New research conducted at The Scripps Research Institute shows that this road atlas undergoes constant revisions as the brain of a young animal develops, with new routes forming and others dropping away in a matter of hours. "We have shown that the connectome is dynamic during development, but we expect it will also change according to an individual's experience and in response to disease,"

Cline's group has been studying how experience—the different sights and sounds and other environmental cues picked up by neurons—change connections and activities in the brain through a process known as plasticity. "Based on our prior research we expected that the connectome would be dynamic," says Cline. To start to document how the connectome changes and test current models of how the map is laid out, Cline and colleagues turned to the frog Xenopus laevis. They combined two new techniques to map in great detail all the connections that form during tadpole development in an area of the brain that receives and interprets signals from the eyes. In the nervous system, information is handed from one nerve cell to another through two arms, called dendrites and axons, stretching out from opposite sides of each cell. The axon carries information away from a nerve cell, or neuron, and passes it to the dendrite of another; dendrites receive the information, which travels through the cell to the axon. The region where information is transferred from one neuron to another (and where axons and dendrites connect) is called the synapse.

Cline's study shows instead the process is not as selective. Each growing dendrite samples not one but many possible partners before selecting one with which to maintain contact. As new branches grow from dendrites, they form many immature synapses on axons. Then, as each new dendrite branch matures, most immature synapses are eliminated; the ones not eliminated mature into stable synapses. "We did not know that dendrites make so many connections that are then removed," says Cline. "It is always fun in science when you see that what was expected is not what actually happens."

The human brain works incredibly fast but visual impressions are so complex that their processing takes up to several hundred milliseconds before they enter our consciousness.  Researchers say they know why this delay may vary in length; if you already know what you are about to see, you recognize it faster.

In an experiment, participants perceived stimuli more efficiently and faster if they knew what to expect. To investigate this, the scientists showed the participants images with a background of randomly distributed dots on a monitor. During an image sequence, the distribution of the dots systematically changed such that a symbol gradually appeared. Following each image, the participants indicated if they could see the symbol by pressing a button. As soon as the symbol had appeared fully and was clearly recognizable, the scientists presented the same image sequence in reverse order, such that the symbol gradually faded again.

“Expectations based on previously acquired information apparently help to perceive the object consciously”

is called connectomics, and the neuroscientists pursuing it compare their work to early efforts in genetics. What they are doing, these scientists say, is akin to trying to crack the human genome — only this time around, they want to find how memories, personality traits and skills are stored.

“You are born with your genes, and they don’t change afterward,” said H. Sebastian Seung, a professor of computational neuroscience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is working on the computer side of connectomics. “The connectome is a product of your genes and your experiences. It’s where nature meets nurture.”

A connectome is a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain. The production and study of connectomes, known as connectomics, may range in scale from a detailed map of the full set of neurons and synapses within part or all of the nervous system of an organism to a macro scale description of the functional and structural connectivity between all cortical areas and subcortical structures. The term "connectome" is used primarily in scientific efforts to capture, map, and understand the organization of neural interactions within the brain.

It is clear that, like the genome, which is much more than just a juxtaposition of genes, the set of all neuronal connections in the brain is much more than the sum of their individual components. The genome is an entity it-self, as it is from the subtle gene interaction that [life] emerges. In a similar manner, one could consider the brain connectome, set of all neuronal connections, as one single entity, thus emphasizing the fact that the huge brain neuronal communication capacity and computational power critically relies on this subtle and incredibly complex connectivity architecture.

It will perceive its surroundings, decide which information is useful, integrate that information into the emerging structure of its reality, and in some applications, formulate plans that will ensure its survival. In other words, MoNETA will be motivated by the same drives that motivate cockroaches, cats, and humans.

It turns out that just under half the time, 46.9% to be exact, people are doing what's called 'mind wandering'. They are not focused on the outside world or the task at hand, they are looking into their own thoughts. Unfortunately, the study of 2,250 people proposes, most of this activity doesn't make us feel happy.

people report being unhappy during mind wandering.Something that we do nearly half the time makes us unhappy! No wonder there are so many spiritual and religious traditions trying to implore people to 'live in the present'.

A 2007 study called "Mindfulness meditation reveals distinct neural modes of self-reference" by Norman Farb at the University of Toronto, along with six other scientists, broke new ground in our understanding of mindfulness from a neuroscience perspective.

emotional data funnels to the brain, exciting the left anterior temporal region in particular, then smolders to the surface of the face, where two muscles, standing at attention, are roused into action: The zygomatic major, which resides in the cheek, tugs the lips upward, and the orbicularis oculi, which encircles the eye socket, squeezes the outside corners into the shape of a crow’s foot. The entire event is short — typically lasting from two-thirds of a second to four seconds — and those who witness it often respond by mirroring the action, and smiling back.

For decades, many psychologists agreed that smiles reflected a vast array of emotions rather than a universal expression of happi­ness. This belief persisted until the 1970s, when Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, psychologists at the University of California at San Francisco, captured the precise muscular coordinates behind 3,000 facial expressions in their Facial Action Coding System, known as FACS. Ekman and Friesen used their system to resurrect Duchenne’s distinction, by that time forgotten, between genuine smiles of enjoyment and other types of smiles.

Some researchers now believe that genuine smiles are not transient sparks of emotion but rather clear windows into a person’s core disposition.

"Generally, positive mood has been found to enhance creative problem solving and flexible yet careful thinking," says Ruby Nadler, a graduate student at the University of Western Ontario.

What happens in our brain when the mind is considering itself? Until now, it has been unclear what happens during a navel-gazing session. Now a team of neuroscientists has shed light on the process by identifying an area of the brain that is larger in more introspective individuals. Introspection is the act of assessing or thinking about one's own thoughts, decisions and feelings. Stephen Fleming from University College London and his colleagues were interested in how the act of introspection - thought to be a crucial component of consciousness - links to the physiology of the brain.

Individuals with a high level of introspective ability should be more confident after making a correct choice and less confident after a poor decision than people who are less good at self-reflection. After the perceptual test, the team scanned the participants' brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging to look for links between the individual's introspective ability and their brain structure. They found that people with a high introspective ability had a larger amount of grey matter in the right anterior prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain located just behind the eyes, involved in decision-making. It is thought that there are different levels of consciousness. Sometimes we are aware of mental processes, like playing the piano, while others may proceed in the absence of consciousness, like driving a car, says Fleming. Thinking about our own thoughts occurs when we are more highly aware of our own consciousness.

"I am cautious about saying that what we are measuring here is consciousness," he says. "But we might be measuring something that is required for a particular type of conscious awareness." "The study addresses an intriguing problem," says neuroscientist Alan Cowey from the University of Oxford in the UK. "The results reveal a fascinating correlation between a level of self-awareness and activity in the prefrontal cortex. They do not yet reveal the neural mechanisms that underlie introspection but that will surely follow".

The cortex of the human brain holds more than 100 trillion neural connections, or synapses, packed into a layer of tissue just 2 to 4 millimeters thick. Visualizing these densely packed units individually has proved extremely challenging. Synapses in the brain are crowded in so close together that they cannot be reliably resolved by even the best of traditional light microscopes, explains Stanford neuroscientist Stephen Smith in a press release from the university.

It is clear that with time, most people can and do psychologically recover from even devastating losses, like the death of a spouse; but reactions to the same blow vary widely, and no one can reliably predict who will move on quickly and who will lapse into longer-term despair.

The role of genes is likewise uncertain. In a paper published online Monday in The Archives of General Psychiatry, researchers at the University of Michigan who analyzed more than 50 studies concluded that variations in a single gene determine people’s susceptibility to depression following stressful events. But an earlier analysis, of fewer but similar studies, concluded that the evidence was not convincing. New research suggests that resilience may have at least as much to do with how often people have faced adversity in past as it does with who they are — their personality, their genes, for example — or what they’re facing now. That is, the number of life blows a person has taken may affect his or her mental toughness more than any other factor.

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards..." - Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Episodic memory is an autobiographical that encodes specific times, places, sensory details and context, in contrast to semantic or non-personal memory that encodes facts (like 3 + 2 = 5 or the definition of a shoe) that can deal with more abstract or representational information that now may only be distantly linked to prior experiences.

When researchers looked at the brain regions involved in looking at the past, they found many of the same regions activated in response to prompts to imagine events in the future.

“The brain is a creativity machine,” Columbia University neuroscientist Eric Kandel told his Harvard audience on Feb. 8. “We get incomplete information from the outside world, and we make a whole lot of things up. This is why the brain can be deceived so easily — because it’s guessing all the time.”

“If you remember anything about this lecture, it’s because genes in your brain will be altered,” said the Columbia University professor, who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his studies on memory. “If you remember this tomorrow, or the next day, a week later, you will have a different brain than when you walked into this lecture.”

“Memory, as you know, makes us who we are,” Kandel said. “It’s the glue that binds our mental life together. Without the unifying force of memory, we would be broken into as many fragments as there are moments in the day.”

‘Grid cells’ that act like a spatial map in the brain have been identified for the first time in humans, according to new research by UCL scientists which may help to explain how we create internal maps of new environments. The study is by a team from the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience and was funded by the Medical Research Council and the European Union. Published today in Nature, it uses brain imaging and virtual reality techniques to try to identify grid cells in the human brain. These specialised neurons are thought to be involved in spatial memory and have previously been identified in rodent brains, but evidence of them in humans has not been documented until now.

The scientists, including several at MIT, are working on technologies needed to accelerate the slow and laborious process that the C. elegans researchers originally applied to worms. With these technologies, they intend to map the connectomes of our animal cousins, and eventually perhaps even those of humans. Their results could fundamentally alter our understanding of the brain. Mapping the millions of miles of neuronal “wires” in the brain could help researchers understand how those neurons give rise to intelligence, personality and memory, says Sebastian Seung, professor of computational neuroscience at MIT. For the past three years, Seung and his students have been building tools that they hope will allow researchers to unravel some of those connections. To find connectomes, researchers will need to employ vast computing power to process images of the brain. But first, they need to teach the computers what to look for.

“Instead of specifying the details of how the computer does something, you give it an example of what you want it to do and an algorithm that tries to figure out how to do what you want,” says Jain. After the computer is trained on the human tracings, it is applied to electron micrographs that have not been traced by humans. This new technique represents the first time that computers have been effectively taught to segment any kind of images, not just neurons.

“Doing such a microscopic level of resolution seemed to be infeasible at the time,” he says. “But now I’m coming around to the idea that something like that may well be possible.” The machine learning technology that Seung and his students are developing could be “a big leap forward” in making that kind of diagram a reality, Sporns adds.