Neuropsychology

This week, engineer Adam Wilson made global headlines by updating Twitter using his brainwaves. "USING EEG TO SEND TWEET" he explained.

Compatible with any PC running Windows, it will ship later this year for $299 (see image). They have shown off a game where the player moves stones to rebuild Stonehenge using mind power alone (see video).

Escaping the lab Researchers have developed systems that read brainwaves – in the form of electroencephalogram (EEG) signals – in order to help people suffering from disabilities or paralysis control wheelchairs, play games , or type on a computer. Now, two companies are preparing to market similar devices to mainstream consumers.

If you're taking a test of rote memorization, like words from a list, move your eyes from side to side for about 30 seconds before you start.

It may be that this quick activity helps facilitate interaction between the brain hemispheres.

any activity that encourages communication between the hemispheres is likely to increase recall.

A surprising consequence of neuroplasticity is that the brain activity associated with a given function can move to a different location as a consequence of normal experience, brain damage or recovery.

The brain compensates for damage by reorganizing and forming new connections between intact neurons. In order to reconnect, the neurons need to be stimulated through activity.

Research has shown that in fact the brain never stops changing through learning. Plasticity IS the capacity of the brain to change with learning. Changes associated with learning occur mostly at the level of the connections between neurons. New connections can form and the internal structure of the existing synapses can change.

But there has been one major payoff from our investigations of the brain: an increasing emphasis on educating young children, before they reach kindergarten. Decades of research have demonstrated that the cortex is astonishingly plastic at a young age and that many important traits and habits seem to solidify before the age of 4.

With the right training, scientists now know the brain can reshape itself to work around dead and damaged areas, often with dramatic benefits.

Therapies that exploit the brain's power to adapt have helped people overcome damage caused by strokes, depression, anxiety and learning disabilities, and may one day replace drugs for some of these conditions.

Children with language difficulties have been shown to make significant progress using computer training tools that are the equivalent of cerebral cross-training.

Our research findings provide a direct functional link between the bursting activity of midbrain dopamine neurons and behavior. The research has significant applications for the improvement of health, because the dopamine neurons we are studying are the same neurons that become inactivated during Parkinson's Disease and with the consumption of psychostimulants such as cocaine and amphetamine

Midbrain dopamine neurons fire in two characteristic modes, tonic and phasic, which are thought to modulate distinct aspects of behavior. When an unexpected reward is presented to an individual, midbrain dopamine neurons fire high frequency bursts of electrical activity. Those bursts of activity allow us to learn to associate the reward with cues in our environment, which may predict similar rewards in the future.

When researchers placed the mice in reward-based situations, they found that the mice without the NMDA receptor in their dopaminergic neurons could not learn tasks that required them to associate sensory cues with reward. Those same mice, however, were able to learn tasks that did not involve an association with rewards.

So instead of promoting retirement at age 65, perhaps we as a society should be promoting transition at age 65: transition into a creative field where our growing resource of individuals with aging brains can preserve their wisdom in culturally-valued works of art, music, or writing.

Numerous studies suggest that highly creative individuals also employ a broadened rather than focused state of attention. This state of widened attention allows the individual to have disparate bits of information in mind at the same time. Combining remote bits of information is the hallmark of the creative idea.

Other studies show that certain areas of the prefrontal cortex involved in self-conscious awareness and emotions are thinner in the aging brain. This may correlate with the diminished need to please and impress others, which is a notable characteristic of both aging individuals and creative luminaries.

Pero al filosofo Camilo Jose Cela Conde le ha sorprendido hallar diferencias de genero en la percepcion de la belleza.

Parece ser que los hombres utilizan el hemisferio derecho durante la contemplacion de imagenes consideradas como esteticamente placenteras mientras que las mujeres utilizan el conjunto del cerebro.

A Northwestern research group has found that people that solve anagram puzzles by sudden insight rather than by conscious search or analytic strategies have an EEG resting state that prefers the right over the left hemisphere.

How often it does seem that it's the highly creative child who is having the greatest struggles in the conventional classroom! It's nice finding research that backs up the association. From this Harvard study, a diffuse attentional style was much more common among individuals with high lifetime levels of creative achievement.

The study concludes with a final interesting finding that differences in this attentional style might account for why high IQ beyond a certain point doesn't correlate with higher levels of creative achievement (the threshold effect...e.g. that once one is beyond 120, higher numbers don't correlate with enhanced achievement). If a focused vs. diffuse attentional style is taken into account, then it becomes more evident that diffuse attentional style + high IQ are important factors that contribute to high levels of creative achievement.

Increasing evidence has shown that, in animal stroke models, administering melatonin significantly reduces infarct volume, edema, and oxidative damage and improves electrophysiological and behavioral performance.

Given that melatonin shows almost no toxicity to humans and possesses multifaceted protective capacity against cerebral ischemia, it is valuable to consider using melatonin in clinical trials on patients suffering from stroke.

Las arterias calcificadas, sin embargo, se encontraron en el 27 por ciento de aquellos que dormían menos de cinco horas diarias por noche y el porcentaje era de un 11 por ciento en quienes dormían entre cinco y siete horas diarias por noche, y de tan sólo un seis por ciento en quienes dormían más de siete horas por noche.

Now referred to as long-term potentiation (LTP), this mechanism has since become the most intensively studied in modern neuroscience,and is widely believed to be the cellular basis of learning and memory, although this is yet to be proven unequivocally.

In the new study, Santiago Canals of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tübingen and his colleagues used the same protocol to induce LTP. But while the vast majority of researchers have investigated LTP in slices of hippocampal tissue, this study involved observing LTP in live animals.

This new research provides the first evidence that the local modifications in synaptic connections induced by LTP lead to long-lasting changes in the activity of a diffuse network of brain regions, and even to facilitated communication between the two hemispheres. The fMRI data showed that hippocampal LTP recruits higher order association areas, as well as regions involved in emotions and others subserving different sensory modalities, all of which are known to be involved in memory formation.

ApplesQuercetin is the flavonoid that enables apples to keep the doctor away. Quercetin has been shown to reduce cancer risk, prevent heart attacks, stave off cataracts, control asthma, prevent recurrent gout attacks, and speed healing from acid reflux. Green TeaGreen tea contains, among others, the cancer-fighting flavonoid epigallocatechin gallate (ECGC). ECGC is unique in that it seems to battle cancer at all stages, from thwarting chemical carcinogens, to suppressing the spread of tumors. ECGC is as much as 100 times more powerful an antioxidant as vitamin C, and 25 times more powerful than vitamin E. ECGC also may account for the antibacterial properties of green tea. ChocolateChocolate contains many of the same flavonoids found in tea. The darker the chocolate, the more flavonoids present. Cocoa powder is the richest source by weight, and to maximize your benefits, make your hot chocolate from scratch. Homemade hot chocolate will provide you with more flavonoids than a store-bought mix. Red WineFlavonoids are the source of the well-known "French Paradox"—the ability of the French to consume lots of fat-laden cheese without dropping like flies from heart attacks. The red wine they enjoy is flavonoid-rich, which lowers their risk of heart disease. And if you're not a drinker, you can get almost all the same benefits from purple grape juice.

Marc G. Berman and colleagues at the University of Michigan wanted to test the effect of a walk’s scenery on cognitive function (Berman, Jonides & Kaplan, 2008; PDF).

In the first of two studies participants were given a 35 minute task involving repeating loads of random numbers back to the experimenter, but in reverse order.

The results showed that people’s performance on the test improved by almost 20% after wandering amongst the trees. By comparison those subjected to a busy street did not reliably improve on the test.