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The Key To Creativity And Innovation
If you want to have increased productivity in the field of creatives, one of the things you may need to do is to grab something as an inspiration. Looking for that small spark may be difficult though, as life is filled with monotonous tasks and the world may seem bleak and shallow due to the different socio-economic problems we’re facing today.But it turns out that our inspiration and creativity may still be obtained by simply lounging around in our homes: via daydreaming. When we daydream, our brains, instead of shutting down, switch to a new mode of thinking. This mode specializes in two processes: imagining and thinking. A reliable network of medial lobe brain structures activates as we daydream. According to Chandra Sripada, our brains create thematic associations between adjacent thoughts, as well as spot the discontinuities in them. This is when our brain can identify interesting patterns and relationships. From there, we can get new patterns, generalizations, interpretations, and insights.Learn more about how daydreaming works in our brains here!Image credit: cottonbro studio #brain #brainactivity #daydreaming
The Potential Cause of Alzheimer’s Disease Has Been Discovered
In research done by scientists from Yale University,an overlooked mechanism has been found that can be a possible reason for manifesting Alzheimer’s Disease. This new discovery changes the perspective of experts. Initially believing the predominant hypothesis of the ailment being caused by amyloid plaques. These refer to the tangled clumps of a protein called beta-amyloid that was observed to occur in big amounts in patients that are suffering from the said disease.Now, however, the new discovery points out that the small swellings on neurons can also be a mechanism related to the sickness. Additionally, a newly-identified protein can be used as a biomarker for early detection and future treatments. The study focused on looking at the small, spheroid-shaped swellings that form near the long, wiry part of the neuron. Researchers found out that the swellings can dampen the transmission of electrical signals through other neurons, which may contribute to neurological degeneration. The bigger the swellings get, the more the patient will be prone to the symptoms of Alzheimer’s or other brain-related diseases, such as dementia. “We have identified a potential signature of Alzheimer’s which has functional repercussions on brain circuitry, with each spheroid having the potential to disrupt activity in hundreds of neuronal axons and thousands of interconnected neurons,” said Dr. Jaime Grutzendler, the senior author of the study.Image credit: MART PRODUCTION#Alzheimers #disease #neuroscience #brain #illness #research
Not Listening to Mom is a Normal Part of Growing Up, According to Science
The development of the MRI has done wonders for neuroscience and brain research. Previous research shows that the brains of infants, toddlers, and children are uniquely stimulated by their mother's voice. New research shows how that changes at about age 13, which signals the beginning of a teenager's separation from parents. The change in adolescence shows that teenagers become more receptive to all kinds of voices, compared to younger children. However, stimulation of the pleasure centers of the brain begin to react more to novel voices, meaning those not quite as familiar as family, and less to one's mother's voice. By the end of the experiment, the scientists could guess how old the subjects were by just looking at data from the brain scans! The effect has been long known by parents. However, the data shows how the change is controlled by biology and is quite consistent from one teen to the next. So when your kid starts to value the voices and opinions of their friends over Mom's, rest assured it's just part of growing up. Read about the experiments that showed these results at Stanford Medicine. -via Damn Interesting(Image credit: SCA Svenska Cellulosa Aktiebolaget) #brain #voice #brainscan #teenager #adolescence
120,000 Brain Scans Show How Brains Grow and Shrink Over a Lifetime
Human brains grow quickly in childhood, then slowly shrink over the rest of our lives. Neurologists knew this, but never had a reference for normal size variations in brains -until now. A catalog of 120,000 brain scans from more than 100,000 people have been compiled into a kind of "growth chart" by a team led by neuroscientist Jakob Seidlitz of the University of Pennsylvania. It is a massive project, and Seidlitz was impressed with how many colleagues participated by donating scans, surmising they had more time to reply to emails due to the pandemic. The scans show that different parts of the brain expand and contract at different rates. For example, cortical thickness peaks in late infancy, while ventricular volume begins a growth spurt that only starts in adulthood. The growth chart can be used to determine what is normal for brain development and size by age, but they caution that the project is not exactly representative of the global population. These scans come from mainly white patients in relatively wealthy nations, because MRI scanners are expensive and not commonly found in many countries of the world. But it's a start, and this catalog will be a big help to researchers and physicians alike. Read more about this project at Nature.(Image credit: Zephyr/SPL)#brain #brainvolume #braingrowth #brainscan
A Chunk of Her Brain was Missing, But She was Fine
A woman who goes by the initials EG has a graduate degree, an accomplished career, and speaks two languages. She is also missing her left temporal lobe, which is considered the seat of language development and processing. EG only found out about her missing chunk of brain as a young adult in 1987, when a scan showed that there was only spinal fluid in that area of her skull. Doctors believe it may have been due to a stroke in her infancy, but she has never suffered from seizures, language problems, or any other expected symptoms.Over the years, she says, doctors have repeatedly told EG that her brain doesn’t make sense. One doctor told her she should have seizures, or that she shouldn’t have a good vocabulary—and “he was annoyed that I did,” she says. (As part of the study at MIT, EG tested in the 98th percentile for vocabulary.) The experiences were frustrating; they “pissed me off,” as EG puts it. “They made so many pronouncements and conclusions without any investigation whatsoever,” she says.EG volunteered for a neuroscience study of how her brain had adapted to the loss of her left temporal lobe. Scientists studied her brain activity as she performed language and non-language tasks. They found that her language skills were processed in the right temporal lobe. But was it always that way for her, or did her brain re-wire itself? Read about the woman who gets along fine with a large part of her brain missing at Wired. And then think about what your own brain might look like if it were ever to be scanned. -via Real Clear Science(Image credit: Evelina Fedorenko, Greta Tuckute/Brain and Cognitive Sciences)#brain #brainplasticity #temporallobe #neuroscience
Brain Implant Lets Paralyzed Man Communicate Just by Thinking
In the near future, people with ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, may be able to regain the ability to communicate with their loved ones. New neurological research involves implanting a patient's brain with microelectrodes which allow him to spell words using his thoughts.This brain-computer interface was tested on the man for 86 days before trying a method called auditory neurofeedback. In it, the man learned to hit audible target notes by increasing or decreasing his neural activity. A higher tone—increased firing rate of neurons—meant “yes,” while a lower tone meant “no.”Within this method, the patient was able to spell about 1 letter per minute. In the end, out of 107 days that the man spelled words, he produced intelligible output on 44 days, according to the study. Of the various sentences that the patient was able to produce, two stood out: "I would like to listen to the album by Tool loud" and "I love my cool son."This may be a long road, but the discovery gives the team hope that someday ALS patients will be able to express themselves no matter how their physicality declines.Image: Wyss Center#brain #brainimplants #thought #ALS #amyotrophiclateralsclerosis
Neuroscientists Identify Neurons in the Brain that Light Up When We Hear Human Singing But Not Other Types of Music
Scientists, following the same vein of research in specific areas of the brain that work during different tasks, have successfully identified the part of the human brain that lights up when we hear singing. It is important to note that this area only responds when the combination of voice and music is heard. The area, found in the auditory cortex, does not respond to regular speech or instrumental music.Neuroscientists from MIT followed up a 2015 study that they worked on. The researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify a population of neurons in the brain’s auditory cortex that responds specifically to music. This new study used a different method to determine brain activity through recordings of electrical activity taken at the surface of the brain to obtain more information. According to Sam Norman-Haignere, the lead author of the study, the recordings gave them a higher resolution where they were able to pick the neurons apart.Image credit: Josh Rocklage#neuroscience #brain #neurons #research #study #science
Scientists See How a Memory Forms in a Brain
Researchers have long know that emotionally-charged memories, particularly those that involve fear, tend to stay around longer than other recollections. A team from the University of Southern California has actually watched imaging under a microscope as a fear experience was encoded in the brain of a living fish. Zebra fish are common in such studies, because they are transparent and they can easily be genetically engineered. The scientists engineered zebra fish to have a fluorescent protein marker in their brain synapses. Then they trained them to fear light. When a fish was exposed to a light, inducing a fear response, they expected the synapses of the palladium(a brain area analogous to the amygdala in mammals) to grow. Instead, they witnessed some synapse "pruning" in the palladium, and synapse building in other parts of the palladium. In other words, they rearranged their synapses. Read a deeper dive into this research and its implications at Quanta magazine. -via Damn Interesting (Image credit: Andrey Andreev, Thai Truong, Scott Fraser; Translational Imaging Center, USC)#brain #imaging #memory #synapse #zebrafish
Brain's "Math Neurons" Fire Specifically When You're Doing Math Calculations
A recent study conducted by the Universities of Tübingen and Bonn in Germany showed that the brain has specific neurons that operate when a person performs different mathematical operations. Some neurons were active only during addition, while some were only active during subtraction. The researchers further discovered that these neurons fire on specific operations even if the calculation instruction was written down as a word or a symbol.Five women and four men who participated in the study had electrodes implanted in their brains to record the activity of nerve cells. During analysis of the participants’ brain activity, the researchers found that aside from specific neurons being active during addition or subtraction, other neurons also became active during one and the same arithmetic task. This phenomenon was referred to by researchers as “dynamic coding.” Image credits: Christian Burkert/Volkswagen-Stiftung/University of Bonn #neurology #brain #neurons #science #research
New Brain and Memory Study: Learning Cause Synapses to Proliferate in Some Areas and Disappear in Others
Researchers from the University of Southern California managed to record the physical changes that occur in the brain when a memory is made. This incredible feat was done by inducing a memory in a larval zebrafish. In order to record the changes that were made after the memory was created, researchers mapped the changes in the animal’s transparent head– which had brain cells that lit up like lights in a city.The groundbreaking research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, discovered that synapses (the connections between neurons) appear and disappear in some areas after learning. This was way different than the initial assumption that synapses only weaken or strengthen, not disappear completely. The memory induced caused the synapses in one part of the zebrafish’s brain to be destroyed and caused completely new ones to form in a different region. Image credit: Don Arnold, University of Southern California#neurology #synapses #brain #science #research
The Science of Kawaii: How Cute Things Affect Human Behavior
Why do we find videos of kittens and puppies cute? Why do we go “aww” when we see babies? Why do cute videos make us happier? To answer these questions, we go to the Japanese word that is synonymous with the word cute: “kawaii.” And because it is a Japanese word, we also need some help from a Japanese person.Enter Hiroshi Nittono, the director of the Cognitive Psychophysiology Laboratory at Osaka University.Nittono is a kawaii researcher—that is, he studies the Japanese concept of cuteness and how we experience it. His research has found that looking at kawaii images, like photos of puppies or kittens (or baby alpacas, perhaps?) helps us focus and pay attention to detail, improves our attention, and leads to better task performance.“Kawaii things not only make us happier but also affect our behavior,” Nittono’s original 2012 study reported.To summarize what he said, kawaii is the “cute emotion” that we experience when we encounter something that makes us feel said emotion. This emotion makes us act tenderly and protectively towards the kawaii object. It is also worth noting that the concept of kawaii is not limited to the visual sense.More about this over at Wired.The more we know!(Image Credit: Pixabay)#Kawaii #Cute #CognitivePsychophysiology #Psychology #Brain
Researchers Developed a 'Speech Neuroprosthesis' That Converts a Paralyzed Man's Brain Waves to Speech
UCSF neurosurgeon Edward Chang has spent the last decade working on a technology that would allow people with paralysis to communicate even though they're incapable of speech on their own.Now, Chang and his team has succeeded in decoding full words from the brain activity. "It shows strong promise to restore communication by tapping into the brain's natural speech machinery," he said.The first patient in the trial of the study suffered a devastating brainstem stroke 15 years ago which left him paralyzed and unable to speak. Since his injury, he communicated by using a pointer attached to a baseball cap to poke at letters on a computer screen.Chang surgically implanted a high-density electrode array over the patient's speech motor cortex. Then, he and neurology professor Karunesh Ganguly and colleagues recorded 22 hours of neural activity in the patient's brain over several months while the patient attempted to vocalize some words many times.The data was fed into custom neural network models, a form of artificial intelligence, to distinguish and identify specific subtle patterns in the brain activity to detect speech and identify which word the patient was trying to say.The UCSF team found that their system was able to decode words from brain waves of the patient at a rate of up to 18 words per minute with up to 93 percent accuracy.#speech #brain #brainwave #electrode #neurology #artificialintelligence #AI #neuroprosthesis #paralysis #stroke #neuralnetwork #UCSF
Is Operating at the Edge of Chaos the Key to Developing Artificial Intelligence?
A team of scientists from the University of Sydney discovered that the key to developing artificial intelligence may be to mimic the human brain, which some neuroscientists think operates in a critical state at the edge of chaos.From Science Alert:The team used varying levels of electricity on a nanowire simulation, finding a balance when the electric signal was too low when the signal was too high. If the signal was too low, the network's outputs weren't complex enough to be useful; if the signal was too high, the outputs were a mess and also useless....For now, the scientists have shown that nanowire networks can do their best problem solving right on the line between order and chaos, much like our brain is thought to be able to, and that puts us a step closer to AI that thinks as we do.#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #brain #nanowire #chaosImage: Adrian Diaz-Alvarez/NIMS Japan
How the Brain Comes Up With All Those Crazy Ideas on the Toilet
Do you do your best thinking while on the toilet? We're laughing at this clever comic by illustrator Tang Yau Hoongof Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. What a brilliant idea!#brain #idea #thinking #toilet #TangYauHoong #comics
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