Brain rhythm predicts ability to sleep through a noisy night. Ever wonder why some people can sleep through just about anything, while others get startled awake at each and every bump in the night? People who have trouble sleeping in noisy environments often resort to strategies like earplugs or noise-cancelling headphones that muffle the sound, but a new study from investigators at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) may lead to ways to block disturbing sounds within the brain. In their report in the August 10 issue of Current Biology, the team reports finding a brain-wave pattern, reflecting activity of a key structure, that predicts the ease at which sleep can be disrupted by noise.
"We wanted to investigate what the brain does to promote stable sleep, even in the face of noise, and why some people are better at staying asleep than others," explains Jeffrey Ellenbogen, MD, chief of the MGH Division of Sleep Medicine. A piece of advice for those who really must go to sleep with the radio or TV on: use a timer. Normal Anatomy. THE BRAIN FROM TOP TO BOTTOM. For many years, scientists’ understanding of how the brain processes language was rather simple: they believed that Wernicke’s area interpreted the words that we hear or read, then relayed this information via a dense bundle of fibres to Broca’s area, which generated any words that we spoke in response.
But subsequent experiments with brain imaging have revealed the existence of a third region of the brain that is also indispensable for language. This region is the inferior parietal lobule, also known as “Geschwind’s territory”, in honour of the American neurologist Norman Geschwind, who foresaw its importance as early as the 1960s. Brain imaging studies have now shown that the inferior parietal lobule (angular gyrus and supramarginal gyrus) is connected by large bundles of nerve fibres to both Broca’s area and Wernicke’s area. The inferior parietal lobule is one of the last structures of the human brain to have developed in the course of evolution.
Shifts in pelvic inclination angle and parasympathetic tone produced by Rolfing soft tissue manipulation. Shifts in Pelvic Inclination Angle and Parasympathetic Tone Produced by Rolfing Soft Tissue Manipulation -- Cottingham et al. 68 (9): 1364 -- Physical Therapy The effects of soft tissue manipulation (Rolfing method) were evaluated on young healthy men using two dependent variables: 1) angle of pelvic inclination and 2) parasympathetic activity.
Pelvic inclination was assessed by determining the angle of standing pelvic tilt (SPT) with an inclinometer. Autonomic tone was assessed by a measure of cardiac vagal tone (amplitude of respiratory sinus arrhythmia) derived from monitoring heart rate. Thirty-two subjects, preselected for exhibiting an anteriorly tilted pelvis, were randomly assigned to either an Experimental Group (n = 16) that received a 45-minute Rolfing pelvic mobilization session or a Control Group (n = 16) that received a 45-minute control session without manipulation. PubMed ID: 3420170. Brain structure corresponds to personality. Personalities come in all kinds. Now psychological scientists have found that the size of different parts of people's brains correspond to their personalities; for example, conscientious people tend to have a bigger lateral prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in planning and controlling behavior.
Psychologists have worked out that all personality traits can be divided into five factors, commonly called the Big Five: conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness/intellect. Colin DeYoung at the University of Minnesota and colleagues wanted to know if these personality factors correlated with the size of structures in the brain.
For the study, 116 volunteers answered a questionnaire to describe their personality, then had a brain imaging test that measured the relative size of different parts of the brain. For example, "Everybody, I think, has a common sense of what extraversion is -- someone who is talkative, outgoing, brash," says DeYoung. Brain Pictures Overview - References, Advice, News, Videos, Coping & Support. Written by Jason Strimpel, Staff Software Engineer, @WalmartLabs I’m a developer for a branch of @WalmartLabs in Carlsbad, Calif. (San Diego area), and one of the pain points we share with the community is unit testing AMD code bases. That’s why our team developed grunt-castle, a unit-testing Grunt plugin for AMD client, server, and client-server code bases. The plugin eases the pain of unit testing AMD code bases by reducing specification boilerplate, auto-resolving of paths, and auto-wiring and configuring other open source libraries.
Today, I’m excited to announce the open sourcing of grunt-castle. We created it because we needed a way to efficiently unit test a new client-server JavaScript web framework (stay tuned for more on that) and internal Walmart Global eCommerce applications that run on the framework. We’re opening it up to the community to make their lives easier and get some feedback on how to make it better. What it does Getting Started Things to Come Help Wanted.