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"Sustained changes in the region of the brain associated with cognitive function and emotional control were found in young adult men after one week of playing violent video games ... The results showed that after one week of violent game play, the video game group members showed less activation in the left inferior frontal lobe during the emotional Stroop task and less activation in the anterior cingulate cortex during the counting Stroop task."

Actually, there are some studies just about emotional Stroop tests that sound similar to the one in the violent video games study. This looks like a good presentation about how emotional Stroop tests work: http://frank.mtsu.edu/~sschmidt/Cognitive/Emotion1.pdf This one talks about why those Stroop tests work: "In this task, participants name the colors in which words are printed, and the words vary in their relevance to each theme of psychopathology.The authors review research showing that patients are often slower to name the color of a word associated with concerns relevant to their clinical condition." - http://brainimaging.waisman.wisc.edu/~perlman/papers/stickiness/WilliamsEmoStroop1996.pdf This is a meta-analysis of emotional Stroop test studies that describes (actually, it's critical of) how such studies are done: http://www.psych.wustl.edu/coglab/publications/LarsenMercerBalota2006.pdf

Thanks, Ryan! I will take a look at these.

Recognition of subtle emotional cues may be developmental, according to neurological research. At the McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., Deborah Yurgelun-Todd and a group of researchers have studied how adolescents perceive emotion as compared to adults. The scientists looked at the brains of 18 children between the ages of 10 and 18 and compared them to 16 adults using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Both groups were shown pictures of adult faces and asked to identify the emotion on the faces. Using fMRI, the researchers could trace what part of the brain responded as subjects were asked to identify the expression depicted in the picture. The results surprised the researchers. The adults correctly identified the expression as fear. Yet the teens answered "shocked, surprised, angry." Moreover, teens and adults used different parts of their brains to process what they were feeling. The teens mostly used the amygdala, a small almond shaped region that guides instinctual or "gut" reactions, while the adults relied on the frontal cortex, which governs reason and planning. As the teens got older, however, the center of activity shifted more toward the frontal cortex and away from the cruder response of the amygdala. Yurgelun-Todd, director of neuropsychology and cognitive neuroimaging at McLean Hospital believes the study goes partway to understanding why the teenage years seem so emotionally turbulent. The teens seemed not only to be misreading the feelings on the adult's face, but they reacted strongly from an area deep inside the brain. The frontal cortex helped the adults distinguish fear from shock or surprise. Often called the executive or CEO of the brain, the frontal cortex gives adults the ability to distinguish a subtlety of expression: "Was this really fear or was it surprise or shock?" For the teens, this area wasn't fully operating.

For the study, conducted by Dr. John Hutton, a researcher and pediatrician at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, and someone with an interest in emergent literacy, 27 children around age 4 went into an FMRI machine. They were presented with the same story in three conditions: audio only; the illustrated pages of a storybook with an audio voiceover; and an animated cartoon. While the children paid attention to the stories, the MRI, the machine scanned for activation within certain brain networks, and connectivity between the networks. Here's what researchers found: In the audio-only condition (too cold): language networks were activated, but there was less connectivity overall. "There was more evidence the children were straining to understand." In the animation condition (too hot): there was a lot of activity in the audio and visual perception networks, but not a lot of connectivity among the various brain networks. "The language network was working to keep up with the story," says Hutton. "Our interpretation was that the animation was doing all the work for the child. They were expending the most energy just figuring out what it means." The children's comprehension of the story was the worst in this condition. The illustration condition was what Hutton called "just right".When children could see illustrations, language-network activity dropped a bit compared to the audio condition. Instead of only paying attention to the words, Hutton says, the children's understanding of the story was "scaffolded" by having the images as clues. Most importantly, in the illustrated book condition, researchers saw increased connectivity between - and among - all the networks they were looking at: visual perception, imagery, default mode and language. One interesting note is that, because of the constraints of an MRI machine, which encloses and immobilizes your body, the story-with-illustrations condition wasn't actually as good as reading on Mom or Dad's lap. The emotional bon

The brain's language regions work together as a co-ordinated network, with some parts involved in multiple functions and a level of redundancy in some processing pathways. So it's not simply a matter of one brain region doing one thing in isolation. Brain-imaging methods have revealed that much more of our brain is involved in language processing than previously thought. Thanks to fMRI technology, we now know that numerous regions in every major lobe (frontal, parietal, occipital and temporal lobes; and the cerebellum, an area at the bottom of the brain) are involved in our ability to produce and comprehend language.

Neuroscientists are testing the embodied cognition metaphor theory articulated by Lakoff and Johnson using fMRI technology. Lakoff and Johnson argue that human cognition is embodied-that human concepts are shaped by the physical features of human brains and bodies, or as Lakoff puts it, "Our physiology provides the concepts for our philosophy."

(This article was by my college friend, Quinn Eastman, who's a trained scientist and science writer for Emory University.) Listening to metaphors involving arms or legs loops in a region of the brain responsible for visual perception of those body parts, scientists have discovered. The finding, recently published in Brain & Language, is another example of how neuroscience studies are providing evidence for "grounded cognition" - the idea that comprehension of abstract concepts in the brain is built upon concrete experiences, a proposal whose history extends back millennia to Aristotle. When study participants heard sentences that included phrases such as "shoulder responsibility," "foot the bill" or "twist my arm", they tended to engage a region of the brain called the left extrastriate body area or EBA. The same level of activation was not seen when participants heard literal sentences containing phrases with a similar meaning, such as "take responsibility" or "pay the bill." The study included 12 right-handed, English-speaking people, and blood flow in their brains was monitored by functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging). "The EBA is part of the extrastriate visual cortex, and it was known to be involved in identifying body parts," says senior author Krish Sathian, MD, PhD, professor of neurology, rehabilitation medicine, and psychology at Emory University. "We found that the metaphor selectivity of the EBA matches its visual selectivity." The EBA was not activated when study participants heard literal, non-metaphorical sentences describing body parts. "This suggests that deep semantic processing is needed to recruit the EBA, over and above routine use of the words for body parts," Sathian says. Sathian's research team had previously observed that metaphors involving the sense of touch, such as "a rough day", activate a region of the brain important for sensing texture. In addition, other researchers have shown t

This month, the journal Pediatrics published a study that used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study brain activity in 3-to 5-year-old children as they listened to age-appropriate stories. The researchers found differences in brain activation according to how much the children had been read to at home. Children whose parents reported more reading at home and more books in the home showed significantly greater activation of brain areas in a region of the left hemisphere called the parietal-temporal-occipital association cortex. This brain area is "a watershed region, all about multisensory integration, integrating sound and then visual stimulation," said the lead author, Dr. John S. Hutton, a clinical research fellow at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center. This region of the brain is known to be very active when older children read to themselves, but Dr. Hutton notes that it also lights up when younger children are hearing stories. What was especially novel was that children who were exposed to more books and home reading showed significantly more activity in the areas of the brain that process visual association, even though the child was in the scanner just listening to a story and could not see any pictures. "When kids are hearing stories, they're imagining in their mind's eye when they hear the story," said Dr. Hutton. "For example, 'The frog jumped over the log.' I've seen a frog before, I've seen a log before, what does that look like?" The different levels of brain activation, he said, suggest that children who have more practice in developing those visual images, as they look at picture books and listen to stories, may develop skills that will help them make images and stories out of words later on. "It helps them understand what things look like, and may help them transition to books without pictures," he said. "It will help them later be better readers because they've developed that part of the brain

"Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words. ... In a 2011 study, participants with electrodes in direct brain contact were able to move a cursor on a screen by simply thinking of vowel sounds. ... With the help of that model, when patients were presented with words to think about, the team was able to guess which word the participants had chosen. They were even able to reconstruct some of the words, turning the brain waves they saw back into sound on the basis of what the computer model suggested those waves meant. ... The authors caution that the thought-translation idea is still to be vastly improved before such prosthetics become a reality." Full study: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001251

Dyslexia stems from physiological differences in the brain circuitry. Those differences can make it harder, and less efficient, for children to process the tiny components of language, called phonemes. Using cutting-edge MRI technology, the researchers are able to pinpoint a specific neural pathway, a white matter tract in the brain's left hemisphere that appears to be related to dyslexia: It's called the arcuate fasciculus. "It's an arch-shaped bundle of fibers that connects the frontal language areas of the brain to the areas in the temporal lobe that are important for language," Elizabeth Norton, a neuroscientist at MIT's McGovern Institute of Brain Research, explains.

When we listen to stories, we immerse ourselves into the situations described and empathize with the feelings of the characters. Only recently has it become possible to find out how exactly this process works in the brain. Scientists have now succeeded using an fMRI scanner to measure how people listen to a literary story.

Studies have proven that bilinguals are better at ignoring unnecessary words in a sentence. Since bilingual people are constantly sorting through one language and the other and picking which one to use and which one to ignore their brain is stimulated more than monolingual people. The monologuists' brains light up more than the bilinguals' brain in an fMRI scan. Researches said that this ment that the monologuists' brain had to work harder to do the same thing as the bilinguals.

"What you're seeing here is, we've selected the pathways in the brain of a chronic pain patient. This may shock you, but we're literally reading this person's brain in real time. They're watching their own brain activation, and they're controlling the pathway that produces their pain."

An infant's mother tongue creates neural patterns that the unconscious brain retains years later, even if the child totally stops using the language, (as can happen in cases of international adoption) according to a new joint study by scientists at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital. The study offers the first neural evidence that traces of the "lost" language remain in the brain and suggests that early-acquired information is not only maintained in the brain, but unconsciously influences brain processing for years, perhaps for life -- potentially indicating a special status for information acquired during optimal periods of development. This could counter arguments not only within the field of language acquisition, but across domains, that neural representations are overwritten or lost from the brain over time.

There are two neural mechanisms that scientists believe enable us to communicate. One is that sound waves made by the speaker affects how the listener's brain responds, which is basically the same way the speaker's brain is responding. The other is that human brains have formed a common neural behavior which makes our brains respond in the same type of pattern, allowing us to share information through this neural behavior. One of the experiments discussed in this article explains that people were brought in and scanned by fMRI machines, monitoring the part of the brain that processes sound waves coming from the ear. These subjects were monitored while they were at rest, telling a story, and/or listening to a story. It then discusses the results and results of similar experiments.

Article reports on the research of Dr. Charles Limb, of Johns Hopkins. Through fMRI, Limb found the brains of jazz musicians engaged with other musicians in spontaneous improvisation show robust activation in the same brain areas traditionally associated with spoken language and syntax. In other words, improvisational jazz conversations "take root in the brain as a language," Limb said. However, the areas of the brain associated with meaning are not activated.

Keeping in touch is no longer about face to face, but instead screen to screen, highlighted by the fact that more than 1 billion people are using Facebook every day. Social media has become second nature -- but what impact is this having on our brain? "In a recent study, researchers at the UCLA brain mapping center used an fMRI scanner to image the brains of 32 teenagers as they used a bespoke social media app resembling Instagram. By watching the activity inside different regions of the brain as the teens used the app, the team found certain regions became activated by "likes", with the brain's reward center becoming especially active." This article goes into depth on how social media like instagram is changing our brain. It shows us what parts of our brain are getting stimulated when we use social media! It also talks about peer influence, social learning, and reward circuitry.

Dr. Joy Hirsch, head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital's functional M.R.I. Laboratory, and her graduate student, Karl Kim, found that second languages are stored differently in the human brain, depending on when they are learned. Babies who learn two languages simultaneously, and apparently effortlessly, have a single brain region for generating complex speech, researchers say. But people who learn a second language in adolescence or adulthood possess two such brain regions, one for each language. To explore where languages lie in the brain, Dr. Hirsch recruited 12 healthy bilingual people from New York City. Ten different languages were represented in the group. Half had learned two languages in infancy. The other half began learning a second language around age 11 and had acquired fluency by 19 after living in the country where the language was spoken. With their heads inside the M.R.I. machine, subjects thought silently about what they had done the day before using complex sentences, first in one language, then in the other. The machine detected increases in blood flow, indicating where in the brain this thinking took place. Activity was noted in Wernicke's area, a region devoted to understanding the meaning of words and the subject matter of spoken language, or semantics, as well as Broca's area, a region dedicated to the execution of speech, as well as some deep grammatical aspects of language. None of the 12 bilinguals had two separate Wernicke's areas, Dr. Hirsch said. But there were dramatic differences in Broca's areas, Dr. Hirsch said. In people who had learned both languages in infancy, there was only one uniform Broca's region for both languages, a dot of tissue containing about 30,000 neurons. Among those who had learned a second language in adolescence, however, Broca's area seemed to be divided into two distinct areas. Only one area was activated for each language. These two areas lay close to each other but were always separate, Dr. Hirsch s

"[New research] is suggesting that atypical brain function is a fundamental aspect of speech production tasks for adults who stutter. ... "Now because many speech areas are interconnected across the two hemispheres through the corpus callosum, it might suggest that hemispheric dominance for speech and language has not been established to the same degree as it has been for normally fluent adults." ... Loucks then used functional magnetic resonance imaging of brain activity to study participants who stutter and found that even brief, simple speech tasks - such as producing a single word to name a picture - is associated with altered functional activity."