Skip to main content

Home/ Groups/ Mind & Brain
Amira .

You won't find consciousness in the brain by Ray Tallis | New Scientist 07 January 2010 - 2 views

  •  
    MOST neuroscientists, philosophers of the mind and science journalists feel the time is near when we will be able to explain the mystery of human consciousness in terms of the activity of the brain. There is, however, a vocal minority of neurosceptics who contest this orthodoxy. Among them are those who focus on claims neuroscience makes about the preciseness of correlations between indirectly observed neural activity and different mental functions, states or experiences.
Amira .

New study shows humans are on auto pilot nearly half the time by Dr. David Rock | Psych... - 5 views

  • 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.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • study how human beings experience their own moment-to-moment experience. They discovered that people have two distinct ways of interacting with the world, using two different sets of networks. One network for experiencing your experience involves what is called the "default network", which includes regions of the medial prefrontal cortex, along with memory regions such as the hippocampus. This network is called default because it becomes active when not much else is happening, and you think about yourself.
  • This is your default network in action. It's the network involved in planning, daydreaming and ruminating.This default network also become active when you think about yourself or other people, it holds together a "narrative". A narrative is a story line with characters interacting with each other over time. The brain holds vast stores of information about your own and other people's history. When the default network is active, you are thinking about your history and future and all the people you know, including yourself, and how this giant tapestry of information weaves together. In this way, in the Farb study they like to call the default network the ‘narrative' circuitry.
  • The default network is active for most of your waking moments and doesn't take much effort to operate. There's nothing wrong with this network, the point here is you don't want to limit yourself to only experiencing the world through this network. The Farb study shows there is a whole other way of experiencing experience. Scientists call this type of experience one of direct experience. When the direct experience network is active, several different brain regions become more active. This includes the insula, a region that relates to perceiving bodily sensations. The anterior cingulate cortex is also activated, which is a region central to switching your attention. When this direct experience network is activated, you are not thinking intently about the past or future, other people, or yourself, or considering much at all. Rather, you are experiencing information coming into your senses in real time. Sitting on the jetty, your attention is on the warmth of the sun on your skin, the cool breeze in your hair, and the cold beer in your hand.
  • A series of other studies has found that these two circuits, narrative and direct experience, are inversely correlated. In other words, if you think about an upcoming meeting while you wash dishes, you are more likely to overlook a broken glass and cut your hand, because the brain map involved in visual perception is less active when the narrative map is activated. You don't see as much (or hear as much, or feel as much, or sense anything as much) when you are lost in thought. Sadly, even a beer doesn't taste as good in this state.Fortunately, this scenario works both ways. When you focus your attention on incoming data, such as the feeling of the water on your hands while you wash up, it reduces activation of the narrative circuitry. This explains why, for example, if your narrative circuitry is going crazy worrying about an upcoming stressful event, it helps to take a deep breath and focus on the present moment. All your senses "come alive" at that moment.
  • Experiencing the world through the direct experience network allows you to get closer to the reality of any event. You perceive more information about events occurring around you, as well as more accurate information about these events. Noticing more real-time information makes you more flexible in how you respond to the world. You also become less imprisoned by the past, your habits, expectations or assumptions, and more able to respond to events as they unfold.
  • A study by Kirk Brown found that people high on a mindfulness scale were more aware of their unconscious processes. Additionally these people had more cognitive control, and a greater ability to shape what they do and what they say, than people lower on the mindfulness scale. If you're on the jetty in the breeze and you're someone with a good level or mindfulness, you are more likely to notice that you're missing a lovely day worrying about tonight's dinner, and focus your attention onto the warm sun instead. When you make this change in your attention, you change the functioning of your brain, and this can have a long-term impact on how your brain works too.
  •  
    Humans are mentally checked out, unhappily, nearly half the time
Amira .

You are not a self! Bodies, brains and the nature of consciousness by prof Thomas Metzi... - 3 views

  • Nobody has ever seen a will. How many grams does a will weigh? What colour does it have? We don't find a will in the brain, that's for sure. What we have is the conscious experience of having free will, of actually deliberating, wanting something, of weighing different goals against each other and so on, and that conscious experience of free will, that will be explained by science.
  • So, what makes you you?
  • you make the provocative argument that there is no such thing as a self, that there never has been, that there never will be.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Thomas Metzinger: Yes, it's actually not so provocative, it's not an original idea at all. Many philosophers, David Hume, in the Anglo Saxon universe have said that for a long time. Who am I? The physical body certainly exists, the organism exists, but organisms are not selves. I don't deny that there is a self-y feeling. I certainly feel like someone, but there is no such thing. There is neither a non-physical thing in a realm beyond the brain or the physical world that we could call a self, but there's also no thing in the brain that we must necessary call a self.
  • Of course Buddhist philosophy had that point 2,500 years ago. So the idea that, as philosophers say, the self is not a substance, that it is something that can stay and hold itself in existence, even if the body or the brain were to perish, that's not a very breathtaking and new idea. What I am interested in is to understand why we just cannot believe that this is so. We have the feeling there is an essence in us, a deepest, inner core. We have this feeling that there must be something that is just not right about neuro-scientific theories about self consciousness, there's something beyond it. And I want to understand what that deepest core is because that's the origin of the subjectivity of consciousness.
  • But the experience of looking, of being directed to one's own feelings or to one's sensory perceptions of the outside world, this is itself an image. There is nobody looking at the image, it's like the camera is part of the picture or the viewing is itself a part of the process of viewing. This is how a first-person perspective emerges in our own case, the question is, okay, if it's not a thing, if it's not something in the brain, what kind of a process is it? And I think it's a process, as philosophers say, of representing, that is of making an image, and that process is not there all the time. You know you have a conscious self in dreams, you have one in your waking life. During anaesthesia or during dreamless sleep there is no such thing as this process of self-ing, if I may call it like that.
  • The conscious self...that's what we call consciousness today. I think it's also something like a computational tool that helps us to navigate the world, like the mouse pointer that tells you 'You are here and now and you can control this and that'. And so we actually have something like a simulation of the world, and I think the amazing thing is Mother Nature has done this much better than any computer today. Millions of years ago we have this feeling of being present in the world as selves, and that's a great achievement of natural evolution and the evolution of nervous systems, but it's virtual.
  • Natasha Mitchell: So interesting. So, consciousness literally is the appearance of an inward world, but that world is a very partial representation of the material, the real world that we experience, is your suggestion.Thomas Metzinger: Right, it's just like your physics teacher perhaps told you in high school, in front of your eyes there is just a raging ocean of different wavelength mixtures, there are no coloured objects. Coloured objects are the models your brain creates of visual objects. The world model our brains create has many dimensions, it has the dimension of auditory perceptions, of sound and speech and music, of colours and smell. But it also has these gut feelings, all our body perceptions, moods, emotions, all these are parts of...it's like a thin film which creates the boundary to the world. I'm not saying there is no outside world and I'm also not saying we're not in contact with it and we don't act in the world, but just for conscious experience, how it appears to you, that is actually an inner space, that is something that is very local in your own brain. In the real world there is no self as one substantial thing. That's part of the simulation.
  • On the one hand I believe that we could have much better science and a much better science of consciousness if many of the involved researchers would do things like meditating or other practices in, say, altered states of consciousness, but as a philosopher I don't believe that in a strict sense that we can just look into our own minds and find facts there. I usually keep this completely separate, this is my private life, but I am also first a long-term meditator and just by chance in my early 20s I've had six or seven spontaneous out-of-body experiences. Nothing dramatic, just when falling asleep. They made me think a lot because I was just writing my PhD thesis on the mind/body problem and I just found out that everybody on the research frontier is a materialist...
  • Natasha Mitchell: So they locate the mind in the body and very much in the brain.Thomas Metzinger: Or to the point that they say that there has never been anything like a mind, that's the most ruthless form of eliminative materialism, as we call it.
  • for most people this only happens when they try to sit up or so, jump up, and then they suddenly really jump up and they float out and then they realise this physical body is behind them. That would be a very simple and natural out-of-body experience that hundreds of thousands of people have had on the planet. Then you suddenly have the experience that your self, your centre of thinking, of attending, is located out of your physical body for the first time and often you experience a second kind of bodily shape, an ethereal light body in which you can fly around. That is of course, or so I have claimed, the root of our belief in souls because human beings have had these experiences at all times and in all cultures, long before there was science or philosophy, and people have made theories about what could that be because it's pretty realistic, at least as realistic as your lucid dreams are. It's at least as realistic as waking life, and then you have a problem. I mean, are you going to tell people about this or are they going to send you to the psychiatrist...
  • atasha Mitchell: Exactly, you've spent many years trying to explain it, but scientifically. And in fact you describe yourself in your new book as an intrepid philosophical psychonaut. It sounds like you've tried all sorts of experiments on yourself, as well as in collaboration with scientists and their subjects. You got your surgeon to alter your anaesthetic regime when you went under surgery once.Thomas Metzinger: Yes, they were really cynical. They said, 'So young man, you've been writing your thesis about the mind/body problem. Observe yourself now!' And they knocked me out and it was very nasty, it was a very death-oriented waking up phase, there was nothing that resembled an out-of-body experience, it was in parts frightening. No special discovery there. But if you want to enhance your lucid dreaming, one thing you could do, a simple old classic, is stop drinking at noon, then stare at a glass of water just before you go to sleep in a really thirsty condition, then you place half a tablespoon of salt in your cheek and go to sleep and make a firm commitment as soon as you are there again and you realise you cannot lift it to drink, you will become aware that you're dreaming now. I can guarantee what's going to happen.
  • Full lucidity means that you become aware of your own agency, that you can control the dream world and your own body, you can go through walls or make experiments, and there are very interesting experiments. For instance, you could ask, as a philosopher, another dream figure if they actually think they have a conscious mind of their own or if they actually think they're a subsystem of your dreaming brain right now.
  • Thomas Metzinger: But more seriously what I'm of course interested in is the functional building blocks of what I call the human self model. So in the transition from the ordinary to the lucid dream, for instance, you gain all these memories you have lost, who you are in waking life, that you have had lucid dreams perhaps before, and most importantly perhaps you can control the focus of your attention, focus your own mind. I don't know if you've ever realised this but in ordinary dreams you cannot really control your attention. And then it's of course an amazing, a unique state of consciousness from a theoretical point of view because it's the only state of consciousness where you are not a naïve realist, where you actually experience everything as an internal simulation and you lose this feeling of moving in a real external world. Then you know you are moving in a simulation and you can try all kinds of things.
  • Thomas Metzinger: Because one of many elements of the conscious self I need to understand is the sense of ownership. Long before language and concepts you have the feeling 'this is me', and we also have this, for instance, in using tools. It may be very important when you use a rake or a stick for the period while you use it to actually incorporate it into your body image. What I was interested in was is there something like a global sense of ownership. Not just a feeling of owning your hand or maybe owning a thought, but owning the body as a whole, and can that be experimentally manipulated, that was the question.
  • My theory—big, unintelligible philosophical theory—says that we identify with this image of our body because we cannot recognise it as an image. And if my theory is correct, there should be just this one element of global identification and it should be easy to control it experimentally. That was the idea behind it. But I must also...one warning, the idea of global ownership for our body as whole is a dangerous idea because it introduces a second self, like a little man that does the owning.
  • what do you think was most adaptive about...most beneficial to us as a species about this unique sense of selfhood that it seems that we possess?Thomas Metzinger: Well, in general of course it's good for an animal to have a model of its own body. How fast can I run? Should I pick a fight with this guy? Or better not? How far can I jump to the next branch? How heavy am I? What are my collision properties? That was important. So I think bodily self models have been on this planet for a long time. The next invention was emotions, to know what is in your own interest and in the interest of your offspring, to have the experience of being...I guess, bonding, you say in English, to other conscious selves.
  • In your work you're also very concerned about our changing conception of consciousness with the help of neuroscience, and this is something you're very enthusiastic about, given your partnerships with scientists for many years, but you're calling for a new field of ethics, Thomas, a ethics of consciousness. What would be the focus of such an ethics and why do you see it as being so crucial?Thomas Metzinger: We do have this brand new discipline since 2002 of neuro-ethics where one investigates the ethical consequences of new technologies that come out of neuroscience, like new lie detectors, cognitive enhancers, brain implants and so on. Our image of ourselves, the image of man, of humankind, is changing faster and more dramatically then through any other scientific revolution in the past. In a way we are destroying a lot of what mankind has believed in during the last 4,000 years, but it's also clear that in this emerging vacuum neuroscience will not be able to put something new into this vacuum.
  • how will our culture actually react to a naturalistic turn in our image of man, if there's no supernatural root even in our minds anymore, and we actually have to come to terms with the fact that not only our bodies but also our minds are results of a process that had no goal, that was driven by chance events...I mean, how are we going to come to terms with this? Will we develop a culture of denial, or will we all become vulgar materialists? And I think something that could help us to take this step in integrating all this brand new knowledge and the new potentials for changing our brains and our minds technologically...
  • Thomas Metzinger: And pharmaceutically, that's what we're researching in my cognitive enhancers group...how are we going to make this historical transition in an optimal way? And I think, to put it very simply, we could do it by just thinking not only about what is a good action but what is a good state of consciousness. What states of consciousness do we want to show our children? How can neuroscience help us with optimising education? What states of consciousness are we allowed to impose, to force upon animals? Are all these experiments in, say, primate research, in consciousness research, in neuroscience ethically tenable? What states of consciousness should be illegal in our society? New drugs. What states of consciousness do we want to foster and cultivate?
  • It's also a question of preserving our dignity in the face of these sometimes very sobering discussions, and in developing a cultural response to it. Can modern science help me? It's not only about defending ourselves, it's also about what I call riding the tiger; can all this new knowledge help us to improve our autonomy, maybe also our rationality? How can I take responsibility and charge for the way I deal with my own brain? Can it help us to die better deaths? Who knows? But I think we should all, not only philosophers and scientists but all of us, start to think about what we want to do with all these new brain/mind technologies. Just looking the other way won't make it go away.
  •  
    German philosopher of mind Thomas Metzinger is one of the world's top researchers on consciousness, instrumental in its renaissance as a respectable problem for scientific enquiry. From out-of-body experiences to lucid dreaming, anarchic hand syndrome to phantom limbs, his investigations have taken him to places few dare to go. Be spooked, bewildered and amazed.
Amira .

Did Evolution of Human Imagination 50,000 Years Ago Trigger Belief in God? | The Daily ... - 1 views

  •  
    French-British anthropologist, Maurice Bloch, of the London School of Economics believes that humans alone practice religion because they're the only creatures to have evolved imagination. The development of imagination occurred at the time of the Upper Palaeolithic 'revolution' 40-50,000 years ago. Bloch challenges the popular notion that religion evolved and spread because it promoted social bonding, as has been argued by some anthropologists (Image is prehistoric rock painting from south of Spain).
Amira .

How Your Brain Creates God by Michael Brooks | New Scientist - 1 views

  •  
    It turns out that human beings have a natural inclination for religious belief, especially during hard times. Our brains effortlessly conjure up an imaginary world of spirits, gods and monsters, and the more insecure we feel, the harder it is to resist the pull of this supernatural world. It seems that our minds are finely tuned to believe in gods.
Amira .

Study shows map of brain connectivity changes during development | Physorg January 26, ... - 4 views

  • 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."
  •  
    Connected highways of nerve cells carry information to and from different areas of the brain and the rest of the nervous system. Scientists are trying to draw a complete atlas of these connections -- sometimes referred to as the "connectome" -- to gain a better understanding of how the brain functions in health and disease.
Amira .

How Expectations Speed Up Perception | Science 2.0, Feb 5, 2011 - 1 views

  • 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”
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Moreover, the measurements of EEG activity produced astonishing results. “We found that the timing of EEG activity for conscious perception changed depending on the person’s expectations”
Amira .

Religion and the Brain: A Debate | The Dana Foundation - 1 views

  • Does evolution explain why the human brain supports religious belief? Dimitrios Kapogiannis and Jordan Grafman, scientists at the National Institutes of Health, follow up on a recent scientific paper by stating that brain networks that evolved for other purposes have given rise to our capacity for religious belief and experience. Andrew Newberg, the radiologist and psychiatrist who wrote How God Changes Your Brain, takes a different approach. He argues that the brain may be an instrument of religious experience but is not necessarily the origin of that experience. Each side of the debate first wrote a position statement; the sides then exchanged statements and wrote rejoinders.
  •  
    Does evolution explain why the human brain supports religious belief? Dimitrios Kapogiannis and Jordan Grafman, scientists at the National Institutes of Health, follow up on a recent scientific paper by stating that brain networks that evolved for other purposes have given rise to our capacity for religious belief and experience. Andrew Newberg, the radiologist and psychiatrist who wrote How God Changes Your Brain, takes a different approach. He argues that the brain may be an instrument of religious experience but is not necessarily the origin of that experience. Each side of the debate first wrote a position statement; the sides then exchanged statements and wrote rejoinders.
Amira .

MoNETA: A Mind Made from Memristors | IEEE Spectrum - 1 views

  • 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.
  •  
    DARPA's new memristor-based approach to AI consists of a chip that mimics how neurons process information
Amira .

How the brain's architecture makes our view of the world unique | PhysOrg.com Dec 5, 2010 - 1 views

  •  
    Wellcome Trust scientists have shown for the first time that exactly how we see our environment depends on the size of the visual part of our brain.
Amira .

The Psychological Study of Smiling By Eric Jaffe | Association for Psychological Scienc... - 0 views

  • 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.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “People photograph each other with casual ease and remarkable frequency, usually unaware that each snapshot may capture as much about the future as it does the passing emotions of the moment,” Harker and Keltner wrote in a 2001 issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. A related study, published in a 2009 issue of Motivation and Emotion, confirmed a correlation between low-intensity smiles in youth and divorce later in life.
Amira .

Positive mood allows human brain to think more creatively | ScienceDaily (Dec. 15, 2010) - 1 views

  • "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.
  •  
    People who watch funny videos on the internet at work aren't necessarily wasting time. They may be taking advantage of the latest psychological science -- putting themselves in a good mood so they can think more creatively
Amira .

Brain's grey matter helps you introspect by Miriam Frankel | New Scientist Sep 20, 2010 - 0 views

  • 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".
Amira .

Connectome - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - 1 views

  • 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.
  •  
    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. One such effort is the Human Connectome Project, sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, whose focus is to build a network map of the human brain in healthy, living adults. Another was the successful reconstruction of all neural and synaptic connections in C. elegans
Amira .

Seeking the Connectome, a Mental Map, Slice by Slice By ASHLEE VANCE | NYTimes.com - 0 views

  • 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.”
Amira .

Exposing a Galaxy within the Brain by Emily Singer | MIT Technology Review Sep 18, 2010 - 1 views

  • 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.
  •  
    A new imaging method developed at Stanford reveals the complex array of synapses in the cortex.
Amira .

Mind - Past Adversity May Aid Emotional Recovery By Benedict Carey | NYTimes.com Jan 3,... - 0 views

  • 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.
  • “Frequency makes a difference: that is the message,” said Roxane Cohen Silver, a psychologist at the University of California, Irvine. “Each negative event a person faces leads to an attempt to cope, which forces people to learn about their own capabilities, about their support networks — to learn who their real friends are. That kind of learning, we think, is extremely valuable for subsequent coping,”
  •  
    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.
Amira .

Our Minds Are Black Boxes - Even to Ourselves | PsyBlog - 0 views

  •  
    The stories we weave about our mental processes are logically appealing but fatally flawed more often than we'd like to think.
Amira .

What the web is teaching our brains by Anastasia Stephens | The Independent - 0 views

  •  
    Spending hours on the net isn't only changing the way we work, shop and socialise. A leading neurologist says it is subtly re-wiring the way we think and behave - often for the better.
1 - 20 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page