Clipmarks | balthazarus's 'neuroscience' clips

Brain could adapt well to cyborg enhancements

Wed, 24 Jun 2009 15:58:54 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: Farné says the same kind of brain "plasticity" might be involved in regaining control of a transplanted hand or a prosthetic limb when the original has been lost. The brain might also readily incorporate cyborg additions – a cyborg arm or other body part – into its body schema, says Farné, "and possibly new body parts differing in shape and/or number, for example four arms."

Small implants such as pacemakers are inserted in the existing body so do not need to be accepted by the body schema, adds Farné, "but a pair of wings would – that would be tough!"

Clip Source: www.newscientist.com

Brain could adapt well to cyborg enhancements

When you brush your teeth, the toothbrush may actually become part of your arm – at least as far as your brain is concerned. That's the conclusion of a study showing perceptions of arm length change after people handle a mechanical tool.

The brain maintains a physical map of the body, with different areas in charge of different body parts. Researchers have suggested that when we use tools, our brains incorporate them into this map.

attached a mechanical grabber to the arms of 14 volunteers. The modified subjects then used the grabber to pick up out-of-reach objects.

Shortly afterwards, the volunteers perceived touches on their elbow and fingertip as further apart than they really were, and took longer to point to or grasp objects with their hand than prior to using the tool.

their brains had adjusted the brain areas that normally control the arm to account for the tool and not yet adjusted back to normal.

Tags: brain, cyborg, neuroscience

"We don't simply feel like three pounds of meat"

Sun, 24 May 2009 13:22:05 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus

Clip Source: www.edge.org

CHIMERAS OF EXPERIENCE

The paradox of modern neuroscience is that the one reality you can't describe as it is presently conceived is the only reality we'll ever know, which is the subjective first person view of things. Even if you can find the circuit of cells that gives rise to that, and you can construct a good causal demonstration that you knock out these circuit of cells, and you create a zombie; even if you do that... and I know Dennett could dismantle this argument very, very quickly ... there's still a mystery that persists, and this is the old mind-body problem, but it’s an old problem for a reason: we don't simply feel like three pounds of meat.

I've talked to enough scientists who thought that LSD would be a great way to study it if it weren't so tough to get it in the lab

What happens in your brain when you have an epiphany? He was saying it would be great for him to use LSD in the lab, because when you take a hit of acid, you're a eureka machine

'aha' moments

Tags: neuroscience, journalism

After Image, try it at home :)

Tue, 07 Apr 2009 17:00:21 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: Cool tricks...
Or perhaps it reveals a deeper sight to the way the nervous system functions; (A system with internal procedure, that correlates to the world outside, but certainly does not create an absolute representation of it...) an interesting experiment a la Maturana and Varela.

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

The Neuroscience of Yoricks's Ghost and other Afterimages

Alas! Poor Yorick. I knew him well. A fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy; he hath borne me on his back a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my afterimage he is!

Well… that’s what Hamlet would have said

you can stare at the X in Yorick’s left eye socket for about 10 to 30 seconds, then look away at a flat surface such as a piece of paper, wall, ceiling or sky, and you will see Yorick’s afterimage as a ghostly apparition

Afterimages such as this one help us to understand how neurons in various areas of the brain adapt to the visual environment

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

The monkeys turn into an afterimage of Darwin’s portrait

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

fixate your gaze on the fly in the right image for 10 to 30 seconds:

look back at the fly on the cow’s nose, and the image will appear to have a perfect color balance

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

After a few seconds, the pink dots will start to adapt and fade. As the pink dots fade, a green afterimage replaces each dot

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

long-lasting red afterimage

Clip Source: www.sciam.com

Twinkle

Unlocking the Secrets and Powers of the Brain

Sun, 01 Mar 2009 09:47:13 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: more from the discussion:
"it turns out, actually, that our brains are constructing representations for all the possible actions with all the possible objects in front of us and then tamping them down. You can see this in patients who have lost some inhibitory controls because they’ve had damage to their frontal lobes. You get what’s called utilization behaviors. You get people who, literally anytime you put a comb in front of them, will start combing their hair just because there’s a comb. They’ll use it. If you put a glass in front of them they’ll drink from it.

I think that’s probably also true of our emotional responses. There’s much more being generated and then tamped down. So one really important function our brain provides us is the ability to not act on all the possibilities that it’s generating."
interesting.

Clip Source: discovermagazine.com

Unlocking the Secrets and Powers of the Brain

Click here or on the above image to see video of the event and interviews with Zimmer and the four scientists. The transcript of the event is below.

We toss away things that are not salient.

These shortcuts help us survive

The big story of memory revealed by music

you tend to remember those things

that you have some deep emotional connection with

it is astonishingly accurate

Our ancestors discovered that if they set the words to music they were easier to remember

“Where is consciousness in the brain?”

conscious experience

like a pipe organ

These things come on and off constantly, and there’s this appearance of unity to it all, but in fact it’s each of these separate circuit systems being enabled and being expressed in a particular moment in time

Clip Source: discovermagazine.com

how vision works

a useful and healthy illusion

Social cognition is the same. We feel as if we can see what other people are thinking.

you can be pretty committed to a decision yet be unaware of it

Tags: neuroscience

Enhancing learning through brain stimulation

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 08:45:03 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: this is an exciting finding. pointing towards ways of enhancing and augmenting basic abilities. i think it ought not to remain in the confines of treating illnesses only. unless we will define unaugmented abilities as illness...

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Motor Skill Learning May Be Enhanced By Mild Brain Stimulation

Motor skills, which are used for activities from typing and driving, to sports, require practice and learning over a prolonged period of time.

During practice, the brain encodes information about how to perform the task, but even during periods of rest, the brain is still at work strengthening the memory of doing the task

This process is known as consolidation.

Subjects in this study were presented with a novel and challenging motor task, which involved squeezing a "joy stick" to play a targeting game on a computer monitor, which they practiced over five consecutive days.

one group received 20 minutes of transcranial direct current stimulation

other group received only a 30 second "sham" stimulation

In this study, Dr. Cohen and his team directed tDCS to the primary motor cortex, the part of the brain that controls movement.

the skill of the tDCS group improved significantly more that that of the control

had learned the skill better

Tags: neuroscience, electrical stimulation

Love Vaccine

Tue, 13 Jan 2009 08:59:04 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: "mouselike creatures are among the small minority of mammals — less than 5 percent — who share humans’ propensity for monogamy. When a female prairie vole’s brain is artificially infused with oxytocin, a hormone that produces some of the same neural rewards as nicotine and cocaine, she’ll quickly become attached to the nearest male. A related hormone, vasopressin, creates urges for bonding and nesting when it is injected in male voles (or naturally activated by sex). After Dr. Young found that male voles with a genetically limited vasopressin response were less likely to find mates, Swedish researchers reported that men with a similar genetic tendency were less likely to get married"

so after all it is all in the chemistry...

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Anti-Love Drug May Be Ticket to Bliss

After analyzing the brain chemistry of mammalian pair bonding — and, not incidentally, explaining humans’ peculiar erotic fascination with breasts

Clip Source: www.nature.com

Being Human: Love: Neuroscience reveals all

Poetry it is not. Nor is it particularly romantic. But reducing love to its component parts helps us to understand human sexuality, and may lead to drugs that enhance or diminish our love for another

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

we might reverse-engineer an anti-love potion, a vaccine

human love is set off by a “biochemical chain of events” that originally evolved in ancient brain circuits involving mother-child bonding

Some of our sexuality has evolved to stimulate that same oxytocin system to create female-male bonds

explain a couple of differences between humans and less monogamous mammals: females’ desire to have sex even when they are not fertile, and males’ erotic fascination with breasts

could help build long-term bonds through a “cocktail of ancient neuropeptides

It is not the dope, it's the dopamine :)

Thu, 01 Jan 2009 08:25:36 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: I think this finding is interesting in the light of the latest and fast growing body of experimental results in neuroscience; finding correlation (some are straight forward, and not very complex) of so called unique attributes to genetics and physiology. this might carry with it a fundamental perceptual change. first we learned that the earth is not the center, than we realized that the human emergence is part of a bigger continuum (evolution that is) and now we come to know that one own psyche is not unique...

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Risk takers seek thrills to compensate for less responsive brain

Researchers have found that impulsive characters are less able to react to dopamine, a substance produced naturally in the brain which triggers feelings of wellbeing and reward.

They believe that this means that these individuals must take bigger risks in order to achieve the same feelings of excitement that others get regularly.

novelty seekers have less of a particular type of dopamine receptor, which may lead them to seek out novel and exciting experiences

"We've found that the density of these dopamine autoreceptors is inversely related to an individual's interest in and desire for novel experiences,"

Previous research has shown that individuals differ in both their number of dopamine receptors and the amount of dopamine they produce, and that these differences may play a critical role in addiction.

Dopamine has long been known to play an important role in how we experience rewards from a variety of natural sources

Tags: neuroscience

SELF AWARENESS: THE LAST FRONTIER

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 12:59:13 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: Very interesting read. just one provoking thought from it:
"It is a sobering thought that the only barrier between you and others is your skin receptors!"

Clip Source: www.edge.org

SELF AWARENESS: THE LAST FRONTIER

One of the last remaining problems in science is the riddle of consciousness. The human brain—a mere lump of jelly inside your cranial vault—can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space and grapple with concepts such as zero and infinity. Even more remarkably it can ask disquieting questions about the meaning of its own existence. "Who am I" is arguably the most fundamental of all questions.

It really breaks down into two problems—the problem of qualia and the problem of the self

I have every confidence that the problem of self will be solved within the lifetimes of most readers of this essay. But not qualia.

Neurological conditions have shown that the self is not the monolithic entity it believes itself to be. It seems to consist of many components each of which can be studied individually, and the notion of one unitary self may well be an illusion

if so we need to ask how the illusion arises; was it an adaptation acquired through natural selection?

Tags: self, philosophy, neuroscience, neurology

Humans And Chimps Register Faces By Using Similar Brain Regions

Sun, 28 Dec 2008 09:17:28 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Humans And Chimps Register Faces By Using Similar Brain Regions

Chimpanzees recognize their pals by using some of the same brain regions that switch on when humans register a familiar face

The study—the first to examine brain activity in chimpanzees after they attempt to match fellow chimps' faces—offers new insight into the origin of face recognition in humans, the researchers said

"We can discover what aspects of human cognition are really unique and which are present in other animals."

examined brain activity

in five chimpanzees by using Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scans

The chimps were shown three faces, two of which were identical, while the third was of a different chimp

the chimpanzees did the same matching task with clip art images

significant face-selective activity in brain regions known to

face-processing network in humans

distinct patches of activity in a region known as the fusiform gyrus—the primary site of face-selective activity in humans—when chimps observed faces

Tags: chimps, human, evolution, neuroscience

Spotless mind?

Fri, 26 Dec 2008 10:05:04 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Spotless Mind? Unwanted Memories Might Be Erasable Without Harming Other Brain Functions

The brain acts as a computer to both store information and process that information.

in the same cells

found that a molecule known to preserve memories – PKMzeta – specifically stores complex, high-quality memories that provide detailed information about an animal's location, fears, and actions

but does not control the ability to process or express this information.

"If further work confirms this view we can expect to one day see therapies based on PKMzeta memory erasure," Dr. Fenton suggests. "Negative memory erasing not only could help people forget painful experiences, but might be useful in treating depression, general anxiety, phobias, post-traumatic stress, and addictions," he adds.

while sparing the computational function of brain

Tags: memory, neuroscience

Blindsight: Blind, yet seeing

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 09:46:09 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: Sounds fascinating...

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

Blind, Yet Seeing: The Brain’s Subconscious Visual Sense

A patient whose visual lobes in the brain were destroyed was able to navigate an obstacle course and recognize fearful faces subconsciously.

blind by two successive strokes

He zigzagged down the hall, sidestepping a garbage can, a tripod, a stack of paper and several boxes as if he could see everything clearly

most dramatic demonstration to date of so-called blindsight

the native ability to sense things using the brain’s primitive, subcortical — and entirely subconscious — visual system.

brain scans and magnetic resonance images to see the damage, finding no evidence of visual activity in the cortex

brain digests what comes through the eyes using two sets of circuits

emotional blindsight. When presented with images of fearful faces, he cringed subconsciously in the same way that almost everyone does, even though he could not consciously see the faces.

Clip Source: www.beatricedegelder.com

Clip Source: www.nytimes.com

may learn to lean more heavily on such subconscious or semiconscious systems

Tags: blindness, sight, neuroscience

Bionic sex chip

Sun, 21 Dec 2008 10:40:28 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: I think it may be more influential than meets the eye; both in the way sex is perceived and operated in society, and in boosting the augmentation revolution that is coming.

Clip Source: www.timesonline.co.uk

What a turn-on: science develops bionic sex chip

scientists are working on an electronic “sex chip” that will be able to stimulate pleasure centres in the brain.

The prospect of the chip, which could be a decade away, is emerging from progress in deep brain stimulation, in which tiny shocks from implanted electrodes are given to the brain. The technology has been used in America to treat Parkinson’s disease.

Clip Source: www.timesonline.co.uk

Stimulating this area can produce pleasure as intense as “devouring a delicious pastry”, he said.

By 2015, he predicts, micro-computers in the brain with a range of applications could be self-powered and controlled by hand-held transmitters.

ew years ago a scientist implanted such a device into the brain of a woman with a low sex drive and turned her into a very sexually active woman

She didn’t like the sudden change

We are being led to big philosophical questions by rapid technological advances

If we don’t discuss them now, they may be taking place before we can resolve the issues

Tags: computer, chip, sex, neuroscience

God Or Science?

Sat, 20 Dec 2008 12:52:48 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: It is the human need to know that gave birth to god/religion as an overall description that provides answers. it is that need that gives birth to an alternative worldview, such as science to replace the older theories.

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

God Or Science? A Belief In One Weakens Positive Feelings For The Other

After using science or God to explain such important questions, most people display a preference for one and a neutral or even negative attitude toward the other.

"It seemed to me that both science and religion as systems were very good at explaining a lot, accounting for a lot of the information that we have in our environment,"

at some point they have to conflict with each another because they can't possibly both explain everything

they were being subliminally primed immediately before each word

A 15-millisecond visual cue is too brief to register in the conscious mind, but the brief word flash did have an effect.

"On the other hand, people may have a generally positive view of science until it fails to explain the important questions. Then belief in God may be boosted to fill in the gap," she said.

A person's unconscious attitudes toward science and God may be fundamentally opposed

those views can be manipulated

Tags: science, god, religion, neuroscience

False Memory Syndrome

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 10:32:52 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus
clipper's remarks: there is the danger of false memory syndrome, defined by the Royal College of Psychiatrists as the recollection of an event that did not occur, but which the individual subsequently strongly believes. Some therapists think that adults who were abused as children but cannot recall the incident can be helped to "recover" their memory. The RCP disputes this, stating that it leads to the creation of false memories: "The evidence does not support the view that memory enhancement techniques actually enhance memory… these are powerful and dangerous methods of persuasion."

Interesting reading and thought provoking. Can we trust, that which seems so true... meaning our own mind?

Clip Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

The perils of relying on memory in court

whose version of events do you believe?

Everyone recalled a slightly different sequence of events, even when it came to such basic facts as the number of bullets fired or the clothes de Menezes was wearing

Most of us, he says, are unaware of how fallible our memories actually are.

"from the colours we see to the experiences we have. The brain is editing the information we take in even before it's laid down as a memory, and further editing takes place as the memory is formed."

memory is not a record of reality, like a video: it is a rough sample of what occurred

In one series of experiments, researchers wrote to the parents of their students, asking them to provide a shortlist of events from the pupils' childhoods. Before giving the list to the students, the scientists added a false event

A third of students not only said that they remembered the incident

but later elaborated on it and integrated it with their other childhood memories

Tags: memory, law, neuroscience

Inside The Consumer Mind

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 12:12:46 GMT

clipped by: balthazarus

Clip Source: www.sciencedaily.com

Inside The Consumer Mind: Brain Scans Reveal Choice Mechanism

shows that decision making is simplified when a consumer considers a third, less attractive option

The less appealing sweater plays the role of a "decoy" that makes the other sweater appear more pleasing than before.

the presence of a relatively unattractive option improves the choice share of the most similar, better item."

"Trade-off Aversion as an Explanation for the Attraction Effect:

Volunteers had their brains scanned while they made choices between several sets of equally appealing options as well as choice sets that included a third, somewhat less attractive option

presence of the extra, "just okay" possibility systematically increased preference for the better options

making a choice between only two, equally preferred options; subjects tended to display irritation

The presence of the third option made the choice process easier and relatively more pleasurable.

Tags: economy, neuroscience