Want To Watch Your Dreams on YouTube? Scientists Take The First Step
Well this just might be the coolest thing you’ll see all month. UC Berkeley scientists have found a way to use brain activity to recreate moving images, i.e. movies. Basically, they were able to record signals in people’s brains, and then they used that data to reconstruct visual images. The researchers used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging to see how the subject’s brains processed visual stimuli, and applied that knowledge to the recreation of images using existing YouTube clips.
The Brain on Trial - Magazine
Advances in brain science are calling into question the volition behind many criminal acts. A leading neuroscientist describes how the foundations of our criminal-justice system are beginning to crumble, and proposes a new way forward for law and order. On the steamy first day of August 1966, Charles Whitman took an elevator to the top floor of the University of Texas Tower in Austin. The 25-year-old climbed the stairs to the observation deck, lugging with him a footlocker full of guns and ammunition.
Meditation found to increase brain size
By William J. Cromie , Harvard News Office Kris Snibbe/Harvard News Office Sara Lazar (center) talks to research assistant Michael Treadway and technologist Shruthi Chakrapami about the results of experiments showing that meditation can increase brain size.
Kant's View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self
First published Mon Jul 26, 2004; substantive revision Tue Jan 22, 2013 Even though Kant himself held that his view of the mind and consciousness were inessential to his main purpose, some of his ideas came to have an enormous influence on his successors. Ideas central to his view are now central to cognitive science. Other ideas equally central to his point of view had almost no influence on subsequent work, however. In this article, first we survey Kant's model as a whole and the claims that have been influential.
Aymara people's "reversed" concept of time
The Aymara, an indigenous group in the Andes highlands, have a concept of time that's opposite our own spatial metaphor. A new study by cognitive scientists explains how the Aymara consider the past to be ahead and the future behind them. According to the study, this is the first documented culture that seems not to have mapped time with the properties of space "as if (the future) were in front of ego and the past in back." From UCSD: The linguistic evidence seems, on the surface, clear: The Aymara language recruits “nayra,” the basic word for “eye,” “front” or “sight,” to mean “past” and recruits “qhipa,” the basic word for “back” or “behind,” to mean “future.”
Penn Gazette | Essays
By Andrew Newburg | Yawn. Go ahead: Laugh if you want (though you’ll benefit your brain more if you smile), but in my professional opinion, yawning is one of the best-kept secrets in neuroscience. Even my colleagues who are researching meditation, relaxation, and stress reduction at other universities have overlooked this powerful neural-enhancing tool. However, yawning has been used for many decades in voice therapy as an effective means for reducing performance anxiety and hypertension in the throat. Several recent brain-scan studies have shown that yawning evokes a unique neural activity in the areas of the brain that are directly involved in generating social awareness and creating feelings of empathy. One of those areas is the precuneus, a tiny structure hidden within the folds of the parietal lobe.
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MIRROR NEURONS and imitation learning as the driving force behind "the great leap forward" in human evolution By V.S. Ramachandran The discovery of mirror neurons in the frontal lobes of monkeys, and their potential relevance to human brain evolution — which I speculate on in this essay — is the single most important "unreported" (or at least, unpublicized) story of the decade. I predict that mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities that have hitherto remained mysterious and inaccessible to experiments.
Do Musicians Have Different Brains?
In the last twenty years, brain imaging studies have revealed that musical training has dramatic effects on the brain. Increases in gray matter (size and number of nerve cells) are seen, for example, in the auditory, motor, and visual spatial areas of the cerebral cortex of musicians. As Dr. Oliver Sacks writes in his book , "Anatomists would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer, or a mathematician - but they could recognize the brain of a professional musician without a moment's hesitation." Perhaps it is not so surprising that brain areas involved in singing and instrument playing, such as auditory and motor cortices, change following extensive musical training, but a recent paper in the journal suggests yet another way that music reshapes the brain. Musicians may not only have better musical memory but they may have enhanced verbal memory as well.
How to Trick Your Brain for Happiness
This month, we feature videos of a Greater Good presentation by Rick Hanson, the best-selling author and trailblazing psychologist. In this excerpt from his talk, Dr. Hanson explains how we can take advantage of the brain’s natural “plasticity”—it’s ability to change shape over time.
Without language, numbers make no sense - health - 07 February 2011
People need language to fully understand numbers. This discovery – long suspected, and now backed by strong evidence – may shed light on the way children acquire their number sense. Previous studies of Amazon tribes who lack words for numbers greater than three – or, in the case of the Pirahã, for any numbers at all – had shown that they struggle to understand precise quantities, when numbers are relatively large. However, it wasn't clear whether this is because they lacked words for larger numbers, or because they came from a culture that viewed precise numbers as unimportant.
The Brain: The Places in the Brain Where Space Lives
See Carl Zimmer's new ebook, Brain Cuttings, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and carlzimmer.com. The great philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that nothing matters more to our existence than space. Every experience we have—from the thoughts in our heads to the stars we see wheeling through the sky—makes sense only if we can assign it a location. “We never can imagine or make a representation to ourselves of the non-existence of space,” he wrote in 1781. The nonexistence of space may certainly be hard to imagine. But for some people it is part of everyday life.
Your Backup Brain
There is, you may be happy to know, a guru of intestinal intelligence. And as improbable as it sounds, he just may be able to explain why you get depressed and anxious, dive for the peanut butter when you are stressed, and rely on "gut instincts," among many other matters of the mind. Meeting him turned out to be a gut-wrenching experience—literally. When a security guard at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons kept me waiting 45 minutes in the lobby while checking and rechecking my credentials, my stomach began churning like a washing machine.
