Sleep, Learning, and Memory | Healthy Sleep. The Learning Process and Sleep Sleep, learning, and memory are complex phenomena that are not entirely understood. However, animal and human studies suggest that the quantity and quality of sleep have a profound impact on learning and memory. Research suggests that sleep helps learning and memory in two distinct ways. First, a sleep-deprived person cannot focus attention optimally and therefore cannot learn efficiently. Second, sleep itself has a role in the consolidation of memory, which is essential for learning new information. Although the exact mechanisms are not known, learning and memory are often described in terms of three functions. Acquisition refers to the introduction of new information into the brain.
Each of these steps is necessary for proper memory function. Sleep researchers study the role of sleep in learning and memory formation in two ways. Sleep Stages and Types of Memory Different types of memories are formed in new learning situations. Open Questions Summary. Why Art Therapy is Good for the Alzheimer's Brain. Art therapy has proven a powerful tool for treating Alzheimer’s. More than giving patients something pretty to look at it or an exercise to keep them busy, it stimulates the brain. It stirs memories and can bring language back into the life of someone who struggles to speak.
“A picture is worth a thousand words,” an adage demonstrated over and over through the success of art therapy on Alzheimer’s patients. Patients don’t necessarily re-learn lost words through this treatment, but they are exploring a new vocabulary. Studies show that art therapy gives back to Alzheimer’s patients, in some part, what the disease has taken away. It stimulates the senses, can trigger dormant memories and encourages conversation. Whether they’re viewing or creating art themselves, Alzheimer’s patients can use it as a form of expression, particularly individuals who can’t communicate verbally. Hecht couldn’t recall time on a clock or name common animals.
All machine and no ghost? The philosophy of mind is concerned with fundamental questions about consciousness - about its existence and nature. The science of psychology is concerned with its empirical workings - how one mental thing leads to another, basically. The former is a branch of metaphysics, the latter of dynamics. The central defining property of the mind is consciousness, so philosophy of mind is concerned with the existence and nature of consciousness: what is consciousness, why does it exist, how is it related to the body and brain, and how did it come into existence?
These are big, difficult questions. Try to imagine a world with no consciousness in it, just clashing quanta in the void and clumps of dead, insensate matter (the way our universe used to be); now add consciousness to it. We can distinguish five positions on consciousness: eliminativist, dualist, idealist, panpsychist and mysterianist. At this point the idealist swooshes in: ladies and gentlemen, there is nothing but mind! The Brain Is Made of Its Own Architects | Mind & Brain.
In the 1940s, the Nobel prize–winning neurobiologist Roger Sperry performed some of the most important brain surgeries in the history of science. His patients were newts. Sperry started by gently prying out newts’ eyes with a jeweler’s forceps. He rotated them 180 degrees and then pressed them back into their sockets. The newts had two days to recover before Sperry started the second half of the procedure. He sliced into the roof of each newt’s mouth and made a slit in the sheath surrounding the optic nerve, which relays signals from the eyes to the brain.
He drew out the nerve, cut it in two, and tucked the two ragged ends back into their sheath. If Sperry had performed this gruesome surgery on a person, his patient would have been left permanently blind. Their vision, he wrote, “was not a blurred confusion.” The experiment revealed that nerve cells, or neurons, possess a tremendous capacity for wiring themselves. Free Online Course Materials | Brain and Cognitive Sciences. How to Trick Your Brain for Happiness. This month, we feature videos of a Greater Good presentation by Rick Hanson, the best-selling author and trailblazing psychologist. In this excerpt from his talk, Dr. Hanson explains how we can take advantage of the brain’s natural “plasticity”—it’s ability to change shape over time. gobyg There’s this great line by Ani Tenzin Palmo, an English woman who spent 12 years in a cave in Tibet: “We do not know what a thought is, yet we’re thinking them all the time.”
It’s true. In recent years, though, we have started to better understand the neural bases of states like happiness, gratitude, resilience, love, compassion, and so forth. Ultimately, what this can mean is that with proper practice, we can increasingly trick our neural machinery to cultivate positive states of mind. But in order to understand how, you need to understand three important facts about the brain. Fact one: As the brain changes, the mind changes, for better or worse. Fact two: As the mind changes, the brain changes. 1. 2. 3. Tinnitus discovery could lead to new ways to stop the ringing. Neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are offering hope to the 10 percent of the population who suffer from tinnitus – a constant, often high-pitched ringing or buzzing in the ears that can be annoying and even maddening, and has no cure. iStock photo Their new findings, published online last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest several new approaches to treatment, including retraining the brain, and new avenues for developing drugs to suppress the ringing. ”This work is the most clearheaded documentation to this point of what’s actually happening in the brain’s cortex in ways that account for the ongoing genesis of sound,” said Michael Merzenich, professor emeritus of otolaryngology at UC San Francisco and inventor of the cochlear implant, who was not involved with the research.
“As soon as I read the paper, I said, ‘Of course!’ It was immediately obvious that this is almost certainly the true way to think about it.” Home page. New Light On Nature Of Broca's Area: Rare Procedure Documents How Human Brain Computes Language. October 16, 2009 — A study by researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine reports a significant breakthrough in explaining gaps in scientists' understanding of human brain function.
The study – which provides a picture of language processing in the brain with unprecedented clarity – will be published in the October 16 issue of the journal Science. "Two central mysteries of human brain function are addressed in this study: one, the way in which higher cognitive processes such as language are implemented in the brain and, two, the nature of what is perhaps the best-known region of the cerebral cortex, called Broca's area," said first author Ned T. Sahin, PhD, post-doctoral fellow in the UCSD Department of Radiology and Harvard University Department of Psychology.
This is the first experiment to use ICE to document how the human brain computes grammar and produces words. Source : University of California - San Diego.