Group items tagged

Science is becoming increasingly interested in the relationship between sound and the brain. An expert explains

Easy to understand evidence for a common ape-like human/chimp ancestor. One of thousands of collaborating pieces of evidence, but this one is very conceptual. Whip it out anytime a creationist starts preaching.

In a new book, neuroscientists Sam Wang and Sandra Aamodt detail how parents can help their children learn the ABCs and self-control. The book, Welcome to Your Child's Brain, explores how the human brain develops from infancy to adolescence.

Listen up, Facebook and Twitter groupies: how easily can social pressure affect your memory?

Very easily, researchers at the Weizmann Institute and University College London have proved, and they think they even know what part of the brain is responsible.

The participants conformed to the group on these "planted" responses, giving incorrect answers nearly 70% of the time.
Volunteers watched a documentary film in small groups. Three days later, they returned to the lab individually to take a memory test, answering questions about the film. They were also asked how confident they were in their answers.
They were later invited back to the lab to retake the test. This time, the subjects were also given supposed answers of the others in their film-viewing group (along with social-media-style photos) while being scanned in a functional MRI (fMRI) that revealed their brain activity.

Is most of what you know false?

Planted among these were false answers to questions the volunteers had previously answered correctly and confidently. The participants conformed to the group on these "planted" responses, giving incorrect answers nearly 70% of the time.

To determine if their memory of the film had actually undergone a change, the researchers invited the subjects back to the lab later to take the memory test once again, telling them that the answers they had previously been fed were not those of their fellow film watchers, but random computer generations.

Some of the responses reverted back to the original, correct ones, but get this: despite finding out the scientists messed with their minds, close to half of their responses remained erroneous, implying that the subjects were relying on false memories implanted in the earlier session.

An analysis of the fMRI data showed a strong co-activation and connectivity between two brain areas: the hippocampus and the amygdala. Social reinforcement could act on the amygdala to persuade our brains to replace a strong memory wi

The lushest patches of some jungles are rooted in enigmatic black soil - with unexpected origins

ScienceDaily (Feb. 11, 2011) - Think you're overloaded with information? Not even close.

By dampening the immune system, cannabis provides relief from inflammatory diseases, but it also increases the risk of infections. Now we know how

ScienceDaily (Nov. 2, 2010) - New research by scientists at the University of Sheffield has shed light on how Earth's first plants began to colonize the land over 470 million years ago by forming a partnership with soil fungi.

In the past 30 years, a scientific revolution has completely transformed our understanding of babies and young children. Babies both know more and learn more than we would ever have thought possible, and we have recently begun to grasp the mechanisms by which they do this. I wrote The Philosophical Baby to try to show that thinking about childhood can help us answer deep questions about truth, imagination, love, consciousness, identity and morality. Without exaggeration, I believe it can tell us how we came to be human.

How horizontal oil and gas wells are drilled with directional drilling techniques.