Autism and Neuropsychology, by Marisa Marzillo
Autism is a lifelong disorder that has become the discussion of many media outlets; it is a disorder that causes abnormal neurological development. It seems that lately autism prevalence is increasing, which is causing a demand for professionals to investigate on what causes autism. Autism disorder is characterized by different behavior including social impairments, difficulty in communication, and restrictive patterns of behavior. Individuals living with autism don’t have a lower IQ than most people, but it is common that they have weak social interaction. Researchers have stated that it is unclear what causes autism; it ranges from environmental surroundings to a strain on normal brain development.
Anxious brains have child-like circuits › News in Science (ABC Science)
News in Science Tuesday, 1 May 2012 Anna SallehABC Emotional response A study of how emotional circuitry develops in the brain suggests that anxiety in adults can result from specific parts of the amygdala remaining like those of a child. The neuroimaging study by behavioural scientist Professor Vinod Menon, of Stanford University, and colleagues, is reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science. The amygdala is known to play a key role in perception, control over emotion, expression of anxiety and responding to threats. But Menon and colleagues wanted to see how the amygdala developed from childhood to adulthood.
Astronomy For Beginners...Astronomy Basics...The Celestial Sphere
As people first started to map out the night sky, it became necessary to have a standard, universal way of plotting positions of objects in the sky. As the stars appear to occupy fixed positions in the sky relative to each other, a convenient way of thinking about the situation would be to imagine the Earth placed at the centre of a larger sphere. The stars occupy fixed positions on the surface of this 'celestial sphere', and the Earth rotates within it.
201 Ways to Arouse Your Creativity
Arouse your creativity Electric flesh-arrows … traversing the body. A rainbow of color strikes the eyelids. A foam of music falls over the ears. It is the gong of the orgasm. ~ Anais Nin Creativity is like sex.
The biology of dreaming
o one would normally consider David Maurice, Ph.D., professor of ocular physiology in the Department of Ophthalmology at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, a revolutionary. Nevertheless, he has reignited a decades-long controversy that could spark a revolutionary re-evaluation of an entire field of behavioral research. Dr. Maurice has developed a startling new line of scientific inquiry that, when added to other findings, could change our understanding of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep and the nature of dreams. What Maurice has done is to suggest an alternative explanation for the phenomenon known as REM sleep, the stage in which the eyes rapidly move and most dreams occur.
Chapter 12: Attention and Consciousness
Attention involves top-down (voluntary) goal-directed processes and bottom-up (reflexive), stimulus-driven mechanisms. They influence the way information is processed in the brain and can occur early during sensory processing. Balint's syndrome is a visual attention and awareness deficit. Someone who has this syndrome can only perceive one object at a time.
The Brain: The Places in the Brain Where Space Lives
See Carl Zimmer's new ebook, Brain Cuttings, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and carlzimmer.com. The great philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that nothing matters more to our existence than space. Every experience we have—from the thoughts in our heads to the stars we see wheeling through the sky—makes sense only if we can assign it a location. “We never can imagine or make a representation to ourselves of the non-existence of space,” he wrote in 1781. The nonexistence of space may certainly be hard to imagine.
The Crime Library — The Yakuza Godfathers
In the years following World War II, yakuza membership increased dramatically to 184,000 members divided into 5,200 gangs throughout the country, making it larger than the Japanese army at the time. Inevitably these gangs encroached on one another's territories, which resulted in bitter and bloody gang wars. The man who brought peace to the warring factions and unified the yakuza was the group's first 20th-century godfather, Yoshio Kodama. Kodama's gift was his ability to balance his affiliations to both right-wing political groups and criminal gangs, using each to keep the other in check.
Shape Magazine
One-legged squats don't seem very tricky—after all, you did manage to pick up that cotton ball you dropped without putting your newly pedicured foot on the floor—but squatting on one leg seriously challenges your balance. It also activates your core and just about every other muscle in your lower body, including your glutes, hamstrings, and calves. Try it: Stand holding your arms straight out in front of your body and raise your right leg off the floor. Push your hips back and lower your body as far as you can. Pause, then push your body back to the starting position.
