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Next
Event
Friday, August 22, 2008, 07:00 PM: Simulations of Society with Loren Cobb
Loren Cobb will present his peculiar 15-year journey into sociological model-making for various military entities, including US Southern Command, the Swedish Ministry of Defence, the British Ministry of Defence, the United Nations, and a miscellany of Latin American countries (Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, ...).
More...
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Neuroscience
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Thomas Lewis, M.D. is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine, and a former associate director of the Affective Disorders Program there. Dr. Lewis currently divides his time between writing, private practice, and teaching at the UCSF medical school.
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Scientists say they have found the part of the brain that predicts whether a person will be selfish or an altruist.
Altruism - the tendency to help others without obvious benefit to oneself - appears to be linked to an area called the posterior superior temporal sulcus. Using brain scans, the US investigators found this region related to a person's real-life unselfish behaviour.
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A probe of the upper echelons of the human brain's chain-of-command has found strong evidence that there are not one but two complementary commanders in charge of the brain. It's as if Captains James T. Kirk and Jean-Luc Picard were both on the bridge and in command of the same starship Enterprise. In reality, these two captains are networks of brain regions that do not consult each other but still work toward a common purpose -- control of voluntary, goal-oriented behavior. "This was a big surprise. We knew several brain regions contribute to top-down control, but most of us thought we'd eventually show all those regions linking together in one system, one little guy up top telling everyone else what to do."
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This year, as every year, we present our list of the 10 technologies we find most exciting—and most likely to alter industries, fields of research, and even the way we live. The list comprises projects in a broad range of fields.
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Scientists have taken an important step toward understanding how the human brain codes the meanings of words by creating the first computational model that can predict the unique brain activation patterns associated with names for things that you can see, hear, feel, taste or smell.
Researchers previously have shown that they can use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to detect which areas of the brain are activated when a person thinks about a specific word. A CMU team has taken the next step by predicting these activation patterns for concrete nouns - things that are experienced through the senses - for which fMRI data does not yet exist.
The work could eventually lead to the use of brain scans to identify thoughts and could have applications in the study of autism, disorders of thought such as paranoid schizophrenia, and semantic dementias such as Pick's disease.
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Researchers have developed a new technique for imaging of neuronal function using bioluminescence. This imaging technique enables the monitoring of neuronal activity (and more specifically, calcium activity), real-time and in-vivo, in either a small group of neurons or in the brain as a whole. The novel imaging technique employs a new, GFP-aequorin marker/tracer. This is a calcium-sensitive protein, which in the presence of its co-factor , coelenterazine, will emit light (a photon) when there is a change to the calcium concentration in a cell; for example, following neuronal activation.
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A new study on rats has identified a part of the brain's cortex that controls learned but not innate fear responses.
The results suggest that hyperactivity in a region of the prefrontal cortex might contribute to disorders of learned fear in humans, such as post-traumatic stress disorder and other anxiety disorders.
This study contradicts prior thinking that the amygdala is sufficient for processing and expressing fear. "This is the first paper demonstrating that a region of the cortex is involved in learned fear but not in innate fear."
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Researchers have discovered that the genetic malfunction that causes a form of mental retardation called Noonan Syndrome (NS) produces an imbalance in the genesis of two types of cells in the developing embryonic brain. NS is a relatively common genetic disorder, occurring in one of every 2,500 live births. It is characterized by congenital heart defects, short stature, learning disabilities, and mental retardation. Approximately 50% of NS cases are caused by a genetic mutation in a biochemical switch called SHP-2. SHP-2 is involved in molecular pathways regulating development of brain cells. The NS mutations cause SHP-2 to be constantly activated.
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In a request issued in October, a government agency asked researchers for "innovative" ways to monitor the brain as it learns and acquires skills, such as by tracking when brain waves flip from those characteristic of novices to those of experts, and noninvasive ways to speed up the process. In February, the agency said it was interested in ways to use EEGs to detect when a brain had found what it was looking for in a photograph, such as a familiar face in a crowd.
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The neural pathways between the left and right side of the brain are more pronounced and interlinked in women than men. Interlinking is the reason why women are better able to multi-task than men. "A man's brain is more compartmentalised.
His emotions are more separate from his rational mind and separate from his intuition. This is why men can more easily block out feelings and intuition."
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A new imaging study shows that our brains react with varying sensitivity to reward and suggests that people most susceptible to impulse - those who need to buy it, eat it, or have it, now - show the greatest activity in a reward center of the brain. In their study of 45 subjects, researchers showed that activity in the ventral striatum, a core component of the brain's reward circuitry, correlated with individuals' impulsiveness.
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New research reveals the brain's capacity to regenerate -- however, the sooner alcoholics abstain from drinking the more they may recover. Researchers used sophisticated scanning technology and computer software to measure how brain volume, form and function changed over six to seven weeks of abstinence from alcohol in 15 alcohol dependent patients (ten men, five women).
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Childhood memories might best be kept in a photo album, not in your mind. Too many long-term memories make it hard to properly filter new information and process short-term memories.
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During learning and memory formation, the brain builds or remodels tiny structures on the surface of its nerve cells to store the new information. Now, a team led by Duke University Medical Center researchers has discovered where the brain gets the raw materials for such construction -- and has even taken "home movies" of the process. "If we need to remember a name, directions to a location or how to perform certain motor tasks -- anything involving learning or memory, really -- our brain does it by changing the properties of synapses."
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 Armed with an array of tools that sound like an intergalactic arsenal straight from Star Wars, modern neuroscientists are increasingly well equipped for forays to the frontiers of the human brain. Through the use of positron emission tomography (PET), near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), neurotechnology is probing the brain with increasing precision and positing biological explanations for human behavior. "For the first time it may be possible to breach the privacy of the human mind, and judge people not only by their actions, but also by their thoughts and predilections. The alteration of brain function in normal humans, with the goal of enhancing psychological function, is increasingly feasible and indeed practiced. At the same time, progress in basic neuroscience is illuminating the relation between mind and brain, a topic of great philosophical importance. Our understanding of why people behave as they do is closely bound up with the content of our laws, social mores and religious beliefs."
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A protein that causes coral to glow is helping researchers to light up brain cells that are critical for the proper functioning of the central nervous system. This fluorescent marker protein may shed light on brain cell defects believed to play a role in various neurological diseases. The researchers describe how this marker works in mice. The marker gives scientists the first-ever opportunity to distinguish between energy-producing structures, called mitochondria, in neurons, from mitochondria in other brain cells, called glia. Defects in mitochondria may be part of the process that leads to Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease.
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People use only ten percent of their brains? While for the people who repeat that myth, it's probably true, the rest of us happily use all of our brains.
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 Researchers discover the molecule that links spontaneous physical activity and food intake in mice.
Why does the same diet make some of us gain more weight than others? The answer could be a molecule called Bsx. Bsx is the molecular link between spontaneous physical activity and food intake. Mice lacking the molecule show less spontaneous physical activity, perceive hunger signals differently and have a lower concentration of feeding hormones in their brain than normal mice. Being conserved across species, Bsx might be a promising target for controlling diet-induced obesity in humans.
Spontaneous physical activity, subconscious movements we make such as fidgeting while working at the computer, and food intake are two crucial factors regulating our body weight. Both are controlled by the same part of the brain, called hypothalamus.
"Mice that lack Bsx in their hypothalamus are a lot lazier than normal mice. They show less spontaneous activity and less food seeking behaviour, which is based on locomotor activity."
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Scientists can elicit complex behaviors by stimulating specific areas in the brain of a small primate called the bush baby. Similar studies have been done on other primates. "These results explain why certain behaviors - such as defensive and aggressive movements, smiling and grasping food - are so similar around the world -- It is because the instructions for these movements are built-in and not learned."
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When researchers scanned the brains of subjects exposed to images of brands, they discovered that strong brands excite parts of the brain most associated with pleasure and reward. Recently, thanks to new technologies such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), neuroscience has been advancing apace. Marketers are intrigued by many of its findings. One is that brain activity for an action seems to begin about half a second before a person decides to take the action - suggesting that we are not so much "making" the decision as simply becoming aware of the fact that a decision has been made. If people are not aware of their own decision-making processes, how can marketers best influence them?
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 Multifunctional neurons that sense the environment and release hormones are the evolutionary basis of our brains.
Hormones control growth, metabolism, reproduction and many other important biological processes. In humans, and all other vertebrates, the chemical signals are produced by specialised brain centres such as the hypothalamus and secreted into the blood stream that distributes them around the body. Researchers now reveal that the hypothalamus and its hormones are not purely vertebrate inventions, but have their evolutionary roots in marine, worm-like ancestors. Hormone-secreting brain centres are much older than expected and likely evolved from multifunctional cells of the last common ancestor of vertebrates, flies and worms.
"Vertebrate-type hormones were found in annelid worms and molluscs, indicating that these centres might be much older than expected."
"So far we have always understood the brain as a processing unit, a bit like a computer that integrates and interprets incoming sensory information. Now we know that the brain is itself a sensory organ and has been so since very ancient times."
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Nine years ago, Rusty Gage shattered a neuroscience dogma when he showed human brains give birth to new neurons. Today, a company is eager to take those findings to the clinic. The compound, now called BCI540, seemed to promote neurons with reasonable potency and was not toxic to cells.
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Get someone to sniff a new potion made from the chemical oxytocin and they'll be more willing to loan you money.
Trust us on this.
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Researchers are now able to study stem cells from the brains of adult mice and their neurogenesis in long-term cell cultures. They have developed a new method which allows them to generate exactly those neurons from stem cells in cell culture as those that would develop in the living brain.
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A new study has found that adult stem cells in a specific region of the mouse brain have a built-in mechanism that allows the cells to participate in the repair and remodelling of damaged tissue in the region. "The results were very surprising. Our results show that neural stem cells in mice have the ability to sense damage in their environment that leads to their subsequent proliferation to help restore local tissue integrity. If we can figure out how this happens, and determine that it occurs in human neural stem cells, we may be able to increase the effect and harness it for therapeutic use."
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By scanning subjects' brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researcher found that, in fact, weighing possible outcomes does influence decision making. "This is the first study to show that you can use brain activation alone to predict purchasing on a trial-by-trial basis." Researchers discovered that when the product first flashed on the screen it activated the nucleus accumbens, a section near the middle of the brain that has been implicated in the brain's reward center, effectively appraising the item. When the price appeared...
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A group of researchers describes an experiment in which nascent rat neural stem cells were used to prod blood vessel cells to assume properties of the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier is an anatomical feature in humans and other animals that protects the brain from chemicals and other harmful agents, but also limits the ability of clinicians to administer helpful drugs. Demonstrating that developing brain cells can release factors that may coax small blood vessels to exhibit the properties of the blood-brain barrier is important for a number of reasons. First, it forms a basis for understanding the mechanism that provides critical protection for the brain. Second...
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The new work, which is largely theoretical, may also lead to improvements of existing algorithms that attempt to determine what parts of the brain are producing the electromagnetic fields that are measured by functional brain imaging techniques such as magnetoencephalography (MEG) or closely-related electroencephalography (EEG). "With this work, functional brain imaging practitioners should be better able to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of competing Bayesian approaches for source localization."
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Researchers said thyroid hormone in the brain is linked to increases in the protein UCP2, setting off a chain reaction that ultimately boosts the neurons that drive hunger. The researchers studied mice on a 24-hour fast. Researchers found there was an increase in the enzyme that stimulates thyroid hormone production in concert with increased UCP2 protein activity.
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To cause loss of the craving for nicotine, the stroke needs to occur in a 2.5-centermeter wide insula, a small island in the cerebral cortex deep in the brain that has been known to function as a platform for feelings and emotion including nicotine addition.
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The researchers found that mice whose brains were severely damaged by loss of the genes "Numb" and "Numblike" in one region just after birth showed substantial mending within weeks. They attributed that repair to neural stem cell "escapees" that had somehow retained or restored the genes' activity and, with it, their regenerative potential.
"At two weeks, the knockout animals' brains had developed a big hole. We thought that the mice would not live long, but by four weeks, the hole was largely repaired and the animals survived.
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Researchers have learned why people should not drive and use their cell phones at the same time -- their brains aren't wired for it. "Even those people who think using a headset with their cell phone while driving is safe, but they're still doing two cognitively demanding tasks at once."
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Empathy allows us to feel the emotions of others, to identify and understand their feelings and motives and see things from their perspective. In 1996, three neuroscientists were probing the brain of a macaque monkey when they stumbled across a curious cluster of cells in the premotor cortex, an area of the brain responsible for planning movements. The cluster of cells fired not only when the monkey performed an action, but likewise when the monkey saw the same action performed by someone else. The neuroscientists named them "mirror neurons." Later experiments confirmed the existence of mirror neurons in humans and revealed another surprise. In addition to mirroring actions, the cells reflected sensations and emotions.
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Alcohol does not make good things nicer but the nasty things less negative. In the case of pleasant experiences alcohol was found to scarcely influence the reward system. The "rosy glasses" that alcohol is said to cause is therefore just a temporary filter for the more sombre issues in life.
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Neuroscientists have mapped the timing and sequence of neural activations that unfold in the brain when people focus their attention on specific locations in their visual fields. "There are a number of clinical syndromes where attention is dysfunctional, including schizophrenia, autism and attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder. Moreover, attentional capabilities change during normal and abnormal aging."
In this study, the researchers combined information from two different technologies for measuring brain activity in order to provide insight into the basic mechanisms by which humans orient and focus their visual spatial attention.
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Attention, shoppers: A brave new retailing world may be just around the corner. Using brain-scanning equipment, a team of scientists has discovered that they can correctly predict whether subjects will decide to make a purchase. To be sure, stores won't actually be able to brain scan shoppers anytime soon to discover which way they're leaning. The necessary technology, a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, remains prohibitively expensive and requires subjects to lie down in a coffin-like tube. The research, nevertheless, has implications for understanding consumer behavior.
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For the first time, scientists have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to read people's minds while they make shopping decisions. Among other things, their results suggest women with large collections of Manolo Blahnik stilettos have a high tolerance for pain - and not just as it relates to their feet.
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Neurobiologists have discovered why the aging brain produces progressively fewer new nerve cells in its learning and memory center. The scientists said the finding, made in rodents, refutes current ideas on how long crucial "progenitor" stem cells persist in the aging brain. The finding also suggests the possibility of treating various neurodegenerative disorders, including Alzheimer’s disease, dementia and depression, by stimulating the brain’s ability to produce new nerve cells. The common assumption had been that the brain drain was due to a decreasing supply of neural stem cells in the aging hippocampus. In the current study, however, the researchers found that the stem cells in aging brains are not reduced in number, but instead they divide less frequently.
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US researchers have discovered a likely reason why people find it hard to do two things at once. A "bottleneck" occurs in the brain when people attempt to carry out two simultaneous tasks, the research shows.
The study found the brain slows down when attempting a second task less than 300 milliseconds after the first.
The findings, published in Neuron, support the case for a complete ban on the use of mobile phones when driving.
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Researchers investigate the molecular basis of memory in living mice. The study identified a molecule that is crucially involved in learning and singled out the signaling pathway through which it affects memory.
Our sense organs inform our brain about what happens around us and brain cells communicate this information between each other using electrical signals. These signals become stronger the more often a cell experiences the same stimulus, allowing it to distinguish familiar information from news. In other words, a cell remembers an event as an unusually strong and long-lasting signal. This phenomenon called long-term potentiation [LTP] is thought to underpin learning and memory and its molecular basis is being investigated intensively.
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Results from a brain-imaging study indicate that levels of a brain protein proposed as a diagnostic marker for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) are not positively correlated with the disease.
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Researchers studied how the retina's complex structure of specialized cells is formed from a small number of retina stem cells during the fetal development of chickens. They examined how one of the retina's specialized cell types, so-called horizontal cells, are formed and reach maturity. Their task is to receive and integrate information from a large number of photoreceptors, and there are at least two functionally different types.
The different types take on their determined role at a very early stage in development. What’s more, they do not develop simultaneously but rather one after the other, and in their development they undergo a highly unexpected cell migration at different times from their birth site to their ultimate position in the retina.
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His subject for this essay: Why women aren't funny. A quick appraisal of the article is this: Hitchens starts with some evo/devo (evolutionary development, for those who aren't totally fed up with its constant use)--men need humor to convince women to mate with them. He throws in a Stanford Medical School study, which found that different brain regions in men and women activate when a person is presented with a humor stimulus. Then he says there are exceptions: Obese women, lesbians and Jewish women can be funny, sometimes--mostly because of mannish tendencies. Then his argument devolves into a lame stew of more evo/devo, not-so-pertinent quotes from Kipling and Mencken and Hitchens' own crude observations--like how all women coo over newborns and talk about the minutia of their dreams. All this unfurls under the editor-chosen tagline: PROVOCATION.
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Shakespeare uses a linguistic technique known as functional shift that involves, for example using a noun to serve as a verb. Researchers found that this technique allows the brain to understand what a word means before it understands the function of the word within a sentence. This process causes a sudden peak in brain activity and forces the brain to work backwards in order to fully understand what Shakespeare is trying to say.
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Subliminal distractions disturb concentration even more than obvious ones, according to U.S. researchers. The more subtle random dots - dubbed 'subliminal stimuli' - only barely activated the brain's 'distraction control centre', a region in the brain called the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC). The LPFC is best at controlling distractions when fully activated, and so more obvious distractions can actually be better controlled than subliminal ones.
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Twenty subjects, while lying in an fMRI machine, listened to two-and-a-half second snippets of sounds conveying emotions: from a cheery "ha ha" or enthusiastic "woo hoo") to a fearful "aaah" and a grumpy "blech." In response to hearing the sounds, subjects not only showed activity in the region of the brain believed to process sound, but also in motor parts. "What we basically see is that as the sounds get more positive," Scott reveals, "we get more activation in the lateral premotor areas and extending into the motor cortex bilaterally." She notes that the upbeat sounds were associated with fun activities such as watching sports or comedy shows. These amusement sounds "seem to have a different function than the negative emotions," she explains. "With things like laughter, we don't tend to just have an emotional experience. What you tend to do is, you see somebody laughing and you actually want to join in."
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Researchers identify a neural circuit that makes mice perceive ambiguous situations as threatening.
People who suffer from anxiety tend to interpret ambiguous situations, situations that could potentially be dangerous but not necessarily so, as threatening. Researchers report that a receptor for the messenger serotonin and a neural circuit involving a brain region called the hippocampus play crucial roles in mediating fear responses in ambiguous situations.
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Researchers have found that adolescence is a time of remodeling in the prefrontal cortex, a brain structure dedicated to higher functions such as planning and social behaviors.
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Is a person hysterical if he or she complains of numbness in a limb but conventional tests reveal no underlying cause? A new study argues yes. While the term hysteria has fallen out of favor--replaced by the more reasonable sounding "conversion disorder," after Freud's explanation of such symptoms as the conversion of intolerable emotional impulses into physical manifestations--the condition has not disappeared. Recent fMRI scans of three women insisting they had no feeling in either a hand or a foot revealed that their brains really were malfunctioning when the numb appendage was stimulated.
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New information is transferred between the hippocampus, the short term memory area, and the cerebral cortex during sleep. Contrary to previous assumptions, the cerebral cortex actively controls this transfer.
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Vladimir Nabokov had it. So did Oliver Messiaen and Richard P Feynman. What could a Russian author, a French composer and an American physicist have in common, apart from a celebrated flair for their chosen vocations? All three experienced the psychological condition known as synaesthesia, where a person experiences unusual sensory combinations. Some synaesthetes have reported sound-taste combinations where, for example, hearing the word ‘prison’ could conjure up the taste of greasy bacon. Others have described a visual-taste effect where shapes have flavours: a strawberry circle or an almond square.
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If you did your Christmas shopping early, you've probably already received those hefty credit card bills in the mail. And if you started late, you're probably dreading receiving your mail for the next two weeks. Most people are in for a world of hurt in January. And worst of all, the pain might not be sufficient to convince spendthrifts to be a little more frugal when shopping this year.
That's because, as a neuroeconomic study in the journal Neuron has it, people who spend a lot of money seem somewhat impervious to the pain associated with with spending money.
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Why you are not always rational with your credit card. Neoclassical economics is built on the assumption that humans are rational beings who have a clear idea of their best interests and strive to extract maximum benefit (or “utility”, in economist-speak) from any situation. In this account, price is a signal that helps you decide the combination of work, spending and saving that suits you best. Neoclassical economics assumes that the process of decision-making is rational. But that contradicts growing evidence that decision-making draws on the emotions—even when reason is clearly involved.
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the molecule MEKK4 regulates Filamin-A and its loss contributes to periventricular heterotopia (PVH), a congenital brain malformation.
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Ever wonder why adults tend to go ga-ga when they see a baby?
Scientists report that sophisticated imaging showed that seeing a baby's face lit up a specific region of the adult brain associated with reward circuitry. This "Christmas tree" effect didn't occur when adults looked at another adult face, suggesting there's a neural basis for protective, nurturing feelings triggered by babies.
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Move over, woodwind and strings -- in the future, the ultimate musical instrument could be the human brain.
Artist Luciana Haill uses medical electroencephalogram, or EEG, monitors embedded in a Bluetooth-enabled sweatband to record the activity of her frontal lobes, then beams the data to a computer that plays it back as song.
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Depression only happens in the subcortex, the feeling part of the brain according to Curtiss. There is never any depression in the neocortex, the thinking part of the brain. Her book teaches you to switch from one brain system to the other. Easy mind exercises thoughtjam depressive focus. Then, neuronal activity sparks up in the neo-cortex powering down the depression in the subcortex.
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Low levels of toxic substances cause critical stem cells in the central nervous system to prematurely shut down.
The researchers exposed a specific population of brain cells to low levels of lead, mercury, and paraquat, one of the most widely used herbicides in the world. These cells, called glial progenitors, are advanced-stage stem cells that are critical to the growth, development, and normal function of the central nervous system. These compounds turned off specific sets of receptors and set into motion a molecular chain reaction that causes the cells to shut down and stop dividing.
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Even after a severe concussion, a brain can look normal and healthy on a traditional brain scan. But now a study co-authored by a Brigham Young University psychology professor, using a new kind of MRI technique, reveals brain changes that are subtle but significant.
The study, which appears in Tuesday's issue of the journal "Neurology," helps prove that concussions result in biological changes — and that long-lasting symptoms such as aggression and sleep problems are not just "psychological."
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Scientists at the Biozentrum have uncovered a new way of generating nerve cells in the developing brain of the fruitfly Drosophila. Their findings reveal that this novel mode of neurogenesis is very similar to that seen in mammalian brains. This newly discovered similarity in brain development in flies and mammals provides further evidence for a surprising evolutionary conservation of the mechanisms for building the brains of all animals.
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 Scientists can accurately predict which of a thousand pictures a person is looking at by analyzing brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Scientists first gathered information about how the brain processes images by recording activity in the visual cortex as subjects looked at several thousand randomly selected pictures. Neurons in this part of the brain respond to specific aspects of the visual scene, such as a patch of strongly contrasting light and dark, so the activity recorded in each area of the brain scan reflects the visual information being processed by neurons in that area of the brain. The researchers compiled this information to develop a computer model that would predict the pattern of brain activity triggered by any image.
When volunteers were later shown a new image not included in the first set, the computer model was able to correctly predict which picture out of 120 or 1,000 possibilities the person looked at with 90 or 80 percent accuracy, respectively.
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