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POPSWhy We Get Lost in Books "Part of the reason we get lost in these imaginary worlds might be because our brains effectively simulate the events of the book in the same way they process events in the real world, a new study suggests".
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POPSBrain Develops Motor Memory For Prosthetics Stunning new research now reveals that the brain can also achieve this motor memory with a prosthetic device, providing hope that physically disabled people can one day master control of artificial limbs with greater ease
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POPSKeep on keepin' on... inspiring story "Profile of ultramarathon runner Diane Van Deren who became a world class endurance athlete after having brain surgery to remove a large chunk of her right temporal lobe".
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POPSA clear link between brain speed and intelligence. "The smarter the person, the faster information zips around the brain, a UCLA study finds. And this ability to think quickly apparently is inherited. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, looked at the brains and intelligence of 92 people. All the participants took standard IQ tests. Then the researchers studied their brains using a technique called diffusion tensor imaging, or DTI. "
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POPSLong-distance brain waves focus attention Just as our world buzzes with distractions — from phone calls to e-mails to tweets — the neurons in our brain are bombarded with messages. Research has shown that when we pay attention, some of these neurons begin firing in unison
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POPSDecoding the brain's response to vocal emotions "We recognize emotions in others by observing their body language and facial expressions. The voice also betrays one's emotional state: words spoken in anger have a different rhythm, stress and intonation than those uttered with a sense of joy or relief. But how the emotional content of a voice is encoded in the brain was unclear. Now though, Swiss researchers report that they have decoded the neural activity in the voice-sensitive regions of the brain'
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POPSInside the baby mind One of the most surprising implications of this new research concerns baby consciousness, or what babies actually experience as they interact with the outside world. While scientists and doctors have traditionally assumed that babies are much less conscious than adults - this is why, until the 1970s, many infants underwent surgery without anesthesia - that view is being overturned.
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POPSRemembering the Past is Like Imagining the Future 'Everyone has heard that memories can be unreliable, but many of us don’t appreciate the extent to which that is true. It’s not the case that “real” memories are stored once and for all deep in the darkest recesses of the brain, and it’s just a matter of digging them up. False memories — conjured from any number of sources, from gradual embellishment to direct suggestion by others — seem precisely as vivid and real to us as accurate memories do. For a good reason: the brain uses the same tools to construct the memory from the available raw materials. A novel and a history book look the same on the printed page'
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POPSUnconditional love in the brain? Of course we must agree first on what " unconditional" means, but it seems that neuroscientists lately have decided somehow to conquer the territory traditionally reserved for philosophers. As I see it, it is high time for serious philosophers to reclaim their place. Unconditionality is not a neurological term and thus to my eyes is meaningless in this particular context. I definitely agree with the writers of brainethics, this is the kind of science one should be skeptical of.
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POPSAre Smart Drugs the Answer to Bad Moods—and a Bad Economy? "Artists and lawyers, musicians and businesspeople mingle, talk, and imbibe that eternally popular feel-good drug, alcohol. The slightly pungent scent of marijuana drifts in from a room off the kitchen, where joints are passed among a dozen people, some of them old enough to have been smoking marijuana as a recreational drug since the 1960s. Despite the fears of their worried parents in the hippie heyday, most of these folks have ended up successful; they say that they are using pot to unwind, de-stress, and be more sociable".
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POPSOur relationship with money has many facets: Instead of treating cash simply as a tool to be wielded with objective precision, we allow money to reach inside our heads and tap into the ancient emotional parts of our brain, often with unpredictable results
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POPSFive Brain-Manipulating Technologies "oss Whedon's new show Dollhouse is about a secret organization that supplies mind-wiped sex ninjas to the rich. It's not set in the future because neuromanipulated technoslaves could exist today.
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POPSLearning Makes Itself Invisible The reason this occurs is because of two facts about the mind that are not widely appreciated. The first is that memory is not kept in a separate store away from the rest of the mind's functions. Although there are brain regions crucial to memory, the memories themselves are not stored separately from the regions which do perception, processing and output. Unlike a digital computer, your mind does not have to fetch stored information when it needs it, instead your memories affect every part of your perception and behaviour.
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