The Secrets of Your Brain's Zoom Lens Notice that, even as you fixate on the screen in front of you, you can still shift your attention to different regions in your peripheries. For decades, cognitive scientists have conceptualized attention as akin to a shifting spotlight that “illuminates” regions it shines upon, or as a zoom lens, focusing on things so that we see them in finer detail. These metaphors are commonplace because they capture the intuition that attention illuminates or sharpens things, and thus, enhances our perception of them. Some of the important early studies to directly confirm this intuition were conducted by NYU psychologist Marisa Carrasco and colleagues, who showed that attention enhances the perceived sharpness of attended patterns. Subsequent studies by Carrasco’s group and others found that attention also enhances perception of other features – for example, color saturation , orientation , and speed . Are you a scientist who specializes in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology?
The Mind's Hidden Switches: Scientific American Podcast Podcast Transcription Meet Dr. Bechard Nor, pioneer transplant surgeon and one of the many achievers helping to unlock human potential at Cutter Foundation. Steve: Okay, how do you do this again? You press this button, no wait. Nestler: The ability of this chronic social stress to produce maladaptive changes in brain and behavior are mediated through epigenetic modifications of gene expression in particular emotional centers of the brain. Steve: That's Eric Nestler. Steve: The old nature versus nurture thing is very simplistic. Nestler: Yes, I think that's true. Steve: You come at this from a particular vantage point, because you're an addiction researcher. Nestler: Yes. Steve: But the findings that your lab generated would apply to great many biological phenomena. Nestler: That's right. Steve: So, let's talk about the nuts and bolts of the research. Nestler: Right. Steve: Right and development is the clearest example. Nestler: It's the best established by far. Steve: Right. Nestler: Exactly.
Everyday Stress Can Shut Down the Brain's Chief Command Center The entrance exam to medical school consists of a five-hour fusillade of hundreds of questions that, even with the best preparation, often leaves the test taker discombobulated and anxious. For some would-be physicians, the relentless pressure causes their reasoning abilities to slow and even shut down entirely. The experience—known variously as choking, brain freeze, nerves, jitters, folding, blanking out, the yips or a dozen other descriptive terms—is all too familiar to virtually anyone who has flubbed a speech, bumped up against writer’s block or struggled through a lengthy exam. For decades scientists thought they understood what happens in the brain during testing or a battlefront firefight. In recent years a different line of research has put the physiology of stress in an entirely new perspective. The response to stress is not just a primal reaction affecting parts of the brain that are common to a wide array of species ranging from salamanders to humans. Select an option below:
What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? "What was he thinking?" It's the familiar cry of bewildered parents trying to understand why their teenagers act the way they do. How does the boy who can thoughtfully explain the reasons never to drink and drive end up in a drunken crash? Adolescence has always been troubled, but for reasons that are somewhat mysterious, puberty is now kicking in at an earlier and earlier age. At the same time, first with the industrial revolution and then even more dramatically with the information revolution, children have come to take on adult roles later and later. Our Juliets (as parents longing for grandchildren will recognize with a sigh) may experience the tumult of love for 20 years before they settle down into motherhood.
Personality Traits Correlate With Brain Activity Your personality says a lot about you. To categorize people by their disposition, psychologists have long relied on questionnaires. Now, however, researchers may be closing in on a tangible view of character in the brain. Even at rest, the brain hums with neural activity. Using functional MRI, the researchers monitored the resting state of 39 healthy participants and looked for regions that tended to activate together. Because the brain activity only correlated with the traits, Milham says it is too soon to tell whether the patterns reflect the neural embodiment of personality.
Exceptional Memory Explained: How Some People Remember What They Had for Lunch 20 Years Ago Researchers from the University of California, Irvine reported in 2006 on a woman named Jill Price who could remember in great detail what she did on a particular day decades earlier. James McGaugh, Larry Cahill and Elizabeth Parker put the woman through a battery of tests and ascertained that she was not using any of the memory tricks that have been known to mnemonists for millennia. Word got out, the media descended and the lab now receives calls every day from people who say they have the same ability as Price. A question that has persisted about this line of research is whether the brains of these people are distinct from the organs of others who can’t remember yesterday’s lunch, let alone trivial events from 20 years back. “There seems to be this extreme organizational capacity, kind of like the tricks that mnemonists use,” says Howard Eichenbaum, a Boston University professor who is editor of the journal Hippocampus. Source: University of California, Irvine
Making Sense of the World, Several Senses at a Time Our five senses–sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell–seem to operate independently, as five distinct modes of perceiving the world. In reality, however, they collaborate closely to enable the mind to better understand its surroundings. We can become aware of this collaboration under special circumstances. In some cases, a sense may covertly influence the one we think is dominant. Our senses must also regularly meet and greet in the brain to provide accurate impressions of the world. Seeing What You Hear We can usually differentiate the sights we see and the sounds we hear. Beep Baseball Blind baseball seems almost an oxymoron. Calling What You See Bats and whales, among other animals, emit sounds into their surroundings—not to communicate with other bats and whales—but to “see” what is around them. Let Your Fingers Do The Hearing People who are both deaf and blind are incredibly good at using other senses such as touch to navigate and understand the world. Do You Have Synesthesia?
The Brain May Disassemble Itself in Sleep Compared with the hustle and bustle of waking life, sleep looks dull and unworkmanlike. Except for in its dreams, a sleeping brain doesn’t misbehave or find a job. It also doesn’t love, scheme, aspire or really do much we would be proud to take credit for. Yet during those quiet hours when our mind is on hold, our brain does the essential labor at the heart of all creative acts. It edits itself. And it may throw out a lot. In a provocative new theory about the purpose of sleep, neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin–Madison has proposed that slumber, to cement what we have learned, must also spur the brain’s undoing. Select an option below: Customer Sign In *You must have purchased this issue or have a qualifying subscription to access this content
How mapping neurons could reveal how experiences affect mental wiring This article was taken from the July 2012 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online. No road, no trail can penetrate this forest. The long and delicate branches of its trees lie everywhere, choking space with their exuberant growth. No sunbeam can fly a path tortuous enough to navigate the narrow spaces between these entangled branches. This forest is majestic, but also comic and even tragic. You may be surprised to hear that it fits in a container less than 30 centimetres in diameter. In the 17th century, the French philosopher Blaise Pascal confessed that he was terrified by the vastness of the universe. As a neuroscientist I have come to know first-hand Pascal's dread. Studying an object as complex as the brain may seem almost futile. What's more, this standardised nervous system has been mapped completely. Differences fascinate us.
The Benefits of Daydreaming A new study suggests that a daydreaming is an indicator of a well-equipped brain Does your mind wander? During a class or meeting, do you find yourself staring out the window and thinking about what you’ll do tomorrow or next week? Well, psychological research is beginning to reveal that daydreaming is a strong indicator of an active and well-equipped brain. A new study, published in Psychological Science by researchers from the University of Wisconsin and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Science, suggests that a wandering mind correlates with higher degrees of what is referred to as working memory. For example, imagine that, when leaving a friend ‘s house, you promise to call when you get home safely. In the study, the researchers sought to examine the relationship between people’s working memory capacity and their tendency to daydream. Surprisingly, there was a correlation between mind wandering during the first task and high scores on the working memory test.
Is the Purpose of Sleep to Let Our Brains “Defragment,” Like a Hard Drive? | The Crux Neuroskeptic is a neuroscientist who takes a skeptical look at his own field and beyond at the Neuroskeptic blog. Why do we sleep? We spend a third of our lives doing so, and all known animals with a nervous system either sleep, or show some kind of related behaviour. But scientists still don’t know what the point of it is. There are plenty of theories. But others argue that sleep has a restorative function—something about animal biology means that we need sleep to survive. Waking up after a good night’s sleep, you feel restored, and many studies have shown the benefits of sleep for learning, memory, and cognition. Recently, some neuroscientists have proposed that the function of sleep is to reorganize connections and “prune” synapses—the connections between brain cells. This illustration, taken from their paper, shows the basic idea: While we’re awake, your brain is forming memories. Yet this poses a problem for the brain. After heavy use, hard disks tend to get “fragmented.”