background preloader

Super Brain - Part 1 of 8

Santiago Ramón y Cajal Santiago Ramón y Cajal ForMemRS[1] (Spanish: [sanˈtjaɣo raˈmon i kaˈxal]; 1 May 1852 – 18 October 1934)[2] was a Spanish pathologist, histologist, neuroscientist and Nobel laureate. His original pioneering investigations of the microscopic structure of the brain have led him to be designated by many as the father of modern neuroscience. His medical artistry was legendary, and hundreds of his drawings illustrating the delicate arborizations of brain cells are still in use for educational and training purposes.[3] Biography[edit] The son of physician and anatomy lecturer Justo Ramón and Antonia Cajal, Ramón y Cajal was born of Aragonese parents in Petilla de Aragón[2] in Navarre, Spain. As a child he was transferred between many different schools because of his poor behavior and anti-authoritarian attitude. Over the summer of 1868, Cajal's father, hoping to interest his son in a medical career, took him to graveyards to find human remains for anatomical study. Works and theories[edit]

The fine dopamine line between creativity and schizophrenia | Sc New research shows a possible explanation for the link between mental health and creativity. By studying receptors in the brain, researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have managed to show that the dopamine system in healthy, highly creative people is similar in some respects to that seen in people with schizophrenia. High creative skills have been shown to be somewhat more common in people who have mental illness in the family. "We have studied the brain and the dopamine D2 receptors, and have shown that the dopamine system of healthy, highly creative people is similar to that found in people with schizophrenia," says associate professor Fredrik Ullén from Karolinska Institutet's Department of Women's and Children's Health. "The study shows that highly creative people who did well on the divergent tests had a lower density of D2 receptors in the thalamus than less creative people," says Dr Ullén.

Khan Academy This is Your Brain on Shakespeare | How to Think Like Shakespeare Shakespeare's literary career, which spanned a quarter century roughly between the years 1587 and 1612, came at a time when the English language was at a powerful stage of development. The great fluidity of Early Modern English gave Shakespeare an enormous amount of room to innovate. In all of his plays, sonnets and narrative poems, Shakespeare used 17,677 words. Of these, he invented approximately 1,700, or nearly 10 percent. What's the Big Idea? In the past, most brain experiments would involve the study of defects, and use a lack of health in the brain to show what it can do. With the aid of brain imaging scientists, Davis conducted neurolinguistic experiments investigating sentence processing in the brain. It should be no surprise that Shakespeare is the master of eliciting P600s, or as Davis told Big Think, Shakespeare is the "predominant example of this in Elizabethan literature." But how is poetic language different from normal language? What is the Significance? Lesson: 1. 2. 3.

Related: