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in’s team benefited from a brain-reading technology called intra-cranial electrophysiology, or ICE, in which electrodes are positioned inside the brain itself. It’s a medical rather than a research tool, used to precisely measure electrical activity in the brains of epileptics who don’t respond to treatment.

This tested only one type of verbal cognition, cautioned Sahin, and the focus was unavoidably narrow, but it was enough to show that Broca’s area is involved not only in translating speech, but receiving it. That role was considered specific to part of the brain called Wernicke’s area. More broadly, the findings may represent a general rule for Broca’s area, and perhaps other brain regions: Each part plays multiple roles, rather than performing a single task.

You probably haven't realizd it, but as you acquire an ability – for example, the ability to read – you have actually created a system in the brain that does not exist, that's not in place, in the non-reader. It [the ability; the brain system that controls the ability] actually evolves in you as it has been acquired through experience or learning.

"There are some very useful exercises at www.BrainHQ.com that are free, and using them can give a person a better understanding of how exercising your brain can drive it in a rejuvenating direction. Using exercises at BrainHQ, most people, of any age, can drive sharp improvements in brain speed and accuracy, and thereby rewire the brain so that it again represents information in detail," he says.

Children operating in the 10th to 20th percentile of academic performance are commonly able to improve their scores to the middle or average level with 20-30 hours of intensive computer-based training. "That's a big difference for the child," he says. "It carries most children who are near the bottom of the class, on the average, to be somewhere in the middle or above average in the class. And that gives struggling children a chance to really succeed and in many cases excel in school."

What do we mean when we say someone is intelligent and is there any scientific basis for defining intelligence? These questions have been at the center of a more than century-old debate in psychology.

Although it may be practical for people to think of intelligence as something that exists, whether science should consider intelligence and how it would define it remains very controversial.

A recent study published by Hampshire et al.1 from the University of Western Ontario has looked into the brain areas that are activated by tasks that are typically used to test for intelligence. In doing so they hoped to determine if brain areas related to cognitive demands are activated altogether as demands increase during intelligence tests of various kinds, or if some areas were activated during tests for a specific intelligence domain and not for others.

The study – which provides a picture of language processing in the brain with unprecedented clarity – will be published in the October 16 issue of the journal Science.

"Two central mysteries of human brain function are addressed in this study: one, the way in which higher cognitive processes such as language are implemented in the brain and, two, the nature of what is perhaps the best-known region of the cerebral cortex, called Broca's area," said first author Ned T. Sahin, PhD, post-doctoral fellow in the UCSD Department of Radiology and Harvard University Department of Psychology.

The study demonstrates that a small piece of the brain can compute three different things at different times – within a quarter of a second – and shows that Broca's area doesn't just do one thing when processing language.

And although vitamin D is well known for promoting bone health and regulating vital calcium levels—hence its addition to milk—it does more than that. Scientists have now linked this fat-soluble nutrient’s hormonelike activity to a number of functions throughout the body, including the workings of the brain.

We know there are receptors for vitamin D throughout the central nervous system and in the hippocampus

We also know vitamin D activates and deactivates enzymes in the brain and the cerebrospinal fluid that are involved in neurotransmitter synthesis and nerve growth.

During the past 20 years or so, biological sciences have advanced to the point that scientists have begun researching biological mechanisms of brain function and suggesting some reasonably well-founded hypotheses for consciousness. Leading the way in these pioneering efforts, in my judgment, have been:   Gerald Edelman with his hypothesis of the Dynamic Core, Antonio Damasio with his concepts of  Protoself, Core Self, Autobiographical Self, Core Consciousness and Extended Consciousness, Joseph LeDoux and his emphasis on the intricacies of synapses and the emotional brain,

Rudolfo Llinás and his researches into ~40 Hz oscillations and synchronization, György Buzsáki with his discussion and exploration of neural mechanisms related to oscillation and synchronization in the neocortex and hippocampus for perception and memory, Joaquín Fuster, the world’s preeminent expert on the frontal lobes, and his concept of the "perception-action cycle," Susan Greenfield's notion of "neuronal gestalts" as a way of conceptualizing a highly variable aggregation of neurons that is temporarily recruited around a triggering epicenter. I use the neuronal gestalts idea in my way of visualizing the functionality of the dynamic core of the thalamocortical system, Eric Kandel who has explored short-term and long-term memory,

The late Francis Crick with his collaborator Christof Koch who have pursued the neural correlate of consciousness (NCC), Michael Gazzaniga with the concept of the left hemisphere ‘interpreter’ unifying consciousness experience, Edmund Rolls and Gustavo Deco with their mathematical models of brain function using information theory approaches for biologically plausible neurodynamical modeling of cognitive phenomena corroborated by brain imaging studies, David LaBerge with his discussion of the thalamocortical circuit and attention, Alan Baddeley who continues to refine his model for working memory, Philosopher John Searle who endorses the idea that consciousness is an emergent property of neural networks.

One explanation for how this occurs comes from Deborah M. Burke, a professor of psychology at Pomona College in California. Dr. Burke has done research on “tots,” those tip-of-the-tongue times when you know something but can’t quite call it to mind. Dr. Burke’s research shows that such incidents increase in part because neural connections, which receive, process and transmit information, can weaken with disuse or age.

But she also finds that if you are primed with sounds that are close to those you’re trying to remember — say someone talks about cherry pits as you try to recall Brad Pitt’s name — suddenly the lost name will pop into mind. The similarity in sounds can jump-start a limp brain connection. (It also sometimes works to silently run through the alphabet until landing on the first letter of the wayward word.)

Recently, researchers have found even more positive news. The brain, as it traverses middle age, gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. If kept in good shape, the brain can continue to build pathways that help its owner recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can.

A new study from the University of Rochester finds that there is no single advanced area of the human brain that gives it language capabilities above and beyond those of any other animal species.

Instead, humans rely on several regions of the brain, each designed to accomplish different primitive tasks, in order to make sense of a sentence.

"We're using and adapting the machinery we already have in our brains," said study coauthor Aaron Newman. "Obviously we're doing something different [from other animals], because we're able to learn language unlike any other species. But it's not because some little black box evolved specially in our brain that does only language, and nothing else."

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