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POPSAccept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up The lesson is that not all data is created equal in our mind’s eye: When it comes to interpreting our experiments, we see what we want to see and disregard the rest. The physics students, for instance, didn’t watch the video and wonder whether Galileo might be wrong. Instead, they put their trust in theory, tuning out whatever it couldn’t explain. Belief, in other words, is a kind of blindness.
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POPSHidden Sensory System Discovered in the Skin The human sensory experience is far more complex and nuanced than previously thought, according to a groundbreaking new study published in the December 15 issue of the journal Pain. In the article, researchers at Albany Medical College, the University of Liverpool and Cambridge University report that the human body has an entirely unique and separate sensory system aside from the nerves that give most of us the ability to touch and feel. Surprisingly, this sensory network is located throughout our blood vessels and sweat glands, and is for most people, largely imperceptible.
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POPSTwitter and the Global Brain In fact, judging by Twitter's Trending Topics, the re-tweeting process does not point to either good, or important content. Of course, it may not be right to assume that a global brain will be smarter, and real significance will be lost in the tsunami of celebrity drivel.
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POPSA Dream Interpretation: Tuneups for the Brain “I argue that dreaming is not a parallel state but that it is consciousness itself, in the absence of input from the senses,” Once people are awake, he argued, their brain essentially revises its dream images to match what it sees, hears and feels " the dreams are “corrected” by the senses.
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POPSBrain Tumor Survivors Shouldn't Take It Easy The mice that were able to exercise scored just as well on a memory test as normal mice did; however, the mice that did not have access to the exercise wheel did not. "It was remarkable that the irradiated, running mice were just like the normal, non-irradiated mice that didn't exercise," lead researcher and graduate student Sarah Wong-Goodrich of the Duke Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, was quoted as saying. "We were expecting some memory retention issues with a longer delay and there weren't any." The researchers believe exercise benefits the mind by improving blood flow to the hippocampus in the brain, a key area for learning and memory.
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POPSWhew! Good thing people are smarter than rats - grin. We don't need a canary to warn us about trouble in the fast food lane of life - we need a rat! Read on to see that rats react the same to heroin, as they do to bacon, cheesecake and HoHos. So why do you think they tested three of guy's favorite food groups?
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POPSThe way the brain buys Scientists used to assume that emotion and rationality were opposed to each other, but Antonio Damasio, now professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, has found that people who lose the ability to perceive or experience emotions as the result of a brain injury find it hard or impossible to make any decisions at all. They can’t shop. ergo we shop with our hearts..;-)
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POPSAttacking Alzheimer's with Red Wine and Marijuana "Could people smoke marijuana to prevent Alzheimer's disease if the disease is in the family? We're not saying that, but it might actually work," he said. "What we are saying is it appears that a safe, legal substance that mimics those important properties of marijuana can work on receptors in the brain to prevent memory impairments in aging. So that's really hopeful."