Brain circuits run their own clocks - life - 30 October 2012. Timing is everything. But exactly how the brain keeps time, which it does very well, has been something of a mystery. One widely held theory suggests that a single brain region acts as a centralised timekeeper – possibly in the basal ganglia or cerebellum. However, a study now suggests that timekeeping is decentralised, with different circuits having their own timing mechanisms for each specific activity. The finding could help explain why certain brain conditions affect our sense of timing, and even raise the possibility of artificially manipulating time perception.
Geoffrey Ghose and Blaine Schneider, at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, investigated timing in the brain by training two rhesus macaques to perform tasks in which they moved their eyes between two dots on a screen at regular 1-second intervals. There were no external cues available to help them keep track of time. Journal reference: PLoS Biology, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001413 More From New Scientist. The Human Brain. Cookies on the New Scientist website close Our website uses cookies, which are small text files that are widely used in order to make websites work more effectively. To continue using our website and consent to the use of cookies, click away from this box or click 'Close' Find out about our cookies and how to change them Log in Your login is case sensitive I have forgotten my password close My New Scientist Look for Science Jobs Brain and mind Introduction: The human brain The brain is the most complex organ in the human body, and perhaps the most remarkable.
How ancient needs still drive our weird ways REVIEW: 19:00 16 April 2014 In Snakes, Sunrises, and Shakespeare, evolutionary psychology pioneer Gordon H. Scans can be vital in judging severity of brain damage TODAY: 00:00 16 April 2014 Doctors use beside observation to gauge consciousness in people with brain damage, but PET scans may be more accurate at predicting recovery We turn brainwaves into sound for music and medicine FAQ: The Human Brain.
Zap your brain into the zone: Fast track to pure focus - life - 06 February 2012. I'm close to tears behind my thin cover of sandbags as 20 screaming, masked men run towards me at full speed, strapped into suicide bomb vests and clutching rifles. For every one I manage to shoot dead, three new assailants pop up from nowhere. I'm clearly not shooting fast enough, and panic and incompetence are making me continually jam my rifle. My salvation lies in the fact that my attackers are only a video, projected on screens to the front and sides. It's the very simulation that trains US troops to take their first steps with a rifle, and everything about it has been engineered to feel like an overpowering assault. Then they put the electrodes on me. I am in a lab in Carlsbad, California, in pursuit of an ...
The grand delusion: Why nothing is as it seems. Cookies on the New Scientist website close Our website uses cookies, which are small text files that are widely used in order to make websites work more effectively. To continue using our website and consent to the use of cookies, click away from this box or click 'Close' Find out about our cookies and how to change them Log in Your login is case sensitive I have forgotten my password close My New Scientist Look for Science Jobs The grand delusion: Why nothing is as it seems (Image: Benoit Paill/Getty) This might come as a shock, but everything you think is wrong. What you see is not what you get Your senses are your windows on the world, and you probably think they do a fair job at capturing an accurate depiction of reality. Blind to bias Do you see the world through a veil of prejudice and self-serving hypocrisies? Head full of half-truths One of the most important components of your self-identity – your autobiographical memory – is little more than an illusionRead more Egotist, moi?
Subscribe Death. Illusion: How to make a dull diamond sparkle. Caitlin Stier, video intern If you know where to fix your gaze, you can make a dull diamond sparkle using the power of your mind. In this animation, a striped diamond seems to twinkle when you track a circle moving back and forth within the shape. Created by psychology researcher Sebastiaan Mathôt of VU University in Amsterdam, the trick seems to be caused by poor estimation of what's happening in our peripheral vision. While focusing on the moving object, our brain only perceives a small part of the diamond shape. According to Mathôt, we expect to see the diamond's outline move perpendicular to the line due to a bias of our visual system. But when we move our gaze to the right, it confuses our brain, perhaps causing a compromise between the conflicting directions of motion that results in a sparkling effect along the line.
The animation is a variation of the boogie-woogie illusion devised by psychologists Patrick Cavanagh and Stuart Anstis from Harvard University. Brain might not stand in the way of free will - life - 06 August 2012. Editorial: "Can we live without free will? " Advocates of free will can rest easy, for now. A 30-year-old classic experiment that is often used to argue against free will might have been misinterpreted. In the early 1980s, Benjamin Libet at the University of California in San Francisco, used electroencephalography (EEG) to record the brain activity of volunteers who had been told to make a spontaneous movement. With the help of a precise timer that the volunteers were asked to read at the moment they became aware of the urge to act, Libet found there was a 200 millisecond delay, on average, between this urge and the movement itself.
But the EEG recordings also revealed a signal that appeared in the brain even earlier – 550 milliseconds, on average – before the action. This conclusion assumes that the readiness potential is the signature of the brain planning and preparing to move. One attempt to do so came in 2009. Crossing a threshold Now, Schurger and colleagues have an explanation.