Health Coaching: A Home-based Approach to Cognitive Monitoring @ 2012 SharpBrains Virtual Summit (June 7-14th, 2012). Holly B. Jimi­son, PhD is an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor of med­ical infor­mat­ics and clin­i­cal epi­demi­ol­ogy at Ore­gon Health & Sci­ence Uni­ver­sity, with exper­tise and research expe­ri­ence in the design and eval­u­a­tion of home mon­i­tor­ing and inter­ac­tive health man­age­ment tools for a vari­ety of con­sumer pop­u­la­tions. Most recently, Dr. Jimison’s…

  • On Music, Dopamine, and Making Sense of Sound

    Laurie Bartels
    15 May 2012 | 9:35 am
    Daniel Levitin, in This Is Your Brain On Music, suggests the following sound experiment. Situate yourself someplace where you can close your eyes and focus on the sounds around you. When you open your eyes, write down each sound you heard and the object that made that sound. If you are in a relatively quiet spot, try this experiment the next time you are in a more sound-rich environment. I began this article while sitting outdoors on an unusually warm day in the suburbs. I heard: rustling of leaves from a squirrel scampering buzz of gardener’s trimming tools roar of an airplane tweets and…

  • Agenda @ 2012 SharpBrains Virtual Summit (June 7-14th)

    Alvaro Fernandez
    11 May 2012 | 10:08 am
    82% of respon­dents to a 2012 Sharp­Brains sur­vey (n=3,165) agreed/ strongly agreed with “Adults of all ages should take charge of their own “brain fit­ness” with­out wait­ing for their doc­tors to tell them to,” and 77% agreed/ strongly agreed with “I would per­son­ally take a brief assess­ment every year as an “annual men­tal check-up.” This grow­ing aware­ness demands new ways to har­ness neu­ro­plas­tic­ity across the lifes­pan to opti­mize health, pro­duc­tiv­ity and qual­ity of life, and high­lights mar­ket oppor­tu­ni­ties. Click Here to see…

  • Music as Therapy: Music, Movement, Cognition!

    Laurie Bartels
    10 May 2012 | 2:25 pm
    The Sound of Music Whether you realize it or not, you already know a lot when it comes to music. According to Daniel Levitin, former record producer, current neuroscientist, psychologist and author of This Is Your Brain On Music, you know: how your body responds to familiar or specific tunes your brain can differentiate between international rhythms (Latin, Indian, Arabic…) bits and pieces of song lyrics that are memorized specific songs can conjure up memories a song can impact your mood If I hear certain types of music, my body starts moving in synch to the rhythm, and if there are…

  • The Next Frontier: Neuroscience, Business and the Arts

    Silvia Damiano
    9 May 2012 | 10:28 am
    “You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.” — Oh The Places You’ll Go, Dr.Seuss. The space between creativity and entrepreneurship is one of the most exciting areas unfolding in our modern world right now. Although this relationship has been acknowledged by every true entrepreneur for many years, it has taken too long for the correlation between the two areas to be understood, encouraged, and expanded upon in a broader sense. Our entire sense of values has shifted dramatically in the last 20 years. A creative economy…
 
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    Brain Science Podcast Blog

  • Update on Consciousness Research with Christof Koch (BSP 84)

    Ginger Campbell, MD
    25 Apr 2012 | 2:10 pm
    Christof Koch, PhDThe scientific study of consciousness was once viewed with skepticism, but this has changed dramatically in recent years. According to pioneering neuroscientist Christof Koch, "the great thing is we’re not condemned to just sort of philosophical speculation, but we can make some predictions, and then go out and measure them.  And those are the things I talk about in this book, Confessions of a Romantic Reductionist." In Brain Science Podcast #84 Koch reflects on the progress that has been made since I interviewed him back in 2007 (BSP 22), and he also talks…

  • "Mind and Brain" with William Uttal (BSP 83)

    Ginger Campbell, MD
    23 Mar 2012 | 5:00 am
    William Uttal, PhD"There is nothing more exciting than the mind/brain problem" according to Dr. William Uttal, author of Mind and Brain: A Critical Appraisal of Cognitive Neuroscience. In the latest episode of the Brain Science Podcast (BSP 83) I talked with Dr. Uttal about why he feels that brain imaging can not solve this mystery. First, there is the problem that brain imaging represents the wrong level of analysis because every spot you see on a brain scan actaully represents thousands of neurons. This means that the activity and interaction between individual neurons has been lost. Then…

  • How Mind Emerges from Brain (BSP 82)

    Ginger Campbell, MD
    28 Feb 2012 | 2:53 pm
    In his latest book Who's in Charge?: Free Will and the Science of the Brain respected neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga explores how the discoveries of neuroscience impact how we see ourselves as human beings. After providing a brief review of 20th century neuroscience, and even some of the work from the past decade, Dr. Gazzaniga concludes that nothing neuroscience has discovered changes the fact that "we are personally responsible agents and are to be held accountable for our actions." Gazzaniga's position contrasts with those who think that recent discoveries show that the brain creates…

  • Patricia Churchland on Neuroscience and Morality (BSP 81)

    Ginger Campbell, MD
    27 Jan 2012 | 6:00 am
    Patricia Churchland (photo by Nines Minquez)BSP 81 marks the return of philosopher Patricia Churchland, who I first interviewed back in Episode 55. Our recent conversation focuses on her latest book, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality. We discuss the historical background and contrast Churchland's approach to that of Sam Harris in The Moral Landscape. Then Professor Churchland discusses how recent discoveries in neuroscience are shedding light on the evolutionary origins of morality. It's a fascinating conversation that you won't want to miss.  Listen to BSP 81 (Free…

  • Brain Science Podcast turns Five Years Old (BSP 80)

    Ginger Campbell, MD
    30 Dec 2011 | 4:00 am
    Original Logo from 2006I launched the Brain Science Podcast in December 2006, so to celebrate I am posting my Fifth Annual Review Episode (BSP 80). This podcast includes a review of the highlights from this year's episodes along with my reflections on what we have learned about brain health over the last few years. I also take a look ahead to 2012 when I hope to continue to produce a Brain Science Podcast every month.   Listen to BSP 80 Episode Transcript (Free PDF) Subscribe to the Brain Science Podcast: This Year's Episodes: BSP 72:  Stephen L. Macknik and Susana…
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    Neuronarrative

  • Starting Over One Thought at a Time

    David DiSalvo
    10 May 2012 | 12:04 pm
    Scott’s situation is atypical, but it offers an example that all of us can learn from – a blueprint for what is necessary to overcome the obstacles that immediately appear whenever we are trying to push ahead, achieve, and accomplish. read more

  • What Eating Too Much Sugar Does to Your Brain

    David DiSalvo
    27 Apr 2012 | 8:32 pm
    Overeating, poor memory formation, learning disorders, depression—all have been linked in recent research to the over-consumption of sugar. And these linkages point to a problem that is only beginning to be better understood: what our chronic intake of added sugar is doing to our brains.read more

  • How to Tell if Someone is Lying to You Online

    David DiSalvo
    16 Mar 2012 | 10:09 am
    Most of us are horrible lie detectors in face-to-face interaction, and we’re even worse when it comes to knowing if someone is lying online. New research suggests, however, that there are certain linguistic signals we can look for to determine if someone is trying to hoodwink us.read more

  • What Is Science-Help?

    David DiSalvo
    7 Feb 2012 | 9:05 am
    Since the publication of my book, "What Makes Your Brain Happy and Why You Should Do the Opposite", I’ve given several interviews, and during each one I’ve been asked to elaborate on a term I used in the book’s introduction and closing chapter: “Science-help.”read more

  • Ten Impressive Psychology Studies from 2011

    David DiSalvo
    28 Dec 2011 | 6:52 pm
    Several great psychology studies were conducted in 2011 and it's hard to choose just ten to write about. In a list that's anything but exhaustive, here are the studies that impressed me the most from the past year. read more
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    NeuroLogica Blog

  • Kastrup Responds

    Steven Novella
    16 May 2012 | 7:17 am
    Yesterday I wrote a reply to a science blogger, Bernardo Kastrup, who wrote a critique of an earlier blog post of mine. He has now written a reply to my reply. I find these blog discussions very useful – each side can take their time to compose their argument and we can usually get down to the key issues.  They can also be fun. Kastrup begins, unfortunately, with a bit of whining. While I appreciate his having taken the time to reply, I am also somewhat surprised by the sheer amount of space he dedicates to ad homenen attacks on me, which dilutes his argument and the quality of the…

  • Another Blogger Jumps Into the Dualism Fray

    Steven Novella
    15 May 2012 | 6:43 am
    It has been a while since I wrote about dualism – the notion that the mind is something more than the functioning of the brain. Previously I had a blog duel about dualism with creationist neurosurgeon, Michael Egnor. Now someone else has jumped into that discussion: blogger, author, and computer engineer Bernardo Kastrup has taken me on directly. The result is a confused and poorly argued piece all too typical of metaphysical apologists. Kastrup’s major malfunction is to create a straw man of my position and then proceed to argue against that. He so blatantly misrepresents my…

  • Ghost Box

    Steven Novella
    14 May 2012 | 7:04 am
    The subculture of pseudoscientific ghost hunting continues to evolve. Have you heard of a “ghost box?” It seems all you have to do is put the word “ghost” in front of something and it becomes technical jargon for ghost hunters, and also a great example of begging the question. A cold spot in a house is therefore “ghost cold.” An electromagnetic field (EMF) detector becomes a “ghost detector.” And now a radio scanner has been rebranded as a “ghost box.” Of course no one has ever established that any of these phenomena have anything to…

  • Analytic Thought and Religious Belief

    Steven Novella
    10 May 2012 | 7:16 am
    A series of psychological studies recently published in Science explores the relationship between analytic thought and religious belief. The studies raise a lot of issues, including how to interpret such studies, but first let me simply convey the results. In the first experiment researchers Will M. Gervais and Ara Norenzayan assessed subjects with a standard measure of analytical thought – problems in which the initial intuitive answer is incorrect and must be overridden by deeper analysis. Try to solve them yourself, they are: A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00…

  • Coherent Breathing

    Steven Novella
    8 May 2012 | 7:02 am
    Last week I wrote about earthing – the claim that being in contact with the earth (especially using products you can buy for this purpose) helps to balance your electrons and improve health.  Earthing fits into a category of pseudoscientific nonsense I called “just make shit up.” This seems to be a deep and constantly growing category, limited only by human imagination, ego, and greed. The existence of claims such as this is an excellent example for why we need the rigors and methods of science – without them to ground us to reality, there is no limit to the nonsense…
 
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    neuroscience « WordPress.com Tag Feed

  • Judge Not....

    Anastasia
    10 May 2012 | 1:41 am
    I’m going to rant, hopefully briefly, about two article I read today online. Please excuse the narrow focus of my rant. I don’t miss all the aspects of this, I just get irked by this one little thing. So. Who cares if I’m brilliant, so long as I went to the right schools.(Yes, Einstein does sarcasm) Ties make you more expensive…or an asshole. One of those. This article… and this article. “Business man” “CEO” wanting “public money”… for chrissake. If the primary indicator to your brain that someone is a good business…

  • Brain Scans Reveal Dogs’ Thoughts

    talkingmonkeynews
    9 May 2012 | 9:23 pm
    Add one more expensive and unnecessary expenditure to the many made by obsessive dog owners: an MRI scan to reveal their innermost thoughts. Via LiveScience: Fido’s expressive face, including those longing puppy-dog eyes, may lead owners to wonder what exactly is going on in that doggy’s head. Scientists decided to find out, using brain scans to explore the minds of our canine friends. The researchers, who detailed their findings May 2 in the open-access journal PLoS ONE, were interested in understanding the human-dog relationship from the four-legged perspective. FULL ARTICLE AND VIDEO…

  • Academy eNews

    Stavros Hadjisolomou
    9 May 2012 | 9:07 pm
    Developing Professional Skills Last month the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS) and Educational Test

  • Robots could soon be probing your brain

    talkingmonkeynews
    9 May 2012 | 9:05 pm
    To figure out how your brain works, researchers need to be able to measure the electrical activity of neurons. But now, a new method allows robots to perform the task instead. Your brain and nervous systems are made up of neurons, sending and receiving the electrical signals that let us breathe, move, think, remember, and generally function. So knowing how individual neurons work, their patterns of electrical activity, and which of their genes are activated at any given time also will also give us insight into how the brain functions as a whole. But how exactly do you crack open a neuron to…

  • A synthesis of neuroscience and phenomenology

    StarDustNotDirtDust
    9 May 2012 | 5:15 pm
    Ingarden’s Aesthetic Experience and the News from Neurophysiology             Roman Ingarden charact
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    Journal of Neurology (Online First™)

  • Should cognition be screened in new-onset epilepsies? A study in 247 untreated patients

    12 May 2012 | 1:12 am
    Abstract  The aim of our study was to assess cognition in newly diagnosed and untreated patients with epilepsy in order to determine the prevalence and the determinants of cognitive deficits at this early stage of the disease. A total of 247 untreated patients with newly diagnosed epilepsy underwent a brief test battery focusing on attention and executive functions (EpiTrack) and memory (short form of the VLMT). In addition, the assessment included ratings of self-perceived deficits in attention and memory. Impairments in attention and executive functions were seen in 49.4 % of…

  • POLG and PEO1 (Twinkle) mutations are infrequent in PSP-like atypical parkinsonism: a preliminary screening study

    12 May 2012 | 1:12 am
    POLG and PEO1 (Twinkle) mutations are infrequent in PSP-like atypical parkinsonism: a preliminary screening study Content Type Journal ArticleCategory Letter to the EditorsPages 1-2DOI 10.1007/s00415-012-6535-1Authors Matthis Synofzik, Department of Neurodegenerative Diseases, Hertie-Institute for Clinical Brain Research, University of Tübingen, Hoppe-Seyler-Str. 3, 72076 Tübingen, GermanyJulia Schicks, Department of Neurodegenerative Diseases, Hertie-Institute for Clinical Brain Research, University of Tübingen, Hoppe-Seyler-Str. 3, 72076 Tübingen, GermanyKarin Srulijes, Department of…

  • Sporadic transthyretin amyloidosis with a novel TTR gene mutation misdiagnosed as primary amyloidosis

    12 May 2012 | 1:12 am
    Sporadic transthyretin amyloidosis with a novel TTR gene mutation misdiagnosed as primary amyloidosis Content Type Journal ArticleCategory Letter to the EditorsPages 1-3DOI 10.1007/s00415-012-6529-zAuthors Chiara Briani, Departments of Neurosciences, University of Padova, Via Giustiniani 5, 35128 Padua, ItalyTiziana Cavallaro, Departments of Neurological, Neuropsychological, Morphological and Movement Sciences, University of Verona, Verona, ItalySergio Ferrari, Departments of Neurological, Neuropsychological, Morphological and Movement Sciences, University of Verona, Verona, ItalyFederica…

  • Interest of CSF biomarker analysis in possible cerebral amyloid angiopathy cases defined by the modified Boston criteria

    11 May 2012 | 12:58 am
    Abstract  According to the modified Boston criteria, cerebral amyloid angiopathy (CAA) can present with lobar hematoma (LH) or superficial siderosis (SS). Recently, decreased CSF β-amyloid peptide 40 and 42 (Aβ40; Aβ42) and increased total and phosphorylated tau (t-tau; p-tau) concentrations have been described in CAA presenting with LH. Our aim was to analyze CSF biomarkers as a diagnostic tool for CAA according to the modified Boston criteria. We prospectively included patients with possible or probable CAA according to the modified Boston criteria. CSF was analyzed for t-tau,…

  • Smoking-induced transient motor deterioration in a levodopa-treated patient with Parkinson’s disease

    10 May 2012 | 12:56 am
    Abstract  We report a 53-year-old patient with Parkinson’s disease who complained of transient worsening of motor symptoms after smoking a tobacco cigarette. She had been a chronic smoker of one packet of cigarettes a day for over 20 years. We objectively assessed her motor performance including repetitive finger tapping (RFT) speed using 3D kinematic recordings, timed finger tapping test (TFT) and Unified Parkinson’s Disease Rating Scale (UPDRS) III before and after the administration of nicotine, and with and without levodopa. Nicotine was delivered by either smoking a…
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    Journal of Neuroscience current issue

  • Cannabinoid Type-1 Receptor Reduces Pain and Neurotoxicity Produced by Chemotherapy

    Khasabova, I. A., Khasabov, S., Paz, J., Harding-Rose, C., Simone, D. A., Seybold, V. S.
    16 May 2012 | 11:01 am
    Painful peripheral neuropathy is a dose-limiting complication of chemotherapy. Cisplatin produces a cumulative toxic effect on peripheral nerves, and 30–40% of cancer patients receiving this agent experience pain. By modeling cisplatin-induced hyperalgesia in mice with daily injections of cisplatin (1 mg/kg, i.p.) for 7 d, we investigated the anti-hyperalgesic effects of anandamide (AEA) and cyclohexylcarbamic acid 3'-carbamoyl-biphenyl-3-yl ester (URB597), an inhibitor of AEA hydrolysis. Cisplatin-induced mechanical and heat hyperalgesia were accompanied by a decrease in the level of…

  • Connectivity Changes Underlying Spectral EEG Changes during Propofol-Induced Loss of Consciousness

    Boly, M., Moran, R., Murphy, M., Boveroux, P., Bruno, M.-A., Noirhomme, Q., Ledoux, D., Bonhomme, V., Brichant, J.-F., Tononi, G., Laureys, S., Friston, K.
    16 May 2012 | 11:01 am
    The mechanisms underlying anesthesia-induced loss of consciousness remain a matter of debate. Recent electrophysiological reports suggest that while initial propofol infusion provokes an increase in fast rhythms (from beta to gamma range), slow activity (from delta to alpha range) rises selectively during loss of consciousness. Dynamic causal modeling was used to investigate the neural mechanisms mediating these changes in spectral power in humans. We analyzed source-reconstructed data from frontal and parietal cortices during normal wakefulness, propofol-induced mild sedation, and loss of…

  • Correction: Stein et al., A Role for the Eph Ligand Ephrin-A3 in Entorhino-Hippocampal Axon Targeting

    16 May 2012 | 11:01 am

  • Regulation of Fasciclin II and Synaptic Terminal Development by the Splicing Factor Beag

    Beck, E. S., Gasque, G., Imlach, W. L., Jiao, W., Jiwon Choi, B., Wu, P.-S., Kraushar, M. L., McCabe, B. D.
    16 May 2012 | 11:01 am
    Pre-mRNA alternative splicing is an important mechanism for the generation of synaptic protein diversity, but few factors governing this process have been identified. From a screen for Drosophila mutants with aberrant synaptic development, we identified beag, a mutant with fewer synaptic boutons and decreased neurotransmitter release. Beag encodes a spliceosomal protein similar to splicing factors in humans and Caenorhabditis elegans. We find that both beag mutants and mutants of an interacting gene dsmu1 have changes in the synaptic levels of specific splice isoforms of Fasciclin II (FasII),…

  • Adult Neurogenesis Is Associated with the Maintenance of a Stereotyped, Learned Motor Behavior

    Pytte, C. L., George, S., Korman, S., David, E., Bogdan, D., Kirn, J. R.
    16 May 2012 | 11:01 am
    Adult neurogenesis is thought to provide neural plasticity used in forming and storing new memories. Here we show a novel relationship between numbers of new neurons and the stability of a previously learned motor pattern. In the adult zebra finch, new projection neurons are added to the nucleus HVC and become part of the motor pathway for producing learned song. However, new song learning occurs only in juveniles and the behavioral impact of adding new neurons to HVC throughout life is unclear. We report that song changes after deafening are inversely correlated with the number of new…
 
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    Sports Are 80 Percent Mental

  • NBA Fans Hurt Their Home Team's Free Throws

    25 Apr 2012 | 10:25 pm
    Ask any NBA player or coach where they would prefer to play a high stakes game, home or away, and the vast majority will choose being in the friendly confines of their home arena.  Overall, the win-loss records of most teams would support that, but they would do even better if they taught their home fans a lesson in performance psychology. When it comes to sports skills, research has shown that we’re better off to just do it rather than consciously thinking about the mechanics of each sub-component of the move.  Waiting for a pitch, standing over a putt or stepping up to the free…

  • A Better Way To Evaluate NFL QB Draft Prospects?

    7 Apr 2012 | 7:36 pm
    Andrew Luck - Robert Griffin III Your favorite NFL team breaks the huddle for the first time in 2012 and your shiny, new first-round draft pick quarterback comes to the line.  As he peers out over the defense, everyone, from the general manager to the fans, is confident they chose the right player in the NFL draft because of his dead-on answer to this question, “A train travels 20 feet in one-fifth of a second.  At this same speed, how many feet will it travel in 3 seconds?” Although he struggled with the next question, “What is the ninth month of the year?”, his overall…

  • Daniel Wolpert On Why You Have A Brain

    31 Mar 2012 | 8:35 pm
    Daniel Wolpert is absolutely certain about one thing.  “We have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that’s to produce adaptable and complex movements,” stated Wolpert, Director of the Computational and Biological Learning Lab at the University of Cambridge.  “Movement is the only way you have of affecting the world around you.”  After that assertive opening to his 2011 TED Talk, he reported that, despite this important purpose, we have a long way to go in understanding of how exactly the brain controls our movements. Daniel Wolpert The evidence for this is…

  • Michel Bruyninckx Trains Soccer Brains

    22 Jan 2012 | 6:22 pm
    Michel Bruyninckx When describing what’s wrong with today’s youth soccer coaching, Michel Bruyninckx points to his head. “We need to stop thinking football is only a matter of the body,” the 59-year old Belgian Uefa A license coach and Standard Liège academy director recently told the BBC. “Skillfulness will only grow if we better understand the mental part of developing a player. Cognitive readiness, improved perception, better mastering of time and space in combination with perfect motor functioning.” We’re not talking about dribbling around orange cones here.

  • "Quiet Eye" Can Help A Surgeon's Patients And Golf Game

    13 Dec 2011 | 2:33 pm
    Surgeons now have a really good excuse to be out on the golf course.  Researchers have shown that the same training technique that will improve their putting can also improve their operating skills.  Dr Samuel Vine and Dr Mark Wilson, from Sport and Health Sciences at the University of Exeter, tested both elite golfers and surgical residents in two separate experiments using the gaze control technique known as the “Quiet Eye.” First, they divided 22 elite golfers, (handicaps less than 6), into two groups after their baseline putting performance was measured.  The control…
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    The Brain Understanding Itself

  • Auditory Hypersensitivity and Autism

    Alex Doman
    25 Apr 2012 | 11:22 am
    Sound is everywhere, it’s as much a part of our lives as the air we breathe and the food we eat. Yet, many people become stressed or uncomfortable with sounds in their own home, school, work, and public places, and aren’t even aware of it.The cause, NOISE! Negative sound exposure has a scientifically proven impact on health, sleep, attention, learning, communication, listening, hearing, stress and more. A 2011 report from the World Health Organization and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre Burden of Disease From Environmental Noise states that “noise like this is second…

  • The Brain is Art

    Alex Doman
    28 Mar 2012 | 9:40 am
    The brain is an amazing work of art. The aesthetic; elegant design, pleasing in proportion and balance, with a complex surface landscape and vast interconnected universe of neural networks linking billions of neurons that enable us to sense, feel, think and express. This thing that allows us to appreciate beauty in all it’s forms is beautiful unto itself, a perfect balance of harmony and nature. The human brain is truly a glorious creation, a sight to behold. If you have never had the opportunity to see one for yourself, consider it. Within us, we each hold the world’s greatest…

  • Neuroimaging: A Slippery Slope

    Alex Doman
    7 Mar 2012 | 10:34 am
    Is there a brain image for that? In the quest to seek understanding of who we are, and how we work, the exploration of the vast landscape of the human brain is helped immensely by functional neuroimaging. However, it is not the answer to all we seek. The brain is a complex system of integrated networks that cannot simply be reduced to an image and our interpretation of what that image represents. We should remain holistic in the study of the brain, never forgetting the intricacy of this wondrous organ. Emotion and behavior is the result of a complex symphony, not to be judged based on the…

  • What if Michelangelo Listened to Lady Gaga: Sculpting Your Brain with Music

    Alex Doman
    5 Jan 2012 | 7:29 pm
    What if Michelangelo Listened to Lady Gaga: SculptingYour Brain with Music Did music influence Michelangelo? If so, was it the sounding of a harmonic chord, the new musical aesthetic for the period? Did it contribute to the transformation of a block of Carrara marble into David, the masterpiece of Renaissance sculpture? What form would David have taken if sculpted in the 21st century, with such a broad range of music genres and styles?  Lady Gaga anyone… These are the kinds of questions I cogitate in moments of quiet. Continue… New blog post at Cognitive Connections. Thanks for the…

  • What we hear can affect how we work | Marketplace from American Public Media

    Alex Doman
    3 Jan 2012 | 6:37 pm
    What we hear can affect how we work | Marketplace from American Public Media. This is an interview I did with Kai Ryssdal on Marketplace yesterday. You can hear the show or read the transcript. Let me know your thoughts on how sounds in your work environment effect your productivity. Filed under: Healing at the Speed of Sound, Press Tagged: book, hearing, kai ryssdal, marketplace
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    Brain Posts

  • Jet Lag and Shift Work Sleep Disorder

    16 May 2012 | 11:37 am
    Transcontinental air travel and shifting work cycles present two of the most common challenges to circadian rhythm and sleep adjustment.  For individuals who travel frequently or have many shifts in their work schedule, adjusting sleep patterns effectively can increase alertness and work performance.Kolla and Auger from the Mayo Clinic recently published an excellent review of the current knowledge of jet lag and shift work disorders.   Here are some of the key findings and recommendations from their clinical and research summary:BackgroundSleep and wakefulness are driven by two…

  • Doxepin For Chronic Primary Insomnia

    15 May 2012 | 11:13 am
    I have previously posted a summary and commentary on the use of low-dose doxepin in the treatment of insomnia.  The first post summarized the results of two studies supporting the safety and efficacy of this compound including it's efficacy in elderly individuals.In a second post a randomized placebo controlled trial demonstrated safety and efficacy in a group of elderly subjects over a 12-week period.Another study of the efficacy and safety of doxepin has been recently published.  This study focused on individuals with chronic primary insomnia.  Chronic primary insomnia…

  • Naltrexone Implants for Polydrug Dependence

    4 May 2012 | 10:50 am
    One of the challenges in the treatment of drug dependence is the common clinical feature of polydrug dependence.  Those with serious drug dependence problems typically use multiple substances including alcohol.Pharmacological interventions that address one specific drug may not influence craving or use of another substance. For example, methadone clinics for heroin dependence commonly find continued use of cocaine and other stimulants despite significant reduction in heroin use.  Obviously, reduction in drug use across all the drugs of abuse categories is a better clinical outcome.A…

  • Brain Recognition of Where We Are: TED Talk of Neil Burgess

    2 May 2012 | 1:25 pm
    I have previously provided reviews on some of the excellent TED talks that relate to the brain and to neuroscience.  Recently a TED video has been posted of a 9 minute presentation by Dr. Neil Burgess from University College in London.  Dr. Burgess has been interested in how the brain determines spatial orientation and sense of place.In the presentation, he does a nice job of using both rat and human studies to help better define the brain regions and neuron cell types that are involved in spatial functioning.  He notes that the monitoring of firing rates of individual neurons…

  • Bipolar Disorder, Lithium and Hippocampal Volume

    1 May 2012 | 10:36 am
    Brain neuroimaging studies continue to outline the structural and functional abnormalities in disorders of mood.  A relatively consistent finding has been a reduced volume of the brain hippocampus in major depressive disorder.  Studies of hippocampal volume in the less common bipolar disorder have been inconsistent--some studies have found reduced hippocampal volumes while others have not.The hippocampus is an important brain region to understand in the mood disorders.  The hippocampus has a key role in memory.  Patients with mood disorders commonly display impairments in…
 
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    Psychology Headlines Around the World

  • Cannes Film Festival Opens Amid Charges of Sexism

    BBC News - Top Headlines
    16 May 2012 | 3:29 am
    Source: BBC News - Top HeadlinesThe 65th Cannes Film Festival is to open in France later, amid criticism that no female directors will be in competition.

  • Transgender TV Ad Ruled "Offensive" and Banned in UK

    BBC News - UK News
    16 May 2012 | 3:29 am
    Source: BBC News - UK NewsComplaints about an advert for bookmaker Paddy Power featuring transgender people are upheld by the industry watchdog.

  • Why Does One Person Become Anorexic and Another Obese?

    ScienceDaily
    15 May 2012 | 5:49 am
    Source: ScienceDailyWhy does one person become anorexic and another obese? Researchers have now shown that reward circuits in the brain are sensitized in anorexic women and desensitized in obese women.

  • A Walk in the Park Gives Mental Boost to People with Depression

    ScienceDaily
    15 May 2012 | 5:49 am
    Source: ScienceDailyIn one of the first studies to examine the effect of nature walks on cognition and mood in people with major depression, researchers in Canada and the US have found promising evidence that a walk in the park may provide some cognitive benefits.

  • 10-Year Roadmap to Prevent, Fight Depression

    Medical News Today
    15 May 2012 | 5:39 am
    Source: Medical News TodayMajor depressive episodes can be prevented, and to help ensure that they are, the health care system should provide routine access to depression-prevention interventions, just as patients receive standard vaccines, according to a new article co-authored by UCSF researcher Ricardo F. Munoz, PhD. The article builds on a 2009 Institute of Medicine report on prevention of mental, emotional and behavioral disorders, which provided presented evidence...
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    N E U R O N A R R A T I V E

  • New Website!

    David DiSalvo
    10 May 2012 | 9:34 am
    Hi everyone. I’ve just launched a new website called The Daily Brain.  We’ll be providing daily doses of science and tech news … please come by and visit!

  • If You’re Looking for Me…

    David DiSalvo
    17 Jun 2011 | 10:07 pm
    Here’s where to find me: Neuronarrative on Psychology Today.com Neuropsyched on Forbes.com My book website Twitter

  • John Cleese on Creativity

    David DiSalvo
    18 Aug 2010 | 1:40 pm
    In this remarkable short talk, comic genius John Cleese explains what he has learned about the creative process.  Be ready to take notes, because he passes along insights worth remembering every day.

  • Going Live on ‘Psychology Today’

    David DiSalvo
    16 Aug 2010 | 12:55 pm
    Wanted to let everyone know that Neuronarrative is now officially a Psychology Today blog, here.   Please subscribe to the RSS feed for updates. Best,                                                                                                                                                David

  • Bargaining with Monkeys Like Us

    David DiSalvo
    3 Aug 2010 | 10:06 am
    In this excellent TED talk, primatologist  Laurie Santos discusses the roots of human irrationality by uncovering the way our primate relatives make decisions. Is it possible that the errors we make–like failing to save money–are not “mistakes” (in the conventional sense) but actually hardwired into our natures?  Santos’ experiments in “monkeynomics” suggest answers to that question that might make human exceptionalists a little nervous.
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    The Neurocritic

  • Fatal Hypernatraemia from Excessive Salt Ingestion During Exorcism

    15 May 2012 | 4:06 am
    Scene from The Exorcist (1973)Now here's something you don't see every day (fortunately!):Fatal voluntary salt intake resulting in the highest ever documented sodium plasma level in adults (255 mmol L−1): a disorder linked to female gender and psychiatric disorders (Ofran et al., 2004).Excessive ingestion of salt is a well-recognized cause of hypernatraemia in children, is uncommonly recognized in debilitated elderly persons, but is rarely diagnosed in healthy, independent adults. We report a case of fatal salt poisoning in a 20-year-old lady who suffered of post-natal depression and…

  • An Orgy of Self-Referential Blogging...

    12 May 2012 | 4:24 pm
    ...may follow from a new PLoS ONE paper on bloggers whose posts are aggregated at ResearchBlogging.org (Shema et al., 2012):The average RB blogger in our sample is male, either a graduate student or has been awarded a PhD and blogs under his own name.The Neurocritic has never been one for meta-blogging.1 I don't like to draw attention to my existence as an actual person, and I don't have time to discuss things like the pros/cons of blogging, scientific outreach, gender imbalances, scientist bloggers vs. science writer bloggers, commenting policies, and blogging networks. It's not that these…

  • Spindle Neurons in Macaques?

    10 May 2012 | 6:49 am
    Spindle neurons, or Von Economo neurons (VENs), are a unique type of large, bipolar neuron found primarily in layer Vb in the anterior cingulate cortex and the frontoinsular cortex of humans.1 In 1999, Nimchinsky and colleagues discovered that among the 28 nonhuman primate species they examined, only great apes had VENs [see Spindle Neurons: The Next New Thing?].Spindle neurons are also seen in humpback, fin, sperm, and killer whales (Hof & Van der Gucht, 2007), elephants (Hakeem et al., 2009), and cetaceans such as the bottlenose dolphin, Risso’s dolphin, and the beluga whale (Butti et…

  • Neurophysiological Explanation for the Perception of Poltergeists

    5 May 2012 | 5:10 pm
    Poltergeist (1982) - IMDb1Poltergeists are defined as paranormal, mischievous ghostly presences that appear to a select group of people. As paranormal entities, they are beyond investigation by rational scientific means. Or are they? Odd sensations, visions, felt presences, out-of-body experiences, etc. have all been explained by unusual brain activity. Hence, neuroscientists should consider that poltergeists exist in the mind of the perceiver, not as a physical reality in the external world.A new paper by parapsychologist William G. Roll and colleagues reported on the case of a woman who…

  • Little Evidence for a Direct Link between PTSD and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy

    29 Apr 2012 | 7:43 pm
    Fig. 2 (Omalu et al., 2011 Photomicrographs of tau-immunostained section of the frontal cortex.Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times the other day about an Iraq War veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and alcohol use problems who ultimately took his own life.Veterans and Brain DiseaseBy NICHOLAS D. KRISTOFPublished: April 25, 2012He was a 27-year-old former Marine, struggling to adjust to civilian life after two tours in Iraq. Once an A student, he now found himself unable to remember conversations, dates and routine bits of daily life. He became…
 
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    The Beautiful Brain

  • When Neuroscience Goes Public

    Noah Hutton
    27 Apr 2012 | 12:21 pm
    A review article published this month in the journal Neuron looks at the last decade of the brain in popular media. In “Neuroscience in the Public Sphere,” [full text available here], the authors reviewed media databases for articles discussing brain research published between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2010 in the six top-selling British newspapers and tabloids. The results? The majority of stories (43%) dealt with brain optimization in some regard, with disease and psychopathology coming in second (36%). Most interesting to me was the topic at the bottom of this list:…

  • Long Live Ignorance!

    Ben Ehrlich
    23 Apr 2012 | 9:48 pm
    In an interview with Casey Schwartz for Newsweek — The Daily Beast, neuroscientist Stuart Firestein argues that knowledge is overrated: As I began to think about it, I realized that, contrary to popular view, scientists don’t really care that much about facts. We recognize that facts are the most unreliable part of the whole operation. They don’t last, they’re always under revision. Whatever fact you seemed to have uncovered is likely to be revised by the next generation. That’s the difference between science and many other endeavors.  Science revels in revision. For science,…

  • Watch: Frans De Waal on Animal Morality

    Sam McDougle
    13 Apr 2012 | 12:48 pm
    The eminent primatologist Frans De Waal’s recent TED talk may be one of my favorite TEDs yet. De Waal presents compelling data on primate senses of fairness and empathy, buttressed by entertaining (and mesmerizing) videos of complex primate social behaviors (the Capuchin monkey experiment is my personal favorite). Oh yea, there are elephants too. De Waal makes a strong case that empathy and fairness are not traits only seen in humans, and that they have older evolutionary roots.  Take a look and tell us what you think:  

  • Rap about the Cosmos

    Ben Ehrlich
    12 Apr 2012 | 12:11 am
    If you love hip hop, you love the Wu Tang Clan, which many people would say is the greatest thing to ever come from Staten Island.  (Please understand that I mean no offense to Staten Island; we’re talking about legends here.)  Matthew Perpetua caught up with one of them — GZA aka The Genius aka Gary Grice — and asked about the influence of science on his upcoming album Dark Matter.  Here is an excerpt from the interview in Rolling Stone: You have a new album, Dark Matter, that is coming out. I understand that you put another record on hold to start on this. What made this…

  • Seeing Ourselves: A Brain and Art Gallery Show Hits New York City

    Noah Hutton
    10 Apr 2012 | 3:12 pm
    A view of the gallery space at MUSECPMI. Visual art and neuroscience are stitched together in a new gallery show in New York City at MUSECPMI, and the results are a mixed bag of intriguing syntheses and frustrating shortcomings. MUSECPMI’s gallery space occupies the sixth and seventh floors of a nondescript office building at Eighth Avenue and 38th Street, and for the past weeks the space has been filled with a collection of paintings, photographs, sculptures, digital projections and interactive stations that all orbit around questions of the mind, identity, and medical imaging of…
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    The Neurocritic

  • Fatal Hypernatraemia from Excessive Salt Ingestion During Exorcism

    The Neurocritic
    15 May 2012 | 4:06 am
    Scene from The Exorcist (1973)Now here's something you don't see every day (fortunately!):Fatal voluntary salt intake resulting in the highest ever documented sodium plasma level in adults (255 mmol L−1): a disorder linked to female gender and psychiatric disorders (Ofran et al., 2004).Excessive ingestion of salt is a well-recognized cause of hypernatraemia in children, is uncommonly recognized in debilitated elderly persons, but is rarely diagnosed in healthy, independent adults. We report a case of fatal salt poisoning in a 20-year-old lady who suffered of post-natal depression and…

  • An Orgy of Self-Referential Blogging...

    The Neurocritic
    12 May 2012 | 4:24 pm
    ...may follow from a new PLoS ONE paper on bloggers whose posts are aggregated at ResearchBlogging.org (Shema et al., 2012):The average RB blogger in our sample is male, either a graduate student or has been awarded a PhD and blogs under his own name.The Neurocritic has never been one for meta-blogging.1 I don't like to draw attention to my existence as an actual person, and I don't have time to discuss things like the pros/cons of blogging, scientific outreach, gender imbalances, scientist bloggers vs. science writer bloggers, commenting policies, and blogging networks. It's not that these…

  • Spindle Neurons in Macaques?

    The Neurocritic
    10 May 2012 | 6:49 am
    Spindle neurons, or Von Economo neurons (VENs), are a unique type of large, bipolar neuron found primarily in layer Vb in the anterior cingulate cortex and the frontoinsular cortex of humans.1 In 1999, Nimchinsky and colleagues discovered that among the 28 nonhuman primate species they examined, only great apes had VENs [see Spindle Neurons: The Next New Thing?].Spindle neurons are also seen in humpback, fin, sperm, and killer whales (Hof & Van der Gucht, 2007), elephants (Hakeem et al., 2009), and cetaceans such as the bottlenose dolphin, Risso’s dolphin, and the beluga whale (Butti et…

  • Neurophysiological Explanation for the Perception of Poltergeists

    The Neurocritic
    5 May 2012 | 5:10 pm
    Poltergeist (1982) - IMDb1Poltergeists are defined as paranormal, mischievous ghostly presences that appear to a select group of people. As paranormal entities, they are beyond investigation by rational scientific means. Or are they? Odd sensations, visions, felt presences, out-of-body experiences, etc. have all been explained by unusual brain activity. Hence, neuroscientists should consider that poltergeists exist in the mind of the perceiver, not as a physical reality in the external world.A new paper by parapsychologist William G. Roll and colleagues reported on the case of a woman who…

  • Little Evidence for a Direct Link between PTSD and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy

    The Neurocritic
    29 Apr 2012 | 7:43 pm
    Fig. 2 (Omalu et al., 2011 Photomicrographs of tau-immunostained section of the frontal cortex.Nicholas Kristof wrote an op-ed piece in the New York Times the other day about an Iraq War veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and alcohol use problems who ultimately took his own life.Veterans and Brain DiseaseBy NICHOLAS D. KRISTOFPublished: April 25, 2012He was a 27-year-old former Marine, struggling to adjust to civilian life after two tours in Iraq. Once an A student, he now found himself unable to remember conversations, dates and routine bits of daily life. He became…
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    Neuroscience RSS Feeds - Neuroscience News Updates

  • Sugar Makes You Stupid: Study Shows High Fructose Diet Sabotages Learning and Memory

    Neuroscience News
    15 May 2012 | 5:37 pm
    This is your brain on sugar: UCLA study shows high-fructose diet sabotages learning, memory. Attention, college students cramming between midterms and finals: Binging on soda and sweets for as little as six weeks may make you stupid. A new UCLA rat study is the first to show how a diet steadily high in fructose slows [...]

  • Surgeons Restore Some Hand Function to Quadriplegic Patient

    Neuroscience News
    15 May 2012 | 12:58 pm
    Technique could help those with C6, C7 spinal cord injuries. Surgeons at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have restored some hand function in a quadriplegic patient with a spinal cord injury at the C7 vertebra, the lowest bone in the neck. Instead of operating on the spine itself, the surgeons rerouted working [...]

  • New Type of Retinal Prosthesis Could Better Restore Sight to Blind

    Neuroscience News
    14 May 2012 | 5:04 pm
    Using tiny solar-panel-like cells surgically placed underneath the retina, scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine have devised a system that may someday restore sight to people who have lost vision because of certain types of degenerative eye diseases. This device — a new type of retinal prosthesis — involves a specially designed pair [...]

  • Smoked Cannabis Reduces Some Symptoms of Multiple Sclerosis

    Neuroscience News
    14 May 2012 | 1:06 pm
    Controlled trial shows improved spasticity, reduced pain after smoking medical marijuana. A clinical study of 30 adult patients with multiple sclerosis (MS) at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine has shown that smoked cannabis may be an effective treatment for spasticity – a common and disabling symptom of this neurological disease. The [...]

  • Let There Be Light: It’s Good for Our Brains

    Neuroscience News
    14 May 2012 | 12:18 pm
    EPFL scientists have proven that light intensity influences our cognitive performance and how alert we feel, and that these positive effects last until early evening. Tests conducted in EPFL’s Solar Energy and Building Physics Laboratory (LESO) have confirmed the hypothesis that light influences our subjective feeling of sleepiness. The research team, led by Mirjam Münch, [...]
 
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    Master RSS Feed - Dana Foundation

  • Stroke Researchers Aim to Stem the “Ischemic Cascade” (News and Features)

    14 May 2012 | 8:00 am
    Much of the damage caused by stroke results from gradual processes, which might be reversible. Scientists are trying compounds that block receptors and methods of cooling the overtaxed brain.

  • The Arts of Neuroscientists: Stanley Froehner (News and Features)

    7 May 2012 | 8:00 am
    When Stanley C. Froehner, Ph.D., isn’t in the lab teasing out the finer points of dystrophin, a protein complex implicated in muscular dystrophies, he enjoys taking photographs of everything from jazz performers to Alaskan fjords. His work has been featured on the cover of Journal of Neurophysiology and  Seattle Real Change newspaper.

  • Smoking’s Ties to Schizophrenia (News and Features)

    2 May 2012 | 8:00 am
    Treatment for smoking cessation is not a priority in psychiatric care, forcing many schizophrenics—who often smoke to manage their symptoms or the side-effects of their medication—to quit cold turkey just when they are having trouble managing their illness.

  • The Role of Stress in Brain Development (Cerebrum)

    25 Apr 2012 | 8:00 am
    During gestation, the fetal brain develops dramatically as structures and connections form, providing the foundation for all future development. Exposure to maternal stress can sometimes have deleterious effects on the fetus, depending on the cause, timing, duration, and intensity of stress. Fortunately, postnatal interventions, such as a secure parent-infant bond and an enriched environment, can buffer the potential negative consequences. 

  • Electroconvulsive Therapy Seems to Stem Excess Connectivity (News and Features)

    23 Apr 2012 | 8:00 am
    Scottish researchers find ECT quiets the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This and other recent findings might help doctors find an alternate treatment that also relieves depression but without producing memory troubles.
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    Generally Thinking

  • What is synesthesia like?

    Warren Davies
    8 May 2012 | 7:24 am
    Synesthesia is a condition in which people senses become entangled, such that a person might see colours when listening to music or feel a certain sensation while tasting something. It’s a really interesting phenomena, and people who have this ability often go a long time before realising it, as it is not necessarily debilitating and they just assume everyone else is the same! It’s not an area I know much about so, I found this video by Robert Sims very interesting, and well made.

  • How to dance according to science (includes videos!)

    Warren Davies
    22 Apr 2012 | 9:16 am
    The theory of sexual selection proposes that certain traits evolved due to the preference of the other gender. These preferences may evolve because the trait is an indicator or genetic fitness, for example through being related to better health. Random genetic mutations that lead an individual to better display this trait are make that person “sexier” to the other sex, and hence the gene is more likely to make it into the next generation. T1000 Getting jiggy with it. John Connor, get down!! Many such traits are physical characteristics, as we’ve discussed before, but…

  • Can being an expert undermine your performance?

    Warren Davies
    21 Apr 2012 | 5:02 am
    As with bilingualism, it’s generally assumed that being an expert completely beneficial and has no downsides to performance. However we know that expertise tends to be domain specific, for example, chess grand masters can memorise chess boards far more quickly and easily that novices, but on standard cognitive tests tend to fare no better. In fact, if you arrange chess pieces to positions that would never be encountered in an actual game, again their recall is no better than chess novices, showing just how domain-specific expertise can be. But surely within a given domain, expertise can…

  • Can your email address make you more attractive?

    Warren Davies
    20 Apr 2012 | 6:30 am
    The age-old advice is that it’s what’s on the inside, not what’s on the outside that makes you attractive. Is that true? Virgin Zeigler-Hill and Erin Myers performed a number of studies to test this theory, but there was one in particular that I found intreresting. They showed 283 students photographs of people with neutral expressions, each one randomly being assigned an email address that expressed either high or low self-esteem, or just a name. For example: Low: justaloser2007@hotmail.com sadeyes@yahoo.com slacker82@yahoo.com High: confidenceissexy@gmail.com…

  • Is it better to use pictures or words when learning languages?

    Warren Davies
    19 Apr 2012 | 6:16 am
    The Rosetta Stone people are making a killing through their concept of “natural” language learning. That is, their angle is that with their product, you supposedly learn a new language in the same way you learned your first, which allegedly makes the process easier. To accomplish this, they use pictures. So you see and hear a foreign word, and a collection of pictures, and you pick the one you think the word represents. This makes nice, intuitive sense, although if you were skeptical you might think that this method is simply an easier way to increase the size of your product…
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    Lumosity Brain Games

  • Take the 12 day challenge for Free!

    isaac
    8 May 2012 | 3:17 pm
    – See a drastic improvement in your memory in just 12 days – 1. The Better Brain Clinic is offering a 12 Day Challenge in conjunction with Lumosity to prove that you can improve your memory in only 12 days. Through our partnership offer you can use the service completely free and cancel before 30 days with no cost. Clinical trials have shown positive results and 80% of our members have continued on with the program after their 12 day challenge was complete. 2. Though numerous studies have proven many games on Lumosity have a direct impact on memory functions, we’ve found…

  • Why I use brain games

    isaac
    27 Apr 2012 | 10:04 pm
    In today’s world of high-tech gadgets and computers I started to worry about how little I needed to actually memorize anything, and I found myself wondering what kind of impact that would have on my mental abilities as I aged. I know I’m not alone in this line of thinking and I was relieved to hear a friend of mine, Mike, raise the subject when he was doing some carpentry at my place of business. “I’m afraid my brain is getting rusty,” he said. “I used to have to memorize phone numbers and when I went on a road trip I’d learn the route by studying maps. Now, with speed dial and…

  • Five Easy Moves for a Better Brain

    isaac
    13 Apr 2012 | 4:34 pm
    1. Eat the Rainbow! Foods with bright or deep colors hold the secret to keeping your mind clear. These foods are full of antioxidants, which neutralize free radicals. Free radicals can damage brain cells, so eat the rainbow for a healthy brain. Purple: plums, red cabbage (which is purple when raw) Blue: Blueberries Red: strawberries, raspberries, cherries, red bell peppers, tomatoes, pomegranates Yellow: yellow bell peppers, peaches Orange: oranges, tangerines, yams, carrots Green: peas, broccoli, spinach, kale 2. Join the Circus! Juggling grows both white matter and grey matter in the brain,…

  • Considering Dementia: From Fear to Hope

    isaac
    24 Mar 2012 | 12:38 pm
    ‘Dementia’ — what a scary word that is, conjuring up fears of becoming increasingly unable to remember, think, make decisions, and care for oneself. The good news is there are many things you can do to stay mentally young. We’ll cover those in a minute — but first, a few points about dementia. The word ‘dementia’ refers to a variety of neurological disorders that affect the brain. The loss of nerve cells in the brain and/or the decline in communication between cells happens in all forms of dementia. People with dementia experience memory loss, but memory loss alone is not a sign…

  • Do Brain Games Really Work?

    isaac
    13 Mar 2012 | 10:47 pm
    You may have heard controversy about whether or not playing brain games really does improve your overall mental abilities. Some media sources and experts have claimed that while, with practice, you may get better at playing specific brain games, that doesn’t mean that your brain will function better when you’re trying to solve a problem in real life, or that you will remember where you put your glasses. So just because you practice a game and get better at playing it, maybe even much better, it doesn’t mean that you can do anything else better, smarter or faster. This criticism of brain…
 
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