BRAINS! Read all my ideas about brains as well as others theories
BRAINS! Read all my ideas about brains as well as others theories
Check out the newest events at the Exploratorium. They Sound Great!
Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (Flow/Optimal Experience Researcher)
Among Renowned Speakers To Appear
Mind Lecture Series Continues
February 2, 9, and 23, 2008
"Flow" (Optimal Experience) researcher Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (February 9) is among the renowned speakers featured in the Exploratorium's continuing Mind Lecture Series in February 2008. The series is presented in conjunction with the opening of Mind, a major new Exploratorium collection, four years in the making, made possible by the National Science Foundation. At the exhibition, visitors experience their own thoughts, feelings and actions in provocative and unexpected ways. Lectures (and the exhibition) are included in the price of admission. Advance lecture reservations are required. To reserve tickets, go to www.ticketweb.com. The Mind Lecture Series schedule for February is as follows:
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Art, Emotion and the Brain
Prize-Winning Documentary War Photographer Smith Patrick and
Assistant Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company Rob Clare
Featured in Panel Discussion Hosted by Pireeni Sundaralingam
McBean Theater, 2pm
How do artists affect our emotions? How do our emotional reactions inform art? Join prize-winning war photographer Smith Patrick, Royal Shakespeare Company director Rob Clare, film composer William Susman, and neuroscientist Pireeni Sundaralingam in a symposium on the mood-altering powers of music, drama, and visual art.
Host Pireeni Sundaralingam likes hiking around on the Nabokovian ridge where "scientific knowledge meets artistic imagination." Educated at Oxford, she has held national fellowships in both cognitive science and poetry, and was the founding director of the Number Perception Laboratory at California State University, Los Angeles.
Saturday, February 9, 2008
The Creative Person and The Creative Context
A Talk with Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
McBean Theater, 2pm
When do you feel creative? Where does creativity come from? From inkling to invention, follow the course of imagination with the foremost authority on positive psychology and flow, Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He'll review the common traits of creative people and introduce the "Systems Model" of creativity, which describes the types of environments that foster innovation.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is C.S. and D.J. Davidson Professor of Psychology and Management and Director of The Quality of Life Research Center at Claremont Graduate University. He has written several books, including the best-selling Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience and Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. He is a member of the American Academy of Education, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Leisure Sciences.
Saturday, February 23, 2008
21st Century Brain: How Neuroscience is Changing the Way We Shop, Vote, and Pay Taxes With Joshua Freedman -- UCLA Psychiatry Professor
Panel Discussion Hosted by Pireeni Sundaralingam
McBean Theater, 2pm
What makes us choose one beauty product over another, or one presidential candidate over another? How free is our free will in the 21st century? Dr. Joshua Freedman of FKF Applied Research and Hans Lee of EmSense join neuroscientist Pireeni Sundaralingam to examine how retail companies, economic think tanks, and political campaign organizers use neuroscience to change the ways we think and feel.
Host Pireeni Sundaralingam likes hiking around on the Nabokovian ridge where "scientific knowledge meets artistic imagination." Educated at Oxford, she has held national fellowships in both cognitive science and poetry, and was the founding director of the Number Perception Laboratory at California State University, Los Angeles
# # #
Read the comments on this post...Friday February 1st is the final day for you to submit your wonderful ideas for the name of the news ScienceBlogs super blog started by Shelley of Retrospectacle and Steve Higgins of Omni Brain (me!). So get out those thinking caps and submit some great ideas right here.
Here's some guidelines from Shelley:
We're holding a contest to Name That Blog, with the winner receiving a slew of recent science books, a subscription to SEED, and a host of other sciency prizes. Plus my eternal love and adoration! The blog will be general wonderful science stuff with a neuroscience slant, so feel free to be creative as hell with the naming. Leave ideas in the comments here, or email them to me. Since there is a prize please be sure to let me know how to contact you in case you win. Multiple entries are fine! Thanks and good luck!Read the comments on this post...
The Super Bowl is all about chips and dip - so be careful. It could kill you!
If you're a Seinfeld watcher you probably remember this scene:
TIMMY: What are you doing?
GEORGE: What?
TIMMY: Did...did you just double-dip that chip?
GEORGE: Excuse me?
TIMMY: You double-dipped the chip!
GEORGE: "Double-dipped"? What are you talking about?
TIMMY: You dipped the chip. You took a bite.
And you dipped again. GEORGE: So...?
TIMMY: That's like putting your whole mouth right in the dip! From now on, when you take a chip - just take one dip and end it!
GEORGE: Well, I'm sorry, Timmy...but I don't dip that way.
TIMMY: Oh, you don't, huh?
GEORGE: No.
You dip the way you want to dip... I'll dip the way I want to dip. TIMMY: Gimme the chip!
Gimme the chip!
And the video:
Timmy is clearly onto something with this. According to research by Judith Trevino, Brad Ballieu, Rachel Yost, Samantha Danna, Genevieve Harris, Jacklyn Dejonckheere , Danielle Dimitroff, Mark Philips from the Deptartment of Food Science & Human Nutrition at Clemson University, "Double-dipping does transfer bacteria: George was wrong!"
I'm imagining doing this experiment right now and giggling to myself. Basically the bacteria levels of each students mouth were measured and then
Each student in the CI team conducted four treatments. For the dipping treatments, a cracker was bitten, dipped in the sterile water then discarded (Figure 1). The control treatments consisted of dipping a cracker without biting. The four treatments were: 3 dips without biting, 6 dips without biting, 3 dips with biting, and 6 dips with biting.After all the dipping and letting stuff sit around for a while they measured the bacteria levels in the sterile water.
Unsurprisingly they found that
For the "double dipping" experiment, a higher population of bacteria ( P?0.05)was found in solutions dipped with crackers after biting compared to solutions dipped without biting (Figure 3). There was no difference between the 3 and 6 dips (P>0.05) as far a bacteria transferred to the dipping solution. Bacterial populations found in the solution after crackers were dipped without biting were less than 10 cfu per ml of the dipping solution. The results of our research proved that bacteria can be transferred from the mouth to the dip.
If you're interested in more details you can Download the poster right here.
Have a happy and healthy Super Bowl - don't forget to only dip once!
HT:Brian L
Read the comments on this post...I started Omni Brain over two years ago on Blogger and eventually gained a number of co-bloggers that have come and gone, most notably Sandra. About a year ago we were invited to blog at ScienceBlogs which is really the ideal place to be for a science blogger. I've had a great run here on Omni Brain but I believe it is time to move on to bigger and better things. So a couple weeks from now a new blog is going to appear - a super blog ;)
Shelley Batts from Retrospectacle is going to join me in this wonderful new adventure in blogging. We'll still be here at ScienceBlogs but just under a new name. But that's actually the catch - We need a new name! Which is where you come in...
In the words of Shelley:
We're holding a contest to Name That Blog, with the winner receiving a slew of recent science books, a subscription to SEED, and a host of other sciency prizes. Plus my eternal love and adoration! The blog will be general wonderful science stuff with a neuroscience slant, so feel free to be creative as hell with the naming. Leave ideas in the comments here, or email them to me. Since there is a prize please be sure to let me know how to contact you in case you win. Multiple entries are fine! Thanks and good luck!
Any good ideas?
Read the comments on this post...Do it! In the address book: 4971 9184 7926 5393
We can share Mii's and stuff!
Read the comments on this post...Reading Thoughts by RadioCan thoughts be read by radio? "Madam Radora" seems to prove that they can. Madam is not a human being, but a life-size automaton shown at the Permanent Radio Fair in New York. Her "thoughts" and movements are controlled entirely by wireless; no wires of any kind are attached to the table whereon she rests, and a liberal reward is promised the person who can prove that this is not true. Persons desiring to ask questions simply stand before "Madam Radora" with their hands resting on a special pedestal carrying a number of electrical contacts. Radora then bends over her crystal, and answers the questions put to her in a clear, feminine voice.
So what do you guys think this is? What exactly is going on?
Read the comments on this post...If I only had a brain:
According to this highly intelligible comment from YouTube this song was featured on Beavis and Butthead - surprise surprise!
Read the comments on this post...
DaDrizzL31214 (2 weeks ago)
On Beavis and Butthead, they were waatching this vid and Beavis started going with the tune for the whole song. He wouldn't shut the hell up even after Butthead smacked him upside his head a couple of times. Lol then Butthead started doing the same at the end. XD
For all of you Illusion Junkies out there:
**** THE FOURTH ANNUAL BEST VISUAL ILLUSION OF THE YEAR CONTEST**** http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com*** We are happy to announce the world's 4th Annual Best Visual Illusion of
the Year Contest!!*** The deadline for illusion submissions is February
15th, 2008!The 2008 contest will be hosted by Stuart Anstis and held in Naples, Florida
(Naples Philharmonic Center for the Arts, http://www.thephil.org) on Sunday,
May 11th, 2008, during the week of the Vision Sciences Society conference
(VSS). The Naples Philharmonic Center is an 8-minute walk from the main VSS
headquarters hotel in Naples, and is thus central to the VSS conference.The 2007 annual contest, held in Sarasota, Florida, drew numerous accolades
from attendees and international media coverage, as well as over *** ONE
MILLION*** website hits from viewers all over the world. The First, Second
and Third Prize winners were Frederick Kingdom, Ali Yoonessi and Elena
Gheorghiu (McGill University, Canada), Pietro Guardini and Luciano Gamberini
(University of Padova, Italy), and Arthur Shapiro and Emily Knight (Bucknell
University, USA). To see the illusions, photo galleries and other highlights
from the 2007 contest, go to http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.comVisual Illusion Contestants are invited to submit novel visual or multimodal
illusions (unpublished, or published no earlier than 2007) in standard
image, movie or html formats. An international panel of impartial judges
will rate the submissions and narrow them to the TOP TEN. Then, at the
Contest Gala in Naples, the TOP TEN illusionists will present their
contributions and the attendees of the event (that means you!) will vote to
pick the TOP THREE WINNERS!The renowned sculptor and artist, Guido Moretti, has created three amazing
works of art to serve as trophies for the TOP THREE winners!See the trophies at:
http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.com/index.php?module=pagemaster&PAGE_
user_op=view_page&PAGE_id=98&MMN_position=41:41Illusions submitted to previous editions of the contest can be re-submitted
to the 2008 contest, as long as they meet the above requirements and were
not among the top three winners in previous years.Submissions will be held in strict confidence by the panel of judges and the
authors/creators will retain full copyright. No illusions will be posted on
the illusion contest's website without the creators' explicit permission. As
with submitting your work to any scientific conference, participating in the
Best Illusion of the Year Contest does not preclude you from also submitting
your work for publication elsewhere.Submissions can be made to Dr. Susana Martinez-Conde (Illusion Contest
Coordinator, Neural Correlate Society) via email (smart@neuralcorrelate.com)
until February 15, 2008. Illusion submissions should come with a (no more
than) one-page description of the illusion and its theoretical underpinnings
(if known). Illusions will be rated according to:* Significance to our understanding of the visual system
* Simplicity of the description
* Sheer beauty
* Counterintuitive quality
* SpectacularityVisit the illusion contest website for further information and to see last
year's illusions: http://illusioncontest.neuralcorrelate.comSubmit your ideas now and take home this prestigious award!
I'll actually be at this conference this year so perhaps I can live blog the awards :)
Read the comments on this post...Check out this fark photoshop contest using neurons. Here's one of my favorites:
I'm sure it's a rough life being a clown, you know... driving a clown car with 18 other passengers in the driver seat alone, walking and tripping around with those really big shoes, and hours of makeup application. But their job is about to get a lot harder, a new study in a nursing journal shows that kids are terrified of clowns.
A poll by researchers looking at what decor to put in hospital children's wards found that youngsters do not like clowns on the walls and even older ones think they are scary."We found that clowns are universally disliked by children. Some found them quite frightening and unknowable," said Penny Curtis, senior researcher at the University of Sheffield which questioned 250 children aged between four and 16.
But their findings, published in a nursing magazine on Wednesday, has put the red noses of the clowning community out of joint.
In a deluge of emails to Reuters, they say they misrepresent just how popular they really are.
I'm with the survey participants - keep those clowns away from me! Creeeepy. If you're freaked out by clowns you might want to head over to ihateclowns.com.
Read the comments on this post...Ahh.... an animated brain on drugs - how could it get any better?!
Just a short note via Sports Illustrated:
Georgia football legend Herschel Walker is expected to reveal in an upcoming book that he has multiple personalities -- a revelation that surprises the man who coached the 1982 Heisman Trophy winner.
...
"Breaking Free" will chronicle Walker's life with multiple personality disorder, according to Shida Carr, the book's publicist at Simon & Schuster.Carr said the book will be published in August, but gave no other details and declined to provide excerpts.
I wonder whether this developed after football? I'm curious to see the book when it comes out. Of course many in the mental health field don't buy dissociative personality disorder. But we'll give Herschel Walker a pass since he did win the Heisman Trophy.
Read the comments on this post...According to Nicholas Epley from the University of Chicago:
"Biological reproduction is not a very efficient way to alleviate one's loneliness, but you can make up people when you're motivated to do so," said Nicholas Epley, Assistant Professor of Behavioral Science at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business. "When people lack a sense of connection with other people, they are more likely to see their pets, gadgets or gods as human-like."
In his experiments he showed that the lonelier a person was the more likely they were to believe in supernatural entities such as God, angels, etc. They were also more likely to attribute human characteristics to their pets, such as thoughfulness or compassion. This effect seems to be specific to feelings of loneliness, not just any negative state. For example fear did not produce similar patterns of results.
So what's this all about?!
Loneliness is both painful to experience and potentially deadly. "It's actually a greater risk for morbidity or mortality than cigarette smoking is. Being lonely is a bad thing for you," he said.But anthropomorphizing pets or God may actually confer many of the same psychological and physical benefits that come from connections with other people. The same benefits may not apply to gadgets, which were a component of Epley's studies.
"Non-human connections can be very powerful," Epley said. "A brain's not so sensitive to whether it's a person or not. If it's something that has a lot of traits associated with what it means to be a human, then all the better for us, it seems."
The study also provides insight into the flip side of anthropomorphism: dehumanization. People who enjoy a strong sense of social connection are less likely to perceive humanlike mental states in people who seem different from them. Classic examples occur during times of war, during which a strong sense of nationalism or group identity tend to emerge.
"It may be that strong in-group identity is one of the things that facilitates dehumanizing the opposing side," Epley said.
-Via EurekAlert-
Read the comments on this post...Don't play any of the embedded videos if you've ever had a seizure.
Now that we're done with the warning...
We've all heard of the Pokemon incident in Japan where nearly 700 school aged children were admitted to the hospital with "convulsions, vomiting, irritated eyes and other symptoms" common to epilepsy. This lead to a number of government investigations and media companies searching their offerings to determine whether any of their shows had similar scenes that might induce photosensitive epilepsy. According to a CNN report of the incidents:
Dr. Yukio Fukuyama, a juvenile epilepsy expert, said that "television epilepsy" can be triggered by flashing, colorful lights. Though the phenomenon was observed before television, photosensitive epilepsy, as it is also called, has become far more common as TV has spread. The same symptoms have also been observed in children playing video games.
It is relatively rare for epileptics to be the photosensitive type, and according to Wikipedia only between three and five percent of epileptics are of the photosensitive type. In the general population only about two people per 10,000 are epileptic. Epilepsy peaks in puberty, so it is relatively rare for adults to present with epilepsy, especially photosensitive epilepsy. So if you are an adult with no history of epilepsy you'll probably be safe watching the famous Pokemon Epilepsy Episode. If you're a teen, perhaps you should watch this with a parent. After all you're better off knowing if you have photosensitive epilepsy in a safe environment with a caretaker. You don't want to be walking down the street and then suddenly wake up in a hospital with your head busted open (It happened to a friend of mine - so I know it's possible!)
As soon as I heard about this effect back in college I went looking for the video but YouTube just wasn't available then so I had to wait until recently to see the Pokemon Epilepsy Episode. So here it is:
In addition to Pokemon there have been a number of other incidents on TV, Dragonball Z as well as a London Olympics 2012 ad campaign have been reported to have caused a number of seizures. Of course there a number of things that can induce seizure in people, annoying spouses, mother-in-laws (kidding about those I hope), and of course seizures can occur for no reason many many times a day. Now there is one more way to induce a seizure for one woman. The song Temperature by Sean Paul has been reported to induce seizures in a Canadian woman. Before I we continue with the story here's the song we're talking about (Warning: If you don't like crappy music you should probably not listen to this!)
-Via Modern Mechanix-
Or course you could always get a pair of 0.50$ ear plugs, but hey if you've got the money ;)
Read the comments on this post...This has to be the coolest face out of art I've ever seen.
-Via Neatorama-
Read the comments on this post...
The memory-evaluation study, headed by Dr. Franklin McCarroll of New York University's School of Psychology, revealed that approximately 47 percent of Jenkins' hippocampus is dedicated to storing notable video-game victories and frustrating last-minute defeats, while 32 percent of his amygdala contains embedded neurological scripts pertaining to game strategies, character back stories, theme songs, and cheat codes. In addition, his entire dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is devoted to remembering the time he did a helicopter dunk from half-court with Shawn Kemp at the buzzer to beat the Charlotte Hornets 82-81 in NBA Jam: Tournament Edition.
Amazing huh? Too bad it's not true since it's from The Onion. However, they might be onto something... As a recent post at Mind Hacks reports London Taxi drivers had larger Hippocampi the longer they were on the job. So the question is, do video game players who play first person shooters have larger hippocampi than those who play sports games?
Read the comments on this post...This is a good collection of illusions, some of which I haven't seen before. I'm not so sure why they had to include a stupidtramp sound track though.
Here's another collection with some overlap and a techno soundtrack:
Unsurprisingly the James Randi Educational Foundation has had a problem giving away their million dollar prize to someone who could demonstrate scientifically under controlled circumstances that they could perform some sort of paranormal ability. They aren't even that specific on what kind of paranormal ability it has to be. It could be ESP, telekinesis, talking to ghosts, oh hell even showing the existence of a ghost - no talking needed. Many have stepped up, usually confused individuals, but none have been able to claim the prize. For some strange reason no big name has stepped up to try their luck. Hmm... weird! It's almost as if they didn't want their abilities to be disproved since they make their money from lying to people.. hmpf...
In any case, since this cool 1,000,000 dollars is just sitting around not doing anything (or even have the chance to ever do anything) for the James Randi Foundation they decided to discontinue the challenge to free the money for more worthwhile pursuits. Here's the details:
As of March 6th, 2010 - twelve years after the challenge was first offered - it will be.The James Randi Educational Foundation Million-Dollar Challenge will be discontinued 24 months from this coming March 6th, and those prize funds will then be available to generally add to our flexibility. This move will free us to do many more projects, which will be announced at that time.
This means that all those wishing to be claimants are required to get their applications in before the deadline, properly filled out and notarized as described in the published rules.
Now, we're sure that there will be those who will offer all kinds of objections to this decision - though they could have simply applied and won the prize. There will be accusations that the JREF is concerned about the safety of the prize money - which was never any sort of concern, I can assure you - and there will be more claims that the money was never there in the first place. I can see the professionals out there sighing in relief that they no longer have to answer questions about why they won't take the prize, and they'll just wait out the remaining period that the prize is available. All that's to be expected.
Ten years is long enough to wait. The hundreds of poorly-constructed applications, and the endless hours of phone, e-mail, and in-person discussions we've had to suffer through, will be things of the past, for us at the JREF.
Those who believe they have mystic powers now have two full years to apply... Let's see what happens.
So don't worry! You still have a full two years to waste the foundations time showing them you're amazing! paranormal abilities.
-via boingboing-
Read the comments on this post...
It's a new year, bringing new changes. I've decided to quit Omni Brain and move on to less important things, like creating baffling and somewhat offensive art and writing more books that I won't want anyone to read. It's been fun to be here, though. I'm grateful to Steve for being a terrific co-blogger, thankful to ScienceBlogs for hosting, and am glad we've all shared lots of laughs.
There's been plenty of silliness and also some seriousness. On pondering what to write in a farewell post, it seems appropriate to share a piece of writing I never really knew what to do with. It exposes the fragmented angles comprising the mental health field. So un-funny that it's absurdly funny; none of the factions involved would publish it and concede to some of the other points of view. Grey in a B&W world is near invisible.
Thanks for the lolz! Bye!
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...Some scientists seem to think so. Check out this comparison between a sagittal section of a brain and this piece of art:
Partly as a joke to entertain sceptical colleagues, he and the team went on a brain trawl, and found many other examples. The team is convinced the artists were fascinated by the scientific discoveries being made by anatomists, but their theories had to be concealed in the imagery of their paintings, particularly when their clients were so often senior clergy who might see their scientific interests as blasphemous or even heretical, an offence punishable by death. The study, Brain imaging in the Renaissance, features in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine.
I'm not sure if I buy their explanation but hey it's pretty cool either way.
-Via Mind Hacks-
Read the comments on this post..."A thrilling documentary covering the origins and troubles surrounding the severe disease, Brain Freeze [a.k.a. Iceberger's Syndrome]." Link.
Read the comments on this post...
The mind is a complicated and a still very much unknown entity. The earliest conceptions of the mind didn't even have it placed in the brain, instead it was very much separate from the body. More recently some philosophers have declared that it is an emergent property of the brain and that it is not the sum of its biological parts. This is of course all very silly, the only possibility is that the mind wholly and completely resides in the neural system and that system is responsible for every aspect of the mind, from perception, to language, and even for experiencing the presence of a higher power.
With all of these misperceptions of the mind it isn't surprising that people could think that this emergent mind of ours could interact with other minds, so much so that they could actually communicate with each other. Among all of the psychic phenomena Extra Sensory Perception (ESP) has had the longest and most fruitful history of experimentation, so successful in fact that a number of psychology departments have divisions or faculty members studying this phenomena as well as the military and CIA spending millions of dollars training psychic spies during the cold war. This was also the job of the Ghost Busters before they got fired from their academic positions and entered the ghost extermination business. Some of these researchers (not just in the movies) even have evidence to 'prove' that ESP exists!
The most common method to study ESP is by using a Ganzfeld experiment. This experiment usually consists of placing half of a ping pong ball over each eye and shining a colored light onto it in order to create a single color visual field which essentially deprives the subject of useful vision (note that this is different than making a room dark since the eyes/brain are actually being stimulated). Pink or White noise is also played to the ESP receiving subject to accomplish the same goal as the visual noise - to put them in a state of isolation, readying them to receive psychic messages. Once this person is in the correct receiving state a person in another room will be given an image and asked to mentally transmit it to the receiver. This might go a little something like this:
Clearly Billy Murray isn't using proper experimental protocols but you get the point ;)
Read the rest of this post... | Read the comments on this post...
After reading well over 400 blog submissions for the second edition of the "Open Laboratory" the judges have finally whittled the list to the best 51 to be included in the book. Surprisingly, one of the Omni Brain posts has made it into the anthology - I think perhaps one of the only serious blog posts I've written this year.
The winning list has a great variety of wonderful posts from a great variety of blogs, some of which I have never heard of. So head over to A Blog Around The Clock for the winning list and links to all of the great articles.
Read the comments on this post...
I Q Mind Brain Memory Self Help Library.
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