A rich club in the human brain Wednesday, November 2, 2011 This image shows the group connectome, with the nodes and connections colored according to their rich-club participation. Green represents few connections. Red represents the most. Credit: Reprinted with permission: Van den Heuvel, et al. The Journal of Neuroscience 2011 Just as the Occupy Wall Street movement has brought more attention to financial disparities between the haves and have-nots in American society, researchers from Indiana University and the University Medical Center Utrecht in The Netherlands are highlighting the disproportionate influence of so called "Rich Clubs" within the human brain. Not all regions of the brain, they say, are created equal. "We've known for a while that the brain has some regions that are 'rich' in the sense of being highly connected to many other parts of the brain," said Olaf Sporns, professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in IU's College of Arts and Sciences.
NIMH · Eating Disorders What are eating disorders? An eating disorder is an illness that causes serious disturbances to your everyday diet, such as eating extremely small amounts of food or severely overeating. A person with an eating disorder may have started out just eating smaller or larger amounts of food, but at some point, the urge to eat less or more spiraled out of control. Severe distress or concern about body weight or shape may also characterize an eating disorder. Eating disorders frequently appear during the teen years or young adulthood but may also develop during childhood or later in life.1,2 Common eating disorders include anorexia nervosa, bulimia nervosa, and binge-eating disorder. Eating disorders affect both men and women. It is unknown how many adults and children suffer with other serious, significant eating disorders, including one category of eating disorders called eating disorders not otherwise specified (EDNOS). Eating disorders are real, treatable medical illnesses. Anorexia nervosa
Neuroscience For Kids The smell of a flower - The memory of a walk in the park - The pain of stepping on a nail. These experiences are made possible by the 3 pounds of tissue in our heads...the BRAIN!! Neuroscience for Kids has been created for all students and teachers who would like to learn about the nervous system. Discover the exciting world of the brain, spinal cord, neurons and the senses. Use the experiments, activities and games to help you learn about the nervous system. Can't find what you are looking for? Portions of Neuroscience for Kids are available in Spanish, Slovene, Portuguese, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Serbian, Russian, Slovak, Romanian, Polish, Albanian, Czech, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Punjabi, Indonesian, Malay, Norwegian, Ukranian and Turkish. "Neuroscience for Kids" is maintained by Eric H.
Yosemite: Where a Waterfall Catches Fire In nature's game, water beats fire -- which is why I'm dying to see a dramatic interpretation of the opposite at Horsetail Falls in Yosemite National Park. Apparently during the last two weeks of February, orange sunsets are reflected in the falls each evening, which makes the cascading water look like it's on fire. "Fire-water is falling from a cliff" is what your brain thinks. What's funny is that even though nature already puts on a fantastic fire-water show at Yosemite, the park put on a similar man-made show for almost a century (as Atlas Obscura points out). But that's OK because, like I said, the sun catches El Capitan's Horsetail Falls on fire every night for a couple of weeks in February. Here's a close-up of the environmentally friendly fire-water:
Neuroscience News - Neuroscience Research Neuroscience Labs Neuroscience Jobs Neuroscience Books Reviews Neuroscience Forums Social Network New neurons help us to remember fear Fear burns memories into our brain, and new research by University of California, Berkeley, neuroscientists explains how. Scientists have long known that fear and other highly emotional experiences lead to incredibly strong memories. In a study appearing online today (Tuesday, June 14) in advance of publication in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, UC Berkeley’s Daniela Kaufer and colleagues report a new way for emotions to affect memory: The brain’s emotional center, the amygdala, induces the hippocampus, a relay hub for memory, to generate new neurons. The figure shows newly born nerve cells (green) colocalizing with a neuronal marker which indicates immature nerve cells (red). In a fearful situation, these newborn neurons get activated by the amygdala and may provide a “blank slate” on which the new fearful memory can be strongly imprinted, she said. “Many affective disorders involve disordered emotional memories like PTSD, depression and anxiety. For more information:
Fossils Of 500 Million Year Old Marine Predator Anomalocaris Discovered | FinestDaily ShareShare A recent discovery in the field of paleontology reveals probably the oldest predator known to man. The fossils found on Kangaroo Island are being studied by scientists from the University of Adelaide, Australia. The fossilized eyes belonged to the 500 million-year-old Anomalocaris, a marine creature believed to be at the top of the food chain in prehistoric times. A full story regarding this subject will be available in December’s issue of Nature. Taking into consideration the studies so far, it seems that the Anomalocaris had extremely acute vision, considered better than any other insects or crustaceans, even by today’s standards. Thanks to the discovery of its eyes, meticulous analysis shows amazing details when it comes to optical design, with some similarities much alike contemporary crabs, flies and kin. These fossils make the Anomalocaris the ancestor of today’s arthropods, alongside other evolutionary implications that affect a lot of species.
List of cognitive biases Cognitive biases are tendencies to think in certain ways that can lead to systematic deviations from a standard of rationality or good judgment, and are often studied in psychology and behavioral economics. There are also controversies over some of these biases as to whether they count as useless or irrational, or whether they result in useful attitudes or behavior. For example, when getting to know others, people tend to ask leading questions which seem biased towards confirming their assumptions about the person. However, this kind of confirmation bias has also been argued to be an example of social skill: a way to establish a connection with the other person.[7] Although this research overwhelmingly involves human subjects, some findings that demonstrate bias have been found in non-human animals as well. Decision-making, belief, and behavioral biases[edit] Many of these biases affect belief formation, business and economic decisions, and human behavior in general. Social biases[edit]
Researchers show that memories reside in specific brain cells Our fond or fearful memories — that first kiss or a bump in the night — leave memory traces that we may conjure up in the remembrance of things past, complete with time, place and all the sensations of the experience. Neuroscientists call these traces memory engrams. But are engrams conceptual, or are they a physical network of neurons in the brain? In a new MIT study, researchers used optogenetics to show that memories really do reside in very specific brain cells, and that simply activating a tiny fraction of brain cells can recall an entire memory — explaining, for example, how Marcel Proust could recapitulate his childhood from the aroma of a once-beloved madeleine cookie. In that famous surgery, Penfield treated epilepsy patients by scooping out parts of the brain where seizures originated. Fast forward to the introduction, seven years ago, of optogenetics, which can stimulate neurons that are genetically modified to express light-activated proteins. False memory
MIT Paper Works out Paradox; Fry may not be own Grandfather It would appear that longstanding and tricky paradox of time travel, that one who travels backward in time could conceivably influence it to the point where the time travel couldn’t have happened is dead. All hail the longstanding and tricky paradox. This, the “grandfather paradox,” is so named because of the thought experiment used to illustrate it. A time traveler could theoretically go back in the past and murder his own grandfather, which would render the time traveler non extant, and thus would lead to the paradox of the time traveler never having been able to go back in time in the first place. Pudding. The same holds true in a less dramatic fashion for subatomic particles like quarks and photons, which hold a much higher likelihood of ever traveling into the past, based on the strange, spooky behavior they’ve demonstrated for the people who’ve studied and been alarmed by them thus far. This little conundrum made time travel fundamentally dangerous, if not impossible.
Researchers may have discovered how memories are encoded in the brain While it’s generally accepted that memories are stored somewhere, somehow in our brains, the exact process has never been entirely understood. Strengthened synaptic connections between neurons definitely have something to do with it, although the synaptic membranes involved are constantly degrading and being replaced – this seems to be somewhat at odds with the fact that some memories can last for a person’s lifetime. Now, a team of scientists believe that they may have figured out what’s going on. Their findings could have huge implications for the treatment of diseases such as Alzheimer's. Leading the study is Prof. The project was inspired by an outside research paper, that described experiments in which memories were successfully erased from animals’ brains. Tuszynski and his colleagues noted that the geometry of the CaMKII molecule was very similar to that of tubulin protein compounds. A paper on the research was recently published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology.
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Making Mouse Memories In the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, scientists erase troubling memories from Jim Carrey’s head. In real life, scientists have done the opposite. By reactivating certain nerve cells, researchers make artificial memories pop into mice’s heads. The results, published in the March 23 Science and online March 22 in Nature, offer a deeper understanding of how the brain creates and uses memories. Much of what scientists know about how the brain remembers comes from studies that look for signs of natural memories in the brain or that disrupt memories. In the new work, memories are actually created, says neuroscientist Richard Morris of the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Though the two teams used different approaches, they both created a false memory of a fearful situation in mice. The marked memory was of a square room with opaque white walls and floor, and no particular odors. Of course, no one knows what the experience was like for the mice.