BRAINS! Read all my ideas about brains as well as others theories
BRAINS! Read all my ideas about brains as well as others theories
If you believe that a name can have an impact on how people treat you, your future career and if you also like math you should name your daughter (or change your name) to something further down this list:
Isabella 1.21 Anna 1.04 Elizabeth 1.02 Emma 0.97 Jessica 0.93 Samantha 0.83 Sarah 0.78 Olivia 0.74 Hannah 0.70 Emily 0.68 Lauren 0.66 Ashley 0.63 Grace 0.50 Abigail 0.48 Alex 0.28
If you want your daughter to be a beautician, home maker or a monarch the names on the top of the list are fine. Something bothers me about studies like this but I'm not sure if it's just that I don't want things like this to be true or what?! Of course I can't find the article online so I don't really have anything to complain about.
Parents are being warned to think long and hard when choosing names for their babies as research has discovered that girls who are given very feminine names, such as Anna, Emma or Elizabeth, are less likely to study maths or physics after the age of 16, a remarkable study has found.Both subjects, which are traditionally seen as predominantly male, are far more popular among girls with names such as Abigail, Lauren and Ashley, which have been judged as less feminine in a linguistic test. The effect is so strong that parents can set twin daughters off on completely different career paths simply by calling them Isabella and Alex, names at either end of the spectrum. A study of 1,000 pairs of sisters in the US found that Alex was twice as likely as her twin to take maths or science at a higher level.
If I decided to change my name I'd go with Snotty Wafflefanny according to this website
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Clearly, washing your hair isn't going to have any effect since I highly doubt that your Head and Shoulders is going to sink through your scalp, through bone, through your meninges and then go straight to the source of your seizures. But hey! If you can get your local neurosurgeon to open up your scalp, do some intracranial recordings to find the source of your seizures and then massage the shampoo onto your neurons you might have some luck. Don't forget to wash, rinse and repeat!
You should probably condition those newly cleaned cells while you're in there as well.
Here's the details:
Epilepsy and other seizure disorders result when nerves excessively or inappropriately "fire" in the brain. The brain's "off" switches fail in part due to protein defects that prevent potassium from exiting nerve cells and calming them. "Channels that carry potassium," says Min Li, Ph.D., professor of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins, "must open on cue to make sure nerve cells only fire for defined periods of time."Read the comments on this post...In their studies of these channels, Li and his colleagues developed a new way of testing thousands of druglike molecules to find any that could turn the potassium switch on or off. Their approach involved chemically shaving off all the potassium channels on the cell surface and forcing the cells to make new channels. By measuring the activity of the new channels, the researchers could identify molecules that accelerated the recovery.
One chemical that proved quite effective in improving channel recovery was zinc pyrithione (ZnPy), the active ingredient in many dandruff shampoos. Li explains that ZnPy has a shape that allows it to fit into the gate region of the channel protein and allow more potassium flow. "If you think of these channels as doors on the cell's surface," Li says, "then ZnPy made this door both easier to open and stay open longer. It's like a tunable hinge that helps sticky doors swing freely."
The researchers then tested defective channels that contain the same mutations known in humans to cause mild epilepsy-like seizures in infants. Bathing cells with small amounts of ZnPy caused the mutant potassium channels to let three times as much potassium flow through, raising the possibility of restoring normal nerve cell activity.
Last week Migraines were good for fending off memory loss in middle age people. Now this week migraines are causing brain damage that potentially can lead to strokes. Pretty fair trade off eh?! Better memory for a horribly disabling stroke that might destroy your memory anyway (well... or kills you)!
Alright... here's the details:
The research, which was done in mice, also suggests giving oxygen may help reduce the damage, said Takahiro Takano, Maiken Nedergaard and colleagues at the University of Rochester in New York, working with a team at the Danish pharmaceutical group Novo Nordisk.Read the comments on this post...They studied a process called cortical spreading depression, known as CSD, a wave of changes in cells associated with migraine, stroke and head trauma.
They used a precise two-photon microscopic and oxygen sensor microelectrodes to look at the brains of live mice while they caused this process.
They saw a swelling occur and the brain cells became starved of oxygen. The nerve cells were damaged -- specifically the dendrites, the long, thin spikes that stretch from one nerve cell to another.
I wish I could see the actual data! I want to see where science fits in!
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And of course a video ;)
Brain Surgery - Scrubs Style
I really like soda, especially the kinds with lots of caffeine and sugar. However, I have minor panic attacks whenever I drink them and think about all the corn syrup and other scary junk that goes into the soda flowing through my body. On the other hand I can't stand diet sodas - whose chemicals won't make me fat and diabetic (and probably take a lot longer to insidiously wreck the body) but taste like crap.
So why do they taste like crap?!
A group from my own campus (The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), has come up with some methods to determine why diet sodas suck.
Consumers may claim they don't like diet soda because of artificial sweeteners, but Schmidt and sensory scientist Lee think people are also influenced by a subtle difference called "mouth-feel." Think body, fullness, thickness; regular soda contains high-fructose corn syrup, diet soda doesn't.What makes these scientists think mouth-feel is the culprit? For one thing, artificial sweeteners have been greatly improved and extensively studied. "Taste profiles for artificial sweeteners now closely match the one for sucrose, which humans describe as the perfect sweetness," Lee said.
But the most compelling piece of evidence is the verdict of Lee's sensory panel--12 people trained for four weeks to use a 15-point scale in order to rate the characteristics that contribute to the mouth-feel of diet and regular soda. Lee called her panelists "highly trained instruments" because they could detect significant differences in the mouth-feel of 14 samples that the scientist's super-sensitive lab instruments identified as very, very small.
Too bad they haven't found a non-toxic ingredient to replace all the bad ones in order to attain the same "mouth feel" as a regular soda.
Before I leave you with this exciting new information I thought I'd give you this last little quote;
"The human mouth cavity appears to be a super-rheometer (the lab instrument that measures viscosity or thickness)"
A mouth cavity?! sounds like the author is talking about a huge alien demon mouth ready to engulf Tokyo.
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It looks like Slate, over the next few days, is going to have a series of articles on some yummy looking neuroscience!
Here's a few details:
Welcome to "Brains!", Slate's special issue on mind science and the state of neuro-culture. Over the next few days, we'll present a series of articles about how laboratory research on the brain makes its way into our daily lives.Read the comments on this post...
Wednesday, William Saletan revisits the most compelling brain-related stories of the year, from mind-reading fMRI scans to the effects of brain damage on morality. Max Linsky heads to the local brain gym for a neurobic work out--and ends up in a battle of wits with a woman 50 years his senior. Meghan O'Rourke sits down and assesses the growing trend toward neurological self-improvement, and Brendan I. Koerner explains how Jerry Falwell and a Nobel prize-winning chemist helped make ginko biloba the top-selling brain-enhancing supplement. Finally, we ask a panel of eminent scientists--like Steven Pinker and Oliver Sacks--to explain how learning about the brain has changed the way they behave from day to day.
I'm heading out to San Francisco in a couple weeks and am looking forward to hitting up the Exploratorium! Too bad I'm going to be missing this exhibition coming in November!
Mind Opens November 9, 2007-December 31, 2008In Mind, you are the exhibit. Experience your own thoughts, feelings and
actions in provocative and unexpected ways in this major new
5000-square-foot Exploratorium exhibition featuring over 40 brand-new
interactive exhibits. In a very real sense, you¹ll discover that the
exhibits in Mind are actually within yourself.At A Sip of Conflict, for example, drink from a water fountain fashioned
from a very real but unused toilet. The tension between reason and emotion
runs high in this experience at the heart of the exhibition. At Limelight,
stand before a simulated lively audience and examine your own emotional and
cognitive reactions to being the center of attention. Combining exhibits,
activities, demonstrations, public programs, and specially commissioned
artist installations probing the mysteries of thought and emotion, this
exhibition invites you to experience -- as never before -- the workings of
your own mind. Mind is made possible by with the support of the National
Science Foundation.
For images, go to http://www.exploratorium.edu/pr/pdf/Mind_PRimages.pdf
It looks like there might be some interesting exhibits going on while I am in San Fran though! Anyone want to meet up with me to explore? Maybe I can even convince the museum to hook me up with a couple free passes for the "press" ;)
Check out what's happening while I'm in San Francisco below the fold:
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Ahh... it all makes sense now! John Wiley and Sons are the publishers of the "for Dummies" series of books - you know... Sex for Dummies, Astrology For Dummies and of course the classic The Supreme Court for Dummies. It seems that their business may be based on a couple of their own books! Particularly these:
Illustrated below...
For more on this issue, visit Shelley's page tracking the buzz, and earlier explanations.
This is just the sort of reason we're stoked to have the EFF, or Electronic Freedom Foundation, as guardians of online liberty. They do great work fighting US legal battles with companies who bully users, while the adage "information wants to be free" still echoes through the years. Every blogger owes a bit of their freedom to the EFF. They need your support, too. Donate to help fight old media bullies like the academic science press.
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Overall people with higher IQ's tend to earn a bit more income (1 IQ pt. = $202-$616 more per year) but when you factor in total wealth (I believe that how much bling you have was the measure) and how likely people were to have financial difficulties the correlations fell apart. The smart and the dumb were both equally as inept at managing their own finances. I can think of countless examples of both sides of the coin. For the idiots we have: MC Hammer, Vanilla ICE, Mike Tyson and many other entertainers (ok ok ... I know entertainers aren't necessarily idiots - but they're the easiest to make fun of here). For the smart ones we have Mozart, Mark Twain, and
Dennis Kozlowski, former CEO of Tyco, [who] received widespread attention for his decadent lifestyle, which he funded in part from the coffers of the company he ran. For his wife's 40th birthday, Kozlowski staged an extravagant $2 million party on the Italian island of Sardinia. The party featured a ice-sculpture of the Statue of David that pissed vodka. He charged the company half the bill for this orgy.Read the comments on this post...
Gestalt Isomorphism and the Primacy of Subjective Conscious Experience: A Gestalt Bubble Model by Steven Lehar Ph.D.,
Peli Lab, The Schepens Eye Research Institute.
Steve, you know something about it? (Scroll down to ch. 8.) Share? What happens inside that blue bubble is what appears to pop apart the theory.
Read the comments on this post...We all know the basic characteristics of a happy dog (well at least pizza guys and mail men know),
Ears close to the head, tense posture, and tail straight out from the body means "don't mess with me." Ears perked up, wriggly body and vigorously wagging tail means "I am sooo happy to see you!"
An article in todays NYT highlights a brand new discovery in doggy linguistics,
When dogs feel fundamentally positive about something or someone, their tails wag more to the right side of their rumps. When they have negative feelings, their tail wagging is biased to the left.
I might even read the original article! looks fun :) Here's the details:
"Asymmetric tail-wagging responses by dogs to different emotive stimuli," appeared in the March 20 issue of Current Biology. The authors are Giorgio Vallortigara, a neuroscientist at the University of Trieste in Italy, and two veterinarians, Angelo Quaranta and Marcello Siniscalchi, at the University of Bari, also in Italy.Read the comments on this post...
A list of the top most satisfying jobs was just released by the General Social Survey (GSS) at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. It seems that Psychologists have made it into the top ten - although I don't think they're talking about my field of psychology (not that I'm unsatisfied). Someone really needs to come up with a new name for clinicians or experimental psychology. Any ideas?
Anyway... here's the list:
* Clergy--87 percent percent
* Firefighters--80 percent percent
* Physical therapists--78 percent percent
* Authors--74 percent
* Special education teachers--70 percent
* Teachers--69 percent
* Education administrators--68 percent
* Painters and sculptors--67 percent
* Psychologists--67 percent
* Security and financial services salespersons--65 percent
* Operating engineers--64 percent
* Office supervisors--61 percent
Freaking hilarious! Nothing to do with the brain though - ohh well. Don't play this out loud at work - it's a bit potty mouthed. (Sorry for the autostart - I can't figure out how to not let it automatically start). And if you have thoughts about which dirty words are appropriate and which are not... head on over to Cognitive Daily for todays Casual Friday.
Does anyone have any suggestions for tomorrows Multimedia Friday? It can be reader request day or something like that ;)
And in thanks for your input I leave you with this completely unconfirmed set of results from a website reporting about a publication on nose picking:
* 8.7% claim that they have never picked their nose. (In other words, they are liars or they can't remember doing it as a kid.)
* 91% stated that they had picked their nose in the past and were still actively practicing this habit. Yet, only 49.2% of the respondents actually thought that nose-picking was common in adults.
* 9.2% rate their pickin' as "more than average."
* 25.6% actually pick their noses daily, 22.3% do it 2 to 5 times each day, and three people admitted to doing it at least hourly.
* 55.5% spent 1-5 minutes, 23.5% spent 5-15 minutes, and 0.8% (2 people) spent 15-30 minutes each day cleaning their nostrils. One lone soul claims to devote over 2 hours each day to this ritual (I'm not a doctor and I can tell you that this guy definitely has rhinotillexomania).
* 18% reported nosebleeds, while 0.8% claimed perforation of the nasal septum from their nose-picking.
* 82.8% had picked their noses to "unclog the nasal passages", 66.4% had done it to relieve discomfort or itchiness, 35.7% to avoid the unsightly appearance of a booger hanging from their nose, 34.0% for personal hygiene, and 17.2% picked out of habit. 2.1% (five people) claimed to pick solely for enjoyment. To no one's surprise, one perverted person picked his/her nose for "sexual stimulation."
* 65.1% use their index finger, 20.2% use their pinky, and 16.4% use their thumb (must have BIG nostrils to fit a thumb in) as their instrument of choice.
* Most people (90.3%) disposed of the goop in a tissue or a handkerchief, while 28.6% used the floor, and 7.6% stuck it to the furniture.
* 8% of the respondents actually ate the end product. In case you are thinking of trying this delicacy, the study claims that the pickings are quite tasty (salty).
Ok... not really but there is a great article in The Onion about some out of work scientists. Here's a snippet:
The team recently managed to secure a New Jersey state research subsidy of $2.55 by returning the empties.Read the comments on this post...McCarthy provided his Shar-Pei, Wrinkles, to serve as a control. Wrinkles was only given water to drink, though the team had to scrap one set of data due to confounding variables introduced when the control subject consumed 7.35 ounces of beer when the scientists' backs were turned.
...
Rogers and his team said they will continue their work in the burgeoning field of dog-beverage interaction."Our research raises tantalizing questions and opens the door to new areas of scientific inquiry," Rogers said. "Does Franklin like mixed drinks? Cordials, such as Kahlúa? It's all very, very exciting."
In addition to the ongoing study, Rogers said that the researchers have outlined a future experiment to study the effects of Cannabis sativa on Huang's cat, Schrödinger.
Usually we feature visual illusions since they seem to be the easiest to make and of course nearly a third to a half of our brain is dedicated to vision so we may just be more interested. In any case here are three auditory illusions from Mighty Optical Illusions.
Shepard's ascending tones (MP3) - This is a recording of Shepard's paradox synthesized by Jean-Claude Risset. Pairs of chords sound as if they are advancing up the scale, but in fact the starting pair of chords is the same as the finishing pair. If you loop this sample seamlessly then it should be impossible to tell where the sample begins and ends.
Falling bells (MP3) - This is a recording of a paradox where bells sound as if they are falling through space. As they fall their pitch seems to be getting lower, but in fact the pitch gets higher. If you loop this sample you will clearly see the pitch jump back down when the sample repeats. This reveals that the start pitch is obviously much lower than the finishing pitch.
Quickening Beat (MP3) - This recording is subtle. A drum beat sounds as if it is quickening in tempo, but the starting tempo is the same as this finishing tempo.
Enjoy!
(via boingboing)
If video games aren't to blame for the shooting, maybe it was Nietzsche! Looking for something (or someone) to blame? Here's the FBI's (laughable) take on profiling school shooters.
One method for discovering potentially violent students involves having students write about their lives as a window into their thoughts. This would have helped in some of the school shootings if the teachers had had the essays and then been able to interpret their content and style. For example, one of the shooters' work was influenced heavily by the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who is best known for having proclaimed the death of God and for calling himself an 'immoralist,' one who opposes all morality. Another suspect's writing was inspired by the musician Marilyn Manson who reportedly based his song 'Antichrist Superstar' on Nietzsche's book The Antichrist... - School Violence: Lessons Learned, Harpold and Band, FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, Sept 2001Meanwhile, an antipsychiatry pundit claims antidepressants are to blame. A Prozac massacre? (Or was it being teased as gay?) Read Columbine: Whose Fault Is It? for Marilyn Manson's view.
Best article by far is Risk factors in school shootings by Stephanie Verlinden [this was her PhD thesis topic], Michel Hersen and Jay Thomas, Clinical Psychology Review, Volume 21, Issue 1, February 2001. (Free PDF.) Very comprehensive. "In all cases, violent intentions were communicated to peers and there was an interest in weapons and targeted violence. ... There was a lack of expressed concern among those who knew the school assailants that they would act on their threats. In all cases, there was a failure of peers to report threats of serious violence and of peers, parents, and professionals to consider them seriously."
Harpold and Band suggest this to help prevent school-associated violent deaths:
...communities must send positive messages to all of their children that they are valuable and important to the community. Parents and other concerned adults must find ways to sincerely praise children, positively recognize their contributions to the community, and actively show children that they are loved and respected.
As if that's going to happen. I hate that I am cynical about it, that child abuse is so problematic. But what's the solution? Good parents are good parents without being reminded to be in news articles. Bad parents don't care, aren't getting or don't want help. So things like Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, PTSD and psychopathy continue. There were over 220 school shooting events in America in just a five-year period (94-99, *). Obviously these kids need "positive messages" they're not getting or likely to get from parents.
Hey! Had enough of analysis and negativity? Read an uplifting, inventive and brilliant novel set around a school shooting is Hey Nostradamus! by Douglas Coupland. It's his best. You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you'll stop thinking about the news for awhile.
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People like Dr. Phil and Jack Thompson feel the need to put themselves in the public eye by espousing ridiculous opinions meant to inflame people and get support for their money making endeavors. I have NO idea where these con artists get the idea that if there weren't violent video games and movies this kind of thing wouldn't happen. Was there anything like modern media around when the largest mass murder in a school happened? The Bath Disaster occurred On May 18, 1927, when
45 people, mostly children, were killed and 58 were injured when disgruntled and demented school board member Andrew Kehoe dynamited the new school building in Bath, Michigan out of revenge over his foreclosed farm due in part to the taxes required to pay for the new school.
Here's a quote from Dr. Phil on the Larry King Show:
KING: Why, though -- OK, you want to kill someone, you're crazed, you're a little nuts, girlfriend drops you, why do you kill innocent people?... Dr. McGraw, are they treatable?MCGRAW: Well, Larry, every situation is different... They're usually dead after something like this happens because the police take them out or they take themselves out. The question really is can we spot them. And the problem is we are programming these people as a society. You cannot tell me -- common sense tells you that if these kids are playing video games, where they're on a mass killing spree in a video game, it's glamorized on the big screen, it's become part of the fiber of our society. You take that and mix it with a psychopath, a sociopath or someone suffering from mental illness and add in a dose of rage, the suggestibility is too high. And we're going to have to start dealing with that. We're going to have to start addressing those issues and recognizing that the mass murders of tomorrow are the children of today that are being programmed with this massive violence overdose.
KING: Well said.
Not only did Dr. Phil and Jack Thompson make statements blaming video games for the murders - they made these statements well before the identification of the shooter.
Below the fold are some entertaining images I found in the fark forums.
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Dr. Janet Hall of Melbourne Australia has found a number of new ways to use hypnosis to 'cure' her patients phobias. These phobias are completely new to me ;)
She said one Indian woman with a sperm phobia overcame her fear in three sessions and was now pregnant.
Another woman used the therapy to successfully overcome the fear that her husband was going to be "swallowed up" during sex.
I wonder if hypnosis can cure my fear of pseudoscience?
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People giving away money:
SEATTLE -- ResearchChannel is helping to document the important work of world-class researchers while bringing that work to millions through its television and Internet platforms. The second Matching Funds Production Program will provide funding to produce videos on a range of research topics.The program enables accredited universities and nonprofit research institutions to share their research through video production, especially those that would not have sufficient funds to do so otherwise. The program aims to raise public awareness of the value of research, and contribute to and support public knowledge of, familiarity with, and thinking about major issues and discoveries that affect our lives and futures.
"We had a terrific response to our first-ever Matching Funds program last year," said Amy Philipson, executive director, ResearchChannel. "We are thrilled to offer this program again this year and look forward to bringing exciting and vital, new research developments to the public."
Deadline is Oct. 1, 2007. Details here.
Picks from their great online video library: This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession with behavioural neuroscience prof and rock star Daniel Levitan, and The Teen Brain with NIH neuroimaging child psychiatrist Jay Giedd.
Read the comments on this post...Now, in order to turn into big brains, we know the first quick way which is genetic engineering, but that needs perfecting first and will probably take another millenia, and then there is the extra long way which is natural evolution which will take some interesting courses.
First, the human brain will eventually become bigger, either the fetus or the child development of the brian. If the brain gets bigger while pregnant, theres no room and will have to be incubated by outside means… its only logical. Also, the humans will lose there hair, body size, nails and even the feet etc.. all the useless stuff(ill explain the feet later) We do not need these things to survive and theyre only a burden, except for some. (These future humans im describing kind of look like the depiction of aliens(conspiracy theory))
This will take thousands and thousands of years, but its just a theory of what is going to happen assuming genetic engineering doesnt exist.
If the brain of the fetus enlarges, then they cannot fit nor come out of the mother etc… but if the brain gets bigger due to chemical means when the child is growing, then nothing will change.
The people of the future due to evolution will have access to brain power that they dont need feet, therefore, just lose it. They can levitate or float to there destination. Sounds cool huh?
Then, they will slowly lose body mass from the bottom of their bodies upwards until theyre just floating brains who are self-sustainiing and orb looking. What do they need organs for? Psychological power is the key to the future.
This method will probably never happen due to its extremely slow process.
Crazy, isn’t it? Imagine if it does happen in the future…
Gigantic floating brains that I have been talking about must have the power of time travel, invisibility and become ethereal.
The fact that they can be ethereal is that we can touch them and not feel them and know that they’re there. Almost like invisible alternate universes and dimensions that we do not see and feel. (String theory)
Now, there can be gigantic floating brains in the room right next to you and cannot see them nor detect them by any means. Gigantic brains are capable of alot of things and is only a possibility of them in the present. The brains are probably laughing at us because they are the future of humans and we are nowhere near there.
Note that the probability of this theory is slim to none so you may think im crazy, but i try to think of things of which noone attempts or even know about.
Just like the lottery… you never know
Art Week (Ok...so its retroactive art week) continues with this strange little commercial with Salvador Dali pimping Alka Seltzer. Enjoy,
Well, I think anybody who believes in time travel is probably from the future… What do you think? Okay so. You dont see anybody with big Brains or aliens walking along the sidewalk, but the brain world is probably the super distant future. Ask people, “how do i know you’re not from the future?” This is good mind control. I bet they will find no way to elude this ultimate question.
If a big brained alien comes in front of you with a wormhole machine(i call time machines wormhole machines or time displacement machines)Go to the ultimate big brain future that i have been talking about and find out if my theory is true. There may be a small chance, but big brains floating around traveling as fast or even faster than the speed of light.I don’t know.
Researchers in at the University of New Hampshire discovered something very important recently. The show COPS is actually useful for something besides freaking out stoned kids who accidentally flip to FOX when it's on. By watching many many many episodes of COPS Mardi Kidwell, assistant professor of communication, learned that making eye contact with a panicked person is a very important way of controlling their behavior. She describes her findings in a paper entitled, "'Calm Down!': the role of gaze in the interactional management of hysteria by the police," which was recently published in Discourse Studies.
Hopefully she won't be performing any studies using Reno 911 as a model of police behavior.
Read the comments on this post...In honor of the Magic of Consciousness Symposium coming up (See below the fold for details) here's a video of Penn and Teller explaining the art of Sleight of Hand tricks.
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This story is almost useless without video - which Is why I'm posting it. Can anyone get a video of an Orangutan playing a video game? In any case... Here's the basic story:
In one game, orangutans choose identical photographs or match orangutan sounds with photos of the animals -- correct answers are rewarded with food pellets. Another game lets them draw pictures by moving their hands and other body parts around the screen. Printouts of their masterpieces are on display in the zoo.The computer games, which volunteers from IBM spent nearly 500 hours developing, test the animals' memory, reasoning and learning, spitting out sheets of data for researchers at the zoo and Atlanta's Center for Behavioral Neuroscience, a partner in the project.
By the way, the animals are in the Atlanta Zoo. So head on over and check them out! (and get some video for us!)
Read the comments on this post...The human brain, if not properly trained, can only take in only so much data. After which, it may become overloaded!
However ,
Brain research in the past five years has exposed
your unlimited brain potential. It is important to
realize that with proper training,
the brain’s full potential Is UNLIMITED
[click on image for readable full-size]
The NIMH seeks participants for a new neuroimaging study on neurodevelopmental abnormalities in the brains of blog trolls. Objective: measuring the quantity of gray matter lost by repeatedly browsing MindFreedom's web site.
It's been hard to find enrollees, so far, because those who qualify tend to sneer and shrug it off with, "NIMH? They're just pharma shills. Neuroscience is a sham, man." Subjects also have difficulty filling out the application form, claiming to be named God, giving a Yahoo newsgroup as an address, and pasting long rants about Zyprexa into the spaces provided for "birthdate" and "sex". The lone participant the NIMH has managed to recruit thus far is apparently getting along fine by screaming "pseudoscience fuckwits! ha-ha, I'll prove you all wrong!" at the lab technicians while they good-naturedly jam him into an MRI tube where a piece of rotting fish is hidden.
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...Do you know what angers me? The fact that you can’t catch up to light even if you go at a decent rate. Light will always escape from you at 3X10^8 m/s.
Anyway… back to the aliens and brains… Why aren’t aliens coming in contact with humans? My theory is that the aliens do not want to come in contact with us is because they’re from the future. They genetically shrunk in body size, lost all hair and muscle etc. and is left with a giant brain. Another way is genetic engineering to become aliens. If brain like aliens invade crap brain people, there would never be a future civilization of brained aliens, and then, the human record would say never to go back in time and invade earth filled with little brained humans when we are in the future and become aliens
Its a good idea for all of us to train our brains because it is mentally healthy and you can live forever… (im not kidding)
Since I seem to be on an art and music kick today I thought I'd highlight a pretty darn cool thing Joshua Bell did.
Cognitive Daily and The Washington Post have the real stories but here's a little snippet:
Leonard Slatkin, music director of the National Symphony Orchestra, was asked the same question. What did he think would occur, hypothetically, if one of the world's great violinists had performed incognito before a traveling rush-hour audience of 1,000-odd people?"Let's assume," Slatkin said, "that he is not recognized and just taken for granted as a street musician . . . Still, I don't think that if he's really good, he's going to go unnoticed. He'd get a larger audience in Europe . . . but, okay, out of 1,000 people, my guess is there might be 35 or 40 who will recognize the quality for what it is. Maybe 75 to 100 will stop and spend some time listening."
So, a crowd would gather?
"Oh, yes."
And how much will he make?
"About $150."
Thanks, Maestro. As it happens, this is not hypothetical. It really happened.
"How'd I do?"
We'll tell you in a minute.
"Well, who was the musician?"
Joshua Bell.
"NO!!!"
Bell made "$32 and change"
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Many famous artists and musicians have had the perception of their own art altered by abnormal physical or mental changes. Critics and historians have often credited these changes as major sources of creativity. Insanity and Drugs seem to usually be the most cited and obvious candidates but very often something a lot more vanilla, like hearing or vision loss, can have the greatest impact on an artists art.
Probably the most famous case of an artist (in this case a musician) losing the one sense that was the most important to their work is Ludwig Van Beethoven. Over the course of the last 20 years of Beethoven's life he became progressively more deaf and with this more socially isolated, being forced to carry on conversations with a little notebook. We know from his letters to family and friends that his loss of hearing was personally devastating and isolating. In one letter to Carl Amenda, in Latvia, he writes "My most prized possession, my hearing, has greatly deteriorated. When you were still with me, I already felt the symptoms but kept silent." His loss clearly had a great impact on his life:
He then writes a testament in Heiligenstadt stating that his condition has driven him to despair and suicidal thoughts. Only morality and music keep him from killing himself. He complains that his hearing condition is hopeless, and although naturally sociable, that he has had to withdraw from society. "How could I possibly admit to an infirmity in that one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession have or ever have had.... [The humiliation] drove me to despair...I would have ended my life. It was only my art that held me back."[source]
A great debate has arisen on how Beethoven's deteriorating hearing and mental health impacted his compositions, even in Beethoven's own time people were asking him about this directly but it seems that Beethoven didn't really buy that his deafness was a great source of creativity.
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...Ever wonder why the new generation of kids are smaller than their supposed to be, and their about 15 years old….
I have found an answer… Human evolution of brains! Every year from now on, human descents will shrink and shrink until they have become nothing but brains…
Brains!!
The government wants in on the action of BRAINS!! Maybe the Conspiracy theory was right… For those of you who dont know what it is.
Its a theory that the government believes that aliens do exist and are the future humans, and they want the masses to be unaware of this…
Since depictions of aliens are shown with big heads… They have BIG BRAINS!!! capable of many brainular activities. Of course the CIA have aliens in captivity, they can study their huge brains… and scientists can modify themselves and others to adapt to big brains.
This is just to speed up the shrinking process of humans… because americans always want more, faster, and better… Our road to big brains has begun and studying aliens will help us get there faster…
Maybe until our brains are so big, they’re capable of MASS Brain like Destruction….
Can’t wait. Can You? Why wait?
BRAINS!!! My ultimate theory of the future. Them scientists are going to come genetically modify humans to have super huge brains. BRAINS! Theres going to be a super secret society of scientists who genetically modify themselves to be actual super powered Brains, and theyre going to float around the earth wreaking havoc on all anti scientists…
Theyre super Brains can do about anything if theyre strong enough…Theres one lesson about bullying brain nerds… They will come back as brains and vaporize you as if you are nothing.
Some interesting findings have popped up in the most recent issue of the Archives of Neurology.
It seems that when comparing individuals who have developed Parkinson Disease with family members who have not - the people with PD are less likely to have smoked or drank coffee on a daily basis.
Check out the abstract below:
Smoking, Caffeine, and Nonsteroidal Anti-inflammatory Drugs in Families With Parkinson DiseaseDana B. Hancock, BS; Eden R. Martin, PhD; Jeffrey M. Stajich, PA-C; Rita Jewett, RN; Mark A. Stacy, MD; Burton L. Scott, PhD, MD; Jeffery M. Vance, PhD, MD; William K. Scott, PhD
Arch Neurol. 2007;64:576-580.
Objective To assess associations between Parkinson disease (PD) and putatively protective factors--smoking, caffeine (coffee, tea, and soft drinks), and nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (aspirin, ibuprofen, and naproxen).
Design Family-based case-control study.
Setting Academic medical center clinic.
Participants A total of 356 case subjects and 317 family controls who self-reported environmental exposures.
Main Outcome Measures Associations between PD and environmental measures (history, status, dosage, duration, and intensity) of smoking, coffee, caffeine, nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs, and nonaspirin nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs were examined using generalized estimating equations with an independent correlation matrix while controlling for age and sex.
Results Individuals with PD were significantly less likely to report ever smoking (odds ratio = 0.56; 95% confidence interval, 0.41-0.78). Additional measures of smoking revealed significant inverse associations with PD (P<.05) and trends in odds ratios (P<.005). Increasing intensity of coffee drinking was inversely associated with PD (test for trend P = .05). Increasing dosage (trend P = .009) and intensity (trend P = .01) of total caffeine consumption were also inversely associated, with high dosage presenting a significant inverse association for PD (odds ratio = 0.58; 95% confidence interval, 0.34-0.99). There were no significant associations between nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs and PD.
Conclusions Inverse associations of smoking and caffeine were corroborated using families with PD, thus emphasizing smoking and caffeine as important covariates to consider in genetic studies of PD.
Others have commented that the study had a small sample size and the authors don't know what exactly to make of their results - but taking up smoking is probably not the best idea to prevent it - taking up boxing might not be a good idea either. In any case I invite you to make wild, insane, crazy and completely nonsensical speculations as to the link (not that there really is one as we all know *everyone say it with me* correlation does not imply causation) between coffee, cigarettes and Parkinson Disease.
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Head on over to Neurontic for the 20th Edition of the Encephalon Blog Carnival.
Ok, I'm not really sure if kids get it right, but after all - they do have all sorts of experience with school buses. Perhaps they do get it right more than adults, after all - experience will trump age and straight up smarts most days of the week.
Here's the test:
Look at the images carefully. Which way is the bus moving?
Ok really.. the only possible answers are right and left.
The answer is below the fold...
Actually, more appropriately,
"Hey do you believe in past lives, aliens or CIA mind control?"
"yes!"
"Do get the feeling that you owe someone money?"
"yes!"
"Yeah, you owe me some money"
There's an interesting article in the March issue of Consciousness and Cognition about the link between false memories and the totally out there belief of reincarnation.
Here's the basic design and results of the study from Live Science/MSNBC
Subjects were asked to read aloud a list of 40 non-famous names, and then, after a two-hour wait, told that they were going to see a list consisting of three types of names: non-famous names they had already seen (from the earlier list), famous names, and names of non-famous people that they had not previously seen. Their task was to identify which names were famous.The researchers found that, compared to control subjects who dismissed the idea of reincarnation, past-life believers were almost twice as likely to misidentify names. In particular, their tendency was to wrongly identify as famous the non-famous names they had seen in the first task. This kind of error, called a source-monitoring error, indicates that a person has difficulty recognizing where a memory came from.
I'm assuming that people who believe they have had past lives have memories which can't be attributed to any source. The mind in turn tries to make sense of the memory - and not surprisingly when confusion arises in the brain it just makes up a bunch of stuff in order to assign the memory to some source or other - in this case a past life. Gotta love heuristics! Other options of course include Alien Abduction, God or the CIA.
I'm not so sure I buy this following statement though: "We suspect that this might be kind of a psychological buffering mechanism against the fear of death." I doubt the fear of death causes the source memory errors- it just lets the brain know what wacky source to give to the errors.
Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy writes eloquently on debating pseudoscientists:
Debunking fringe theories is usually not trivial. For example, Richard Hoagland has been making his (mistaken) claims about Mars for literally decades. The breadth and depth of his claims is astonishing! It would take forever to debunk everything he says, as it would for most pseudoscience theories. And every time you debunk one thing, they pop up with another claim, instantly ignoring that you just destroyed their last argument. This is another reason most scientists don't bother debunking wacky theories.... I took on the gist of the claims, and I don't bother with the hundreds or sometimes thousands of minor details. Destroy the foundation of their theories, and all the little claims flutter to the ground as well on their own.
But then, inevitably, the issue of a debate comes up. Nearly every major (in the loose sense of the term) pseudoscientist has challenged me to a debate at one time or another. Both McCanney and Hoagland have publicly called for me to debate them on, for example, the "Coast to Coast AM" radio show. In almost every case, I have refused.
Why?
To Hoagland's followers, the answer is obvious: I'm scared to debate him, because I know he will win. That is silly, and obviously so. If I thought I were wrong, why would I write my pages in the first place? Moreover, and this may be more pertinent: why go on C2C and talk about it? After all, there is a chance that one of the people whose theories I am trashing might call in! Clearly, there must be another explanation.
There is; read more. Or listen to an mp3 of the classic lecture Science and Pseudoscience by Imre Lakatos, with the transcript here on a memorial web site.
Among the pseudoscience out there today (hallmarks: paranoia, revolutionary, anecdotal, it's the only way, 100% cure, proprietary formulas, grandiose, expensive, medical miracle inspiration stories, poor references) is this ebook on how multiple sclerosis is a sham while the author has the real cure. For a fee, of course.
I challenge any media representative to investigate: the claims I make against medical leaders, my treatment approach, and the testimonies I supply on this website, to reveal that there is abundant medicald ocumentation which proves, the advice medical doctors and neurologists give to MS patients that lesions on the brain and irreversible deterioration of the nerve myelin sheath are responsible for the symptoms of multiple sclerosis and that the symptoms of MS cannot be overcome, is nothing short of absolute nonsense!
He goes on, and on. "I am willing to appear on any television program ..." I'm sure. But I'll heed the two scientists above and engage in debate. Instead, just a snicker at this banner. So bad it's good camp.
Dr. Phil will likely not debate either, though he and Oprah get a direct attack: "Dr Phil is completely wrong in saying: 'being overweight is nobody's fault but your own.'"
Why? Another pseudoscience cliche.
After Receiving Horrible Treatment At A Brisbane Hospital At Age Thirteen, I Am Speaking Out Loud And Clear, Against Leaders Of The Medical Profession Who Allow Pharmaceutical Drug Companies To Control The Medical Industry.Read the comments on this post...
This topic usually falls into the realm of ESP and parapsychology but there is no reason that it has to. For starters check out this snippet from a Wired article:
"It was slightly strange at first," Wächter says, "though on the bike, it was great." He started to become more aware of the peregrinations he had to make while trying to reach a destination. "I finally understood just how much roads actually wind," he says. He learned to deal with the stares he got in the library, his belt humming like a distant chain saw. Deep into the experiment, Wächter says, "I suddenly realized that my perception had shifted. I had some kind of internal map of the city in my head. I could always find my way home. Eventually, I felt I couldn't get lost, even in a completely new place."The effects of the "feelSpace belt" -- as its inventor, Osnabrück cognitive scientist Peter König, dubbed the device -- became even more profound over time. König says while he wore it he was "intuitively aware of the direction of my home or my office. I'd be waiting in line in the cafeteria and spontaneously think: I live over there." On a visit to Hamburg, about 100 miles away, he noticed that he was conscious of the direction of his hometown. Wächter felt the vibration in his dreams, moving around his waist, just like when he was awake.
Direction isn't something humans can detect innately. Some birds can, of course, and for them it's no less important than taste or smell are for us. In fact, lots of animals have cool, "extra" senses. Sunfish see polarized light. Loggerhead turtles feel Earth's magnetic field. Bonnethead sharks detect subtle changes (less than a nanovolt) in small electrical fields. And other critters have heightened versions of familiar senses -- bats hear frequencies outside our auditory range, and some insects see ultraviolet light.
Pretty cool eh? I'm not sure how legitimate this type of 'belt' is and whether the results are 'real' since I haven't seen any sort of research on this. Hey If they send me the belt I'll do some research!
In any case... I wanted to highlight a slightly less exciting but more demonstrative instance of a simple change in a task that allows us to become 'aware' of something we weren't before.
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The Assn for the Scientific Study of Consciousness announced their 2007 conference, June 22-25. It's being held at the Imperial Palace hotel on the Las Vegas strip, and features a special symposium on The Magic of Consciousness with five top magicians performing and discussing their trade.
Just as visual scientists study visual art and illusions to elucidate the workings of the visual system, so too can cognitive scientists study artists of cognitive illusions to elucidate the underpinnings of cognition. Stage magic shows are the manifestation of the deep intuition and understanding of human attention and awareness held by the accomplished magical performer. By studying magicians, and learning their techniques, researchers can hope to learn the skills necessary to manipulate attention and awareness in the lab, at a quantitative level. In this spirit, each of these performers will describe an aspect of magical technique that serves as a powerful tool to manipulate attention and/or awareness, either on a large scale (to a large audience) or a small scale (such as a card trick, or other close-up manipulation). They will demonstrate an example application of each technique, and then discuss why/how they believe the technique may work, in terms of human cognition.The presentations will be followed by 30 minutes of Q&A with the audience.
The goal of the event is to help raise awareness among ASSC delegates about the powerful tools that magicians have already developed to manipulate awareness. And the magicians themselves have also expressed their wish that the information flows both ways! The performers deeply hope to learn from the consciousness research community about new principles in cognitive science that can be exploited to entertain and amaze their audiences.
Probably change blindness is just the beginning. Sounds fun. A reader recently went to Las Vegas and left this comment at Channel N on a post with a great video on ghe neurobiology of addiction: "I JUST GOT BACK FROM LAS VEGAS BABY, I'D LOVE TO SEE WHAT KIND OF ADDICTION THAT CAUSES. I WANT A SLOT MACHINE ON EVERY CORNER STORE AND A ROULETTE TABLE IN EVERY OUTBACK STEAKHOUSE." What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, though, right? Even this symposium on secrets of stage magic illusions? We'll see.
Hat tip to The Neurocritic!
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I'm sad to report today that watching panda pornography didn't excite the two pandas enough for them to engage in kinky panda sex. Perhaps the porn built unrealistic expectations for the male panda and the girl panda didn't match his kinky panda fantasies?! Maybe they should have given the girl panda some breast implants and included another girl panda into the mix. [edit by Sandra - or maybe the girl panda doesn't need to change her body, which is fine the way it is, to conform to some artificial panda porn ideal beauty standard.]
After panda porn failed to spark amour, Thai zoo authorities turned Monday to artificial insemination in the hope of impregnating their lone female giant panda.Read the comments on this post...Authorities at the Chiang Mai Zoo in northern Thailand inseminated Lin Hui with semen from her cage-mate, Chuang Chuang, on Monday morning and will repeat the procedure on Tuesday. The artificial insemination is a last ditch effort to get Lin Hui pregnant, after videos of pandas having sex failed to entice Chuang Chuang into mating with his partner.
I've been waiting for a long time for major press to finally come around and start telling people how Baby Einstein videos or listening to Mozart isn't going to make your baby into a genius. If you have a baby and are wondering whether a certain product will help your baby become smarter, there is a good rule to follow. If it's on TV it's not going to help and if it costs more than $10 it's not going to help either. I'm sure watching these videos are probably better than kids watching random flashing colors on a TV, but come on.
Here's a snippet of an article from USA Today (Which I'd normally make fun of as a trashy newspaper but hey - lots of people read it).
"While neural connections in babies' brains grow rapidly in the early years, adults can't make newborns smarter or more successful by having them listen to Beethoven or play with Einstein-inspired blocks," says Sara Mead, a senior policy analyst with Education Sector, a centrist Washington think tank.That a baby's first three years are key for brain development is beyond dispute; scientists know that babies' brains change rapidly, growing and pruning synapses. But Mead says a few early childhood advocates have misinterpreted or misused research to suggest that if parents don't sufficiently stimulate children's brains before age 3, they'll do irreparable harm. There is no evidence that the first three years "are a singular window for growth that slams shut once children turn 3," Mead says.
She says researchers don't know enough about brain growth to say whether educational toys or lessons help: We are "far from knowing how to build a better brain."
But that hasn't stopped parents from spending billions on infant brain-building products. In 2005, the market was $2.5 billion, according to Fortune.
If you're interested in a good book about the whole making kids smarter schtick Einstein Never Used Flash Cards seems to cover the topic pretty well. (I only know this book by reputation - so no guarantees).
Here's a summary of that book from Publishers Weekly:
The new study A Feedforward Architecture Accounts for Rapid Categorization, Serre, T., A. Oliva and T. Poggio, PNAS, 2007, in press [not online yet] reveals the success of a computational version of vision modeled on the visual cortex processes of immediate recognition of objects. The feedforward model is based on what our vision perceives in the first 100-200 milliseconds of exposure in the ventral stream before cognitive feedback loops kick in. It recognized objects in a database of street scenes with reasonable accuracy and uses a learning algorithm to become better at categorizing new objects. In this study, their system was trained with exposure to images then pitted against human vision and both performed nearly the same, with over 90% accuracy for close-ups and 74% for distant views.
Thomas Serre, Tomaso Poggio and others at the Center for Biological and Computational Learning in the McGovern Institute, the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, and the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT collaborated on the system. Another new paper, Robust Object Recognition with Cortex-Like Mechanisms, Serre et al., IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, Vol 29 No 3, March 2007 [free PDF], describes the development. The feedforward model uses four layers:
- Visual processing is hierarchical, aiming to build invariance to position and scale first and then to viewpoint and other transformations.
- Along the hierarchy, the receptive fields of the neurons (i.e., the part of the visual field that could potentially elicit a response from the neuron) as well as the complexity of their optimal stimuli (i.e., the set of stimuli that elicit a response of the neuron) increases.
- The initial processing of information is feedforward (for immediate recognition tasks, i.e., when the image presentation is rapid and there is no time for eye movements or shifts of attention).
- Plasticity and learning probably occurs at all stages and certainly at the level of inferotemporal (IT) cortex and prefrontal cortex (PFC), the top-most layers of the hierarchy.
Poggio said, "We have not solved vision yet, but this model of immediate recognition may provide the skeleton of a theory of vision. The huge task in front of us is to incorporate into the model the effects of attention and top-down beliefs."
Their next goal is research on the 200-300 milliseconds after the feedforward process of immediate recognition, and a larger one is to incorporate cognitive feedback loops. The feedforward model may ultimately be useful as a front end to more complex processing systems. Bigger implications:
This new study supports a long-held hypothesis that rapid categorization happens without any feedback from cognitive or other areas of the brain. The results also indicate that the model can help neuroscientists make predictions and drive new experiments to explore brain mechanisms involved in human visual perception, cognition, and behavior. Deciphering the relative contribution of feed-forward and feedback processing may eventually help explain neuropsychological disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. The model also bridges the gap between the world of artificial intelligence (AI) and neuroscience because it may lead to better artificial vision systems and augmented sensory prostheses.
Read more.
Download the open source software with StreetScenes dataset.
More research from the MIT CBCL lab.
x-posted from Neurofuture
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Is this an April Fools Joke?!
Here's a challenge for everyone - see how many you can debunk!
1. Men's brains are larger, but as they age, they also shrink faster than women's brains.Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...2. Women's brains operate at a higher temperature, due to burning more glucose.
3. Women use more of their brains when they think.
4. In general, men are better at math and women are better at language skills. This is suggested by research on the brain that has found that the "gray matter" in men's brains is more active during thought while the "white matter" in women's brains is more active. Gray matter is the unscientific name for the part of the brain that handles information processing, and white matter is made up of the parts that network information together to understand relationships among pieces of data.
5. Perhaps due to the previous point, men tend to score an average of 5 points higher on intelligence tests. (Unknown, however, is whether such tests are geared disproportionately toward mathematical and other straightforward problem-solving, or even whether most IQ tests are created by men.)
6. The average man will think about sex approximately once a minute, while the average woman will think of sex around once every few days.
7. Why do women always want to talk? Researchers have found that connecting with another through talking will trigger the pleasure centers in a woman's brain, a high second only to an orgasm.
8. Baby girls have stronger reactions to disturbing or distressful sounds.
9. A 20-second hug will trigger the release of oxytocin in a woman's brain. The effect of this chemical will often give the woman a feeling of trust in the person hugging her.
10. Men reportedly use an average of 7,000 words a day, while women use 20,000.
I Q Mind Brain Memory Self Help Library.
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