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Subliminal Perception: Just How Fast Is The Brain? - Neuroskeptic. Subliminal perception has long been a hot topic.

Subliminal Perception: Just How Fast Is The Brain? - Neuroskeptic

The idea that something (generally an image) could appear and disappear before us so quickly that it escapes conscious perception, and yet affect us subconsciously, is a fascinating (and scary) one. Induced hallucination turns doctors into pizza chefs - health - 24 April 2014. A 22-year-old man has been instantaneously transported to his family's pizzeria and his local railway station – by having his brain zapped.

Induced hallucination turns doctors into pizza chefs - health - 24 April 2014

These fleeting visual hallucinations have helped researchers pinpoint places where the brain stores visual location information. Pierre Mégevand at the Feinstein Institute for Medical Research in Manhasset, New York, and his colleagues wanted to discover just where in the brain we store and retrieve information about locations and places. They sought the help of a 22-year-old man being treated for epilepsy, because the treatment involved implanting electrodes into his brain that would record his neural activity. Mégevand and his colleagues scanned the volunteer's brain using functional MRI while he looked at pictures of different objects and scenes. Discovery of quantum vibrations in 'microtubules' inside brain neurons supports controversial theory of consciousness. How the Brain Creates Personality: A New Theory.

Are you a mover, a perceiver, a stimulator, or an adapter?

How the Brain Creates Personality: A New Theory

Modes of thinking can be understood in terms of how the top and bottom—rather than right and left—parts of the brain interact. It is possible to examine any object—including a brain—at different levels. Take the example of a building. If we want to know whether the house will have enough space for a family of five, we want to focus on the architectural level; if we want to know how easily it could catch fire, we want to focus on the materials level; and if we want to engineer a product for a brick manufacturer, we focus on molecular structure.

Similarly, if we want to know how the brain gives rise to thoughts, feelings, and behaviors, we want to focus on the bigger picture of how its structure allows it to store and process information—the architecture, as it were. Scientists Show That Paranormal Activity Is All In Our Heads. Brown Lady of Raynham Hall, a claimed ghost photograph by Captain Hubert C.

Scientists Show That Paranormal Activity Is All In Our Heads

Provand. First published in Country Life magazine, 1936 Ghosts exist only in the mind, and scientists know just where to find them, an EPFL study suggests. Researchers Make Huge Step Forward In Understanding How The Brain Processes Emotions. Emotion can be evoked by different things for different people, including visual stimulus and different taste sensations.

Researchers Make Huge Step Forward In Understanding How The Brain Processes Emotions

How can feelings be tied into sensory perception? A new study led by Cornell University’s Adam Anderson has found that emotions are encoded by the brain in a very standardized way. The results of the study were published in Nature Neuroscience. 2014/05/27 Journey of Discovery Starts toward Understanding and Treating Networks of the Brain. May 27, 2014 SUBNETS program includes two complementary research pathways that emphasize neural plasticity and single-neuron recording Work on DARPA’s Systems-Based Neurotechnology for Emerging Therapies (SUBNETS) program is set to begin with teams led by UC San Francisco (UCSF), and Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH).

2014/05/27 Journey of Discovery Starts toward Understanding and Treating Networks of the Brain

The SUBNETS program seeks to reduce the severity of neuropsychological illness in service members and veterans by developing closed-loop therapies that incorporate recording and analysis of brain activity with near-real-time neural stimulation. The program, which will use next-generation devices inspired by current Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) technology, was launched in support of President Obama’s brain initiative.

UCSF and MGH will oversee teams of physicians, engineers, and neuroscientists who are working together to develop advanced brain interfaces, computational models of neural activity, and clinical therapies for treating networks of the brain. Tweet@darpa. Brain Injury Releases Astonishing Mathematical Powers. When two thugs bashed Jason Padgett outside a bar they weren't trying to release skills he never knew he had, less still conduct one of the most groundbreaking neuroscience experiments of the century.

Brain Injury Releases Astonishing Mathematical Powers

But as it turned out, that's what they did. Hopefully the events will never be repeated, but they opened up new worlds for Padgett and lines of inquiry for neuroscientists. Pre-bashing, Padgett not only had no particular mathematical skill and no interest in the subject. “I cheated on everything and I never cracked a book” is how the self-confessed former "jock" describes his approach to math. After recovering from concussion resulting from being knocked to the ground and repeatedly kicked in the head, Padgett saw the world in an entirely different way. “Everything has a pixilated look,” Padgett says. Controlling brain waves to improve vision. Have you ever accidentally missed a red light or a stop sign?

Controlling brain waves to improve vision

Or have you heard someone mention a visible event that you passed by but totally missed seeing? "When we have different things competing for our attention, we can only be aware of so much of what we see," said Kyle Mathewson, Beckman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois. "For example, when you're driving, you might really be concentrating on obeying traffic signals. " But say there's an unexpected event: an emergency vehicle, a pedestrian, or an animal running into the road—will you actually see the unexpected, or will you be so focused on your initial task that you don't notice? "In the car, we may see something so brief or so faint, while we're paying attention to something else, that the event won't come into our awareness," says Mathewson.

"EROS is based on near-infrared light," explained Fabiani and Gratton via email. Controlling brain waves to improve vision. Boosting depression-causing mechanisms in brain increases resilience, surprisingly. A new study points to a conceptually novel therapeutic strategy for treating depression.

Boosting depression-causing mechanisms in brain increases resilience, surprisingly

Instead of dampening neuron firing found with stress-induced depression, researchers demonstrated for the first time that further activating these neurons opens a new avenue to mimic and promote natural resilience. The findings were so surprising that the research team thinks it may lead to novel targets for naturally acting antidepressants. Results from the study are published online April 18 in the journal Science. Researchers from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai point out that in mice resilient to social defeat stress (a source of constant stress brought about by losing a dispute or from a hostile interaction), their cation channel currents, which pass positive ions in dopamine neurons, are paradoxically elevated to a much greater extent than those of depressed mice and control mice. Allyson K. Drs. Note: Material may have been edited for length and content.

Sand Pile Model of the Mind Grows in Popularity. From Quanta Magazine (find original story here).

Sand Pile Model of the Mind Grows in Popularity

In 1999, the Danish physicist Per Bak proclaimed to a group of neuroscientists that it had taken him only 10 minutes to determine where the field had gone wrong. Perhaps the brain was less complicated than they thought, he said. Perhaps, he said, the brain worked on the same fundamental principles as a simple sand pile, in which avalanches of various sizes help keep the entire system stable overall — a process he dubbed “self-organized criticality.”

As much as scientists in other fields adore outspoken, know-it-all physicists, Bak’s audacious idea — that the brain’s ordered complexity and thinking ability arise spontaneously from the disordered electrical activity of neurons — did not meet with immediate acceptance. But over time, in fits and starts, Bak’s radical argument has grown into a legitimate scientific discipline. Human brains 'hard-wired' to link what we see with what we do. Your brain's ability to instantly link what you see with what you do is down to a dedicated information 'highway', suggests new UCL-led research. For the first time, researchers from UCL (University College London) and Cambridge University have found evidence of a specialized mechanism for spatial self-awareness that combines visual cues with body motion. Standard visual processing is prone to distractions, as it requires us to pay attention to objects of interest and filter out others.

The new study has shown that our brains have separate 'hard-wired' systems to visually track our own bodies, even if we are not paying attention to them. In fact, the newly-discovered network triggers reactions even before the conscious brain has time to process them. Computer Program Allows the Blind to 'See' With Sound. A man blind since birth is taking up a surprising new hobby: photography. His newfound passion is thanks to a system that turns images into sequences of sound. The technology not only gives “sight” to the blind, but also challenges the way neurologists think the brain is organized. In 1992, Dutch engineer Peter Meijer created vOICe, an algorithm that converts simple grayscale images into musical soundscapes.

(The capitalized middle letters sound out “Oh, I see!”). The system scans images from left to right, converting shapes in the image into sound as it sweeps, with higher positions in the image corresponding to higher sound frequencies. In 2007, neuroscientist Amir Amedi and his colleagues at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem began training subjects who were born blind to use vOICe.

The training program also devoted 10 hours to recognizing human silhouettes represented by sound. Severed Corpus Callosum. Brain process takes paper shape. A paper-based device that mimics the electrochemical signalling in the human brain has been created by a group of researchers from China. The thin-film transistor (TFT) has been designed to replicate the junction between two neurons, known as a biological synapse, and could become a key component in the development of artificial neural networks, which could be utilised in a range of fields from robotics to computer processing.

The TFT, which has been presented today in the journal Nanotechnology, is the latest device to be fabricated on paper, making the electronics more flexible, cheaper to produce and environmentally friendly. Researchers discover how brain regions work together, or alone. Stanford researchers may have solved a riddle about the inner workings of the brain, which consists of billions of neurons, organized into many different regions, with each region primarily responsible for different tasks. The various regions of the brain often work independently, relying on the neurons inside that region to do their work. At other times, however, two regions must cooperate to accomplish the task at hand. The riddle is this: what mechanism allows two brain regions to communicate when they need to cooperate yet avoid interfering with one another when they must work alone? New Neuroscience Journal to Launch. The publisher of The Journal of Neuroscience has laid out plans for an open-access, online-only journal for brain research.

WIKIMEDIA, NICOLAS ROUGIERThe Society for Neuroscience (SfN), which publishes The Journal of Neuroscience, has given its flagship journal a competitor. The publisher announced that a new open-access, online-only journal for reporting brain research could launch as early as this fall. “The field has expressed great enthusiasm for an open-access journal from SfN,” Carol Mason, SfN president, said in a press release. Like many online-only and open-access journals, the new publication promises researchers who submit papers ease and speed in getting their reports through peer review.

A New Method to Measure Consciousness Proposed. Leonardo Da Vinci, in his Treatise on Painting (Trattato della Pittura), advises painters to pay particular attention to the motions of the mind, moti mentali. Brain Neuron Degeneration via Mercury. Part 1 - Phantoms In The Brain (Episode 1) Neuroscience 5e: Chapter 1 Summary. Grégoire Courtine: The paralyzed rat that walked. See-through brains. Synchronized virtual reality heartbeat triggers out-of-body experiences.

Human Cells Make Mice Smarter. Support cells found in human brain make mice smarter. Glial cells -- a family of cells found in the human central nervous system and, until recently, considered mere "housekeepers" -- now appear to be essential to the unique complexity of the human brain. Scientists reached this conclusion after demonstrating that when transplanted into mice, these human cells could influence communication within the brain, allowing the animals to learn more rapidly.

First mind-reading implant gives rats telepathic power - life - 28 February 2013. Split brain with one half atheist and one half theist. When Proof Is Not Enough: Eben Alexander's Proof of Heaven and the Problem of Objectivity in Science. Scientists debunk the IQ myth: Notion of measuring one's intelligence quotient by singular, standardized test is highly misleading.

After conducting the largest online intelligence study on record, a Western University-led research team has concluded that the notion of measuring one's intelligence quotient or IQ by a singular, standardized test is highly misleading. The findings from the landmark study, which included more than 100,000 participants, were published Dec. 19 in the journal Neuron. Scientists make monkeys smarter using brain implants. Could you be next? Dragonflies have human-like 'selective attention' In a discovery that may prove important for cognitive science, our understanding of nature and applications for robot vision, researchers at the University of Adelaide have found evidence that the dragonfly is capable of higher-level thought processes when hunting its prey. The discovery, to be published online December 20 in the journal Current Biology, is the first evidence that an invertebrate animal has brain cells for selective attention, which has so far only been demonstrated in primates.

Spaun, the most realistic artificial human brain yet. Neuroscience of Music - How Music Enhances Learning - Neuroplasticity. Neural interaction in periods of silence. From Cooling System to Thinking Machine. Scientists Afflict Computers with Schizophrenia to Better Understand the Human Brain. Brain drain: Hackers could dip their phishing poles into your mind.

Does Self-Awareness Require a Complex Brain? Brain might not stand in the way of free will - life - 06 August 2012. Brain imaging can predict how intelligent you are: 'Global brain connectivity' explains 10 percent of variance in individual intelligence. The Brain Set Free. Daniel Wolpert: The real reason for brains. Your Color Red Really Could Be My Blue. Neuroscience: The mind reader. Mind control: the advent of neuroscience in marketing. Multiple thought channels may help brain avoid traffic jams. Rebecca Saxe: How we read each other's minds. Researchers show that memories reside in specific brain cells. The split brain: A tale of two halves. Head Transplant: The Truly Disturbing Truly Real Story. The cockroach beatbox. Mapping out a new era in brain research.

Study: Sleeplessness Causes Our Mental Circuits to Overheat. New brain connections form in clusters during learning. Solve for X: Mary Lou Jepsen on imaging the mind's eye. Gene therapy boosts brain repair for demyelinating diseases. Drug quickly reverses Alzheimer's symptoms in mice. Visual-cortex simulator sees animals as humans do - tech - 03 April 2007. 'Matrix'-style effortless learning? Vision scientists demonstrate innovative learning method.

Engineers build a nanoscale device for brain-inspired computing. Simon Lewis: Don't take consciousness for granted. Buddha's Brain: Neuroplasticity and Meditation. Amping Up Brain Function: Transcranial Stimulation Shows Promise in Speeding Up Learning. Allan Jones: A map of the brain.

Jim Fallon: Exploring the mind of a killer. Paul Zak: Trust, morality. Daniel Wolpert: The real reason for brains. RSA Animate - The Divided Brain. Neuroimaging fails to demonstrate ESP is real (1/15/2008) Why We Sleep. Steven Pinker on the myth of violence. Jeff Hawkins on how brain science will change computing. Brain imaging reveals the movies in our minds.