Sharpened focus: Improving the numbers, utility of medical imaging The idea of probing the body's interior with radiation stretches back to experiments with X rays in the 1800s, but more than a century later, images taken with radiological scans still are not considered reliable enough to, for example, serve as the sole indicator of the efficacy of a cancer treatment. Lisa Karam, a biochemist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and a few dozen of her colleagues across North America have set out to change that. The group of radiology specialists from a number of institutions has recently published a pair of papers that Karam describes as part of a major effort to turn medical imaging -- CT scans, PET scans, MRIs, X rays and the like -- into a quantitative research tool, one that produces reliable numbers. The many coauthors of the two papers are members of a subgroup of the Radiological Society of North America called the Quantitative Imaging Biomarker Alliance (QIBA).
10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong Is your gym locker room crawling with drug-resistant bacteria? Is the guy with the bulging backpack a suicide bomber? And what about that innocent-looking arugula: Will pesticide residue cause cancer, or do the leaves themselves harbor E. coli? These days, it seems like everything is risky, and worry itself is bad for your health. The human brain is exquisitely adapted to respond to risk—uncertainty about the outcome of actions. Still, uncertainty unbalances us, pitching us into anxiety and producing an array of cognitive distortions. I. Risk and emotion are inseparable. Fear feels like anything but a cool and detached computation of the odds. As a result of these evolved emotional algorithms, ancient threats like spiders and snakes cause fear out of proportion to the real danger they pose, while experiences that should frighten us—like fast driving—don't. II. Fear skews risk analysis in predictable ways. After 9/11, 1.4 million people changed their holiday travel plans to avoid flying.
BEING CRAZY IS NOISY | More Intelligent Life - StumbleUpon John Sterns is diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder (a co-diagnosis of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder), chronic depression and chronic anxiety. He describes a lifetime of fighting demons ... Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE I. I hear voices (“auditory hallucinations”, technically). But the most persistent and long-standing of my voices, which began when I was eight years old, pounds on my left shoulder like a jackhammer, repeating, “I hate myself. Before my treatment, hospitalisations and incarcerations, these voices were all separate and distinct, with individual sounds, tones, rhythms and pitches. II. I immediately hated Kevin. III. Art therapy required me to sit around a table with seven other inmates and a social worker, and stare at a blank piece of paper and a torn box of broken crayons. The next day brought another art therapy session and once again I turned in a blank sheet of white paper. “John,” she began ominously, “you are failing art therapy.” I misheard her, clearly.
Mind-Controlled Musical Instrument Helps Paralysis Patients Rehabilitate Music Through the Mind Eduardo Miranda Paralysis patients could play music with their minds , using a new brain-control interface that senses brain impulses and translates them into musical notes. Users must teach themselves how to associate brain signals with specific tasks, causing neuronal activity that the brain scanners can pick up. Then they can make music. It’s a pretty unique use of brain-computer interfaces, which are already being used to do things like drive cars , control robots and play video games. Patients with neurodegenerative disorders like Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s can use music to walk to a rhythm or even to trigger memories or emotions. Like other brain-computer interfaces, a user calibrates the system — and his or her brain — by learning to associate certain brain signals with a stimulus. By varying levels of concentration, she learned to vary the amplitude of the EEG, which allowed her to choose among the different notes, like striking piano keys. [ Nature News ]
Personality test based on Jung - Myers-Briggs typology A good and stable relationship between partners is conducive to a happy marriage, and we often don't know what the underlying cause of our conflicts is. The ability to assess the likelihood of a healthy long term relationship is one of the main challenges in dating and matchmaking. Jung Marriage Test™ addresses this challenge. Extraversion - Introversion Sensing - Intuition Thinking - Feeling And the fourth criterion added by Isabel Briggs Myers *: Judging-Perceiving The different combinations of these four criteria define sixteen possible personality types. ENFP - Extravert iNtuitive Feeling Perceiving Once you know the type formula and strengths of the preferences of both partners (or prospective partners), it is possible to calculate the index of compatibility (MatchIndex) between the partners. A high MatchIndex ensures a good and stable long-term relationship.
List of emotions The contrasting and categorisation of emotions describes how emotions are thought to relate to each other. Various recent proposals of such groupings are described in the following sections. Contrasting Basic Emotions[edit] The following table,[1] based on a wide review of current theories, identifies and contrasts the fundamental emotions according to a set of definite criteria. HUMAINE's proposal for EARL (Emotion Annotation and Representation Language)[edit] The emotion annotation and representation language (EARL) proposed by the Human-Machine Interaction Network on Emotion (HUMAINE) classifies 48 emotions.[2] Parrott's emotions by groups[edit] A tree-structured list of emotions was described in Parrott (2001).[3][unreliable source?] Plutchik's wheel of emotions[edit] Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions Robert Plutchik created a wheel of emotions in 1980 which consisted of 8 basic emotions and 8 advanced emotions each composed of 2 basic ones.[5] See also[edit] References[edit] External links[edit]
Silicon Chips Wired With Nerve Cells Could Enable New Brain/Machine Interfaces It's reminiscent of Cartman's runaway Trapper Keeper notebook in that long-ago episode of South Park, but researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison may be scratching the surface of a new kind of brain/machine interface by creating computer chips that are wired together with living nerve cells. A team there has found that mouse nerve cells will connect with each other across a network of tiny tubes threaded through a semiconductor material. It's not exactly clear at this point how the nerve cells are functioning, but what is clear is that the cells seem to have an affinity for the tiny tubes, and that alone has some interesting implications. To create the nerve-chip hybrid, the researchers created tubes of layered silicon and germanium that are large enough for the nerve cells' tendrils to navigate but too small for the actual body of the cell to pass through. What isn't clear is whether or not the cells are actually communicating with each other they way they would naturally.
The Key to Understanding Body Language Since writing “ What Every Body is Saying ,” the question I am most often asked is, “What nonverbal behaviors should I be looking for and are they different at home, at work, or in relationships?” Perhaps this will help to clarify the matter. Somewhere in our hominid past, as with most animals, we developed the ability to communicate nonverbally and that still remains our primary method of communication, especially when it comes to emotions. Charles Darwin first and Paul Ekman much later, have written about the universality of emotions in part because, as Joseph Ledoux has pointed out, these and other survival behaviors are governed by our very elegant limbic brain. The governance of homeostasis, procreation, emotion, spotting and reacting to threats, as well as assuring our survival, are all heavy responsibilities of the limbic system. Our needs, feelings, thoughts, and intentions are processed by the limbic brain and expressed in our body language. Darwin, C. (1872). Ekman, P. (2003).
Your flaws are my pain: Experience of vicarious embarrassment is linked to empathy Today, there is increasing exposure of individuals to a public audience. Television shows and the Internet provide platforms for this and, at times, allow observing others' flaws and norm transgressions. Regardless of whether the person observed realizes their flaw or not, observers in the audience experience vicarious embarrassment. For the first time, such vicarious embarrassment experiences as well as their neural basis have been investigated in research published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE. In two consecutive studies, using behavioral measures and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the authors show that the experience of vicarious embarrassment is linked to empathy and neural activations in brain areas constituting the affective component of the pain matrix: the anterior cingulate cortex and the left anterior insula (Hein & Singer, 2008; Singer et al., 2004). "Today, nearly any aspect of one's personal life may reach a broad audience.
Are Role-Playing Gamers Insane? For the benefit of my readers who don't get out much: Role playing games are a popular form of amusement in which players assume the identity of fictional characters and embark upon adventures. Some of the parameters of these adventures are specified by the game one is playing, but these games also allow for lots of imaginative improvisation by the players. When I began researching role-playing games for my book Caught in Play , I read stories about players who had gone over the edge and had been swallowed up in the imaginary world of the game. I also heard such stories from many of the role-players I interviewed. Why tell these stories, then? This in turn raises the question of why so many role-players are so eager to claim that they have no problem with maintaining the boundaries of reality. But none of this means that role players have a tenuous grip on reality. To learn more, visit Peter G.
How beliefs shape effort and learning If it was easy to learn, it will be easy to remember. Psychological scientists have maintained that nearly everyone uses this simple rule to assess their own learning. Now a study published in an upcoming issue Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests otherwise: "Individuals with different theories about the nature of intelligence tend to evaluate their learning in different ways," says David B. Miele of Columbia University, who conducted the study with Bridgid Finn of Washington University in St. It has long been known that these theories have important effects on people's motivation to learn. To test whether these theories also affect the way people assess their own learning, the researchers conducted two experiments. And which theory of intelligence is correct?
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'Thunder' protein regulates memory formation Researchers at Johns Hopkins have discovered in mice a molecular wrecking ball that powers the demolition phase of a cycle that occurs at synapses -- those specialized connections between nerve cells in the brain -- and whose activity appears critical for both limiting and enhancing learning and memory. The newly revealed protein, which the researchers named thorase after Thor, the Norse god of thunder, belongs to a large family of enzymes that energize not only neurological construction jobs but also deconstruction projects. The discovery is described in the April 15 issue of Cell. "Thorase is vital for keeping in balance the molecular construction-deconstruction cycle we believe is required for memory formation," explains Valina Dawson, professor of neurology and neuroscience in the Johns Hopkins Institute of Cell Engineering. The enzyme is one of many AAA+ ATPases that drive the assembly of proteins needed to form specialized receptors at the surfaces of synapses.