Cool Brain Art. Last month was the conclusion of Brain-Art Competition 2011, and some of the entries are really intriguing. There were four categories of entry: Best 3-Dimensional Brain RenderingBest Representation of the Human ConnectomeBest Abstract Brain IllustrationBest Humorous Brain Illustration The winner in the 3-D category was Rebrain by Robert Toro (above). More brain art: The Brain Tree by Silje Soeviknes Andy Warhol for Neuroscientists I by Valerie van Mulukom View the entire gallery of entries in this year’s competition here. art, brain art. Neuron's cobweb-like cytoskeleton (its interior scaffolding) Multitasking: This Is Your Brain On Media. From Rasmussen College, Multitasking: This Is Your Brain On Media is a cool infographic design that looks at some of the research behind multitasking.
New reports find that multi-taskers are “lousy at everything that’s necessary for multi-tasking.” Considering the amount of time people spend with around-the-clock access to TV, the Internet and mobile devices, it’s not surprising.This infographic looks at the causes and effects of multi-tasking. From a design perspective, I like the clean look with a simple color palate that is easy on the eyes. The statistics in the Media Addiction section could have been visualized to make them easier to comprehend. I love the brain diagrams. Found on Infographics Journal. Scientists Are Mapping the Brain's Connections to Understand How Thoughts Form. Musicians use both sides of their brains more frequently. A colleague pointed me to this interesting (to me, because I'm a pianist) work by Sohee Park's laboratory at Vanderbilt. Their central finding is that professionally trained musicians more effectively use divergent thinking (the ability to come up with new solutions to open-ended, multifaceted problems, or thinking 'outside of the box').
Creative thinking was tested both with written word association test and by asking subjects to make up new functions for a variety of household objects. Brain activity was measured by near infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), a noninvasive neuroimaging method that allows in-vivo measurement of changes in the concentrations of oxygenated hemoglobin and deoxygenated hemoglobin in the cortex. They suggest that musician's elevated use of both brain hemispheres may be related to having to use two hands independently, as well as follow multiple voices on musical scores. How Emotions Jump from Face to Face. Disability advocates were seeing red after two elderly women with medical conditions were allegedly strip-searched by TSA agents at New York’s JFK airport last December. You’d have to have a pretty thick skin not to empathize with an elderly, wheelchair-bound woman having her colostomy bag frisked.
But the notion of one passenger being an unlikely terrorist also belies a discomfiting flipside: another passenger being a more likely candidate. For the last few decades, social scientists have been teasing out the mental and physiological systems involved in profiling and social bias. Taken at face value, the biases look like simple prejudice, like assuming that black people are criminals, or that people from the Middle East are terrorists. Across two studies, lead author Rebecca Neel and her colleagues found that male faces were more likely to grab anger from the face next to them, and female faces were more likely to grab happiness. Stuttering Reflects Irregularities in Brain Setup. Put on a pair of headphones and turn up the volume so that you can’t even hear yourself speak. For those who stutter, this is when the magic happens. Without the ability to hear their own voice, people with this speech impediment no longer stumble over their words—as was recently portrayed in the movie The King’s Speech.
This simple trick works because of the unusual way the brain of people who stutter is organized—a neural setup that affects other actions besides speech, according to a new study. Normal speech requires the brain to control movement of the mouth and vocal chords using the sound of the speaker’s own voice as a guide. This integration of movement and hearing typically happens in the brain’s left hemisphere, in a region of the brain known as the premotor cortex.
In the new study, published in the September issue of Cortex, researchers found that the unusual neural organization underlying a stutter also includes motor tasks completely unrelated to speech. Could boredom be curable? - Ideas. Neuron viewed with an electron microscope. How the Mind Works | Video channel on TED.com. Oliver Sacks: What hallucination reveals about our minds | Video.