Switch in Mouse Brain Induces a Deep Slumber Similar to Hibernation. A well-worn science-fiction trope imagines space travelers going into suspended animation as they head into deep space.
Closer to reality are actual efforts to slow biological processes to a fraction of their normal rate by replacing blood with ice-cold saline to prevent cell death in severe trauma. But saline transfusions or other exotic measures are not ideal for ratcheting down a body’s metabolism because they risk damaging tissue. Coaxing an animal into low-power mode on its own is a better solution. For some animals, natural states of lowered body temperature are commonplace. Hibernation is the obvious example. The mechanisms that control torpor and other hypothermic states—in which body temperatures drop below 37 degrees Celsius—are largely unknown.
"Understanding the human brain" Playlist - BBC Ideas. The 10 Biggest Breakthroughs in the Science of Learning. Greater understanding of our brain’s functioning, abilities, and limitations allows us to constantly improve our teaching skills and the productivity of our Brainscape study sessions and working hours (and after-work hours, for that matter).
We’ve already given you tips on how to keep your brain in shape and how to boost your brain’s abilities through exercise. This article, originally published by OnlinePHDPrograms.com, shares the 10 most significant breakthroughs that recent research has made on the science of learning, providing valuable insights on how to make the best use of your brain without wasting energy. When it comes to human organs, none is quite so mysterious as the brain.
For centuries, humans have had numerous misconceptions and misunderstandings about how the organ works, grows, and shapes our ability to learn. Waves of CSF Flow Into the Brain During Sleep. The brain's cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) pulses during deep sleep and this appears to be tied to brain wave activity and blood flow, an exploratory study showed.
Large oscillations of CSF inflow to the brain appeared about every 20 seconds and were tightly coupled to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) signals of blood flow and electroencephalogram (EEG) slow waves, reported Laura Lewis, PhD, of the Boston University College of Engineering, and co-authors, who described this activity for the first time in Science. Brains in Oper.ability. Brains Operating Differently. Thought Patterns. Emotions. Neuroscientists Discover a Song That Reduces Anxiety By 65 Percent (Listen) Could consciousness all come down to the way things vibrate? Why is my awareness here, while yours is over there?
How an outsider bucked prevailing Alzheimer's theory, clawed for validation. Robert Moir was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t.
The Massachusetts General Hospital neurobiologist had applied for government funding for his Alzheimer’s disease research and received wildly disparate comments from the scientists tapped to assess his proposal’s merits. It was an “unorthodox hypothesis” that might “fill flagrant knowledge gaps,” wrote one reviewer, but another said the planned work might add little “to what is currently known.” A third complained that although Moir wanted to study whether microbes might be involved in causing Alzheimer’s, no one had proved that was the case.
As if scientists are supposed to study only what’s already known, an exasperated Moir thought when he read the reviews two years ago. A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley. We are more than our brains: on neuroscience and being human. More than 2,000 years ago, the semi-mythical father of medicine, Hippocrates of Kos, challenged the spiritualists of his time with a bold claim about the nature of the human mind.
In response to supernatural explanations of mental phenomena, Hippocrates insisted that ‘from nothing else but the brain come joys, delights, laughter and sports, and sorrows, griefs, despondency, and lamentations’. In the modern age, Hippocrates’ words have been distilled into a Twitter-friendly pop-neuroscience slogan: ‘We are our brains.’ This message resonates with recent trends to blame criminality on the brain, to redefine mental illness as brain disease and, in futuristic-technological circles, to imagine enhancing or preserving our lives by enhancing or preserving our brains.
A neuroscientist explains what tech does to the reading brain. The Couple Who Helped Decode Dyslexia. NEW HAVEN, Conn. — By now, Sally and Bennett Shaywitz might have retired to a life of grandchild-doting and Mediterranean-cruising.
Instead, the Shaywitzes — experts in dyslexia at Yale who have been married to each other for 55 years — remain as focused as ever on a research endeavor they began 35 years ago. Sally, 76, and Bennett, 79, both academic physicians, run the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity. Their goal is not just to widen understanding of the scientific underpinnings of dyslexia, the most common learning disorder in the United States, but to push for public policies aligned with that knowledge.
Your Memory is Worse Than You Think - by Line Høj Høstrup. Brain stimulation could zap out violent and criminal thoughts, according to new research. Women who don’t know they’re autistic click 2x. This article was co-written by Adeline Lacroix, who works with Fabienne Cazalis and was diagnosed with Asperger syndrome in 2017.
A second-year master’s student in psychology, she is working on a scientific literature review about the characteristics of high-functioning autistic women. Depression treatment: 30 years after Prozac arrived, we still buy the lie that chemical imbalances cause depression. The first time Nick Mullins entered Deep Mine 26, a coal mine in southwestern Virginia, the irony hit him hard.
Once, his ancestors had owned the coal-seamed cavern that he was now descending into, his trainee miner hard-hat secure. His people had settled the Clintwood and George’s Fork area, along the Appalachian edge of southern Virginia, in the early 17th century. Around the turn of the 1900s, smooth-talking land agents from back east swept through the area, coaxing mountain people into selling the rights to the ground beneath them for cheap. One of Mullins’ ancestors received 12 rifles and 13 hogs—one apiece for each of his children, plus a hog for himself—in exchange for the rights to land that has since produced billions of dollars worth of coal.
“I probably ended up mining a lot of that coal,” says Mullins, a broad-shouldered, bearded 38-year-old with an easy smile. Physicists Overturn a 100-Year-Old Assumption on How Brains Work. The human brain contains a little over 80-odd billion neurons, each joining with other cells to create trillions of connections called synapses.
The numbers are mind-boggling, but the way each individual nerve cell contributes to the brain’s functions is still an area of contention. A new study has overturned a hundred-year-old assumption on what exactly makes a neuron ‘fire’, posing new mechanisms behind certain neurological disorders. A team of physicists from Bar-Ilan University in Israel conducted experiments on rat neurons grown in a culture to determine exactly how a neuron responds to the signals it receives from other cells. Your Pun-Divided Attention: How the Brain Processes Wordplay. Puns are divisive in comedy. Critics groan that they are the “lowest form of wit,” a quote attributed to various writers. Others—including Shakespeare—pun with abandon. The brain itself seems divided over puns, according to a recent study published in Laterality: Asymmetries of Body, Brain and Cognition. The results suggest the left and right hemispheres play different roles in processing puns, ultimately requiring communication between them for the joke to land.
DARPA's New Brain Device Increases Learning Speed by 40% In Brief An international team of scientists has created a non-invasive device that stimulates the brain to improve cognitive function. In tests on macaques, it reportedly increased the monkeys' learning speed by 40 percent. Cheap and Non-Invasive New research funded by the U.S. Department of Defense’s Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) has successfully demonstrated how a non-invasive method of stimulating the brain can boost cognitive performance.
Inside the Moonshot Effort to Finally Figure Out the Brain - MIT Technology Review. "Here’s the problem with artificial intelligence today," says David Cox. Yes, it has gotten astonishingly good, from near-perfect facial recognition to driverless cars and world-champion Go-playing machines. And it’s true that some AI applications don’t even have to be programmed anymore: they’re based on architectures that allow them to learn from experience. Yet there is still something clumsy and brute-force about it, says Cox, a neuroscientist at Harvard. “To build a dog detector, you need to show the program thousands of things that are dogs and thousands that aren’t dogs,” he says. The Human Brain: Ultimate Supercomputer – Health Transformer.
Estimate: Human Brain 30 Times Faster than Best Supercomputers. An artificial intelligence project recently funded by Silicon Valley pioneer Elon Musk aims to find a new way to compare supercomputers to the human brain. Instead of trying measure how quickly wetware or hardware can do calculations, the project measures how quickly the brain or a computer can send communication messages within its own network. That benchmark could provide a useful way of measuring AI’s progress toward a level comparable with human intelligence.
The AI Impacts project is the brainchild of two PhD students from the University of California, Berkeley, and Carnegie Mellon University. Neurotechnology. Neurotechnology is any technology that has a fundamental influence on how people understand the brain and various aspects of consciousness, thought, and higher order activities in the brain. It also includes technologies that are designed to improve and repair brain function and allow researchers and clinicians to visualize the brain. Background[edit] Linking Words and Memories: How We Remember the Structure of Things. Neuroscience. Neuroscience. Anjan Chatterjee: How your brain decides what is beautiful.
The Plot Thickens in the Gnarly Story of IQ and Genetics. Not everyone thinks the future will look so different, though. Nine lifestyle changes can reduce dementia risk, study says. Using Music To Boost Hearing In Noisy Environments. Creative people physically see and process the world differently. Neuralink and the Brain's Magical Future. Terry Jones: ‘I’ve got dementia. My frontal lobe has absconded’ MIT's Super-Thin Wires Are Leading to a New Age in Brain Implants. UNIT 1: Sensory Receptors. Neuroscientists Discover an Ignition Switch for Consciousness.
Scientists Attempt to Reanimate the Brain Dead. What are the Implications? How hormones work. Scientists Unveil a New Map of the Brain With Unrivaled Resolution. In Brief The Allen Institute for Brain Science has published and released a comprehensive, high-resolution map of the brain anyone can access online. Been Traumatized? Here's How PTSD Rewires the Brain. What brain mapping hopes to accomplish. Human Connectome Project. Updated Brain Map Identifies Nearly 100 New Regions. Why Aspirin May be the Most Powerful Weapon in the War on Brain Cancer. VS Ramachandran: The neurons that shaped civilization. How your brain constructs reality. If We’re Going to Talk About Brainwaves, We Should Know What They Are. The Unfixed Brain. The brain dictionary. New cryopreservation procedure wins Brain Preservation Prize.
Brain facts. Innovative Brain Imaging Combines Sound And Light. Researchers show that memories reside in specific brain cells. This Nifty Infographic is a Great Introduction to Neuroplasticity and Cognitive Therapy. 20 Amazing Facts About Your Brain. Controlling RNA in living cells. Brain Information, Facts. Mind & Brain News. Recent Articles.