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 Post subject: Why We Do the Things We Do
PostPosted: Wed Apr 15, 2009 4:10 am 
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I feel for tears -- they"re usually looked down upon or feared, their producers shunned or coddled, but I guess that"s also part of their power. A neuroscientist has conducted an experiment that gives a little more insight into how people respond to and interpret the sight of tears.


In today"s duh news, sitting there at your desk reading this on your lunch break is making you a little bit fatter.


This is really where technology gets us: to the efficient production of delicious Easter candy. (Plus, bonus Easter candy item! How to make a Peeps wreath. I kind of really want one of these.)


Also in today"s links: parasites breed and library patrons read.


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 Post subject: The Science of Distraction
PostPosted: Sat May 30, 2009 8:45 pm 
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Just look at all the things you"re doing instead of working this beautiful day before a holiday weekend. Checking Facebook, looking at emails, listening to music, checking out Popsci.com and its Twitter feed, etc. How can you manage to hold all that information in your head at once? And is it any good for you?


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 Post subject: Memories! Is Sleep Key To What We Remember (and Forget)? Harvard Team Says "Yes"
PostPosted: Thu Jun 18, 2009 9:08 pm 
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MemoryManDad “Sleep is a smart, sophisticated process. You might say that
sleep is actually working at night to decide what memories to hold on
to and what to let go of."

Jessica Payne, Harvard University

We
all have memories of the the way we were. What"s too painful to remember, we simply
choose to forget. Or do we?



A study led by Harvard researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) and Boston College offers new insights into the specific components of emotional memories, suggesting that sleep plays a key role in determining what we remember – and what we forget.

The team"s findings show that a period of slumber helps the brain to selectively preserve and enhance those aspects of a memory that are of greatest emotional resonance, while at the same time diminishing the memory’s neutral background details.

“This tells us that sleep’s role in emotional memory preservation is more than just mechanistic,” says the study’s first author Jessica Payne, PhD, a Harvard University research fellow in the Division of Psychiatry at BIDMC. “In order to preserve what it deems most important, the brain makes a tradeoff, strengthening the memory’s emotional core and obscuring its neutral background.”.

Sleep’s importance in the development of episodic memories – in particular, those with emotional resonance– has been previously uncharted territory.

“Emotional memories usually contain highly charged elements – for example, the car that sideswiped us on the ride home – along with other elements that are only tangentially related to the emotion, such as the name of the street we were traveling on or what store we’d just passed,” explains study author Elizabeth Kensinger, an Assistant Professor in the College of Arts and Sciences at Boston College. “We were interested in examining whether sleep would affect memory for all of these elements equally, or whether sleep might allow some of the event features to decay at a faster rate than others.”

The authors tested 88 college students. Study participants were shown scenes that depicted either neutral subjects on a neutral background (a car parked on a street in front of shops) or negatively arousing subjects on a neutral background (a badly crashed car parked on a similar street). The participants were then tested separately on their memories of both the central objects in the pictures and the backgrounds in the scenes. In this way, memory could be compared for the emotional aspects of a scene (the crashed car) versus the non-emotional aspects of the scene (the street on which the car had crashed.)

Subjects were divided into three groups. The first group underwent memory testing after 12 hours spent awake during the daytime; the second group was tested after 12 nighttime hours, including their normal period of nighttime sleep; and the third baseline group was tested 30 minutes after viewing the images, in either the morning or evening.

“Our results revealed that the study subjects who stayed awake all day largely forgot the entire negative scene [they had seen], with their memories of both the central objects and the backgrounds decaying at similar rates,” says Payne. But, she adds, among the individuals who were tested after a period of sleep, memory recall for the central negative objects (i.e. the smashed car) was preserved in detail.

“After an evening of sleep, the subjects remembered the emotional items [smashed car] as accurately as the subjects whose memories had been tested only 30 minutes after looking at the scenes,” explains Kensinger. “By contrast, sleep did little to preserve memory for the backgrounds [i.e. street scenes] and so memory for those elements reached a comparably low level after a night of sleep as it did after a day spent awake.”

“This is consistent with the possibility that the individual components of emotional scene memory become ‘unbound’ during sleep,” adds Payne, explaining that “unbinding” enables the sleeping brain to selectively preserve only that information which it calculates to be most salient and worthy of remembering. A real-world example of this tradeoff, she adds, is the “weapon focus effect” in which crime victims vividly remember an assailant’s weapon, but have little memory for other important aspects of the crime scene. Traumatic memories, such as the flashbacks experienced among individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder, can demonstrate similar disparities, with some aspects of an experience seemingly engraved in memory while other details are erased.

The research findings are Reported in the August 2008 issue of the journal Psychological Science.

Posted by Casey Kazan.

http://www.harvardscience.harvard.edu/medicine-health/articles/researchers-find-sleep-selectively-preserves-emotional-memories





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 Post subject: Stanford Team Re-Engineering Brain Cells to be Controlled by Lasers
PostPosted: Wed Jul 01, 2009 11:18 pm 
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1174991014healing_quran_secrets_5 Scientists are working on genetically engineered laser-controlled brain cells.  You could take the adjectives from five scifi books, roll them into a ball and shoot them through a hyperbole gun and STILL not come up with something so incredible sounding.  The work could utterly revolutionize neurotherapy, psychology, and the goopy goo of "you" inside that bone basket you carry around on top of your neck.



Stanford scientist Dr Deisseroth and colleagues work on the awesome idea of "optogenetics", re-engineering cells to be controlled by light.  This means they can access deep brain tissues with needles and fiber-optics, instead of the traditional knives and implants that make brain surgery such a serious proposition.

Making the science sound even more fictiony, the genes which have been virally injected into existing cells are derived from light-sensitive algae and some salt-dwelling extremophiles (lifeforms capable of surviving in environments fatal to almost everything else.)  If movie logic is to be believed, this would turn the patient into a infectiously shambling photosynthetic plant-zombie who raids kitchens.  Luckily it isn"t, and instead you end up with a brain structure that can be turned on or off by pulses of yellow or blue light (giving a whole new meaning to "feeling blue.")

The work is progressing well in trials on mice, and turns up in Nature every time they decide to report something - so at least somebody knows that "Method of mood control via laser, including moods other than "vaporized"", is a big deal.

Deisseroth Lab
Laser-brain





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 Post subject: Goodbye, Ritalin. Hello, Brain Magnets
PostPosted: Wed Aug 12, 2009 2:12 am 
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An Israeli company wants to keep adults focused using a magnetic field to stimulate the brain. The technique, called transcranial magnetic stimulation, involves hooking someone up to a device that creates a magnetic field. The field then induces an electrical current in specific brain regions, which activates that part of the brain. It"s worked for depression, and now may help the estimated 8 million adults with ADHD.


Despite sounding crackpot crazy, there’s a biological reason why this might work. The brain uses two different means of transmitting signals: electric pulses and chemicals. Drugs mess with the chemical part. Magnetic stimulation messes with the electrical part.


The method has proved useful for depression. Many legitimate researchers are testing magnetic stimulation for other problems (pain, schizophrenia, ringing ears), and at least one group is using it to study the nature of free will.


The company, Brainsway, will team up with the Veterans Administration Medical Center of Los Angeles to test the treatment’s safety and effectiveness in 20 adults with ADD. Hopefully the patients won’t come out with ringing ears.


[Via Medgadget




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 Post subject: Is Quantum Mechanics Selectively Erasing Our Memory?
PostPosted: Wed Sep 02, 2009 1:23 am 
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In a paper published last week, MIT physicist Lorenzo Maccone hypothesizes that, yes, quantum physics is messing with our minds. The laws of physics work just as well if time is running forwards or backwards. But we all seem to experience time running in only one direction, and in the same direction as everyone else -- a mystery of physics that"s yet to be solved.


So life as we observe it presents a quandary. Randomness -- or entropy -- naturally increases. A drop of food coloring in water will spread out. Heat from a pizza dissipates. But the laws of physics that govern the tiny particles that make up everything could just as well run backwards, so something doesn"t jibe. Why don"t we see more instances of molecules ordering themselves (sugar un-dissolving itself from my coffee, ice cubes spontaneously forming in my water) if it"s just as likely according to the laws of physics?


Maccone says that we do see these events. We just don"t remember them, because some quantum weirdness erases the memories. Using a bunch of math, he says that your memory and the event are in a state of quantum entanglement, and that when that state gets broken, the memory is erased.


What do you think is going on? Is time running backward sometimes? Are molecules organizing themselves behind our backs? All I know is that my brain hurts right now.


[Via Guardian Science Blog]




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 Post subject: A Squirt of Stem Cell Gel Heals Brain Injuries
PostPosted: Sat Sep 05, 2009 12:57 am 
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Scientists have developed a gel that helps brains recover from traumatic injuries. It has the potential to treat head injuries suffered in combat, car accidents, falls, or gunshot wounds. Developed by Dr. Ning Zhang at Clemson University in South Carolina, the gel is injected in liquid form at the site of injury and stimulates the growth of stem cells there.


Brain injuries are particularly hard to repair, since injured tissues swell up and can cause additional damage to the cells. So far, treatments have tried to limit this secondary damage by lowering the temperature or relieving the pressure at the site of injury. However, these techniques are often not very effective.


More recently, scientists have considered transplanting donor brain cells into the wound to repair damaged tissue. This method has so far had limited results when treating brain injuries. The donor cells often fail to grow or stimulate repair at the injury site, possibly because of the inflammation and scarring present there. The injury site also typically has very limited blood supply and connective tissue, which might prevent donor cells from getting the nutrients they require.


Dr. Zhang"s gel, however, can be loaded with different chemicals to stimulate various biological processes at the site of injury. In previous research done on rats, she was able to use the gel to help re-establish full blood supply at the site of brain injury. This could help create a better environment for donor cells.


In a follow-up study, Dr. Zhang loaded the gel with immature stem cells, as well as the chemicals they needed to develop into full-fledged adult brain cells. When rats with severe brain injuries were treated with this mixture for eight weeks, they showed signs of significant recovery.


The new gel could treat patients at varying stages following injury, and is expected to be ready for testing in humans in about three years.




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 Post subject: Has Evolution Etched Fear Into Our Behavior?
PostPosted: Thu Oct 01, 2009 3:20 am 
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Ev

Fear_and_loathing

olution has hidden post-hypnotic suggestions in your behavior.  You may think you"re the absolute master of your emotions, but that whole "consciousness" thing is just a thin scraping of self-awareness over a huge network of evolved drives and compulsions.  If you can honestly say you"re not affected by your subconscious wiring then we"re flattered, because we didn"t think many Buddhas read this site.




Some
excellent experiments in behavioral research were conducted by
Professor Susan Mineka in the eighties. She worked with monkeys and
videotapes, and unlike most recorded work featuring monkeys from the
eighties, hers did not feature skateboards, wacky escapes from inept
hitmen or even a single harebrained scheme to raise funds for the local
youth center.  It was about fear.

Wild
monkeys are deathly afraid of snakes - to the point where they"ll
starve to death rather than reach across even a fake snake to get
food.  Since learning this fear by experience is a literally
short-lived solution, this fear was thought to be hereditary. Monkeys
born in captivity exhibited no such fear, however, which seemed to hole
the hereditary idea - until Mineka got together some primates for the
ultimate horror movie.

By
showing some monkeys footage of a wild monkey utterly terrified of
snakes, she triggered the same hysterical responses in those who had
never seen the object of fear, would never see it and were never going
to be at any risk from it.  We can"t comment on whether the Department
of Homeland Security read this research.  Further, attempts to trigger
a fear of flowers by showing fake footage of a monkey scared of plants
failed. It seemed that the "snakes suck" wiring was always there, but
until it was externally triggered it never manifested.

The
same research also showed how to combat these phobic trip-switches:  by
showing them a monkey that wasn"t scared of snakes, even if that was a
fake monkey, the terror-reaction was strongly reduced.  Which
technically means you could make a child immune to letting them watch
Chuck Norris movies when young.  Because all these phobic-factors seem
as applicable to humans as they are to other primates, with
applications in child-rearing and anxiety management.  They weren"t
just doing this research because somebody wanted the job "monkey
frightener."

Posted by Luke McKinney.

Genes affect phobias http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/ridley03/ridley_p5.html
Anxiety Disorder research http://www.loc.gov/loc/brain/emotion/Mineka.html





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 Post subject: Boosting a Brain Wave Makes People Go Slo-Mo
PostPosted: Fri Oct 02, 2009 9:44 pm 
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Researchers manipulate a certain brain wave to slow down voluntary movement in humans<--paging_filter-->

Researchers have found that manipulating a particular brain wave can force human subjects to move more slowly, and provided some of the first evidence of how brain waves can directly affect behavior.

A group of 14 volunteers received brain stimulation as they tried to manipulate the position of a spot on a computer screen with a joystick. That stimulation led to a 10 percent drop in execution of the computer task.

The electrical current used in this study specifically boosted normal beta activity that has links to sustained muscle activities, such as holding a book. Such beta activity typically drops off before people make a move.

At last we have some direct experimental proof that brain waves influence behavior in humans, in this case how fast a movement is performed, said Peter Brown, a neuroscientist at the University College London in the UK. The implication is that it is not just how active brain cells are that is important, but also how they couple their activity into patterns like beta activity.

The latest study differs from previous work by using an oscillating current that more closely mimics normal brain waves, as opposed to constant brain stimulation found in other studies. Still, Brown and his colleagues had not expected such a relatively small electric current to have such noticeable effect on participant behavior -- the first interventional proof of a cause-and-effect for beta brain waves and voluntary movement.

Scientists have recently deployed a vast array of technologies to probe, poke and manipulate brains. Magnetic fields that stimulate the brain have undergone testing for treating ADHD and depression, and a laser device piped into a mouse"s brain stopped Parkinson-like tremors almost instantly.

Brown"s research could also help scientists better understand conditions where uncontrolled or slowed movements affect sufferers, such as in Parkinson"s. But people looking to replicate Hollywood slo-mo action scenes for YouTube still may want to hold off on this approach.


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 Post subject: Nasal Spray for Better Memory
PostPosted: Sat Oct 03, 2009 10:37 am 
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Snort your way to perfect health? Just last week, we heard that snorting stem cells might be the best way to get them into your noggin. And this week, scientists have declared that a nasal spray can help your memory.


Researchers tested the spray before and after sleeping because sleep is thought to help the brain solidify long-term memories while purging extraneous details from the day. First, they read an emotional story to 17 volunteers. Then the participants were given a nasal spray of either the molecule interleukin-6 or a placebo. The next morning, the people were asked to remember as many words from the story as they could. It turned out that people who had taken interleukin-6 had better recall of words the story they had heard than those in the control group. (The researchers, who published their findings in the October issue of The FASEB Journal, didn"t find any effect for nonemotional stories.)


What is particularly curious about this study is the identity of what was going up people"s snouts: interleukin-6. This molecule is primarily known as having an important role in the immune system, but researchers noted that its levels rise in the body (including the brain) when people sleep. Now it seems that it might be helping you remember emotional memories, as well.


And what if you don"t want to remember something terrible and emotional from the day? One thing"s for sure: don"t go sticking any interleukin-6 up your nose.




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