Social Sciences

A segment on ABC’s Good Morning America May 19 caught my attention, so much so that I spent a good chunk of time attempting to find research to back up the claims. The idea itself seems to be obvious – if you have a neurological disorder affecting your brain, you should examine the brain in order to figure out exactly what’s going on to figure out how to best treat the problem, right? I am not a neurologist, so my thinking could be flawed. A comment by the doctor featured in the segment made sense to me, though: diagnosing children with behavioral disorders like ADHD and autism without…

Molecular and statistical genetic studies in 15 Finnish families have shown that there is a substantial genetic component in musical aptitude. Musical aptitude was determined using three tests: a test for auditory structuring ability (Karma Music test), and the Seashore pitch and time discrimination subtests. The study represents the first systematic molecular genetic study that aims in the identification of candidate genes associated with musical aptitude. The identified regions contain genes affecting cell extension and migration during neural development. Interestingly, an overlapping…

Chemicals found in green tea may be able to stave off the cognitive deficits that occur with obstructive sleep apnea (OSA), according to a new study published in the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine. Researchers examined the effects green tea polyphenols (GTP), administered through drinking water, on rats who were intermittently deprived of oxygen during 12-hour “night” cycles, mimicking the intermittent hypoxia (IH) that humans with OSA experience. People with OSA have been reported to have increased markers of oxidative stress and exhibit architectural changes in…

Patients suffering from “hemineglect” ignore things presented to their left side. However, sometimes these ignored stimuli may be processed without awareness. In a paper published in Cortex Issue 6, Sackur and colleagues reported that unconscious processing in hemineglect is not limited to low level features of the stimuli. They showed that the brain may extract the meaning of symbols that the patient has not consciously perceived. Thus, digits or number words presented on the left side were not detected by hemineglect patients, but still their numerical value influenced the way these…

Long-term harmful effects of marijuana include risk for heart attacks and strokes in addition to impaired learning and memory. The active chemical in marijuana, called delta-9-tetrahyrdocannabinol (THC), is believed to exert these effects by binding to cannabinoid (CB) receptors located on several cell types in various organs. Scientists have found CB receptors in many organs including the brain, heart, liver, kidney, and spleen. In this study, researchers investigated if persistent heavy marijuana use might be associated with changes in different blood proteins in order to check if the…

We're a long way from machine cognition but scientist are making improvements, mostly in recognition. Researchers have managed to teach a computer’s vision system to recognise up to 100 objects. But there is another radically different approach available that European researchers have applied to the study of robotics and AI. The MACS project does not attempt to get robots to perceive what something is, but how it can be used. This is an application of the cognitive theory of ‘affordances’, developed by the American psychologist James J. Gibson between 1950 and 1979. He rejected…

Teaching robots to understand enough about the real world to allow them act independently has proved to be much more difficult than first thought. The technologies developed on the iCub platform – such as grasping, locomotion, interaction, and even language-action association – are of great relevance to further advances in the field of industrial service robotics. The EU-funded RobotCub project, which designed the iCub, will send one each to six European research labs. Each of the labs proposed winning projects to help train the robots to learn about their surroundings – just as a child…

Mars, Venus, Uranus. They're all still planets. So it goes with the human brain and gender. While males and females might sometimes act as though they come from different planets, a new study in flies suggests the brain is largely unisex. By artificially triggering the neurons responsible for singing —normally a male only activity - researchers have made female flies play their first tune. Male flies work hard to convince females to mate with them, often by showing a talent such as sticking out one wing and vibrating it to produce sound. Earlier studies had identified the neurons…

People who score high on intelligence tests are also good at keeping time, new Swedish research shows. The team that carried out the study also suspect that accuracy in timing is important to the brain processes responsible for problem solving and reasoning. Researchers at the medical university Karolinska Institutet and Umeå University have now demonstrated a correlation between general intelligence and the ability to tap out a simple regular rhythm. They stress that the task subjects performed had nothing to do with any musical rhythmic sense but simply measured the capacity for rhythmic…

A study by scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, in collaboration with the Charite University Hospital and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin says that several seconds before we consciously make a decision its outcome can be predicted by unconscious activity in the brain. The researchers from the group of Professor John-Dylan Haynes used a brain scanner to investigate what happens in the human brain just before a decision is made. "Many processes in the brain occur automatically and without involvement of our…