0 (1152×648) Eureka! When a Blow to the Head Creates a Sudden Genius - Brian Fung - Health. Brain injuries can sometimes reveal extraordinary talents in people. Now, savant syndrome is helping to create whole new fields of scientific discovery. Wikimedia Commons For a long time, it was a mystery as to how horses galloped. Did all four hooves at some point leave the ground?
Or was one hoof always planted? It wasn't until the 1880s when a British photographer named Eadweard Muybridge settled the debate with a series of photographs of a horse in midstride. Muybridge took a great interest in capturing the minute details of bodies in motion. Muybridge could be obsessive -- and eccentric, too. Muybridge may have been what psychiatrists call an acquired savant, somebody with extraordinary talent but who wasn't born with it and who didn't learn the skills from someplace else later. It sounds crazy. Wisconsin psychiatrist Darold Treffert keeps a registry of known savants as part of his research on the subject. "What happens is that there is injury," said Treffert. Or do we? The Stanford Prison Experiment Turns 40. By Maria Popova Insights on identity and the aberrations of authority from the most notorious psychology experiment of all time. Forty years ago today, the Stanford Prison Experiment began — arguably history’s most notorious and controversial psychology experiment, which gleaned powerful and unsettling insights into human nature.
Orchestrated by Stanford researcher Philip Zimbardo, the study randomly assigned 24 middle-class college-aged males, recruited via newspaper classifieds and pre-screened to have no mental health issues or criminal history, to the roles of prisoners and prison guards in a hyper-realistic simulated prison environment. What followed was a devastating manifestation of the human capacity for cruelty and evil, so powerful and dehumanizing that the researchers had to end the two-week experiment after the sixth day.
It’s important not to think of this as prisoner and guard in real prison. Donating = Loving Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter. Share on Tumblr. The Trust Molecule by Paul J. Zak. iBrain can ‘read your mind’; enlists Stephen Hawking | The Sideshow. A team of California scientists have developed the world's first portable brain scanner, and it may soon be able to "read a person's mind," playing a major role in facilitating medical breakthroughs. "This is very exciting for us because it allows us to have a window into the brain.
We're building technology that will allow humanity to have access to the human brain for the first time," said the project's leader, Phillip Low. KGTV reports that the device, created by San Diego-based NeuroVigil, and dubbed the iBrain, fits over a person's head and measures unique neurological patterns connected to specific thought processes.
Low says the goal is to eventually have a large enough database of these brainwaves that a computer could essentially read a person's thoughts out loud. "We'd like to find a way to bypass his body, pretty much hack his brain," said Low. NeuroVigil says the device could be used at home by individuals and worn during sleep. More popular Yahoo! Sebastian Seung: A Neuroscientist Reverse-Engineering The Brain. Hide caption A map of neurons of the mouse retina, reconstructed automatically by artificial intelligence from electron microscopic images. A. Zlateski based on data from K. Briggman, M. Helmstaedter, and W. Denk/MIT/Seung A map of neurons of the mouse retina, reconstructed automatically by artificial intelligence from electron microscopic images. Our brains are filled with billions of neurons, entangled like a dense canopy of tropical forest branches.
How these neurons interact with each other — and what the wiring is like between them — is key to understanding our identity, says Sebastian Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience at MIT. Seung's new book, Connectome: How the Brain's Wiring Makes Us Who We Are, explains how mapping out our neural connections in our brains might be the key to understanding the basis of things like personality, memory, perception and ideas, as well as illnesses that happen in the brain, like autism and schizophrenia. Interview Highlights On connectomes. Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century. By Maria Popova We’re all about the cross-pollination of disciplines and we’re (naturally) fascinated by the human brain, so today’s release of Portraits of the Mind: Visualizing the Brain from Antiquity to the 21st Century, a book that sources its material in science, roots its aesthetic in art, and reads like a literary anthology, is making us swoon in all kinds of ways.
Author Carl Schoonover explores — in breathtaking visual detail — the evolution of humanity’s understanding of the brain, from Medieval sketches to Victorian medical engravings to today’s most elaborate 3D brain mapping. Axon Scaffolding Proteins (Photomicrograph, 2008) | The arrangement of proteins forming the inner scaffolding of axons, captured thanks to genetically engineered antibodies that help researchers study the molecular components neurons like specific types of proteins Image by Michael Hendricks and Suresh Jesuthasan Photograph by Eszter Blahak/Semmelweis Museum Drawing by Camillo Golgi. Share on Tumblr. 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... Scientists Reconstruct Brains' Visions Into Digital Video In Historic Experiment. 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. Wilder Penfield, the U.S. 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: World we see is make-believe, top British scientist says | Information, Gadgets, Mobile Phones News & Reviews. "A lot of the world is make-believe" Brain creates its own version of reality "We're only aware of a fraction of what's going on" "One thing I guarantee is that I will leave the audience wondering if they can ever trust their brain again," Prof Hood promised, ahead of his lecture.
Source: Supplied THE human brain creates its own version of reality, and the world we see around us is mostly make-believe, according to a top British scientist. Professor Bruce Hood will explore the limits of the human mind in a series of prestigious lectures for the Royal Institution of Great Britain, the oldest independent research body in the world, it was announced yesterday. The psychologist plans to induce false memories in audience members and use pickpockets to demonstrate how easily people are distracted, in a bid to prove how we have less control over our own decisions and perceptions than we like to imagine.
"A lot of the world is make-believe. Brain ‘hears’ voices when reading direct speech. Protein complex linked to memory. The CaMKII molecule has 12 lobes (6 shown here). The number of such complexes at the synapse may increase the amount of memory that can be stored. (Credit: Neal Waxham) Researchers at Brandeis University have discovered a key protein complex that determines how strong a synapse is, and, most likely, how well a memory is stored. The researchers showed that synaptic strength is controlled by the complex of CaMKII with another molecule called the NMDAR-type glutamate receptor (NMDAR). The experiments were done using small slices of rat hippocampus, the part of the brain crucial for memory storage.
To prove their hypothesis, the team first strengthened a synapse, eventually saturating it to the point where no more learning or memory could take place. “You have to understand how memory works before you can understand the diseases of memory,” said Professor John Lisman. Ref.: J. Scientists Create Tiny Artificial Brain That Exhibits 12 Seconds of Short Term Memory. It's not artificial intelligence in the Turing test sense, but the technicolor ring you see above is actually an artificial microbrain, derived from rat brain cells--just 40 to 60 neurons in total--that is capable of about 12 seconds of short-term memory. Developed by a team at the University of Pittsburgh, the brain was created in an attempt to artificially nurture a working brain into existence so that researchers could study neural networks and how our brains transmit electrical signals and store data so efficiently. The did so by attaching a layer of proteins to a silicon disk and adding brain cells from embryonic rats that attached themselves to the proteins and grew to connect with one another in the ring seen above.
But as if the growing of a tiny, functioning, donut-shaped brain in a petri dish wasn't enough, the team found that when they stimulate the neurons with electricity, the pulse would circulate the microbrain for a full 12 seconds. That's essentially short-term memory. 8 Percent of Human Genome Was Inserted By Virus, and May Cause Schizophrenia.
The rise of psychopharmacology has led doctors to not only treat mental illnesses like regular diseases, but think of them as such as well. Turns out, schizophrenia may be more than just a disease in concept, but actually a virus itself. According to new research, as much as eight percent of the human genome consists of viruses that inserted themselves into our DNA for replication, including the gene that causes schizophrenia. Writing in this week's issue of the journal Nature, Cédric Feschotte, a professor of biology at the University of Texas, Arlington, explains how traces of animal virus DNA *found by Keizo Tomonaga, a professor at Osaka University, Japan, may form the genes for schizophrenia and other mood disorders. By spreading his search to a class of viruses ignored by other researchers due to its inability to infect primates, Tomonaga found far more viral DNA in our genome than previous studies.
[University of Texas, Austin] Jacob Barnett,12, with higher IQ than Einstein develops his own theory of relativity. By Daily Mail Reporter Created: 16:03 GMT, 24 March 2011 A 12-year-old child prodigy has astounded university professors after grappling with some of the most advanced concepts in mathematics. Jacob Barnett has an IQ of 170 - higher than Albert Einstein - and is now so far advanced in his Indiana university studies that professors are lining him up for a PHD research role. The boy wonder, who taught himself calculus, algebra, geometry and trigonometry in a week, is now tutoring fellow college classmates after hours. Scroll down for video Gifted: Jacob Barnett is so far ahead of his age group he is now leaving university he is developing his own theory on how the universe came into being And now Jake has embarked on his most ambitious project yet - his own 'expanded version of Einstein's theory of relativity'. His mother, not sure if her child was talking nonsense or genius, sent a video of his theory to the renowned Institute for Advanced Study near Princeton University.