This finding-that having more mature brains did not help the adoptees avoid the toddler-talk stage-suggests that babies speak in baby talk not because they have baby brains, but because they only just got started learning and need time to accrue sufficient vocabulary to be able to expand their conversations. Before long, the one-word stage will give way to the two-word stage, and so on. Learning how to chat like an adult is a gradual process. (Scientific American)

there's some suggestive evidence that the brain might contemplate other people very differently when that person is a virtual Facebook "page" and not a flesh and blood individual, with a tangible physical presence. Humans, after all, are social primates, blessed and burdened with a set of paleolithic social instincts. We aren't used to thinking about people as computerized abstractions. (The Frontal Cortex)

At the center of the discovery is the signaling of rhodopsin to transducin. Rhodopsin is a pigment in the eye that helps detect light. Transducin is a protein (sometimes called "GPCR") which ultimately signals the brain that light is present. The researchers were able to "freeze frame" the chemical communication between rhodopsin and transducin to study how this takes place and what goes wrong at the molecular level in certain disorders. (Science Blog)

The level of activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex correlated with the level of responsibility that the volunteers assigned to the defendant, whereas activity in the amygdala, the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate cortex predicted punishment magnitude, indicating that distinct neural systems underlie the two processes in legal decision making. (Deric Bownds' MindBlog)

publication

This talk mulls over how/why human's construct these things we call a self or an "I" .

Don't think too much before purchasing that new car or television. According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, people who deliberate about decisions make less accurate judgments than people who trust their instincts.

Your brain contains billions of nerve cells arranged in patterns that coordinate thought, emotion, behavior, movement and sensation. A complicated highway system of nerves connects your brain to the rest of your body, so communication can occur in split seconds. Think about how fast you pull your hand back from a hot stove. While all the parts of your brain work together, each part is responsible for a specific function - controlling everything from your heart rate to your mood.

Fellows 3 (3): 159 -- Behavioral and Cognitive Neuroscience Reviews

Harvard course syllabus

A major focus of our research is to examine the neurobiological underpinnings of category learning and attentional processes. We achieve this goal through a blending of empirical data collection, cognitive neuroscience, and mathematical modeling.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an integrative review of the area of Neuroscience and its relationship to Behavioral Decision Making. I will start by discussing Prospect theory and the role that neuroscience can play in understanding human behavior under risky situations. I will then discuss the Somatic Marker Hypothesis and its application in decision making. Further, I will highlight some techniques that are used to measure neural responses. Finally, I will end with future avenues of research where Neuroscience techniques can be applied in studying different Marketing phenomena.

No matter which public topic you discuss or which personal aspect you worry about - you need reasons for your opinion and argumentation. Moreover, the ability of reasoning is responsible for your cognitive features of decision making and choosing among alternatives.

By combining the models and tasks of Game Theory with modern psychological and neuroscientific methods, the neuroeconomic approach to the study of social decision-making has the potential to extend our knowledge of brain mechanisms involved in social decisions and to advance theoretical models of how we make decisions in a rich, interactive environment. Research has already begun to illustrate how social exchange can act directly on the brain's reward system, how affective factors play an important role in bargaining and competitive games, and how the ability to assess another's intentions is related to strategic play. These findings provide a fruitful starting point for improved models of social decision-making, informed by the formal mathematical approach of economics and constrained by known neural mechanisms. -- Sanfey 318 (5850): 598 -- Science

This paper reviews the cognitive neuroscience of decision making and summarizes a talk given by the author at a SOL-UK workshop entitled 'Improving the Decision-Taking Process in Institutions' and held at the London School of Economics on 23rd June, 2006.\n\nAn operational definition of decision making is discussed as it relates to neuroscientific research and application. Neuroanatomical and cortico- subcortical as well as cortico-cortical connections between brain structures are then reviewed as they relate to the decision making process. Finally, while biased toward the individual level of analysis, extrapolations to the larger group environment are also discussed.

"In the study, Prof. Fried observed the neural activity in the brains of 13 epilepsy patients, as the patients watched clips from TV shows like Seinfeld and The Simpsons. A short while after, the test subjects were asked to describe what they remembered from the video clips. During recall, the exact same neurons that had fired while viewing a clip fired once again while the subject was recalling it. Soon, the researchers were able to predict what clip the subjects would recall just by looking at the neurons that lit up seconds before the recall experience was vocalized."

"Cdk5 therefore appears to be crucial only for later stages of the maturation of newborn neurons. The authors suggest that the improper connections formed by these cells could interfere with information processing in the hippocampus. However, they did not carry out any behavioural tests to explore the consequences of blocking cdk5 activity. This would be an interesting thing to do next, given the recent discovery that new neurons are needed for new memories. Nevertheless, the new findings could have important implications for the use of stem cells in cell replacement therapies for neurological diseases, as they suggest that cells would have to be transplanted accurately into specific locations in order to be effective. " (Neurophilosophy)