Neuroscience

The schedule 1 illicit drug known as ecstasy has been used by up to 12 million people in the United States  and millions more worldwide.  Past research has suggested that ecstasy users perform worse than others on some tests of mental ability but there have been concerns that the methods used to conduct that research were flawed, and the experiments overstated the cognitive differences between ecstasy users and non-users.  In response to those concerns, a team of researchers has conducted one of the largest studies ever undertaken to re-examine the cognitive effects of ecstasy…

Last year I attended a singularity conference and Ray Kurzweil's avatar predicted it was 25 years away.   Well, it's been 25 years away for a long time.  It's a nice, safe number, close enough that no one gives up and stops buying books (global warming will happen in 100 years, for example) and not so close anyone looks silly (Al Gore saying in 2006 that we were doomed in 10 years, for example) it if doesn't happen.  In 1993, for example, Vernor Vinge said "Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era…

Mice have a healthy concept of fear and so they fear the scent of a predator.   While it seems obvious that brains quickly figure out with a sniff that a predator, like a cat, is nearby, the mechanism is not well understood. In a Nature study, researchers describe a new technique that makes it possible to map long-distance nerve connections in the brain. The scientists used the technique to map for the first time the path that the scent signals take from the olfactory bulb, the part of the brain that first receives signals from odor receptors in the nose, to higher centers of the mouse…

Measuring 'intelligence' is a much art as science.   Even using the word intelligence sends people down a philosophical rabbit hole, disagreeing about what the word means. So can there be a 'universal' intelligence test that measures...okay, we have to use the world 'intelligence' despite it being a logical fallacy to use it in its own definition...intelligence regardless of cultural or language? José Hernández-Orallo, a researcher at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, says he can do even better.   He says his intelligence test can fairly measure the intelligence of adults or…

Can olive oil prevent mental illness? A new study says the ingestion of trans-fats and saturated fats increases the risk of suffering depression and that olive oil protects against this mental illness.  The study by researchers from Navarra and Las Palmas de Gran Canaria used 12,059 SUN Project volunteers over the course of six years; the volunteers had their diet, lifestyle and ailments analyzed at the beginning of the project, over its course and at the end of the project. The researchers say none of the volunteers reported depression at the beginning of the study but, at the end, 657…

Frédéric Chopin, composer of "The Last Waltz" and poet of the piano, suffered from tuberculosis and regularly hallucinated. Even for those in the Romantic Revolution, like Liszt, Schumann and Victor Hugo, among others, Chopin was considered frail and hypersensitive and somewhat of a mad genius.   Tuberculosis would claim him at age 39 but a paper published in Medical Humanities says that his hallucinations were not madness, but rather temporal lobe epilepsy.  Hallucinations typically feature in seizure disorders, they say. The truth is hard to know, of course, and his well-…

The dynamics behind signal transmission in the brain are extremely chaotic.  The brain codes information in the form of electrical pulses, known as spikes. Each of the brain's approximately 100 billion interconnected neurons acts as both a receiver and transmitter: these bundle all incoming electrical pulses and, under certain circumstances, forward a pulse of their own to their neighbours. In this way, each piece of information processed by the brain generates its own activity pattern. This indicates which neuron sent an impulse to its neighbors: in other words, which neuron was active…

Want to know if you can be the king of Donkey Kong?    A group of researchers say they can predict "with unprecedented accuracy" how well you will do on a complex task like a strategic video game - by analyzing activity in a specific region of your brain. Instead of measuring how brain activity differs before and after subjects learn a complex task, the researchers analyzed background activity in the basal ganglia, a group of brain structures known to be important for procedural learning, coordinated movement and feelings of reward. Using magnetic resonance imaging and a method…

Neurons within the brain's neocortex behave much like people in social networks, with a small population of highly active members who give and receive more information than the majority of other members, says Alison Barth, associate professor of biological sciences at Carnegie Mellon in new research. By identifying these neurons, scientists could increase understanding of the neocortex, thought to be the brain's center of higher learning.  There are trillions of neurons in the neocortex, the part of the cerebral cortex that is responsible for a number of important functions, including…

In the Silhouette Illusion (video at the bottom), a silhouetted woman is seen spinning on one foot, her leg extended. The appeal of the illusion is in the way the woman is spinning – she can be perceived as spinning clockwise or counter-clockwise.  A psychology professor has found that the way people perceive the Silhouette Illusion, a popular trick that went viral and has received substantial online attention, has little to do with the viewers' personality, or whether they are left- or right-brained, despite the fact that the illusion is often used to test these attributes in popular e-…