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POPSPlacebo effect caught in the act in spinal nerves indeed, the biggest obstacle to establishing the spinal cord's role in placebo pain relief was measuring its activity with fMRI scanning, says Falk Eippert, a neuroscientist at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, who led the study. FMRI scanning has long been used to image the brain, but the part of the spinal cord that Eippert's team was interested in – the dorsal horn – is minuscule in comparison, and so is harder to image. It also swims around in cerebrospinal fluid, further complicating real-time measurement.
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POPSDo our brains interpret our values and beliefs as facts (objective truths)?
Such messages caused activation in the brain region that is responsible for error detection. So in other words (and yes, I am grossly simplifying here), it was as if people's brain's were indicating "error, error, error; this message does not compute." This is consistent with research by Emily Pronin (psychology professor at Princeton University), which shows that people of all beliefs see their own beliefs as LESS biased than others. In other words, republicans see themselves as less biased, and so do democrats, and for that matter, so do mailman, coperate CEO's and homeless people. I think this goes a long way in explaining the depth and extent to which people defend their beliefs. Perhaps, Berger and Luckmann are right; we do live, in some sense, in alternative forms of reality. Sure, we all know a rock won't bite us and 2 + 2 = 4, but what I "know" (George W. Bush was lousy) is not what many Republicans "knows" (George W. Bush was a good president).
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POPS"Brain Reading" Device Can Predict What People See "The fMRI technique is a relatively new way to measure changes in the brain's blood oxygen levels, which have strong links to neural activity. The collected data were used to "teach" a computer program to associate certain blood flow patterns with particular kinds of images. Participants were then asked to look at a second set of images they had never encountered before. The model was programmed to take what it had learned from the previous pairings and figure out what was being shown in the new set of images. For a collection of 120 images, the model correctly identified what a person was looking at 90 percent of the time. When the set was enlarged to a thousand images, accuracy was about 80 percent. Continued at: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/03/080305-brain-scan_2.html
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POPSWhat Britney Spears Can Reveal About Alzheimer's
More: When volunteers saw names such as Britney Spears, George Clooney, and Marilyn Monroe, those who were at the highest risk of developing Alzheimer's - those with both the genetic makeup and a family history - showed high levels of activity in the hippocampus, posterior cingulate and regions of the frontal cortex, all areas involved in memory. The control group showed the opposite pattern. Their brains became more excited when they saw unfamiliar names, which included Irma Jacoby, Joyce O'Neil and Virginia Warfield. That could mean that the at-risk people were working harder to recognize the well-known celebrities, compensating for already damaged or destroyed neurons that were no longer functioning, while the control group had to struggle only when trying to place the names of noncelebrities, recruiting more nerve cells and connections, racking their memory banks and recall centers. Other signs of Alzheimer's were not present yet allowing for earlier detection.
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POPSIs Wisdom in the Brain? Wisdom for centuries has been a religious or philosophical concept that varies somewhat by culture. But Jeste tells ScientificAmerican.com that there is reason to believe that it's rooted in neurobiology.
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POPSMood Literally Affects How We See World “Good moods enhance the literal size of the window through which we see the world,” Taylor Schmitz, a graduate student in psychology at the University of Toronto and lead author of the study, says in a written statement. “The upside of this is that we can see things from a more global, or integrative perspective. The downside is that this can lead to distraction on critical tasks that require narrow focus, such as operating dangerous machinery or airport screening of passenger baggage.”
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POPSMRI Lie Detection to Get First Day in Court Laboratory studies using fMRI, which measures blood-oxygen levels in the brain, have suggested that when someone lies, the brain sends more blood to the ventrolateral area of the prefrontal cortex. In a very small number of studies, researchers have identified lying in study subjects with accuracy ranging from 76 percent to over 90 percent (pdf). But some scientists and lawyers like Greely doubt that those results will prove replicable outside the lab setting, and others say it just isn't ready yet.
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POPSBrain Matrix Responds To God Issues Cont: A first part of the study established a range or spectrum of religious beliefs relating to God's perceived involvement in this world, God's perceived emotion, and personal experiences as opposed to abstract doctrine. The second part examined how participants responded to religious statements reflecting those beliefs, with the help of fMRI scanners.
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POPSLonliness Impacts Brain Function (continuing on) About one if five Americans experience loneliness, Cacioppo said. And it is a growing problem in modern society in part because the average household size is decreasing. By 2010, 31 million Americans — roughly 10 percent of the population — will live alone, Cacioppo and his colleagues say. Previous work has suggested it can be as detrimental to health as smoking, Cacioppo said. In his book, "Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection" (W.W. Norton, 2008), he presented evidence that loneliness is related to less blood flow through the body, poorer immune systems, increased levels of depression and a faster progression of Alzheimer's disease.
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POPSReading changes brain as well as mind continues: The study, forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, is one of a series in which Zacks and colleagues use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to track real-time brain activity as study participants read and process individual words and short stories. Hey, pathworking and other forms of guided imagery actually do something measurable! Why, that means that role-playing games…umh…uh, oh.
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POPSI Feel Your Pain: Neural Mechanisms Of Empathy
CIP patients showed decreased fMRI activation of visual regions, a result indicative of their reduced emotional arousal to the view of others' pain. On the other hand, in the CIP patients but not the controls, the capacity for empathy strongly predicted activation of key midline brain structures involved in processes linked to inferring the emotional states of others. These results suggest that in the absence of functional resonance mechanisms shaped by personal pain experiences, CIP patients might rely crucially on their empathetic abilities to imagine the pain of others, with activation of midline brain structures being the neural signature of this cognitive-emotional process. "Our findings underline the major role of midline structures in emotional perspective taking and in the ability to understand someone else's feelings despite the lack of any previous personal experience of it—an empathetic challenge frequently raised during human social interactions," concludes Dr. Danzig
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POPSWhy working out may help memory Glucose metabolism naturally slows with age, and memory begins to decline in our 30s, says co-author Scott Small, an associate professor of neurology at Columbia University Medical Center in New York. The new study suggests a possible association between the two, because elevated blood sugar appears to damage the dentate gyrus, Small says. The dentate gyrus's exact function is unknown. But it's one of several circuits in the hippocampus that, if disrupted, impairs memory, such as a person's ability to learn the names of new people or to remember where they parked their car. The possible connection between its dysfunction and poor glucose regulation may explain earlier observations that exercise benefits the dentate gyrus, Small says. Until now, scientists believed that physical activity reduced the risk of age-related memory loss by allowing glucose to be absorbed more quickly into muscle cells, but were not sure why.
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