Posts Tagged ‘brain’
Video Player Creativity: The Mind, Machines, and Mathematics: Public Debate
August 11, 2009
Two of the sharpest minds in the computing arena spar gamely, but neither scores a knockdown in one of the oldest debates around: whether machines may someday achieve consciousness. (NB: Viewers may wish to brush up on the work of computer pioneer Alan Turing and philosopher John Searle in preparation for this video.)
By MIT World
Watch the Video Here
How Much of Your Memory Is True?
August 5, 2009
These recent insights into memory are part of a larger about-face in neuroscience research. Until recently, long-term memories were thought to be physically etched into our brain, permanent and unchanging. Now it is becoming clear that memories are surprisingly vulnerable and highly dynamic. In the lab they can be flicked on or dimmed with a simple dose of drugs. “For a hundred years, people thought memory was wired into the brain,” Nader says. “Instead, we find it can be rewired—you can add false information to it, make it stronger, make it weaker, and possibly even make it disappear.” Nader and Brunet are not the only ones to make this observation. Other scientists probing different parts of the brain’s memory machinery are similarly finding that memory is inherently flexible.
By Kathleen McGowan (Discover Magazine)
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Brain Develops Motor Memory For Prosthetics
August 4, 2009
“Practice makes perfect” is the maxim drummed into students struggling to learn a new motor skill – be it riding a bike or developing a killer backhand in tennis. Stunning new research now reveals that the brain can also achieve this motor memory with a prosthetic device, providing hope that physically disabled people can one day master control of artificial limbs with greater ease.
By Science Daily
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Artificial brain ’10 years away’
August 3, 2009
Henry Markram, director of the Blue Brain Project, has already simulated elements of a rat brain.
He told the TED Global conference in Oxford that a synthetic human brain would be of particular use finding treatments for mental illnesses.
Around two billion people are thought to suffer some kind of brain impairment, he said.
“It is not impossible to build a human brain and we can do it in 10 years,” he said.
By Jonathan Fildes (BBC News)
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Brain Boosters
July 29, 2009
Daryl Kipke is showing off his company’s latest prototype, a state-of-the-art electronic chip. It’s not the sort likely to end up powering your iPod, but it does produce a beat you won’t be able to get out of your head—because this device is designed to be surgically implanted deep in your brain, where the chip will deliver electric signals to specific clusters of cells. Kipke’s firm, NeuroNexus Technologies in Ann Arbor, Michigan, is developing and testing the device to deliver electric pulses that can relieve some of the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression. “Deep-brain stimulation has been poorly understood,” says Kipke, who is also a University of Michigan neuroscientist. “But with this technology we can improve neuron targeting and tuning.”
By David H. Freedman (Newsweek)
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The Brain Adapts in a Blink to Compensate for Missing Information
July 23, 2009
The human brain has long been known to perceive things that aren’t there—from phantom limbs to patterns in chaos. But a new study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.) shows for the first time that it is surprisingly quick to bend reality when normal perception is disrupted. The results were published yesterday in The Journal of Neuroscience.
By Katherine Harmon (Scientific American)
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The experience of time
July 21, 2009Suggested by Pocholo Peralta (Plato On-line)
Time research has been a neglected topic in the cognitive neurosciences of the last decades: how do humans perceive time? How and where in the brain is time processed? This introductory paper provides an overview of the empirical and theoretical papers on the psychological and neural basis of time perception collected in this theme issue. Contributors from the fields of cognitive psychology, psychiatry, neurology and neuroanatomy tackle this complex question with a variety of techniques ranging from psychophysical and behavioural experiments to pharmacological interventions and functional neuroimaging. Several (and some new) models of how and where in the brain time is processed are presented in this unique collection of recent research that covers experienced time intervals from milliseconds to minutes. We hope this volume to be conducive in developing a better understanding of the sense of time as part of complex set of brain–body factors that include cognitive, emotional and body states.
By Marc Wittmann and Virginie van Wassenhove (The Royal Society)
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Do ADHD Drugs Take a Toll on the Brain?
July 13, 2009
Stimulant treatments for ADHD are effective; they can improve attention, concentration and productivity and suppress impulsive behavior, producing significant improvements in some people’s lives.
Over the past 15 years doctors have been prescribing stimulants for a rapidly rising number of patients, who also increasingly take the drugs for many years. With the expanded and extended use of stimulants comes mounting concern that the drugs might wreak silent havoc on the brain over the long run.
A smattering of recent studies, most of them involving animals, hint that stimulants could alter the structure and function of the brain in ways that may depress mood, boost anxiety and, in sharp contrast to their short-term effects, lead to cognitive deficits.
By Edmund S. Higgins (Scientific American)
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Does smoking cause mental health problems?
July 2, 2009
We already know smoking has nothing to offer our physical health, but now there’s evidence that lighting up can deflate mental health, too.
In a study of more than 1000 women, the University of Melbourne has found that women who smoke are more likely to develop depression.
By Health and Wellbeing (ninemsn)
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Smoking and mental health
Why people smoke
The biological factors involved in smoking relate to how the brain
responds to nicotine. When a person smokes, a dose of nicotine reaches the brain within about 10 seconds. At first, nicotine improves mood and concentration, decreases anger and stress, relaxes muscles and reduces appetite.
Smoking and anxiety
Research into smoking and stress has shown that instead of helping people to relax, smoking actually increases anxiety and tension. Nicotine creates an immediate sense of relaxation so people smoke in the belief that it reduces stress and anxiety. This feeling of relaxation is temporary and soon gives way to withdrawal symptoms and increased cravings.
Smoking and schizophrenia
People with schizophrenia are 3 times more likely to smoke than other people and they tend to smoke more heavily. One of the most common explanations of this is that people with schizophrenia use smoking to control or manage some of the symptoms associated with their illness and to reduce some of the side effects of their medication.
By the Mental Health Foundation
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Brain Time
July 1, 2009
The days of thinking of time as a river—evenly flowing, always advancing—are over. Time perception, just like vision, is a construction of the brain and is shockingly easy to manipulate experimentally. We all know about optical illusions, in which things appear different from how they really are; less well known is the world of temporal illusions. When you begin to look for temporal illusions, they appear everywhere. In the movie theater, you perceive a series of static images as a smoothly flowing scene. Or perhaps you’ve noticed when glancing at a clock that the second hand sometimes appears to take longer than normal to move to its next position—as though the clock were momentarily frozen.
By David M. Eagleman (Edge)
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Inside the Mind of a Kid Genius
June 30, 2009
Tori has been different for as long as she can remember. When she was five, she scored more than 180 on an IQ test. It’s estimated that one in a million children is that intelligent.
Tori’s brain has outdeveloped her growth since birth. At three years old, she felt six. At six, she felt 12.
Her mother, Margaret, likens her daughter’s brain to a sponge: Tori absorbs information quickly, making connections between disparate ideas as she files them away.
By Brooke Lea Foster (Washingtonian.com)
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Our Mind Electric?
June 29, 2009
Are our thoughts made of electricity? Not the familiar kind of electrical signals that travel up and down wires in our computer or nerves in our brain, but the distributed kind of electromagnetic field that permeates space and carries the broadcast signal to the TV or radio.
By Liezel Tipper (Innovations Report)
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A thinking cap that can unlock hidden genius
June 17, 2009
The device works by switching on and off certain sections of the brain and so unlocking its hidden potential, reported The Daily Telegraph newspaper in London.
The hairnet-like cap uses tiny magnetic pulses to change the way the brain works and has led to improved artistic ability, mathematical ability and proof-reading skills.
By (The Australian)
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Can consciousness be artificially created?
June 1, 2009Suggested by Pocholo Peralta (Plato On-line)
Some of the most profound questions in science are also the least tangible.
A physician and cell biologist who won a 1972 Nobel Prize for his work describing the structure of antibodies, Edelman is now obsessed with the enigma of human consciousness—except that he does not see it as an enigma. In Edelman’s grand theory of the mind, consciousness is a biological phenomenon and the brain develops through a process similar to natural selection.
We construct what we call brain-based devices, or BBDs, which will be increasingly useful in understanding how the brain works and modeling the brain. They may also be the beginning of the design of truly intelligent machines.
Article by Susan Kruglinski (Discover Magazine)
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Brain Mapping Time Reduced From Years To A Few Months With New Technology
May 20, 2009
Mapping the billions of connections in the brain is a grand challenge in neuroscience. The current method for mapping interconnected brain cells involves the use of room-size microscopes known as transmission electron microscopes (TEMs). Until now the process of mapping even small areas of the brain using these massive machines would have required several decades.
By Science Daily
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Future mind: are computers radically changing the way we think?
May 19, 2009
We live in a world mediated by flickering screens. But do ‘people of the screen’ think fundamentally differently to ‘people of the book’? What will the brain look like in generations to come? Eminent neuroscientist Baroness Susan Greenfield paints an apocalyptic picture of an identity lost, and cognition fundamentally compromised, forever stuck in the sensory chaos of early childhood.
Interview with Susan Greenfield (All in the mind: ABC Radio)
Read or listen to the show here
Can the Mind Shape the Brain?
May 15, 2009
Conventional wisdom holds that the human mind is nothing more than the human brain. This belief derives from materialism. By “materialism” I don’t mean the mania to shop unceasingly at the mall. Rather, I mean the philosophy that material reality is all that there is. Immaterial or spiritual realities are, in this view, simply epiphenomena of the material world.
By Dinesh D’Souza (AOL News)
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Honda Shows Off Robot Controlled By The Human Mind
May 5, 2009
Honda unveiled a new technology that allows humans to control a robot with their minds, the Associated Press reported.
A helmet-like device that measures the users brain activity and sends signals to the machine controls the robot, allowing it to perform tasks such as dancing and running.
The technology works by reading patterns of electric currents on the operator’s scalp as well as changes in cerebral blood flow when the user thinks about four simple movements – moving the right hand, moving the left hand, running and eating.
By (Redorbit)
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The Big Similarities & Quirky Differences Between Our Left and Right Brains
May 5, 2009
There is nothing more humbling or more perception-changing than holding a human brain in your hands. I discovered this recently at a brain-cutting lesson given by Jean-Paul Vonsattel, a neuropathologist at Columbia University. These lessons take place every month in a cold, windowless room deep within the university’s College of Physicians and Surgeons. On the day I visited, there were half a dozen brains sitting on a table. Vonsattel began by passing them around so the medical students could take a closer look. When a brain came my way, I cradled it and found myself puzzling over its mirror symmetry. It was as if someone had glued two smaller brains together to make a bigger one.
By Carl Zimmer (Discover Magazine)
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How the brain separates audio signals from noise
April 16, 2009
How are we able to follow a single conversation in the midst of a crowded and noisy room? Little is known about how the human brain accomplishes the seemingly simple task of extracting meaningful signals from noisy acoustic environments.
By Physorg.com
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Training the Mind Changes the Brain
April 14, 2009
Whenever we talk about positive interventions, we are assuming that people are malleable. William James wrote about intentional activity to change habits in ways that make life better. That’s the premise of books like The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky: that research has shown that people can make lasting changes in their level of happiness, but it requires action, effort and persistence.
By Kathryn Britton (Positive Psychology News Daily)
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Brain Scans Of The Future
March 25, 2009
Psychologists have found that thought patterns used to recall the past and imagine the future are strikingly similar. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging to show the brain at work, they have observed the same regions activated in a similar pattern whenever a person remembers an event from the past or imagines himself in a future situation.
By Science Daily
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Words are only labels
March 19, 2009 
What is a word, a phrase, a sentence but a creation within our world in which to communicate with another, who in turn understands us through the process of stimulated repetitiveness?
We learn words in our world from a very young age and continue each day adding to our dictionary of knowledge called the brain. Each word learnt is adjoined often by an impulse or stimulated interaction directed by an outside source. How would we then categorize such communication as language except to call it creative interaction?
By Stacey T Pollock (Creation Theory Revised)
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A step closer to reading the mind
March 13, 2009
Scientists say for the first time they have understood someone’s thoughts by looking at what their brain is doing.
The hippocampus is widely known to be integral to
memory, but researchers say they now see just how images are stored and recalled in this part of the brain.
By (BBC News)
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Robots and the Future
March 11, 2009
Science and technology is starting to delve into the possibility of creating a humanoid robot that can feel, think and act in the same way as any human. They are experimenting on the human brain, linking robotic hands to our brain synapses, creating full models of humanoid robots that are now in the beginning stages in their design, now taken on as a technological challenge. What is to become of this technology in the future and to what limits will we take our exploration into the arena of creating humanoid robots?
By Stacey T Pollock (Creation Theory Revised)
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Debunking Materialism: Mind over matter
March 9, 2009
The dogma held by most scientists until the 1990’s was that after adolescence the brain cannot be significantly changed. Today this doctrine is buried in the cemetery of scientific dogma. Also dead, but not buried, is materialism.
By Leo Kim (Healing the rift)
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Perception – The reality beyond matter
March 4, 2009An interesting video and study on the perception of reality.
Scientists extract images directly from brain
March 2, 2009
Researchers from Japan’s ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories have developed new brain analysis technology that can reconstruct the images inside a person’s mind and display them on a computer monitor, it was announced on December 11. According to the researchers, further development of the technology may soon make it possible to view other people’s dreams while they sleep.
By Pink Tentacle
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