Posts Tagged ‘Neurology’

God Damn it’s awesome to F****** swear! Didn’t need a scientific study to know that, but this is interesting nonetheless.

In fact, so good that he wondered whether there might be something to the power of profanity—a curiosity that only increased when his wife, while participating in the miracle that is childbirth, swore like a drunken sailor.

So Stevens looked into it. And he discovered that uttering profanity may actually make one better able to withstand pain. In a study published in this month’s issue of NeuroReport, he and his colleagues put that theory to the test. They asked participants to submerge their nondominant hand in ice-cold water for as long as possible (or for a maximum of 10 minutes) while either repeating a swear word or a neutral word (one that describes a table). The volume and pace used for swear words and neutral words were kept similar. Then, the researchers compared those who swore and those who didn’t to determine the effect on the length of time that participants were able to keep their hands submerged.

Subjects who swore managed an average of 40 seconds, or about a third longer than those who didn’t—evidence that a few well-placed word bombs of your choosing actually has a protective effect.

Dirty Words, Filthy Kids, and Other Surprisingly Good-for-You Vices

…even if you don’t read the article in the link, click it to watch the vid. Amazing stuff.

Chien-Te Wu and his colleagues at the Brain and Cognition Research Centre in Toulouse used a visual phenomenon called motion-induced blindness, in which a constantly rotating background causes prominent and motionless visual stimuli to disappear and reappear, as demonstrated in the video below. Fixate on the flashing green spot in the centre, and you’ll notice that the surrounding yellow spots begin to disappear and reappear after about ten seconds. Then replay the clip and focus on any of the yellow spots; you’ll see that it is a visual disappearance illusion. Exactly how it works is unclear; according to one hypothesis it is due to the properties of neurons in area V1 of the visual cortex.

The rest is here.

…is sometimes kinda cool.

Kim Delvaux was undergoing surgery to remove a brain tumor when doctors at Loyola University Hospital woke her up. Dr. Vikram Prabhu talked to her about her favorite topics — NASCAR and her kids.

“I can remember two distinct conversations,” said Delvaux, who lives in Downers Grove. “My friends can’t believe it, but it’s true.”

While she was awake, Prabhu gently probed brain tissue surrounding the tumor. If this affected Delvaux’s ability to speak or move, Prabhu would avoid those areas when he later removed the tumor. “We call these areas ‘No Fly Zones,’” he said.

The technique allows the surgeon to map out sites that are essential for speech and motor skills. Surgeons have been doing various forms of brain mapping for decades. But advances in preoperative imaging, anesthesia and surgical tools and techniques have significantly improved outcomes. Consequently, surgeons are able to remove tumors in close proximity to critical parts of the brain, and patients are experiencing fewer cognitive and motor deficits, Prabhu said.

Read the rest here.

…is the crack of the 21st Century!

OK, well, not completely. But he does raise valid points about how the brain rewards us when we find pleasant information that we like. I personally wonder, as the internet becomes more and more ingrained into our lives, how serious this addiction can be. One wonders how this could relate to gaming addiction as well, since similar neural networks would be at play.

That said, I think it’s worth qualifying this “information equals crack” meme. The brain, as we all know, is not an indiscriminate curiosity machine. Most people don’t want to know more about quantum mechanics, or the actual details of health care reform, or what’s happening in the Afghanistan presidential campaign. In other words, our craving for news tends towards the local and the personal – our curiosity is circumscribed. Why might this be? The answer, I think, has to do with the molecular details of how information triggers rewards.

This isn’t the post for another summary of computational models of dopamine activity – see here and here, if you’re interested – but suffice to say that our brain cells are finely tuned to want more information about stuff which they already know. In essence, these cells work by constantly striving to reduce their “prediction-error signal,” which is the gap between what these cells expect to happen and what actually occurs. If a monkey has been trained to get a squirt of juice everytime a bell is rung, then these dopaminergic cells quickly learn that the bell predicts the sweet reward. As a result, they want more information about that specific rewarding stimulus. What, for instance, predicts the bell? Maybe the scientist flicks a switch before ringing the bell? Or maybe he scratches his nose? Or maybe he simply enters the room? What numerous experiments have found is that our dopamine neurons aren’t interested in responding to the reward itself – instead, they want to find the first reliable bit of information that predicts the reward. This is why we crave new facts: they are means of updating our old facts, of extending our cognitive models forward in time.

The rest is here.

Disappointing – I thought this was so cool when I first read about it a few years ago. Alas, like most things in science, it’s fairly controversial depending on who you talk to, what definitions you use, ect, ect, ect…

The story of human mirror neurons is confused by frequent changes in definition. In the first papers published about them, most “mirror” neurons found in the macaque brain are merely neurons who have visual properties – they “fire” when the macaque sees movements although they are situated in motor areas. In addition to these visual properties, many of them also fire when the animal performs a movement – as one would expect in a motor area.

Now, a small percentage of these neurons investigated in the first studies also displayed a variable degree of congruence between their visual properties and their motor properties. In other words, they fired when the animal performed a gesture and when it saw the same gesture being performed. Few people cared to remark that this property of high congruence, from which “Mirror” neurons got their name, concerned only a tiny minority of actual macaque mirror neurons.

The rest is here.

…or:

Magicians utilize holes in our perception to fool us into thinking they’re preforming magical acts, when in fact it’s all fake.

But then Teller pivots so the audience can see him from the other side. He goes through the same set of motions, except this time everything is different: Much of what just transpired, the audience now perceives, was a charade, a carefully orchestrated stack of lies. He doesn’t stamp out the first cigarette—he palms it, then puts it in his ear. There is no second cigarette; it’s a pencil stub. The smoke from the first butt is real, but the lighter used on the pencil is actually a flashlight. Yet the illusion is executed so perfectly that every step looks real, even when you’re shown that it is not.

Penn and Teller demonstrate the seven basic principles of magic.

The trick is called Looks Simple, and the point is that even a puff on a cigarette, closely examined, can disintegrate into smoke and mirrors. “People take reality for granted,” Teller says shortly before stepping onstage. “Reality seems so simple. We just open our eyes and there it is. But that doesn’t mean it is simple.”

The rest is here.

…now has a neurological correlate. Everything has a neurological correlate.

Experts have pinpointed the part of the brain that guides people when they are battling with difficult moral dilemmas, according to a study.

Highly-sophisticated brain scans show that the response is linked to certain areas usually associated with primitive emotions of sex, fear and anger.

…

Professor Jeste admitted the possibility that wisdom and free will are based on the make-up of someone’s brain rather than metaphysics is unsettling.

But he said: ‘Knowledge of the underlying mechanisms in the brain could potentially lead to developing interventions for enhancing wisdom.’

The rest is here.

A thought – we can induce religious experiences with magnets, alter our perceptions with drugs, and can even give the average person idiot-savant abilities.

The nervous system is the conduit of spirituality.

Meanwhile, another FACETS group is developing simplified mathematical models that will accurately describe the complex behaviour that is being uncovered. Although the neurons could be modelled in detail, they would be far too complicated to implement either in software or hardware.

The goal is to use these models to build a ‘neural computer’ which emulates the brain. The first effort is a network of 300 neurons and half a million synapses on a single chip. The team used analogue electronics to represent the neurons and digital electronics to represent communications between them. It’s a unique combination.

The rest of the article is here.

What does a brain do when it sees a friend across the street?
Answer: It gives a brain wave.

Ok, maybe that wasn’t funny. I thought it was, so there.

From a Yahoo! News Story:

“Surprisingly, just by looking at the brain data we could predict exactly where they were in the virtual reality environment,” said Eleanor Maguire, a neuroscientist at the University College London in the U.K. “In other words, we could ‘read’ their spatial memories.”

Maguire and her colleagues focused on the hippocampus, or a small part of the brain that deals with navigation, memory recall and imagining future events. Neurons known as “place cells” activate in the hippocampus and inform people of where they are as they move around.

The rest can be found here.

Grafman started by interviewing 26 people of varying religious sentiments, breaking down their beliefs into three psychological categories: God’s perceived level of involvement in the world, God’s perceived emotions, and religious knowledge gained through doctrine or experience. Then they submitted statements based on these categories to 40 people hooked to fMRI machines.

Statements based on God’s involvement — such as “God protects one’s life” or “Life has no higher purpose” — provoked activity in brain regions associated with understanding intent. Statements of God’s emotions — such as “God is forgiving” or “the afterlife will be punishing” — stimulated regions responsible for classifying emotions and relating observed actions to oneself. Knowledge-based statements, such as “a source of creation exists” or “religions provide moral guidance,” activated linguistic processing centers.

The rest of the article can be found here.

(By the way, ignore the comment section at the bottom, unless you want your neocortex to melt. People arguing religion are like people arguing when the ‘end of days’ is going to happen – mostly just ends up being a waste of time.)