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. After three months, the monkeys had learned to move their eyes between the two dots with average intervals of 1.003 and 0.973 seconds, respectively.
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. 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.
But I am failing miserably. 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. The animation is a variation of the boogie-woogie illusion devised by psychologists Patrick Cavanagh and Stuart Anstis from Harvard University. If you enjoyed this brain trick, check out a mind-bending chessboard or rotating rings that create a phantom swirl.
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.