Scientists are making the first attempts to understand spiritual experience — and what happens in the brains and bodies of people who believe they connect with the divine.
The field is called “neurotheology,” and although it is new, it’s drawing prominent researchers in the U.S. and Canada. Scientists have found that the brains of people who spend untold hours in prayer and meditation are different.
Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist, has been scanning the brains of religious people for more than a decade. He has found that people who meditate, from Franciscan nuns to Tibetan Buddhists, go dark in the parietal lobe — the area of the brain that is related to sensory information and helps us form our sense of self.
Brain scans now reveal that living a life without regrets may be one key to aging well.
As painful as regret can be, scientists think it can help us make better choices in the future when we are young. However, as second chances decrease as we get older, the benefits of mulling over what might have been also decline with age.
In their first set of experiments, published in the April 19 issue of Science, Stefanie Brassen of the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany and her colleagues studied 20 healthy 20-somethings, as well as 20 healthy adults and 20 depressed adults around 65 years old.
Ref: Science 1217516 Published online 19 April 2012
(Source: scientificamerican.com)
If you are looking for a particular object, such as a yellow pencil on a cluttered desk, how does your brain work to visually locate it?
Researchers have identified how different parts of the brain communicate to determine what to visually pay attention to and what to ignore.
“We have demonstrated that attention is a process in which there is one-to-one mapping between the first place visual information comes from the eyes into the brain and beyond to other parts of the brain,” says Adam S. Greenberg, postdoctoral fellow of psychology at Carnegie Mellon University.
The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, used various brain imaging techniques to show exactly how the visual cortex and parietal cortex send direct information to each other through white matter connections in order to specifically pick out the information that you want to see.
(Source: futurity.org)
Children are the greatest learning machines in the universe. University of California, Berkeley researchers are tapping the cognitive smarts of babies, toddlers, and preschoolers to program computers to think more like humans.
Imagine if computers could learn as much and as quickly as they do,” says Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at Berkeley and author of The Scientist in the Crib and The Philosophical Baby.
“Young children are capable of solving problems that still pose a challenge for computers, such as learning languages and figuring out causal relationships,” says Tom Griffiths, director of UC Berkeley’s Computational Cognitive Science Lab. “We are hoping to make computers smarter by making them a little more like children.”
(Source: futurity.org)
As part of cognitive behavioral therapy, receiving text messages can make people feel less isolated. Research by Adrian Aguilera, a social welfare professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has found an upside to texting, especially for people who feel stressed out, isolated, and alone.
“When I was in a difficult situation and I received a message, I felt much better. I felt cared for and supported. My mood even improved,” reported one Spanish-speaking patient in Aguilera’s cognitive behavior therapy group at San Francisco General Hospital.
The project began in 2010 when Aguilera developed a customized “Short Message Service (SMS)” intervention program in which his patients were sent automated text messages prompting them to think and reply about their moods and responses to positive and negative daily interactions.
(Source: futurity.org)
Confronted with new things, the brain effortlessly moves from an initial “What’s that?” to “Oh, that old thing” after a few casual encounters.
New research published online in the journal Neuron sheds light on the malleability of this recognition process, and shows how neuroscientists have teased apart the potentially different roles the two distinct cell types may play.
Researchers had yet to figure out the steps required to move from novelty to familiarity, a process they refer to as “plasticity.”
“We know little about that because of the level at which this plasticity is taking place,” says senior author David Sheinberg, professor of neuroscience and a member of the Institute for Brain Science at Brown University. “The inner workings made up of individual neurons make it very hard to actually track what’s going on at that level.”
MRI evidence: Children who struggle with reading may benefit from being taught new words in isolation, rather than in the context of a sentence.
Published in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, “While the benefit of explicit instruction over implicit instruction may seem obvious, it was surprising to find such differences in brain function between groups of a very narrow range of reading skill,” says Laurie Cutting, associate professor of special education, psychology, radiology, and pediatrics at Vanderbilt University.
Cutting created a tool to mimic learning in order to identify the differences in neurological response to two types of teaching methods: implicit teaching—which uses words in a sentence, and explicit teaching—which teaches the words in isolation..
(Source: futurity.org)
There is a specific type of “timing” problem that limits our hearing as we age, Robert D. Frisina, Ph.D., professor of Otolaryngology at the University of Rochester Medical Center and his group have found increasing evidence of a “feedback” problem in the brain that diminishes our ability to hear.
There are many people who have good inner ears who just don’t hear well. That’s because their brains are aging. It is the ability of the brain, not hearing itself, that is diminished in older people who say they don’t “hear” well. The loss is detected most markedly in tests that measure a person’s ability to hear a sentence amid a background of babble, much as one might hear at a party while trying to speak to an individual nearby.
Ref; Frisina RD. “Age-related hearing loss: ear and brain mechanisms.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences. 2009; 1170
If a guy says he can’t hear you in a noisy club, sport’s setting or when the baby is crying, he’s lying! Why?
Research by Ida Zündorf from the Center of Neurology at Tübingen University, together with Prof. Hans-Otto Karnath and Dr. Jörg Lewald, to investigate the audio-spatial abilities in healthy men and women by means of a sound-localization task revealed that men have the advantage.
sounds were presented one at a time and both men and women accomplished the task with great accuracy. Later, several sounds were presented simultaneously and participants had to focus on and localize only one sound.
This is known as the cocktail party phenomenon — the human capacity to detect and focus on one particular sound source in a noisy environment.
Interestingly, women found the second task much more difficult, compared to men, to the extent that in some cases they even thought the sounds were coming from the opposite direction.
Ref: Ida C. Zündorf, Hans-Otto Karnath, Jörg Lewald. Male advantage in sound localization at cocktail parties. Cortex, 2011; 47 (6): 741 DOI: 10.1016/j.cortex.2010.08.002
