Do musicians have different brains? In the last twenty years, brain imaging studies have revealed that musical training has dramatic effects on the brain. Increases in gray matter (size and number of nerve cells) are seen, for example, in the auditory, motor, and visual spatial areas of the cerebral cortex of musicians. As Dr. Oliver Sacks writes in his book , "Anatomists would be hard put to identify the brain of a visual artist, a writer, or a mathematician - but they could recognize the brain of a professional musician without a moment's hesitation." Perhaps it is not so surprising that brain areas involved in singing and instrument playing, such as auditory and motor cortices, change following extensive musical training, but a recent paper in the journal suggests yet another way that music reshapes the brain. Musicians may not only have better musical memory but they may have enhanced verbal memory as well. In the experiment, all the students listened to and attempted to remember a set of 20 words.
Khan Academy How the Brain Stops Time One of the strangest side-effects of intense fear is time dilation, the apparent slowing-down of time. It's a common trope in movies and TV shows, like the memorable scene from The Matrix in which time slows down so dramatically that bullets fired at the hero seem to move at a walking pace. In real life, our perceptions aren't keyed up quite that dramatically, but survivors of life-and-death situations often report that things seem to take longer to happen, objects fall more slowly, and they're capable of complex thoughts in what would normally be the blink of an eye. Now a research team from Israel reports that not only does time slow down, but that it slows down more for some than for others. An intriguing result, and one that raises a more fundamental question: how, exactly, does the brain carry out this remarkable feat? Researcher David Eagleman has tackled his very issue in a very clever way . Was it scary enough to generate a sense of time dilation?
Zen Habits | Simple Productivity Workplace Psychology Brain Teasers: selection of best adult brain games for attention, memory, planning, visual, logic, corporate, math, and more Here you can enjoy the Top 25 Brain Teasers, Games & Illusions that SharpBrains readers (primarily adults, but some younger minds too) have enjoyed the most. It is always good to learn more about our brains and to exercise them!. Fun experiments on how our brains and minds work 1. 2. 3. 4. Challenge your attention and memory 5. 6. 7. Optical illusions 8. 9. 10. 11. Language and logic puzzles 12. 13. 14. 15. A few visual workouts 16. 17. 18. Teasing your pattern recognition and thinking 19. 20. 21. 22. Brain teasers for job interviews 23. 24. 25.
Rosenhan experiment Experiment to determine the validity of psychiatric diagnosis As a critique of psychiatric diagnosis, it broached the topic of wrongful involuntary commitment.[3] The experiment is said to have "accelerated the movement to reform mental institutions and to deinstitutionalize as many mental patients as possible".[4] Rosenhan claimed that he, along with eight other people (five men and three women), entered 12 hospitals in five states on both coasts of the US. Three of the participants were admitted for only a brief period of time, and in order to obtain sufficient documented experiences, they re-applied to additional institutions. Respondents defended psychiatry against the experiment's conclusions, saying that as psychiatric diagnosis relies largely on the patient's report of their experiences, faking their presence no more demonstrates problems with psychiatric diagnosis than lying about other medical symptoms.[5] Pseudopatient experiment [edit] While listening to a lecture by Ronald D.
List Of 8 Best Documentary & Infotainment Torrent Trackers And DDL Forums Are there torrent sites or direct download link forums that specialize in documentaries and infotainment content? This is a question we see all too often in our E-mail inbox. The answer is yes, there are quite a few of those sites. Although we have featured them on this blog from time to time, it seems there are still folks out there who have missed out on these invaluable file sharing resources. This article features 8 best torrent sites and DDL forums where you can find premium video content from renowned publishers such as Discovery Channel, National Geographic, Animal Planet, BBC, PBS, HBO, Frontline, Imax, Channel 4 and lots more. Apart from documentaries, these trackers and forums usually index talk shows, Sci Fi and other infotainment content which are not usually found on your average private torrent tracker. Note that most of the forums mentioned in this post require you to sign up and log in before you can see download links, torrents or certain forum categories. Docs4You
Ten Psychology Studies from 2009 Worth Knowing About - David DiSalvo - Brainspin Image by AFP/Getty Images via Daylife Several great psychology and neuroscience studies were published in 2009. Below I’ve chosen 10 that I think are among the most noteworthy, not just because they’re interesting, but useful as well. 1. If you have to choose between buying something or spending the money on a memorable experience, go with the experience. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Why Intelligent People Drink More Alcohol Drinking alcohol is evolutionarily novel, so the Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent people drink more alcohol than less intelligent people. The human consumption of alcohol probably originates from frugivory (consumption of fruits). Fermentation of sugars by yeast naturally present in overripe and decaying fruits produces ethanol, known to intoxicate birds and mammals. However, the amount of ethanol alcohol in such fruits ranges from trace to 5%, roughly comparable to light beer. (And you can't really get drunk on light beer.) It is nothing compared to the amount of alcohol present in regular beer (4-6%), wine (12-15%), and distilled spirits (20-95%). Human consumption of alcohol, however, was unintentional, accidental, and haphazard until about 10,000 years ago. Human experience with concentrations of ethanol higher than 5% that is attained by decaying fruits is therefore very recent.
Intelligence: The Evolution of Night Owls IQs and Zs Night owls are smarter than other people, and now we may know why. The modern world contains many features our slow-to-evolve brains still find unfamiliar—cars, TVs, hot dogs on a stick. But the world has always thrown new stuff at us, and brighter humans may adapt more ably. Satoshi Kanazawa, a psychologist at The London School of Economics and Political Science, argues that, while we have specialized mental modules for navigation, social interaction, and other age-old tasks, general intelligence is its own module handling only evolutionarily novel circumstances. A previous study found that evening people are smarter than morning people. Night Lights
The fine dopamine line between creativity and schizophrenia New research shows a possible explanation for the link between mental health and creativity. By studying receptors in the brain, researchers at the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet have managed to show that the dopamine system in healthy, highly creative people is similar in some respects to that seen in people with schizophrenia. High creative skills have been shown to be somewhat more common in people who have mental illness in the family. "We have studied the brain and the dopamine D2 receptors, and have shown that the dopamine system of healthy, highly creative people is similar to that found in people with schizophrenia," says associate professor Fredrik Ullén from Karolinska Institutet's Department of Women's and Children's Health. "The study shows that highly creative people who did well on the divergent tests had a lower density of D2 receptors in the thalamus than less creative people," says Dr Ullén.