Neuroscience

Fear is a healthy response, kept intact over eons of evolution, but sometimes it can be irrational. A new brain circuit discovery may help make sense of the madness. The study details the role of dopamine in ensuring that rats stop being afraid when there isn't anything to be afraid of anymore.  Like animals, people develop conditioned responses, especially if strong negative emotions are involved.  Millions of people saw the film "Jaws", for example, and remain terrified of sharks even though cows kill more people each year. Over time, the conditioned stimulus (the music in "Jaws…

An experimental study which sought to determine perceptions of sexual text (sext) messaging situations concluded that men and women were judged differently by the sext messages they sent, even when they were the same. When messages were unsolicited, men were judged as creepy while women were judged as more appropriate. The strange conclusion by the authors from their finding was not the obvious one, that men were being discriminated against, "slut shaming" for guys, but that consent is important in sexting.  Sexting. Vaguely date rapey when a guy does it. But when a woman does it,…

For thousands of years, trepanation--the act of scraping, cutting, or drilling an opening into the cranium--was practiced around the world, primarily to treat head trauma but also for headaches, seizures and mental illnesses. Sometimes it was even done to expel demons. It sounds garish now, but ancient Peruvians were surprisingly adept at it, so adept that Incan "neurosurgeons" had twice the survival rate for the procedure than better equipped surgeons during the American Civil War centuries later. Obviously there could be differences in when it was done, so it may be due to confounders that…

Peter Heine Nielsen, a Danish chess Grandmaster, summarized it quite well. "I always wondered, if some superior alien race came to Earth, how they would play chess. Now I know". The architecture that beat humans at the notoriously CPU-impervious game Go, AlphaGo by Google Deep Mind, was converted to allow the machine to tackle other "closed-rules" games. Successively, the program was given the rules of chess, and a huge battery of Google's GPUs to train itself on the game. Within four hours, the alien emerged. And it is indeed a new class of player.The AlphaZero neural network uses…

There is an area close to the left ear, in the ‘temporal lobe’, that, when stimulated via strong magnetic fields, triggers religious feelings, visions of bright lights at the end of a tunnel, and, at a certain frequency, the feeling of the presence of somebody next to oneself, or somehow present, although subjects are in another room and separated from the researchers. This area is damaged in patients with the kind of schizophrenia that Vincent Van Gough suffered. His attacks of deeply religious visions started a few years before he died.   The feeling that another person is present…

Brain-computer interfaces can replace bodily functions to a certain degree and now they can even compose music. At least in a sense. Derived from an established brain-computer interface method which mainly serves to spell - more accurately - write, a team writing in PLOS One has shown how they developed a new application by which music can be composed just through the power of thought. All that is needed is a special cap which measures brain waves, composition software. Before you start to think you'll be the next Haydn, keep in mind it can't create musical knowledge. The basic principle of…

Researchers looked at frequency magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) images to compare neural responses to food cues in overweight and normal weight adolescents. They noted that food stimuli activated regions of the brain associated with reward and emotion in all groups but overweight adolescents had progressively less neural activity in circuits of the brain that support self-regulation and attention.  Of the 36 adolescents (ages 14 to 19 years) enrolled in the study published in Neuroimage, 10 were overweight/obese, 16 were lean but considered at high risk for obesity because they had…

Men who worry that women may not make the right decisions during a menstrual cycle, and women who claim biology is a valid excuse for being a jerk, you're both out of luck. An examination of three aspects of cognition across two menstrual cycles found that the levels of estrogen, progesterone and testosterone had no impact on working memory, cognitive bias or ability to pay attention to two things at once. While some hormones were associated with changes across one cycle in some of the women taking part, these effects didn't repeat in the following cycle. Overall, none of the hormones the…

Many have advanced the idea that adolescent anatomical brain development justifies denying adolescents the civil liberties and decisional autonomy that are granted to almost all adults automatically [1][2]. In an earlier writing, I made a case for the opposite position [3], pointing out that a significant fraction of the adult population never exceeds the behavioral maturity of a typical 13-year-old, therefore an age of majority above 13 is equivalent to declaring a lot of normal adults to be incompetent. So the point is made that in a society where normal, mentally healthy, non-demented…

Capacity for vicarious experiences is a fundamental aspect of human social behavior. For example, seeing others experiencing pain can activate brain circuits that are known to support actual first-hand experience of pain.  A new study has revealed how the human brain’s opioid system modulates responses to other people’s pain. The less opioid receptors the participants had in their brain, the stronger were their emotion and pain circuits’ response to seeing others in distress. Similar association was not found for the dopamine system despite its known importance in pain management. The…