Berkeley on Biphasic Sleep. If you see a student dozing in the library or a co-worker catching 40 winks in her cubicle, don’t roll your eyes. New research from the University of California, Berkeley, shows that an hour’s nap can dramatically boost and restore your brain power. Indeed, the findings suggest that a biphasic sleep schedule not only refreshes the mind, but can make you smarter. Students who napped (green column) did markedly better in memorizing tests than their no-nap counterparts. (Courtesy of Matthew Walker) Conversely, the more hours we spend awake, the more sluggish our minds become, according to the findings.
The results support previous data from the same research team that pulling an all-nighter — a common practice at college during midterms and finals — decreases the ability to cram in new facts by nearly 40 percent, due to a shutdown of brain regions during sleep deprivation. In the recent UC Berkeley sleep study, 39 healthy young adults were divided into two groups — nap and no-nap. A companion to phenomenology and ... Me, Myself and My Stranger: Understanding the Neuroscience of Selfhood. Where are you right now? Maybe you are at home, the office or a coffee shop—but such responses provide only a partial answer to the question at hand.
Asked another way, what is the location of your "self" as you read this sentence? Like most people, you probably have a strong sense that your conscious self is housed within your physical body, regardless of your surroundings. But sometimes this spatial self-location goes awry. During a so-called out-of-body experience, for example, one's self seems to be transported outside the physical body into a surreal perspective—some people even believe they are viewing their bodies from above, as though their true selves were floating. In a related experience, people with a delusion known as somatoparaphrenia disown one of their limbs or confuse another person's limb for their own.
Such warped perceptions help researchers understand the neuroscience of selfhood. Patient 2 was a 30-year-old man suffering from epilepsy that resisted medication. Frontline: the persuaders: neuromarketing. But 30 years after the commercials debuted, neuroscientist Read Montague was still thinking about them. Something didn't make sense. If people preferred the taste of Pepsi, the drink should have dominated the market. It didn't. So in the summer of 2003, Montague gave himself a 'Pepsi Challenge' of a different sort: to figure out why people would buy a product they didn't particularly like. What he found was the first data from an entirely new field: neuromarketing, the study of the brain's responses to ads, brands, and the rest of the messages littering the cultural landscape.
Neuromarketing, in one form or another, is now one of the hottest new tools of its trade. Getting an update on research is one thing; for decades, marketers have relied on behavioral studies for guidance. That last piece of research is particularly worrisome to anti-marketing activists, some of whom are already mobilizing against the nascent field of neuromarketing. Brainbow | Center for Brain Science. Neuroscience of Free Will. On several different levels, from neurotransmitters through neuron firing rates to overall activity, the brain seems to "ramp up" before movements.
This image depicts the readiness potential (RP), a ramping-up activity measured using EEG. The onset of the RP begins before the onset of a conscious intention or urge to act. Some have argued that this indicates the brain unconsciously commits to a decision before consciousness awareness. Others have argued that this activity is due to random fluctuations in brain activity, which drive arbitrary, purposeless movements.[1] Philosophers like Daniel Dennett or Alfred Mele consider the language used by researchers. They explain that "free will" means many different things to different people (e.g. some notions of free will believe that free will is compatible with determinism,[10] some not). Overview[edit] Patrick Haggard discussing[15] an in-depth experiment by Itzhak Fried[16] Free will as illusion[edit] Relevance of scientific research[edit]