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5 mind-bending facts about dreams

5 mind-bending facts about dreams
When your head hits the pillow, for many it's lights out for the conscious part of you. But the cells firing in your brain are very much awake, sparking enough energy to produce the sometimes vivid and sometimes downright haunted dreams that take place during the rapid-eye-movement stage of your sleep. Why do some people have nightmares while others really spend their nights in bliss? Like sleep, dreams are mysterious phenomena. But as scientists are able to probe deeper into our minds, they are finding some of those answers. Here's some of what we know about what goes on in dreamland. 1. As if nightmares weren't bad enough, a rare sleep disorder — called REM sleep behavior disorder — causes people to act out their dreams, sometimes with violent thrashes, kicks and screams. 2. Staying up late has its perks, but whimsical dreaming is not one of them. In the study 264 university students rated how often they experienced nightmares on a scale from 0 to 4, never to always, respectively. 3.

Top 10 Mysteries of the Mind by Jeanna Bryner, Live Science Managing Editor | October 09, 2007 01:25pm ET Credit: NIH, NIDA Much of what we don't understand about being human is simply in our heads. The brain is a befuddling organ, as are the very questions of life and death, consciousness, sleep, and much more. Author Bio Jeanna Bryner Before becoming managing editor, Jeanna served as a reporter for Live Science and SPACE.com for about three years. Jeanna Bryner on

The Neuroscience Of Music - Wired Science Why does music make us feel? On the one hand, music is a purely abstract art form, devoid of language or explicit ideas. The stories it tells are all subtlety and subtext. And yet, even though music says little, it still manages to touch us deep, to tickle some universal nerves. We can now begin to understand where these feelings come from, why a mass of vibrating air hurtling through space can trigger such intense states of excitement. Because the scientists were combining methodologies (PET and fMRI) they were able to obtain an impressively precise portrait of music in the brain. The more interesting finding emerged from a close study of the timing of this response, as the scientists looked to see what was happening in the seconds before the subjects got the chills. In essence, the scientists found that our favorite moments in the music were preceeded by a prolonged increase of activity in the caudate. The question, of course, is what all these dopamine neurons are up to.

inversion vieillissement A technique to keep the tips of your chromosomes healthy could reverse tissue ageing. The work, which was done in mice, is yet more evidence of a causal link between chromosome length and age-related disease. Telomeres, the caps of DNA which protect the ends of chromosomes, shorten every time cells divide. But cells stop dividing and die when telomeres drop below a certain length – a normal part of ageing. The enzyme telomerase slows this degradation by adding new DNA to the ends of telomeres. Mariela Jaskelioff and her colleagues at the Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts, engineered mice with short telomeres and inactive telomerase to see what would happen when they turned the enzyme back on. Four weeks after the team switched on the enzyme, they found that tissue had regenerated in several organs, new brain cells were developing and the mice were living longer. Journal reference: Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09603 More From New Scientist Celery power (New Scientist)

molecules storage Storage is a very exciting thing these days: SSDs are increasing in capacity and becoming cheaper, hard drives are offering storage capacity that’s unprecedented at the consumer level, and recently, scientists have been able to store significant amounts of data using unusual mediums, such as strings of DNA and small groups of atoms. Now, scientists have managed to store data in individual molecules. Using a new, still-experimental technology, researchers have managed to turn individual molecules into a storage medium. In theory, this molecular memory could increase current storage capacities by one thousand times over more conventional means. Molecular memory isn’t an entirely new concept but there have always been significant hurdles, the first of which is no stranger to the computing world: cooling. The team also overcame another significant hurdle standing in the way of molecular memory. Research paper: Interface-engineered templates for molecular spin memory devices

Accelerating Future » Top 10 Transhumanist Technologies Transhumanists advocate the improvement of human capacities through advanced technology. Not just technology as in gadgets you get from Best Buy, but technology in the grander sense of strategies for eliminating disease, providing cheap but high-quality products to the world’s poorest, improving quality of life and social interconnectedness, and so on. Technology we don’t notice because it’s blended in with the fabric of the world, but would immediately take note of its absence if it became unavailable. (Ever tried to travel to another country on foot?) Technology needn’t be expensive – indeed, if a technology is truly effective it will pay for itself many times over. Transhumanists tend to take a longer-than-average view of technological progress, looking not just five or ten years into the future but twenty years, thirty years, and beyond. 10. 9. Clearly, World of Warcraft’s eight million subscribers and SecondLife’s five million subscribers are onto something. 8. 7. 6. 5. 4. 3. 2.

Qu'est-ce que la conscience - Le cerveau à tous les niveaux Parmi toutes les approches philosophiques proposées au fil des siècles pour tenter de résoudre , le dualisme et le matérialisme recueillent l’adhésion d’un nombre considérable de penseurs. Ceux-ci ont toutefois été amenés à nuancer ces deux positions théoriques générales afin de faire face aux critiques formulées à leur endroit. Pour éviter les pièges du dualisme de substance par exemple, on a proposé un « dualisme de propriété ». Celui-ci reconnaît que tout est matière mais que cette matière peut posséder deux types de propriété : des propriétés physiques et des propriétés mentales, ces dernières n’étant pas réductibles aux premières. On qualifie d’ailleurs souvent le dualisme de propriété de «physicalisme non réductible». La douleur aurait par exemple une propriété physique (les fibres C qui émettent des potentiels d’action) et, en même temps, une propriété consciente (le sentiment douloureux). D’après Valentine, E.R. (1982) et

Scientists’ depressing new discovery about the brain This article originally appeared on Alternet. Yale law school professor Dan Kahan’s new research paper is called “Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government,” but for me a better title is the headline on science writer Chris Mooney’s piece about it in Grist: “Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math.” Kahan conducted some ingenious experiments about the impact of political passion on people’s ability to think clearly. His conclusion, in Mooney’s words: partisanship “can even undermine our very basic reasoning skills…. [People] who are otherwise very good at math may totally flunk a problem that they would otherwise probably be able to solve, simply because giving the right answer goes against their political beliefs.” In other words, say goodnight to the dream that education, journalism, scientific evidence, media literacy or reason can provide the tools and information that people need in order to make good decisions. The answer, basically, is no.

UCSB scientists discover how the brain encodes memories at a cellular level ... (Santa Barbara, Calif.) –– Scientists at UC Santa Barbara have made a major discovery in how the brain encodes memories. The finding, published in the December 24 issue of the journal Neuron, could eventually lead to the development of new drugs to aid memory. The team of scientists is the first to uncover a central process in encoding memories that occurs at the level of the synapse, where neurons connect with each other. "When we learn new things, when we store memories, there are a number of things that have to happen," said senior author Kenneth S. "One of the most important processes is that the synapses –– which cement those memories into place –– have to be strengthened," said Kosik. This is a neuron. (Photo Credit: Sourav Banerjee) Part of strengthening a synapse involves making new proteins. The production of new proteins can only occur when the RNA that will make the required proteins is turned on. When the signal comes in, the wrapping protein degrades or gets fragmented.

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