tagged w/ Brain
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Scientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have tuned in to precise frequencies of brain activity for new insights into how the brain works. Neuroscientists have closely analyzed where and when the brain becomes active for many years, but now researchers are gathering evidence that the frequency of that activity can be a source of important insights.
Link : http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/02/-human-brains-radio-frequencies-reveal-new-insights.htmlScientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis have tuned in to... more
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eva2
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1 year ago
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The average size of modern humans -- the Homo sapiens -- has decreased about 10 percent during that period -- from 1,500 to 1,359 cubic centimeters, the size of a tennis ball.
Women's brains, which are smaller on average than those of men, have experienced an equivalent drop in size.
These measurements were taken using skulls found in Europe, the Middle East and Asia.
"I'd called that a major downsizing in an evolutionary eye blink," John Hawks of the University of Michigan told Discover magazine.
But other anthropologists note that brain shrinkage is not very surprising since the stronger and larger we are, the more gray matter we need to control this larger mass.
The Neanderthal, a cousin of the modern human who disappeared about 30 millennia ago for still unknown reasons, was far more massive and had a larger brain.
The Cro-Magnons who left cave paintings of large animals in the monumental Lascaux cave over 17,000 years ago were the Homo sapiens with the biggest brain. They were also stronger than their modern descendants.
Psychology professor David Geary of the University of Missouri said these traits were necessary to survive in a hostile environment.
He has studied the evolution of skull sizes 1.9 million to 10,000 years old as our ancestors and cousins lived in an increasingly complex social environment.
Geary and his colleagues used population density as a measure of social complexity, with the hypothesis that the more humans are living closer together, the greater the exchanges between group, the division of labor and the rich and varied interactions between people.
They found that brain size decreased as population density increased.
"As complex societies emerged, the brain became smaller because people did not have to be as smart to stay alive," Geary told AFP.
But the downsizing does not mean modern humans are dumber than their ancestors -- rather, they simply developed different, more sophisticated forms of intelligence, said Brian Hare, an assistant professor of anthropology at Duke University.
He noted that the same phenomenon can be observed in domestic animals compared to their wild counterparts.
So while huskies may have smaller brains than wolves, they are smarter and more sophisticated because they can understand human communicative gestures, behaving similarly to human children.
"Even though the chimps have a larger brain (than the bonobo, the closest extant relative to humans), and even though a wolf has a much larger brain than dogs, dogs are far more sophisticated, intelligent and flexible, so intelligence is not very well linked to brain size," Hare explained.
He said humans have characteristics from both the bonobo and chimpanzee, which is more aggressive and domineering.
"The chimpanzees are violent because they want power, they try to have control and power over others while bonobos are using violence to prevent one for dominating them," Hare continued.
"Humans are both chimps and bobos in their nature and the question is how can we release more bonobo and less chimp.
"I hope bonobos win... it will be better for everyone," he added.
(c) 2011 AFP
http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-brains-smarter.htmlThe average size of modern humans -- the Homo sapiens -- has decreased about 10... more
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eva2
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1 year ago
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The Internet is constantly messing with your head and is turning you into a mindless zombie that can't spell and needs help going to the toilet. Every second I spend typing this article I am loosing on average 100 brain cells due to the Internets sheer presence as well as my Wi-Fi point probably nurturing a tumour inside my brain. Physical deformities aside, what is the actual research being done to see how people's behaviours are changing due to the internet and how is your reading ability being impaired thanks to this article?The Internet is constantly messing with your head and is turning you into a mindless... more
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timoto
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1 year ago
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Gordon Murray, co-author of THE INVESTMENT ANSWER and former Wall Street investment banker, died at his home on Saturday, January 15. He had been battling glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer, first diagnosed in 2008. Business Plus announced it today. Keep Reading>>>>http://anewsfuse.blogspot.com/2011/01/investment-answer-author-gordon-murray.htmlGordon Murray, co-author of THE INVESTMENT ANSWER and former Wall Street investment... more
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Researchers report that they can predict "with unprecedented accuracy" how well you will do on a complex task such as a strategic video game simply by analyzing activity in a specific region of your brain.
:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110113213058.htmResearchers report that they can predict "with unprecedented accuracy" how... more
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suzane
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1 year ago
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One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper presenting what its author describes as strong evidence for extrasensory perception, the ability to sense future events.
The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn.
The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments performed over the past decade by its author, Daryl J. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell, testing the ability of college students to accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects.
Some scientists say the report deserves to be published, in the name of open inquiry; others insist that its acceptance only accentuates fundamental flaws in the evaluation and peer review of research in the social sciences.
“It’s craziness, pure craziness. I can’t believe a major journal is allowing this work in,” Ray Hyman, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University Oregon and longtime critic of ESP research, said. “I think it’s just an embarrassment for the entire field.”
more at link...
Outrage from a bunch of quacks.One of psychology’s most respected journals has agreed to publish a paper... more
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An international team of physicists and neuroscientists has reported a breakthrough in magnetic resonance imaging that allows brain scans more than seven times faster than currently possible.
:http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/01/110105194850.htmAn international team of physicists and neuroscientists has reported a breakthrough in... more
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suzane
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1 year ago
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Regularly drinking green tea could protect the brain against developing Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia, according to latest research by scientists at Newcastle University.
:http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-01-properties-green-tea-uncovered.htmlRegularly drinking green tea could protect the brain against developing... more
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suzane
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1 year ago
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Have you ever felt that someone is lying to you, but dismissed the thought thinking that you are not a lie-detecting machine? As per the researchers of a new study recently presented, there’s a built-in mechanism in our brains that warns us whenever someone lies to us.Have you ever felt that someone is lying to you, but dismissed the thought thinking... more
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Alstom
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1 year ago
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Researchers have found evidence for “chronesthesia,” which is the brain’s ability to be aware of the past and future, and to mentally travel in subjective time. They found that activity in different brain regions is related to chronesthetic states when a person thinks about the same content during the past, present, or future. Image credit: Lars Nyberg, et al. ©2010 PNAS.
The ability to remember the past and imagine the future can significantly affect a person's decisions in life. Scientists refer to the brain’s ability to think about the past, present, and future as "chronesthesia," or mental time travel, although little is known about which parts of the brain are responsible for these conscious experiences. In a new study, researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the neural correlates of mental time travel and better understand the nature of the mental time in which the metaphorical "travel" occurs.
The researchers, Lars Nyberg from Umea University in Umea, Sweden; Reza Habib from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois; and Alice S. N. Kim, Brian Levine, and Endel Tulving from the University of Toronto in Toronto, Ontario, have published their results in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Mental time travel consists of two independent sets of processes: (1) those that determine the contents of any act of such ‘travel’: what happens, who are the 'actors,' where does the action occur; it is similar to the contents of watching a movie – everything that you see on the screen; and (2) those that determine the subjective moment of time in which the action takes place – past, present, or future," Tulving told PhysOrg.com.
"In cognitive neuroscience, we know quite a bit (relatively speaking) about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined space," he said. "We know essentially nothing about perceived, remembered, known, and imagined time. When you remember something that you did last night, you are consciously aware not only that the event happened and that you were ‘there,’ as an observer or participant ('episodic memory'), but also that it happened yesterday, that is, at a time that is no more. The question we are asking is, how do you know that it happened at a time other than 'now'?"
In their study, the researchers asked several well-trained subjects to repeatedly think about taking a short walk in a familiar environment in either the imagined past, the real past, the present, or the imagined future. By keeping the content the same and changing only the mental time in which it occurs, the researchers could identify which areas of the brain are correlated with thinking about the same event at different times.
The results showed that certain regions in the left lateral parietal cortex, left frontal cortex, and cerebellum, as well as the thalamus, were activated differently when the subjects thought about the past and future compared with the present. Notably, brain activity was very similar for thinking about all of the non-present times (the imagined past, real past, and imagined future).
Because mental time is a product of the human brain and differs from the external time that is measured by clocks and calendars, scientists also call this time “subjective time.” Chronesthesia, by definition, is a form of consciousness that allows people to think about this subjective time and to mentally travel in it.
Some previous research has questioned whether the concept of subjective time is actually necessary for understanding similarities in brain activity during past and future thinking compared with thinking about the present. A few past studies have suggested that the brain’s ability for scene construction, and not subjective time, can account for the ability to think about past and future events. However, since scene construction was held constant in this study, the new results suggest that the brain’s ability to conceive of a subjective time is in fact necessary to explain how we think about the past and future.
“Until now, the processes that determine contents and the processes that determine time have not been separated in functional neuroimaging studies of chronesthesia; especially, there have been no studies in which brain regions involved in time alone, rather than time together with action, have been identified,” Tulving said. “The concept of ‘chronesthesia’ is essentially brand new. (You find a few entries on it in Google, but not on Web of Science.) Therefore, I would say, the most important result of our study is the novel finding that there seem to exist brain regions that are more active in the (imagined) past and the (imagined) future than they are in the (imagined) present. That is, we found some evidence for chronesthesia. Before we undertook this study it was entirely possible to imagine that we find nothing!”
He added that, at this stage of the game, it is too early to talk about potential implications or applications of understanding how the brain thinks about the past, present, and future.
“Our study, we hope, is the first swallow of the spring, and others will follow,” he said. “Our findings, as I alluded to above, are promising, but they have to be replicated, checked for validity and reliability, and, above all, extended to other conditions and situations, before we can start thinking about their implications and applications (of which it is easy to think of many).”
More information: Lars Nyberg, et al. “Consciousness of subjective time in the brain.” PNAS Early Edition. DOI:10/1073/pnas.1016823108Researchers have found evidence for “chronesthesia,” which is the... more
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Sophisticated brain scans accurately predicted which teens with dyslexia would learn to read within three years, a finding that could lead to better ways to treat the common learning disability, researchers said on Monday.
:http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6BJ52R20101220Sophisticated brain scans accurately predicted which teens with dyslexia would learn... more
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suzane
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1 year ago
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A small area deep in the brain called the perirhinal cortex is critical for forming unconscious conceptual memories, researchers at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain have found.
link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101215151307.htmA small area deep in the brain called the perirhinal cortex is critical for forming... more
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eva2
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1 year ago
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A middle-aged woman known as SM blithely reaches for poisonous snakes, giggles in haunted houses and once, upon escaping the clutches of a knife-wielding man, didn’t run but calmly walked away. A rare kind of brain damage precludes her from experiencing fear of any sort, finds a study published online December 16 in Current Biology.
link: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/12/fear-brain-amygdala/A middle-aged woman known as SM blithely reaches for poisonous snakes, giggles in... more
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eva2
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1 year ago
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A new wave of research into bullying’s effects, however, is now suggesting something more than that — that in fact, bullying can leave an indelible imprint on a teen’s brain at a time when it is still growing and developing. Being ostracized by one’s peers, it seems, can throw adolescent hormones even further out of whack, lead to reduced connectivity in the brain, and even sabotage the growth of new neurons.
These neurological scars, it turns out, closely resemble those borne by children who are physically and sexually abused in early childhood. Neuroscientists now know that the human brain continues to grow and change long after the first few years of life. By revealing the internal physiological damage that bullying can do, researchers are recasting it not as merely an unfortunate rite of passage but as a serious form of childhood trauma.
http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2010/11/28/inside_the_bullied_brain/?page=1A new wave of research into bullying’s effects, however, is now suggesting... more
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Studies on rats by Cambridge and Edinburgh University researchers identified how to help stem cells in the brain regenerate myelin sheath, needed to protect nerve fibres.
link: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11913689Studies on rats by Cambridge and Edinburgh University researchers identified how to... more
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eva2
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1 year ago
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