A Call to Arms: Conquering the Brain
We put a man on the moon. We mapped the entire human genome. And next, we will have access to the brain and all of its connections at our finger tips.
The Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies Initiative (known most commonly as the BRAIN Initiative) is a collaborative research effort that is a “combination of approaches into a single integrated science of cells, circuits, brain, and behavior”. It will span a variety of institutes in order to engineer new technologies for the study neural systems and apply the technology developed in order to better understand how these systems function in health and disease. President Obama dubbed the Initiative “the next great American project”, following in the hefty footsteps left by the Human Genome Project and the Apollo 11 moon landing. In addition to the President’s endorsement the NIH was heavily involved in the development of the project. NIH Director Francis Collins worked closely with the President and secured a total of 4.5 billion dollars towards the cause. NIH Advisory Committees the 10-12 year project and distributed research areas through 15 NIH Institutes and Centers. Other major players, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, the FDA and several private partners, have also contributed major funds and planned specific research projects towards the Initiative. The sudden frenzy for neuroscience research raises many questions – why should this be done now and not in a few decades instead? Should we have been more proactive about advances in neuroscience sooner? What makes this area more in need of financial resources and government attention than research in cancer, nutrition or epidemics?
Keep Calm And Neuroscience On
It’s every student’s favorite time of the semester: midterm week. As you are freaking out about the upcoming exams that you have, you notice that others around you are relatively calm. You envy them and their ability to cope with stress. But here’s the thing: keeping calm under pressure isn’t a character trait or ability, it’s a skill that you can teach yourself in minutes. You’re probably thinking that that sounds ridiculous, but by following a few simple steps one can easily improve one’s ability to manage stress.
Video Games Can Read Your Emotions
Using technology similar to that found in a lie detector, Corey McCall, a Stanford University doctoral candidate, is creating a video game controller that registers signals about a players respiration, pulse, and perspiration. In Gregory Kovacs’s lab, in association with Texas Instruments, a prototype was constructed.
As a player gets more excited, all of signals the device registers change. Consider physical activity or watching an interesting movie, surprising these have similar autonomous nervous responses. As your interest or involvement increases your respiration rate decreases, pulse increases, and perspiration increases.
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Study Suggests Possible Connection Between TBI and Homelessness
Many homeless men have suffered a traumatic brain injury in their life, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at St. Michael’s Hospital.
After collecting data from over 100 men aged 27 to 81 from a shelter in downtown Toronto, researchers found that nearly half of the homeless men surveyed had suffered a traumatic brain injury. Of those who had suffered a traumatic brain injury, 87 percent experienced the injury prior to becoming homeless.
Using brain imaging to predict which vegetative patients have potential to recover
According to new research, positron emission tomography (PET), a functional brain imaging technique, is a promising tool for determining which brain damaged individuals in vegetative states have the potential to recover consciousness. This is the first time researchers have tested the accuracy of functional brain imaging for diagnosis in clinical practice.
The researchers from the University of Liége in Belgium suggest that PET imaging can reveal cognitive processes that would otherwise be hidden to traditional testing. Using imaging in addition to standard behavioral assessments could improve patients with the potential for long-term recovery.
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Dreaming
I am assuming that whoever is reading this right now has had a dream before. Am I right? But have you ever had a dream with a person in it whom you have never seen before in your life? It may seem that way, but it is impossible. It is believed that the human brain is incapable of "creating" a new face. Every person you dream of has been someone you have either known personally or merely came across looking through your friend's Facebook photos. Even those whom you do not consciously notice but still look at as you pass by may be an implanted image in your brain and show up later when you are dreaming.
Sigmund Freud is most famous for his definition and study of dreams. He taught about the unconscious and based it on repression and how some ideas and events in one's life are repressed and brought up later in life. Freud believed in a cycle where these repressed ideas remain in the mind while removed from consciousness. They reappear and become a part of our consciousness only at specific times, for example, in our dreams.
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Just Forget It!
Have you ever lost something, yet had the feeling that you knew where it was?
Have you ever studied hours for an exam only to forget most of what you have learned?
I am sure you have had an experience in which you were frustrated by a spotty memory. Memory is an extremely complicated process. In a nutshell, it is the ability to store, connect, and retrieve information over time. The key stages are encoding, storage and retrieval. In the encoding phase, our minds process sensory information and convert it into enduring memories, a process that primarily occurs at the hippocampus. As its name suggest, the storage phase is maintenance of information in memory over time. Finally, retrieval is the process by which information is brought back to the consciousness from storage. There are various types of encoding, various types of memory storage, various retrieval cues, as well as many limitations to our memory process.
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A Bad Joke Won’t Fool The Brain
I think I'm funny. Some people say I'm funny. But when the moment presents itself where its my time to shine, all lights on me, this 'one' is going to be a knee slapper...nope, not so much. The first time I realized I wasn't funny was in the eleventh grade in my calculus class. My teacher's name was Mr. Butke and he easily is ranked in my top 3 'all-time' of the math professors I've encountered in my lifetime. He had a mustache that covered his mouth and you never knew whether he was smiling, smirking, or grimacing at you. It kept you guessing, I liked that. He also presented stories of how he slayed cobras in Kenyan villages while pursuing a multi-purpose cure for malaria, encephalitis' of sorts, and maybe AIDS. Bottom line, he was memorable and his stage presence resonated with my classmates and I.
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Popularity and Your Brain
Whereas the fields of psychology, sociology, and anthropology have extensively studied group dynamics and popularity, neuroscience is barely starting to scratch the surface. Although the role of power in social status has been well-investigated, research into popularity has been minimal. However, recent research by Kevin Ochsner of Columbia University is exploring how likability determines social status within a group. Using previously established social groups (specifically student organizations), Ochsner used individual ratings to determine which students were the most liked among each group. Then, using fMRI, Ochsner measured each students' brain response to pictures of the other students in the group.
Ochsner found that how much the displayed student was liked correlated with the activity of two brain systems: the emotional evaluation and reward system centering on the ventral striatum, amygdala, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and the social cognition system, centering on the temporopariatal junction, precuneus, and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. The activity of the former could be explained by the brain recognizing previous pleasure from interactions with those who are likable, and anticipating further rewards. The latter could come from the social awareness required to understand and be cognizant of the complexities of social interactions, and how they could be most advantageous.
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The Numbers are All in Your Head
Numbers. Those arithmetical values that allow us to analyze and measure our surroundings. Without them, our understanding of the world we live in would be far less interesting. But what may be even more interesting is the way we process those numbers and how closely related that process is to spatial reasoning. The connection between space and numbers, specifically how we materialize values in our heads through mental number lines has been studied over the years, revealing that spatial orientation is incredibly important to this hypothetical number line. One study led by cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene investigated how number magnitude is spatially organized in our minds and introduced the phenomenon of Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes, or the SNARC effect for short.
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