PsychSplash Psychology Group

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.

Next Mrs. Retallack tried another experiment again using the three chambers. In one chamber she played North Indian classical music performed by sitar and tabla, in another she played Bach organ music, and in the third, no music was played. The plants "liked" the North Indian classical music the best. In both the Bach and sitar chambers, the plants leaned toward the speakers, but he plants in the Indian music chamber leaned toward the speakers the most.

Mrs. Retallack placed plants in each chamber and speakers through which she played sounds and particular styles of music. She watched the plants and recorded their progress daily. She was astounded at what she discovered.

What the scientists found was that after a week of practice, the stretch of motor cortex devoted to these finger movements took over surrounding areas like dandelions on a suburban lawn.

He extended the experiment by having another group of volunteers merely think about practicing the piano exercise. They played the simple piece of music in their head, holding their hands still while imagining how they would move their fingers. Then they too sat beneath the TMS coil.

they glimpsed a revolutionary idea about the brain: the ability of mere thought to alter the physical structure and function of our gray matter. For what the TMS revealed was that the region of motor cortex that controls the piano-playing fingers also expanded in the brains of volunteers who imagined playing the music--just as it had in those who actually played it.

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.

The researchers found that the guitarists' brain waves were aligned most during three pivotal times: when they were syncing up with a metronome, when they began playing the piece and at points during the composition that demanded the most synchrony.

The synchrony was most prominent in the frontal and central parts of the brain that regulate motor function. "Whenever synchrony of behavior was high, synchrony of brain waves were also high,"

While brain synchrony during a duet seems like a given, it's a mystery how it happens, says Lindenberger, a psychologist. "One could speculate that this may be related to mirror neurons, the capacity of primates and humans to imagine the action of the other person while performing actions yourself," he says. "The mirror neuron system could be active during synchronized guitar playing."

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.