Neuroscience
A Penn State physicist is looking at how songbirds transmit impulses through nerve cells in the brain to produce a complex behavior, such as singing.
The research will help scientists gain insight into how the human brain functions, which may lead to a better understanding of complex vocal behavior, human speech production and ultimately, speech disorders and related diseases.
The findings were presented this week at the American Physical Society's March meeting in Portland.
Songbirds are particularly well suited for studying speech production and syntax -- the rules of syllable or word…
This
is an interview of Prof. Richard J. Davidson on Shrink Rap Radio, hosted by David Van
Nuys, discussing his research on meditation and the brain. Davidson
tells that his research shows that meditation has a beneficial effects
on the mind and quantitative effects on brain functions. Even novice
meditators show immediate changes, with experienced long term
meditators showing more pronounced changes to their brainwave patterns. One thing he has noticed is
that, given each individual starts with a slightly different brain
structure, different meditation techniques have varying degrees of…
Bees see the world almost five times faster than humans, giving them the fastest color vision of all animals, according to new research appearing in the Journal of Neuroscience.
The ability to see at high speed is common in fast-flying insects; allowing them to escape predators and catch their mates mid-air. However, until now it wasn't known whether the bees' full colour vision was able to keep up with their high speed flight. This research sheds new light on the matter; suggesting that although slower, it is also much faster than human vision.
"We can't easily follow a fast flying insect by…
I had previously speculated on how electric and magnetic fields generated by individual neurons may be able to transmit information to other neurons with which they are not in synaptic contact. From a purely physical point of view it strikes me as at least something to investigate. After all, we know that there are broad sweeps of electric fields that travel across the brain - whether alpha, beta, gamma, delta or theta waves. Such endogenous fields are both generated by the brain and feed back upon the brain. There must therefore be a mechanism by which such emergent fields are generated,…
I've been pondering this for some time and have just now been fired into action by a comment I made in another article “Building Smarter Artificial Intelligence By... Shrinking the Body?” One approach to artificial intelligence is to model the activities of neurons as electrical circuits with multiple inputs and multiple outputs. The model assumes that each individual neuron affects only those other neurons with which it has direct contact at the synapses. But, we also know that an electrical signal will also generate an electromagnetic field. We know the brain as a whole does…
University of California, San Francisco researchers have uncovered a crucial mechanism that encourages alcohol consumption after extended abstinence.
Previous work has suggested that people, places, and objects associated with alcohol use are potent triggers for eliciting relapse and that cravings for both alcohol and drugs can increase across protracted abstinence. However, the specific molecular mechanisms that underlie pathological alcohol seeking are not well defined.
The team studied how alcohol addiction impacted a part of the brain called the nucleus accumbens (NAcb) core that is known…
There are currently two ambitious projects straddling artificial intelligence and neuroscience, each with the aim of building big brains that work. One is The Blue Brain Project, and it describes its aim in the following one-liner:
“The Blue Brain Project is the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, in order to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations.”
The second is a multi-institution IBM-centered project called SyNAPSE, a press release which describes it as follows:
“In an unprecedented undertaking, IBM Research and five leading…
Traditionally, scientists believed that nicotine inhaled in a puff of cigarette smoke took a mere seven seconds to be taken up by the brain, but new evidence indicates that nicotine takes much longer to reach peak levels in the brains of cigarette smokers, according to a new study in PNAS.
Using PET imaging, Duke investigators found for the first time that cigarette smokers actually experience a steady rise of brain nicotine levels during the course of smoking a whole cigarette.
"Previously it was thought that the puff-by-puff spikes of nicotine reaching the brain explained why cigarettes are…
A generation ago it was only a brave eclectic minority of psychologists and neuroscientists who dared to address the arts. Things have changed considerably since then. “Art and brain” is now a legitimate and respected target of study, and is approached from a variety of viewpoints, from reductionistic neurophysiology to evolutionary approaches.
Things have changed so quickly that late 20th century conversations about how to create stronger art-science collaborations and connections are dated only a decade later – everyone’s already doing it! And the new generation of students being trained…
Marketing experts may be able to test a product's appeal while it is still being designed thanks to advanced tools used to see the human brain at work, according to researchers from Duke and Emory Universities.
So-called "neuromarketing" takes tools like the functional MRI and applies them to the somewhat abstract likes and dislikes of customer decision-making.
Though this raises the specter of marketers being able to read people's minds, neuromarketing may prove to be an affordable way for marketers to gather information that was previously unobtainable, or that consumers themselves may not…