Win of the Week: Keywords vs. Mental Imagery, Science vs. Emotion Take a look at the two ads below. Imagine you're a middle-aged man or woman who's interested in sharpening your memory and increasing your brain power. You go to Google and type in "brain games." Which ad do you click on? Of course, the ad YOU click on may not be the same ad the majority of people click on. And THAT is not an easy question to answer. Alright, made your decision? The winning ad is ad number two. So why did the new ad win? 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. The bottom line: The new ad wins because it abandons a keyword-heavy approach in favor of strong visuals and emotional language. Question: Have you been relying on facts and keywords to write your PPC ads? And, of course, if you'd rather not write new PPC ads yourself, you can always call on the BoostCTR writers. About the Author: Ryan Healy is a direct response marketer and BoostCTR writer.
Most Theories of Consciousness Are Worse Than Wrong - The Atlantic According to medieval medicine, laziness is caused by a build-up of phlegm in the body. The reason? Phlegm is a viscous substance. Its oozing motion is analogous to a sluggish disposition. The phlegm theory has more problems than just a few factual errors. After all, suppose you had a beaker of phlegm and injected it into a person. In the modern age we can chuckle over medieval naiveté, but we often suffer from similar conceptual confusions. One corner of science where phlegm theories proliferate is the cognitive neuroscience of consciousness. The oscillation theory of consciousness became popular in neuroscience in the 1990s and still has its adherents. Neuronal oscillations probably do play an important role in the flow of information in the brain, although the exact role is debated. Most people have a set of intuitions about consciousness. Another popular explanation of consciousness is the integrated information theory. Again, it flatters intuition.
Personality Reflects Size of Respective Brain Area By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on June 28, 2010 An interesting new study posits the size of different parts of people’s brains correspond to their personalities. For example, conscientious people tend to have a bigger lateral prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in planning and controlling behavior. Although personalities are often complex, psychologists broadly classify personality traits into five factors: conscientiousness, extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness/intellect. In the study, Colin DeYoung at the University of Minnesota and colleagues wanted to know if these personality factors correlated with the size of structures in the brain. Investigators asked 116 volunteers to answer a questionnaire to describe their personality. A computer program was used to warp each brain image so that the relative sizes of different structures could be compared. Source: Association for Psychological Science
Holonomic brain theory - Wikipedia The holonomic brain theory, developed by neuroscientist Karl Pribram initially in collaboration with physicist David Bohm, is a model of human cognition that describes the brain as a holographic storage network.[1][2] Pribram suggests these processes involve electric oscillations in the brain's fine-fibered dendritic webs, which are different from the more commonly known action potentials involving axons and synapses.[3][4][5] These oscillations are waves and create wave interference patterns in which memory is encoded naturally, and the waves may be analyzed by a Fourier transform.[3][4][5][6][7] Gabor, Pribram and others noted the similarities between these brain processes and the storage of information in a hologram, which can also be analyzed with a Fourier transform.[1][8] In a hologram, any part of the hologram with sufficient size contains the whole of the stored information. Origins and development[edit] Theory overview[edit] The hologram and holonomy[edit] Recent studies[edit]
A novel mechanism regulating stress is identified Neuroscience researchers from Tufts have demonstrated, for the first time, that the physiological response to stress depends on neurosteroids acting on specific receptors in the brain, and they have been able to block that response in mice. This breakthrough suggests that these critical receptors may be drug therapy targets for control of the stress-response pathway. This finding may pave the way for new approaches to manage a wide range of neurological disorders involving stress. The stress-control pathway, more technically known as the Hypothalamus-Pituitary-Adrenal (HPA) axis, determines the levels of cortisol and other stress hormones in the human body. “We have identified a novel mechanism regulating the body’s response to stress by determining that neurosteroids are required to mount the physiological response to stress. “We have found a definite role of neurosteroids on the receptors regulating CRH nerve cells and the stress response.
Brain is 10 times more active than previously measured -- ScienceDaily A new UCLA study could change scientists' understanding of how the brain works -- and could lead to new approaches for treating neurological disorders and for developing computers that "think" more like humans. The research focused on the structure and function of dendrites, which are components of neurons, the nerve cells in the brain. Neurons are large, tree-like structures made up of a body, the soma, with numerous branches called dendrites extending outward. Somas generate brief electrical pulses called "spikes" in order to connect and communicate with each other. Scientists have believed that this was dendrites' primary role. But the UCLA team discovered that dendrites are not just passive conduits. "Dendrites make up more than 90 percent of neural tissue," said UCLA neurophysicist Mayank Mehta, the study's senior author. The research is reported in the March 9 issue of the journal Science. Recent studies in brain slices showed that dendrites can generate spikes.
Twenty years of fMRI Functional magnetic resonance imaging, better known as fMRI, is 20 years old this week. October’s NeuroPod marks the celebrations by looking back at the brain scanning technology, it’s successes, and its troublesome teenage years. The imaging technique was first announced in a 1991 study published in Science that announced how a standard MRI scanner could be used to used to track where oxygenated and deoxygenated blood flowed in the brain. The technique takes advantage of the fact that haemoglobin, the iron containing protein that carries oxygen to essential tissues in the body, is differently magnetic when it is carrying oxygen, in comparison to when it is oxygen depleted. The scanner is essentially a large electromagnet that aligns the proton spin of hydrogen atoms in the body, plus a radio frequency pulse that knocks them out of alignment. Like shaking a compass, the protons move back into alignment again. Link to October’s NeuroPod.
Artificial Stupidity Artificial Stupidity by Ali Minai "My colleagues, they study artificial intelligence; me, I study natural stupidity." —Amos Tversky, (quoted in “The Undoing Project” by Michael Lewis). Not only is this quote by Tversky amusing, it also offers profound insight into the nature of intelligence – real and artificial. Most of us working on artificial intelligence (AI) take it for granted that the goal is to build machines that can reason better, integrate more data, and make more rational decisions. The work of Tversky and Kahneman focused on showing systematically that much of intelligence is not rational. The field of AI began with the conceit that, ultimately, everything is computation, and that reproducing intelligence – even life itself – was only a matter of finding the “correct” algorithms. One of the biggest gaps between AI and natural intelligence is speed. When an artificial system such as a car or computer is first deployed, it is not surprising to see it work perfectly.
The Split Brain Revisited The Split Brain Revisited Groundbreaking work that began more than a quarter of a century ago has led to ongoing insights about brain organization and consciousness By Michael S. Gazzaniga About 30 years ago in these very pages, I wrote about dramatic new studies of the brain. It became clear that visual information no longer moved between the two sides. The same kind of finding proved true for touch, smell and sound. Ultimately, we discovered that the two hemispheres control vastly different aspects of thought and action. In the intervening decades, split-brain research has continued to illuminate many areas of neuroscience. The original split-brain studies raised many interesting questions, including ones about whether the distinct halves could still "talk" to each other and what role any such communication played in thought and action. Remaining Bridges By studying the attentional system, researchers have been able to address this question. Recent investigations by Steve J. Kathleen B.
Why upgrading your brain could make you less human | Aeon Ideas Within the lifetimes of most children today, bioenhancement is likely to become a basic feature of human society. Personalised pharmaceuticals will enable us to modify our bodies and minds in powerful and precise ways, with far fewer side-effects than today’s drugs. New brain-machine interfaces will improve our memory and cognition, extend our senses, and confer direct control over an array of semi-intelligent gadgets. Genetic and epigenetic modification will allow us to change our physical appearance and capabilities, as well as to tweak some of the more intangible aspects of our being such as emotion, creativity or sociability. Do you find these ideas disquieting? But if we’re not careful, we ignore the fact that these ‘products’ are altering key aspects of a human being’s selfhood. Get Aeon straight to your inbox The problem of dehumanisation isn’t new, as the bleak history of war, colonialism and slavery attests. So, what can you do?
Culture Vaults : Resonant Frequencies and the Human Brain One of the great revelations of 20th century science is that all existence can be broken down into simple wave functions. Every photon, energy emission, and elementary particle rings with its own unique wave signature. When we see a color, we are actually seeing a distinct frequency of visible light. When we hear a sound, our eardrums are actually being vibrated by subtle waves in the air molecules around us. Even the neurochemical processes of human consciousness our very thoughts ring with their own distinct wave patterns. By studying the way that waves interact with other waves, researchers have found that even low-powered oscillations can have enormous effects on standing waves, physical structures, and even the human brain. Tesla first realized the massive potential of resonant waves in 1898 when he performed a simple experiment with an electromechanical oscillator the size of an alarm clock. "The principle cannot fail," Tesla would say. Monroe's Big Discovery The Neural Radio
Single-Cell Genomics Allows Identification of New Cell Types How many types of cells are there in the human body? Textbooks say a couple of hundred. But the true number is undoubtedly far larger. Piece by piece, a new, more detailed catalogue of cell types is emerging from labs like that of Aviv Regev at the Broad Institute, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, which are applying recent advances in single-cell genomics to study individual cells at a speed and scale previously unthinkable. The technology applied at the Broad uses fluidic systems to separate cells on microscopic conveyor belts and then submits them to detailed genetic analysis, at the rate of thousands per day. Regev says she has been working with the new methods to classify cells in mouse retinas and human brain tumors, and she is finding cell types never seen before. Other labs are racing to produce their own surveys and improve the underlying technology. Such surveys have only recently become possible, scientists say.
Quantum minds: Why we think like quarks - life - 05 September 2011 Read full article Continue reading page |1|2|3 Read more: "Quantum logic could make better robot bartenders" The fuzziness and weird logic of the way particles behave applies surprisingly well to how humans think THE quantum world defies the rules of ordinary logic. Yet that mathematics actually stands on its own, quite independent of the theory. Human thinking, as many of us know, often fails to respect the principles of classical logic. It may sound preposterous to imagine that the mathematics of quantum theory has something to say about the nature of human thinking. It's a finding that has kicked off a burgeoning field known as "quantum interaction", which explores how quantum theory can be useful in areas having nothing to do with physics, ranging from human language and cognition to biology and economics. One thing that distinguishes quantum from classical physics is how probabilities work. But the quantum world doesn't obey. Remarkably, people don't respect this rule. Recommended by