For cellist, the music lingers after memory has faded A concert cellist whose memory was virtually wiped out by a brain infection may no longer remember the names of the composers whose work he once played before admiring audiences. But he can remember and recognize virtually every note of their compositions, and even more remarkably, can learn and commit to memory new pieces of music he did not know before a raging case of herpes encephalitis robbed him of his ability to recognize most of his family, recall details of his homeland or remember details of his own life before his illness. The findings from this remarkable case study, presented Sunday in Washington at the Society for Neuroscience's annual meeting, suggest that musical memory may be formed, stored and retrieved using an entirely different set of brain structures from those used for verbal or experiential memories. Copyright © 2014, Los Angeles Times
Controlling the Subconscious Mind Controlling the subconscious mind is not something that can be done with force or coercion. Here's an example of what happens when you try to use conscious willpower to "make" your subconscious mind do something... You may remember times when you studied hard for an important test or exam and you were sure that you knew the material well. But when the time came the only thing more blank than the test sheet was your mind. The harder you tried to remember the answers, the worse it became...and to top it off, after the test was over, and the pressure was off, the answers came flooding back to you! Controlling the subconscious mind with force is a mistake because the act of consciously applying willpower sends signals of struggle to the subconscious mind. The subconscious mind takes its cues from the messages sent by the conscious mind -- and it makes the struggle real by creating resistance. Tips for Programming the Subconscious Mind: Programs for Controlling the Subconscious Mind: Also...
Technion Photsynt>Elec RADIO JUDAIQUE FM, 94.8 FM CHRONIQUE DU TECHNION PAR MURIEL TOUATYLE 5 AVRIL 2011 A 09H45 PROCHAINE EMISSION MARDI 10 MAI A 09h45 Retrouvez l’Association Technion France sur Facebook L’édition de Février du magazine du Technion ‘Focus’. Retrouvez ‘Technion Live’ sur Facebook L’invitation du Professeur Peretz Lavie au Conseil des Gouverneurs au Technion en Juin sur Youtube Le Blog de Muriel Touaty Le Technion et ses diplômés ‘Start Up Nation’ Des feuilles peuvent produire de l’électricité here Vous souhaitez adhérer au TECHNION FRANCE et faire ainsi partie du progrès scientifique et technologique here Vous souhaitez soutenir la recherche et nos étudiants au Technion here Nouvelles du Technion et de l’ATF Mission annuelle de l’Association Technion France - 1er au 4 mai 2011 Délégation de l’’American Technion Society’ à Paris du 29 mai au 30 juin Mission annuelle de l’Association Technion France, du 1er au 4 mai 2011 : Un rendez vous à ne pas manquer
Current Biology - Reconstructing Visual Experiences from Brain Activity Evoked by Natural Movies To view the full text, please login as a subscribed user or purchase a subscription. Click here to view the full text on ScienceDirect. Figure 1 Schematic Diagram of the Motion-Energy Encoding Model (A) Stimuli pass first through a fixed set of nonlinear spatiotemporal motion-energy filters (shown in detail in B) and then through a set of hemodynamic response filters fit separately to each voxel. (B) The nonlinear motion-energy filter bank consists of several filtering stages. Figure 2 The Directional Motion-Energy Model Captures Motion Information (A) Top: the static encoding model includes only Gabor filters that are not sensitive to motion. (B) The nondirectional motion-energy encoding model includes Gabor filters tuned to a range of temporal frequencies, but motion in opponent directions is pooled. (C) The directional motion-energy encoding model includes Gabor filters tuned to a range of temporal frequencies and directions. (G) Receptive field for a second voxel. Figure 3 Figure 4
Could we create a perfect society by tweaking two areas of the human brain? Citations of Serenity, Firefly and The Culture aside, I doubt even superhumanly intelligent beings can have a perfect society or utopia. Perfection is like infinity, conceivable, at least indirectly, but never reachable. I don't think any amount of social or technological fixes can achieve this. Having said that, I still think we should strive for it. Would humans be better with more powerful vmPFCs and insular cortices? I think the answer to this second question is only maybe, or yes in very specific contexts but no in others. I think the same is true of an enhanced vmPFC or insular cortex. Anyway, it's a very intriguing subject which I can rant and rant about, these questions having vexed me for far too long.
10% of brain myth The 10% of brain myth is the widely perpetuated urban legend that most or all only make use of 3%, 10% or some other small percentage of their brains. It has been misattributed to people including Albert Einstein.[1] By association, it is suggested that a person may harness this unused potential and increase intelligence. Though factors of intelligence can increase with training,[2] the popular notion that large parts of the brain remain unused, and could subsequently be "activated", rests more in popular folklore than scientific theory. Though mysteries regarding brain function remain—e.g. memory, consciousness — the physiology of brain mapping suggests that most if not all areas of the brain have a function.[3][4] Origin[edit] According to a related origin story, the 10% myth most likely arose from a misunderstanding (or misrepresentation) of neurological research in the late 19th century or early 20th century. The origin has also been attributed to Dr. Refutation[edit] See also[edit]
Un tél aud/Kinesth KDDI : un téléphone dépourvu de haut-parleur mais parfaitement audible C’est au Ceatec que KDDI a présenté un prototype de téléphone Android sans haut-parleur et pourtant parfaitement audible. En effet, le son émis par l’appareil n’emprunterait pas la voie des airs mais celle de votre corps s’adressant directement à votre oreille interne selon le principe de la transmission osseuse. Pour démontrer cela, une charmante opératrice place sur ses oreilles un casque anti-bruit puis saisi le téléphone pour engager une conversation classique avec son correspondant. Le son ou plutôt les vibrations naviguent ainsi à travers le corps de l’utilisateur jusqu’à atteindre la partie des oreilles situées derrière les tympans de façon à ce que son cerveau perçoive le son. Intégrer directement cette technologie au sein d’un smartphone Android est plutôt bien calculé, puisque cela permet à KDDI de faire comprendre au public que cette technologie pourrait facilement se démocratiser. Source
The Future of Literature in the Age of Information « Three Pound Brain Information technology made Plato anxious. Writing, he feared, would lead people to abandon their memory, to trust in “external characters which are no part of themselves.” Now we find ourselves living through a new revolution in information technology, one with consequences every bit as dramatic and likely even more profound. How could we not be anxious? Our old ways of communicating are either becoming obsolete or finding themselves dramatically ‘repurposed’ before our very eyes. Including the grandest one of all: literature. Literature is one of those categories that have vexed the human intellect for centuries. The morphology of what we like to call literature has remained fairly stable since at least the beginning of the twentieth century. The problem, I would like to argue, is one of habitat. No generation has witnessed such a sudden change in cultural environment, period. So why does it all feel so, well, dusty? Or should be. One genre among many. This is no easy task. But will it?
Why You Should Be Glad You're Not a Vulcan Thank you for writing this Esther! I'm always having (and frequently failing) to try and and explain to people why we're not nearly as rational as we like to think we are—-and why we wouldn't want to be. Logic is great, but it also requires fairly complete information in order to be useful. Emotions highlight what's important (more literally, what's relevant) in reaching our goals—especially those goals hardwired by our evolution. Without that; without emotions; we wouldn't know what's important, and we wouldn't really care. Also, our economy would collapse... because no matter what economists claim, we are not rational utility maximizers, because our calculations of utility usually have very little to do with rationality.
Ten Percent of our Brains Claim: We use only ten percent of our brains. Origins: Someone has taken most of your brain away and you probably didn't even know it. Well, not taken your brain away, exactly, but decided that you don't use it. It's the old myth heard time and again about how 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. The Myth and the Media That tired Ten-Percent claim pops up all the time. One reason this myth has endured is that it has been adopted by psychics and other paranormal pushers to explain psychic powers. This was also the reason that Caroline Myss gave for her alleged intuitive powers on a segment of Eye to Eye with Bryant Gumbel, which aired in July of 1998. Even Uri Geller, who has made a career out of trying to convince people he can bend metal with his mind, trots out this little gem. Evidence Against the Ten-Percent Myth Variants of the Ten-Percent Myth Acknowledgments: Sources:
Flexible memory Flexible memory wrapped on quartz rod (credit: KAIST) Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) researchers have developed fully functional flexible non-volatile resistive random access memory (RRAM), a new technology that allows a memory cell to be randomly accessed, written, and erased on a plastic substrate. The demand for flexible electronic systems such as wearable computers, E-paper, and flexible displays has recently increased due to their advantages over present rigid electronic systems. Although several flexible memory materials have been reported, these devices could not overcome cell-to-cell interference due to their structural and material limitations. RRAM (credit: KAIST) To solve this problem, switching elements such as transistors must be integrated with the memory elements. The KAIST researchers solved the cell-to-cell interference issue by integrating a memristor with a high-performance single-crystal silicon transistor on flexible substrates.
Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson | Art Beat On Monday’s NewsHour, Jeffrey Brown spoke with author Margaret Atwood about her latest novel, “The Year of the Flood”: Atwood, one of Canada’s leading writers, has published more than two dozen books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction. She won the 2000 Booker Prize for her novel, “The Blind Assassin,” but is perhaps still best known for her first foray into futuristic fiction, the 1985 novel, “The Handmaid’s Tale.” Her newest novel is “The Year of the Flood” — a companion to her recent book, “Oryx and Crake.” Below is Jeffrey Brown’s extended interview with Atwood at her home in Toronto: Atwood put together a dramatic reading of the novel as part of its launch. Graeme Gibson is the author of five novels and a collection of stories called “The Bedside Book of Birds.” In the clip below, Gibson reads a passage from “The Bedside Book of Beasts,” recounting an animal encounter from his youth:
What cannabis actually does to your brain Like with all herbal remedies, they are just as serious as man-made meds but weed won't put a rational person in a psych ward. Yes, it can. I've seen it happen. There's also this episode of The Nature of Things (a Canadian science documentary program) that talks about it: [www.cbc.ca] [www.cbc.ca] Apparently there's a genetic marker that can cause an otherwise healthy, if sensitive person, to undergo a psychotic break with the overuse of marijuana. Ok, out of the millions upon millions of people who have used marijuana, how many do you know in a psych ward? If you are referring to folks who overuse, like alcoholics, drug addicts, quadruple espresso drinkers, pack of smokes a day smokers, or 10 hr internet surfers, then you are referring to individuals with problems....not a problematic substance. I agree genetically altering marijuana to be over stuffed with THC is bad, but a natural, untampered plant with it's original levels of THC is fine. I just ask, please stop blaming the marijuana.