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POPSCyborg is possible A very interesting direction, augmenting the bodily capabilities, the interface of biology and technology takes a step further.
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POPSScientists adapt economics theory to trace brain's information flow Scientists believed the frontoparietal cortex was influencing the visual cortex, but the brain scanning approach they were using, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), can only complete scans about once every two seconds, which was much too slow to catch that influence in action. When researchers applied Granger causality, though, they were able to show conclusively that as volunteers waited for the stimulus to appear, the frontoparietal cortex was influencing the visual cortex, not the reverse.
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POPSLearning How Not To Be Afraid When Kandel's team used radiation to blunt the birth of new cells in the dentate gyrus, they discovered that their interventions both slowed safety learning and stunted the antidepressant effects of learned safety. Another study that points to the origin of fear as a biological entity. the glitch is it turning into anxiety.
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POPSThe Power of a Handshake: How Touch Sustains Personal and Business Relationships Recent research from Zak's neuroeconomics lab has shown that the human brain uses oxytocin to unconsciously assess if a person is trustworthy using our memory of past encounters and all of our senses, including touch. If the stranger is a good match for other trustworthy people, the brain releases oxytocin, telling us it is safe to trust. Interesting read.
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POPS Brain's Hub of Fear Found The results of the study, funded by the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, Burroughs Wellcome Fund, the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience and the Yerkes Center, are detailed in the October issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience. The genetically engineered virus was injected into the amygdala of the mice by Emory graduate student Kimberly Maguschak. The amygdala is a part of the brain thought to be important for forming memories of emotionally charged events. "We found that after beta-catenin is taken out, the mice can still learn to fear the shocks," Maguschak said. "But two days later, their fear doesn't seem to be retained because they spend half as much time freezing in response to the tone." So it appears that beta-catenin is turned on in the amygdala to help in signaling during the learning process, Maguschak said.
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POPSResearchers decode thought “In one of our early studies, we showed people words representing tools and words representing buildings,” Mitchell said. “We found that we could train our model so that it could successfully distinguish new tool words from new building words.” Having developed a model able to categorize objects correctly approximately 90 percent of the time, the team sought to determine the effect that viewing an object as a picture, as opposed to viewing an object as a word, has on a person’s brain activation patterns. The team therefore trained their model on fMRI data collected from subjects looking at pictures, and then tested the model on fMRI data collected as subjects read corresponding words. “The accuracy was almost the same,” Mitchell said. “The fact that it doesn’t matter whether we use a word or a picture means that we are really capturing the neural activity associated with the meaning of an item, and not just the .”
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POPSBrain Regions Responsible for Warding off Negative Emotion Identified Researchers found that subjects most successful in warding off negative emotions activated the nucleus accumbens and amygdala regions of the brain more than unsuccessful subjects. They hypothesize that the nucleus accumbens is used to suppress the negative emotional response generated by the amygdala.
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POPSArtificial eye implant sits mostly outside the eye. The coil around the iris receives wireless power and image data from a microcontroller that can be carried on a belt. The coil transmits data to electronics inside a waterproof titanium case. The electronics controls an electrode array (not visible) connected to nerves in the back of the retina. This device would be more bio-compatible than others, because it sits mostly outside the eye and therefore carries a reduced risk of inflammation and of a decline in performance with time. So far it has only been tested in pigs but human trials are planned for 2010.
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POPSMirror Neuron - Almost everything you wanted to know Very interesting and educative read: Based on context, mirror neurons can distinguish intention. The activity of the observer’s mirror neurons is greatest for the neat scenario—almost double the amount in the messy one—because drinking is a more fundamental intention than cleaning up.
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POPSCan Sugar Substitutes Make You Fat? Speaking of artificial sweeteners, this article talks about the study into how artificial sweeteners may cause the body to seek more calories. Maybe you can't fool Mother Nature, after all.
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POPSThe bliss of ignorance I for one, cannot see why one would prefer to remain ignorant. Happiness, besides being overrated, is no excuse for voting ignorance.
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POPSMinority Report is being materialized "The inventors of the technology claim the system can distinguish between people’s memories of events they witnessed and between deeds they committed" “As we enter more fully into the era of mapping and understanding the brain, society will face an increasing number of important ethical, legal and social issues raised by these new technologies,” Mr. Greely, the Stanford bioethicist, and his colleague Judy Illes wrote last year in the American Journal of Law & Medicine." Interesting article. Raises many questions; a) the easiest one is is it valid? why easiest because it can be one day answered, at least i assume so. b) if it is valid, should we use it? where is the line of privacy? should there be a line as such? i find it fundamentally challenging the human conceptual descriptions of what is self, identity, society and its relation. Fascinating. what do you think?
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POPSBed sharing 'drains men's brains' "Sharing the bed space with someone who is making noises and who you have to fight with for the duvet is not sensible. "If you are happy sleeping together that's great, but if not there is no shame in separate beds." He said there was a suggestion that women are pre-programmed to cope better with broken sleep. "A lot of life events that women have disturb sleep - bringing up children, the menopause and even the menstrual cycle," he explained. But Dr Stanley added people did get used to sharing a bed. "If they have shared their bed with their partner for a long time they miss them and that will disturb sleep.' Boy, talking about sleeping with your enemy.
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POPSThe 'satellite navigation' in our brains
n a follow-up study, Dr Spiers and Professor Maguire used the Playstation2 video game "The Getaway" to examine how taxi drivers use their hippocampus and other brain areas when they navigate. Taxi drivers used the virtual reality simulation to navigate the streets of London whilst lying in an fMRI brain scanner. The researchers found that the hippocampus is most active when the drivers first think about their route and plan ahead. By contrast, activity in a diverse network of other brain areas increases as they encounter road blocks, spot expected landmarks, look at the view and worry about the thoughts of their customers and other drivers. "The hippocampus is crucial for navigation and we use it like a 'sat nav'," says Dr Spiers from the Institute of Behavioural Neuroscience at UCL. "London taxi drivers, who have to know their way around hundreds of thousands of winding streets, have the most refined and powerful innate sat navs, strengthened over years of experience."
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POPSThe Teen Brain Human and animal studies, Jensen and Urion note, have shown that the brain grows and changes continually in young people—and that it is only about 80 percent developed in adolescents. The largest part, the cortex, is divided into lobes that mature from back to front. The last section to connect is the frontal lobe, responsible for cognitive processes such as reasoning, planning, and judgment. Normally this mental merger is not completed until somewhere between ages 25 and 30—much later than these two neurologists were taught in medical school. There are also gender differences in brain development. As Urion and Jensen explain, the part of our brain that processes information expands during childhood and then begins to thin, peaking in girls at roughly 12 to 14 years old and in boys about two years later. This suggests that girls and boys may be ready to absorb challenging material at different stages, and that schools may be missing opportunities to reach them.
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POPSRemember = Reliving Very interesting findings. if it holds true to 'older' memories, then it raises a question; as the neural network molds and reshapes, so does our memories? if so maybe we can only remember who we are, rather than what we were...
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