6. brain & neuro & cogno

Brain (942)
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Brainchild (7)
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Cerebral cortex (4)
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Cognitive science (8)
Cortex (27)
Hippocampus (11)
Human brain (49)
Memories (75)
Neuro (342)
Neuroscience (58)
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The autistic brain Temple Grandin Slate 1 may 2013 Book extract.""In 1947, the diagnosis of autism was only four years old.

She took me to a neurologist. The diagnosis: brain damage. Â Where uniqueness lies Gary Marcus Nautilus 29 april 2013 Advances in genetics, biology, neuroscience,

anthropology, tend to point up how similar humans are to other animals, not how different. Whatever sets us apart,

it isn't very much.""Humans will never abandon the quest to prove that they are special.

we need a"new science of pleasure Â incorporating psychology, neuroscience and anthropology. Economics has taken too narrow a view:

experience, mood, trust, and brain chemistry. What if we never run out of oil? Charles Mann The Atlantic 24 april 2013 Fracking and shale gas have transformed America's energy balance.

At the hospital, magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans revealed plaques peppered throughout Turk's brain and spine.

or slowed the spread of telltale brain and spine lesions.""I've always had a research interest so

a professor of neurology, presented him with a vial of clear liquid.""It tasted a little bit salty

At the start of the trial, MRI scans showed patients had an average of 6. 6 active lesions oe scars on the protective layer around nerve cells that disrupt the transmission of electrical messages in the brain and spinal cord.

This ability to deconstruct immense visual complexity is regarded usually as an exquisite refinement of the neural circuitry of the human brain:

A team at Princeton university led by William Bialek now integrates these ideas with concepts from image processing and neuroscience.

If that's so, Bialek and colleagues think the brain might exploit this fact to aid visual perception by filtering out"noise Â that occurs naturally on the retina.

If the brain were to attune groups of neurons to these privileged"patches Â, then it would be easier to distinguish two genuinely different images (made up of the"special Â patches) from two versions of the same image corrupted by random noise

claiming that it was advanced"more than the human brain Â. And just two days before the TEDX event,

Most efforts to establish the root of risky decisions made by human teenagers focus on the underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain responsible for mental processes like long-term planning and judgement.

but their success isn't just down to teachers'brainpower.""If you want to be a top tutor,

000 neurons (compared to the approximately 85 billion neurons in the human. The human capacity for language has allowed our species to transcend the core mathematical and numerical skills that are shared with other species both closely and distantly related.

or read the recent Newsweek cover story in which a neurosurgeon, Eben Alexander, described his experience of the afterlife.

Fearing that something may have misfired in his own brain Harris enlisted the opinion of a neuroimaging expert to interpret Dr Alexander's account of his experience.

For more articles worth reading, visit The Browser. If you would like to comment on this article

Bridgeman, a 67-year-old neuroscientist at the University of California in Santa cruz, grew up nearly stereoblind, that is, without true perception of depth."

Some part of his brain had awakened. Conventional wisdom says that what happened to Bridgeman is impossible.

who according to the author and neurologist Oliver Sacks first experienced stereovision while she was undergoing vision therapy.

two-dimensional world did Bridgeman's brain spontaneously begin to process 3d images? Altered images For centuries, scientists have known that two eyes are better than one.

the differences between the two images allow the brain to generate a sensation of depth.

Somehow the brain fuses these images automatically, and it's only in the last few decades that we have begun to understand the nerve signals underlying this stereovision.

and brain that respond to only one type of signal, for example, vertical or horizontal lines.

The farther this signal travels into the brain, the more complex it becomes. Neuroscientists have found cells in the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes vision,

whose sole job is to respond to differences in the position of the images transmitted from each eye to the brain.

These cells, called binocular neurons, are thought to be the key to seeing in three dimensions.

According to the Nobel prize-winning research from David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel in the 1960s, the brain may only have a short window of opportunity in

which to develop binocular vision, in which both eyes are used together. Their studies in cats,

if the developing brain isn't exposed to overlapping images from the two eyes, it will never form the connections it needs to process a three dimensional scene,

and that the binocular neurons in the visual cortex will never exist. These doors close early oe at the end of childhood oe after which people are locked into a two-dimensional world.

and certainly the most sensitive strategy that the brain has for acquiring information about depth,

This difference in the apparent motion of objects tells the brain how far away each one is from us.

"Your brain has to make a choice, Â says Leonard Press, a vision therapist in Fair Lawn, New jersey."

All of which lends further evidence to the idea that the brain is more malleable than scientists first believed."

"This is the way a lot of neuroscience is going, Â says Wilcox, of York University.""The amount of plasticity is greater than we had thought.

and whether our poorly adapted human brains are unable to act on this message oe is another question.

#15 Most Bizarre Brain Experiments If the brain is a supercomputer these would be its hacks.

it might just succeed 1. Scientists Hope To Record Our Dreams After Successful Experiments Using Brain Implants A group of scientists,

known as the Caltech team, can attach electrodes to your brain that lets you move a mouse cursor with your thoughts.

the day will come when even your dreams arent safe from spying eyes. http://foreign. peacefmonline. com/tech/201010/98495. php 2. Hyperscanning Brain Experiment:

The Human Neuroimaging Laboratory at Baylor College of Medicine uses this money game, along with brain scanning fmri machines, to literally measure

and quantify trust levels each player has for the other as the game progresses. http://www. networkworld. com/news/2008/082208-one-man-it-shop-side. html 3. Experiment on brain cells

of singing birds Every season, song birds lose some of their brain cells. The cells that allow the birds to learn songs commit suicide only to be replaced by newly grown cells.

This is interesting because brain cells arent supposed to be regenerative, and these so-called precursory cells are native to the bird brain.

The entire process exists only so the birds can learn new songs. http://www. news. harvard. edu/gazette/1998/04. 16/Experimentsrais. html 4. Using immature cells from the brains of mammals to replace dead

or dying human adult cells This is related to the oesong bird secret, except applied to the human brain.

We dont need to regenerate brain cells to learn new songs, but we do need a cure for Alzheimers disease and Parkinsons disease.

Recent experiments show that dead brain cells in mice (which are mammalian like us) can be regenerated with immature brain cells.

The implications are exciting, one day we might even be able to rebuild the entire brain from scratch. http://www. news. harvard. edu/gazette/1998/04. 16/Experimentsrais. html 5. The Suda Experiment:

ECG Recording Using Perfused Cat Brains and Glycerol Professor Isamu Suda, of Kobe University in Japan, is renowned for devising a cryonics methodology right out of Tales from the Crypt.

Basically, the Suda technique involves deep freezing a live cat brain and then thawing it back out.

Whats interesting for cryobiologists is that, using the Suda technique, electrical brain waves can be detected (via EEG).

This can either mean that the brain isnt killed by the deep freeze (which is a common criticism of cryonics)

or that Suda is a lunatic (which is a common criticism of professors). 6. Brain Experiment:

Drinking Like crazy to Activate Hangover Brain Molecule This is a strange study: scientists ran an experiment b y giving the C. elegans worm small doses of alcohol to track the affects of withdrawal.

They learned no surprise here hat giving the worms more alcohol eased withdrawal symptoms. They also learned with a much bigger surprise that theres an actual oehangover molecule that can be quantified in the recovering brain http://www. stumbleupon. com/su/2k89pc/www. livescience. com/culture/hangover

-brain-molecule-100509. html http://ezinearticles. com/?/Alcohols-Effects-in-the-Brain&id=1319880 7. Scientists create Mice with Human brain Cells Fred Gage

and is crew of researcher at the Salk Institute in San diego are trying to create a real-life Splinter.

Remember him, from Teenage Mutant Ninja turtles? Gages team has injected successfully mice which are genetic twins to humans,

having a 97.5%similarity with human brain cells. The injection was marginal (a mere 0. 1%increase) but in the future,

who knows? Gages breed of man/mice lab creations are known as chimeras, not unlike the geep (half-goat, half-sheep) or mule (half-ass, half-horse.

citing issue with the resulting creature being oetoo human. http://www. msnbc. msn. com/id/10441350/ns/health-cloning and stem cells 8. Robot powered by rats brain in bizarre British experiment

On the other hand, robots controlled by rat brains now thats an abomination if Ive ever heard of one.

which consist of attaching a chunk of rat brain to a robot to see if it moves The creepy part is that it does move.

as if it was an animal being trained. http://www. dailymail. co. uk/sciencetech/article-1044909/Robot-powered-rats-brain-bizarre-British-experiment. html#ixzz16mpvastz 9. Brain

During the Cold war, the CIA was busy hacking away at the human brain, implanting electrodes with the aim of creating robotlike killers.

Dissecting and Cementing Marmosets Brains Scientists crack open the marmosets scull, vacuum out swaths of brain tissue to cause visual blind spots,

The marmoset is strapped to an EEG machine to track brain activity, before being brought in the back

since human brains and marmoset brains are completely different. http://en. wikipedia. org/wiki/Cambridge university primates http://www. humanecharities. org. au/experiments/marmosets. html 11.

Brain Experiment Using Salamanders: The Spemann-Mangold Experiments German scientist Hans Spemann and Ph d candidate Hilde Mangold take the proverbial cake for strange brain experiments.

In their momentous study, the brain of a live salamander was extracted and divided into sections.

The remainder as dropped back into the still-living salamander body and the salamander would jump up

and injecting parts of one half into the other just to see what would happen. http://ts-si. org/biology/3305-brain-before-body-the-spemann-mangold-experiments 12.

Brain Preference Experiment Using Coke and Pepsi If you adamantly prefer Coke, then youve been brainwashed

Whats interesting is the Coke label activated parts of the brain (memory, self-image and cultural knowledge) that the Pepsi label didnt. http://www. hnl. bcm. tmc. edu

Scientists have believed always that the information created in the hippocampus was sporadic until now. New experiments held at University college London reveal a way of deciphering hippocampus activity, resulting in a crude system for oereading thoughts.

The system works by scanning the brain as each subject navigates a simulated reality; the resultant data reveals exactly where the subject was simulated in the reality at any given time. http://www. guardian co uk/science/2009/mar 12/mind-reading-brain-scans-memories http://www. world-science. net

/othernews/090313 fmri. htm http://www. physorg. com/news156084067. html 14. Thomas Edisons Magnetic brain experiment using a Young Boy Thomas Edison picked a boy off the street

and ran electromagnetic fluctuations directly through is brain to research effects. This was completely normal and ethical behavior to Edison.

I wont comment on that but I will say that we should be glad Edison didnt use his famous oe10,

000 tries to find 1 solution approach he used on the light bulb. http://xenophilius. wordpress. com/2010/09/29/thomas-edisons-magnetic-brain-experiment/15.

The Split Brain Experiments Roger Sperry is the godfather of brain experiments. Back in the 60s Sperry figure out that the right half of the brain does very different things than the left side.

In a nutshell, the left hemisphere is analytical/rational and the right hemisphere is conceptual/emotional. Sperry gave us this insight through experimentation,

and won a Nobel prize in the process. http://nobelprize. org/educational/medicine/split-brain/background. html LINK Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati b

#Angry Birds Unlikely Pop-Culture Craze Goes From Cellphone Screen to Mainstream Fans celebrate Angry Birds Day It may sound like a tough sell:

disease of knowledge and the brain which makes adults become babies. But South koreas low birth rate will make family caregiving tougher. oei feel

like the brain, he said, letting it crash down. Now, oethe brain is destroyed. oedementia is very bad for you,

so protect your brain, he said, with exercise, oenot drinking too much sugar, and saying, oe Daddy, dont drink so much because its not good for dementia.

At a Dementia March outside the World cup Soccer Stadium children carried signs promoting Dr. Yangs Mapo district center:

oemake the Brain Smile! and oehow is Your Memory? Free diagnosis center in Mapo. The Mapo Center for Dementia perches at a busy crossroads of old and new, near a university and a shop selling naturopathic goat extracts.

and my brain is processing it, but I cannot say it out loud, he said about the questions. oehow can my brilliant brain remember everything?

Jeez, its so headachy. Checking his ability to categorize items, Dr. Yang asked, oewhat do you call dog and tiger?

He suggested that Mr. Cha get a government-subsidized brain M. R i. to confirm the diagnosis,

what brain cells he has. These include rooftop garden oefloral therapy, art classes making realistic representations of everyday objects, music therapy with bongos sounding oelike a heartbeat.

gesturing toward his brain, oethat somethings wrong with this, just a little bit. Students as Helpers Schools offer community service credit, encouraging work with dementia patients,

Although Cox has wracked her brain for years trying to come up with a good skin care use for leftover turkey,

The researchers uncovered extensive molecular differences in the brains of worker bees and queen bees which develop along very different paths when put on different diets.

which genes are to be fine-tuned in the brains of workers and queens to produce their extraordinarily different behaviors.

because the enzymes that mark DNA in the bee are also the enzymes that mark DNA in human brains,

more than 550 genes are marked differentially between the brain of the queen and the brain of the worker,

he said. oesimilar studies are impossible to do on human brains, so the humble honey bees are the pioneers in this fascinating area. more via sciencedaily. com Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati e

and author of oeibrain, said Internet use activated more parts of the brain than reading a book did.

it goes right to your brain. With a couple of exceptions Mr. Bellingham among them interviewing pot sellers is unlike interviewing anyone else in business.

Well, if youre Roald Dahl, you team up with a couple of other guys to invent a brain shunt to ease the pain.

severely injuring the infant and causing water to pool on his brain. The current device that helped drain the fluid was unreliable;

and a neurosurgeon to come up with a better solution the Wade-Dahl-Till valve. His son had recovered

or maybe an evil brain, but its actually a fungus that attacks corn. U s. farmers call it oecorn smut

Science will create real-time reactive sensors in our bodies that can read everything from the fluctuation of brainwaves, to micro changes in heartbeats, to gastro-digestive processes, to variations of skin perspiration rates.

Standing before a class of college seniors, her brain sometimes stalls while in a state better suited to her kids schools.

rather than her customary oeladies and gentlemen. oethe brain just cant toggle back and forth indefinitely, says Julie Morgenstern, a New york corporate productivity consultant and author.

To ward off that kind of brain freeze Ms. Morgenstern says mini-shifters need to be organized oehyper,

even when flying through optical illusions created in a lab. How theyre able to do this, with brains smaller than a peppercorn,

The brainchild of Larry Peterman, 70, HOTLIX have expanded their line to include devilish delights from apple,

PEAS cohort, AEA, is a neurotransmitter that acts on the brain in a similar fashion to tetrahydrocannabinol (THC),

Power of 10 Interface-The distance between information and our brain is getting shorter. Twenty years ago if you had access to a large information base,

The next iteration of our information-to-brain interface will give us the power to find answers in as little as 10 seconds.

Brain Quants Where the stock market manipulators of the past meet the brain manipulators of the future to usurp control of Madison avenue. 35.

Memory Augmentation Therapists Entertainment is all about the great memories it creates. Creating a better grade of memories can dramatically change who we are

and pave the way for an entirely new class of humans. 44. Time Brokers Time Bank Traders Where do you go

Amnesia Surgeons Doctors who are skilled in removing bad memories or destructive behavior. 55. Executioners for Virus-Builders In the future, virus-builders who get caught will have a choice.

With a constantly surging trend line towards creating a seamless and invisible interface between the information world and our brains,

#Most women are experts at knowing how to activate the monkey-part of the male brain.

The drug enters rivers from the sewer system and tinkers with the brain chemistry of fish, the researchers claimed.

As a neurologist I interviewed a few years ago told me: If you did MRI scans on a hundred 40-year-olds,

Regular exercise lowers levels of cortisol, the stress hormone, in the brain. Warning: Going cold turkey is one of the least successful ways of quitting. 3. ACCIDENTS Why youre at risk:

and so are our brains Scientists blame agriculture, with restricted diets and urbanization. Man has conquered Everest and landed on the Moon,

our brains are also smaller. The findings reverse perceived wisdom that humans have grown taller and larger

However, the rise of agriculture does not explain why brains are also shrinking. The male brain of 20,000 years ago measured 1, 500 cubic centimetres.

Modern mans brain averages just 1, 350 cubic cm#a decrease equivalent to the size of a tennis ball.

The female brain has shrunk by about the same proportion. It doesnt mean we are less intelligent#rather we have learnt to make the best use of our resources.

Dr Lahr said: Over evolutionary time there would have been huge energy savings in making the brain smaller

but more efficient#as we see today with computer processors. Robert Foley, a Cambridge university professor of human evolution, said:

The story of pesticides in food is part of a larger story of our growing knowledge of the exquisite vulnerability of the developing human brain to pesticides

Dr. Mohammed Abou-Donia of Duke university studied lab animals performance of neuro-behavioural tasks requiring muscle co-ordination.

even including boosting brain functions like memory and learning. Photo credit: Flickr Via Treehugger Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati e

For this reason, the first step in this journey will be to build a community of like-minded free-thinkers to establish a fledgling brain-trust for the work that follows.

Researchers have found that labelling something organic tricks the brain into thinking it is better tasting

take over its brain, and then kill the insect once it moves to a location ideal for the fungi to grow

Lodged in a zombie ants brain, the fungi species direct#the dying ants to anchor themselves to leaves or other stable places,

who is a neuroscientist. We know exactly how much they are eating.##To allow monitoring of their food intake,

what cannot be done with people#kill some of the monkeys to examine their brains and pancreases.

Rinat Neuroscience had an experimental drug that sharply reduced appetite in rodents. But obese baboons in San antonio doubled

and killed so their brains could be dissected. She also questioned the need to study fat monkeys:

#But he said the study found the diet induced chemical changes in the brains of fetuses that might be responsible for the problems in the offspring.

and have long memories. Sheep arent as stupid as previously thought, according to researchers. Never considered particularly intelligent,

and have long memories, remembering friends for two years. They can remember faces, be they other sheep or human,

Dr Laura Avanzo and Dr Jennifer Morton were studying neurodegeneration with a focus on Huntingdons disease

Successfully completing the tasks relies on the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain larger in humans than other animals, New Scientist reported.

Some things are hardwired just genetically into the male brain...Beware of the bark side of the force...

. While your body is making this transition the brain can misinterpret the sudden relaxation of the muscles

fatigue and discomfort because the brain is confused more easily. Either way, it is a normal part of the sleep process

Scientists blame something they refer to as earworms#which create a cognitive itch#that makes the brain to fill in the gaps in a songs rhythm.

Songs trigger activity in the auditory cortex of the brain, and studies have found that the part of the auditory cortex that is active

your brain becomes desensitized to the euphoria of junk food and sugar and needs more and more of it.

Every year IBM polls its R&d brain trust about what technologies that may have been at the hairy edge before

As for mind-reading headsets that measure our brain activity and recognize our facial expressions: Um, no, don t think so.

A centralized computer the workers call The Brain dictates their speed. Managers know exactly what the workers do, to the precise minute.

but several former employees who spoke for this article said they had fond memories of their jobs,

#or that one can speak of a neuroscience#of the flower? Chamovitz answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook. 1. How did you first get interested in this topic?

Many years later, we now know that these same genes are important in animals for the timing of cell division, the axonal growth of neurons,

the longer term memories are based in epigenetics#changes in gene activity that don t require alterations in the DNA code,

but I think purposeful thinking necessitates a highly developed brain and autonoetic, or at least noetic, consciousness.

Just as a plant can t suffer subjective pain in the absence of a brain, I also don t think that it thinks. 7. Do you see any analogy between what plants do and

what the human brain does? Can there be a neuroscience of plants, minus the neurons? First off, and at the risk of offending some of my closest friends,

I think the term plant neurobiology is as ridiculous as say, human floral biology. Plants do not have neuron

just as humans don t have flowers! But you don t need neurons in order to have cell to cell communication and information storage and processing.

Even in animals, not all information is processed or stored only in the brain. The brain is dominant in higher-order processing in more complex animals,

but not in simple ones. Different parts of the plant communicate with each other, exchanging information on cellular, physiological and environmental states.

For example root growth is dependent on a hormonal signal that s generated in the tips of shoots

the entire plant is analogous to the brain. But while plants don t have neurons, plants both produce and are affected by neuroactive chemicals!

For example, the glutamate receptor is a neuroreceptor in the human brain necessary for memory formation and learning.

While plants don t have neurons, they do have glutamate receptors and what s fascinating is that the same drugs that inhibit the human glutamate receptor also affect plants.

From studying these proteins in plants, scientists have learned how glutamate receptors mediate communication from cell to cell.

So maybe the question should be posed to a neurobiologist if there could be a botany of humans, minus the flowers!

Darwin, one of the great plant researchers, proposed what has become known as the root-brain#hypothesis. Darwin proposed that the tip of the root, the part that we call the meristem,

acts like the brain does in lower animals, receiving sensory input and directing movement. Several modern-day research groups are following up on this line of research.

Via Scientific American Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati c

#32 technological innovations that will change your tomorrow The electric light bulb was a failure. In the early 1800#s, The british chemist Humphry Davy invented the light bulb

This seems to gum up the brain s cognitive processes#a phenomenon known as delayed auditory feedback #and can painlessly render the person unable to speak.

say, schizophrenia, Parkinson s, depression or Alzheimer s in the brain, even though there may be no obvious symptoms.#

and assessing traumatic brain injury in soldiers. Currently, Low is working on a newer version of the device,

and will transmit brain scans directly to smartphones and tablet computers. We re using sleep, #Low says,

as the gateway to the brain.##25. A Blood test for Depression This year, Eva Redei, a professor at Northwestern s Feinberg School of medicine, published a paper that identified molecules in the blood that correlated to major depression in a small group of teenagers.

It ll be less of a hammer on the brain.##Photo credit: Random Thoughts Via New york times Share Thissubscribedel. icio. usfacebookredditstumbleupontechnorati E