Science asks and answers the question in every parent's mind, why are teenagers reckless? It's due to how the teen brain interprets risks and rewards:

Recent studies in the neuroscientist B.J. Casey's lab at Cornell University suggest that adolescents aren't reckless because they underestimate risks, but because they overestimate rewards—or, rather, find rewards more rewarding than adults do. The reward centers of the adolescent brain are much more active than those of either children or adults. Think about the incomparable intensity of first love, the never-to-be-recaptured glory of the high-school basketball championship.

What teenagers want most of all are social rewards, especially the respect of their peers. In a recent study by the developmental psychologist Laurence Steinberg at Temple University, teenagers did a simulated high-risk driving task while they were lying in an fMRI brain-imaging machine. The reward system of their brains lighted up much more when they thought another teenager was watching what they did—and they took more risks.

Link (Image: Harry Campbell)

Have you ever frantically searched for your keys, only to pick them up and move them without realizing it? Blame your brain: it's out of sync with itself.

Grayden Solman and colleagues at the University of Waterloo explains:

Solman's team propose that the system in the brain that deals with movement is running too quickly for the visual system to keep up. While you are rummaging around a messy house to find your keys, you might not be giving your visual system enough time to work out what each object is. Since time can be costly, sacrificing accuracy on occasion for speed might be beneficial overall, Solman thinks.

The slowing of mouse movements suggests that at some level the volunteers were aware that they had missed their target, a theory that is backed up by other studies that show people tend to slow down their actions after they have made a mistake, even if they don't consciously realise the mistake. Solman reckons this reflects the brain's "attempt to slow down the motor system", to allow the visual system to catch up and conscious perception to occur.

"What's really interesting is the notion that the motor and perceptual system are decoupled. They're both trying to help you find [your keys] but they're not coordinating," says Todd Horowitz, at Harvard University. "There are implications for social search, such as a doctor looking through an X-ray or [security] looking through luggage."

Link

Nail in the head ain't nothin' to Dante Autullo, who accidentally fired a three-inch nail into his brain and didn't even feel it:

Dante Autullo remained conscious after the self-inflicted injury and initially believed he had only brushed his nail gun against his head.

The 32-year-old, who is recovering in hospital, even continued doing handiwork around his Chicago home for the rest of the day and chatted to his family.
But he was taken to hospital the following afternoon after waking up from a nap feeling ill.

An X-ray revealed the nail lodged in his brain – but Mr Autullo was still well enough to post an image of the scan on Facebook during an ambulance ride between hospitals.

Link

It turns out that a glimpse of flesh strongly influences our perception of Erin/Aaron. When the pictures only showed a face, they had lots of agency. But when we saw their torso, we suddenly imagined them as obsessed with experience. Instead of being good at self-control, they were suddenly extremely sensitive to hunger and desire. Same person, same facial expression, same brief description – but a hint of body changed everything.

In another experiment, the researchers varied the volunteers’ mindsets, sometimes asking them to look at photos as if they were on an online-dating website, focusing on attractiveness, and sometimes asking them to look at the photos as if they were hiring for a professional job, focusing on the mind. Once again, thinking about how “sexy and cute” someone is – those are bodily attributes – led students to endow them with more experience and less agency. The opposite held when people were asked to evaluate intelligence and efficiency.

Read more about it at Frontal Cortex, but be warned there is no full nudity in the article. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science

The Dutch National Ballet rehearses for a performance at TEDxAmsterdam 2011, an independently organized TED event, November 25th in the Netherlands. Narrated by Rutger Hauer. -via Everlasting Blort

Maybe. Parts of your brain, anyhow. According to new research, those who are most active in social media have larger brain parts than others (even when compared to those who are social in real life):

How social you are on social networks may depend on the size of your brain, according to new research. Or, at least, the size of your superior temporal sulcus, middle temporal gyrus, entorhinal cortex and amygdalae.

The research, from University College in London, discovered that those who are more social in general tend to have larger amygdalae than their peers, but that those who are more social online also have increased sizes of the right superior temporal sulcus, the left middle temporal gyrus and the right entorhinal cortex. For those curious: The superior temporal sulcus is known to give cues about others' emotions, while the middle temporal gyrus helps us react to said social cues. The entorhinal cortex, meanwhile, has been linked to our memory.

Researchers are uncertain what this information means or, more interestingly, whether the larger brain sections are the cause or the result of the size of the subjects' social networks.

Graeme McMillan of TIME's Techland reports: Link

Henry Head, in a photograph taken in 1914 or in some other year, the documentation being unclear.

by Marc Abrahams, Improbable Research staff

Nowadays not many people read Brain on Head in Brain. That could change, because this year is the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Russell Brain’s mostly-admiring six-page essay called “Henry Head: A Man and His Ideas,” which celebrated the 100th anniversary of Dr. Head’s birth. Which means that this year we are all of us entitled to celebrate the 150th anniversary of that happy event.

Dr. Brain—who was also Lord Brain, Baron Brain of Eynsham—was editor of the journal Brain.

It would have been surprising had he not written that essay about Dr. Head. That’s because Head preceded Brain (the man) as head (which is to say, editor) of the journal (the name of which, I repeat for clarity, is Brain).

Head headed Brain from 1905 to 1923. Brain became head in 1954, dying in office  in 1967. No other    editors    in    the journal’s long history (it was founded in 1879) could or did boast surnames that so stunningly announced their obsession, profession, and place of employ. One of Dr. Brain’s final articles,  in 1963, is called “Some Reflections on Brain and Mind.”

“Some Reflections on Brain and Mind,” Lord Brain, Brain, vol. 86, no. 3, 1963, pp. 381-402.

Dr. Head wrote many monographs, some quite lengthy, for Brain. The first, a 135-page behemoth, appeared in 1893, long before he became editor. In it, Dr. Head gives special thanks to a Dr. Buzzard, citing Dr. Buzzard’s generosity, the nature of  which is not specified.

Dr. Russell Brain

Reading Dr. Brain’s Brain tribute and other material about Dr. Head, one gets the strong impression that Head had a big head, and that it was stuffed full of knowledge, which Dr. Head was not shy about sharing. Brain writes that “Some men… feel impelled to impart information to others. Head was one of those.”

Brain then quotes Professor H.M. Turnbull as saying:

I had the good fortune when first going to the hospital to meet daily in the mornings, on the steam engine underground railway, Dr. Henry Head. He… kindly taught me throughout our journeys about physical signs, much to the annoyance of our fellow travellers; indeed in his characteristic keenness he spoke so loudly that as we walked to the hospital from St. Mary’s station people on the other side of the wide Whitechapel Road would turn to look at us.

Brain says that Head “would illustrate his lectures by himself reproducing the involuntary movements or postures produced by nervous disease, and ‘Henry Head doing gaits’ was a perennial attraction.”

In 1904, at the age of 42, Head married a headmistress: Ruth Mayhew of Brighton High School for Girls. Brain assures us that she was “a fit companion for him in intelligence.”

Brain, though respectful of Head, suggests that his predecessor may have been over-brainy: “He had many ideas: he bubbled over with them, and perhaps he was sometimes too ready to convince himself of their truth”.

Head’s Heady Experiment, in (of course) Brain
Head’s most nervy experiment involved (although not exclusively) his penis, about which he presented a surprising amount of detail, in a lengthy monograph in Brain, helping to enliven a new century.

“A Human Experiment in Nerve Division,” W.H.R. Rivers and Henry Head, Brain, vol. 31, no. 3, 1908, pp. 323–450.

Henry Head, in a photograph taken in or near 1914.

The account is too lengthy to reproduce here, except for the following snippets:

We then discovered that the glans penis responded to cutaneous stimuli in that peculiar manner with which we were already familiar from our study of the first stage  of recovery after nerve division.

On turning to von Frey’s account of the glans penis ([9] p. 175) we found a brilliant description of a part endowed with protopathic and deep sensibility only. We can add nothing material to this remarkable description, but shall attempt to show how exactly in the case of H. the response of this organ to cutaneous stimuli corresponds to that of the highly protopathic area, which remains on the back of his hand….

[An] interrupted current almost painless on the normal skin causes an aching, tingling sensation over the glans which is extremely unpleasant. The characteristic “whirring” sensation is absent and is replaced by a slowly increasing diffused pain. The most remarkable peculiarities are shown in the behaviour of the glans to heat and cold. In the case of H., there appear to be no heatspots except in the neighbourhood of the corona; the body and tip of the glans are entirely insensitive to heat. But cold- spots abound and paradox-cold can be as easily evoked…

We therefore made a number of observations in the following manner. The foreskin was drawn back, and the penis allowed to hang downwards. A number of drinking glasses were prepared containing water at different temperatures. H. stood with his eyes closed, and R. gradually approached one of the glasses until the surface of the water covered the glans but did not touch the foreskin. Contact with the  fluid was not appreciated; if, therefore,  the temperature of the water was such that it did not produce a sensation of heat or cold, H. was unaware that anything had been done…

1923—A Brain- and Brain-filled Year  of Lasts and Firsts
The year 1923 was a historic year for Head and for Brain, and one could argue, especially for Brain. First,    Brain’s first article in Brain appeared. Though brief, it was and remains one of the few well-regarded medical studies that includes the phrase “cracked-pot” in its title:

“Clinical Meeting Held May 10, 1923: Case of Right Frontal Tumour; Cracked-pot Percussion Note over Right Frontal Bone; Left Palmar Reflex,”   Dr. George Riddoch and Dr. Russell Brain, Brain, vol. 46, no. 2, 1923, p. 246.

Then, just months later, came Head’s last article in Brain:

“Speech and Cerebral Localization,” Henry Head, Brain, vol. 46, no. 4, 1923, pp. 355–528.

Thus there was a brief but documented period in which both Head, as head, and Brain, headed to eventually become head, were officially part of Brain.

References and Notes
The full citation for Brain on Head in Brain is:
“Henry Head: The Man and His Ideas,” Russell Brain, Brain, vol. 84, no. 4, December 1961,  pp. 561–6.

The title of Head’s first article in Brain alluded only indirectly to the head and brain:
“On Disturbances of Sensation with Especial Reference to the Pain of Visceral Disease,” Henry Head, Brain, vol. 16, nos. 1-2, 1893, pp. 1-133.

Brain itself eventually produced a small essay about Head and Brain and other editors of Brain. “Editorial,” Alastair Compston, Brain, vol. 127,  2004, pp. 1689–90.

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the September-October 2009 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

Good news: your brain is hardwired for good news
Bad news: your brain is hardwired for good news

Why don't people stop smoking even after hearing bazillion public service messages that doing so will give them cancer? Why do people get married even though the rate of divorce is 50%?

Neuroscientists have the answer: it's because the human brain rejects negative thoughts (and yes, sometimes to the detriment of the brain's host).

When the news was positive, all people had more activity in the brain's frontal lobes, which are associated with processing errors. With negative information, the most optimistic people had the least activity in the frontal lobes, while the least optimistic had the most.

It suggests the brain is picking and choosing which evidence to listen to.

Dr Sharot said: "Smoking kills messages don't work as people think their chances of cancer are low. The divorce rate is 50%, but people don't think it's the same for them. There is a very fundamental bias in the brain."

Dr Chris Chambers, neuroscientist from the University of Cardiff, said: "It's very cool, a very elegant piece of work and fascinating.

"For me, this work highlights something that is becoming increasingly apparent in neuroscience, that a major part of brain function in decision-making is the testing of predictions against reality - in essence all people are 'scientists'.

"And despite how sophisticated these neural networks are, it is illuminating to see how the brain sometimes comes up with wrong and overly optimistic answers despite the evidence."

Link

Do you have a zombieriffic family? Tell the world, or at least the guy stuck behind you in traffic, with the My Zombie Family Car Stickers by Adam “ape lad” Koford from the NeatoShop. This frighteningly fabulous set comes with 8 stickers:

• Zombie Dad
• Zombie Mom
• Zombie Brother
• Zombie Sister
• Zombie Baby
• Zombie Cat
• Zombie Dog
• and heart-shaped brain

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Zombie fun!

Link

Her most famous study, conducted in twelve different New York City schools along with Claudia Mueller, involved giving more than 400 fifth graders a relatively easy test consisting of nonverbal puzzles. After the children finished the test, the researchers told the students their score, and provided them with a single line of praise. Half of the kids were praised for their intelligence. “You must be smart at this,” the researcher said. The other students were praised for their effort: “You must have worked really hard.”

The students were then allowed to choose between two different subsequent tests. The first choice was described as a more difficult set of puzzles, but the kids were told that they’d learn a lot from attempting it. The other option was an easy test, similar to the test they’d just taken.

When Dweck was designing the experiment, she expected the different forms of praise to have a rather modest effect. After all, it was just one sentence. But it soon became clear that the type of compliment given to the fifth graders dramatically affected their choice of tests. When kids were praised for their effort, nearly 90 percent chose the harder set of puzzles. However, when kids were praised for their intelligence, most of them went for the easier test. What explains this difference? According to Dweck, praising kids for intelligence encourages them to “look” smart, which means that they shouldn’t risk making a mistake.

A further experiment showed how fear of failure can inhibit learning. Read about all of them at The Frontal Cortex. Link

(Image credit: Flickr user mujalifah)

Is there a "unit" of memory? Some scientists now think so.

Using a method that allowed them to make brain measurements down to the millisecond levels, researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology discovered that there's a discrete "quantum" of memory:

You're rudely awakened by the phone. Your room is pitch black. It's unsettling, because you're a little uncertain about where you are -- and then you remember. You're in a hotel room.

Sound like a familiar experience? Or maybe you've felt a similar kind of disorientation when you walk out of an elevator onto the wrong floor? But what actually happens inside your head when you experience moments like these?

[A new study] describes exactly how the brain reacts in situations like these, during the transition between one memory and the next. [...]

Their findings show that memory is divided into discrete individual packets, analogous to the way that light is divvied up into individual bits called quanta. Each memory is just 125 milliseconds long -- which means the brain can swap between different memories as often as eight times in one second.

"The brain won't let itself get confused," says Professor May-Britt Moser. "It never mixes different places and memories together, even though you might perceive it that way. This is because the processes taking place inside your head when your brain is looking for a map of where you are take place so fast that you don't notice that you are actually switching between different maps. When you feel a little confused, it is because there is a competition in your brain between two memories. Or maybe more than two."

Link

Scientists are taking one step closer to reading your mind using brain imaging techniques:

Imagine tapping into the mind of a coma patient, or watching one’s own dream on YouTube. With a cutting-edge blend of brain imaging and computer simulation, scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, are bringing these futuristic scenarios within reach.

Using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and computational models, UC Berkeley researchers have succeeded in decoding and reconstructing people’s dynamic visual experiences – in this case, watching Hollywood movie trailers.

As yet, the technology can only reconstruct movie clips people have already viewed. However, the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories, according to researchers.

“This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery,” said Professor Jack Gallant, a UC Berkeley neuroscientist and coauthor of the study published online today (Sept. 22) in the journal Current Biology. “We are opening a window into the movies in our minds.”

Link | Hit play or go to YouTube to watch the video clip

Let’s start with the teen’s love of the thrill. We all like new and exciting things, but we never value them more highly than we do during adolescence. Here we hit a high in what behavioral scientists call sensation seeking: the hunt for the neural buzz, the jolt of the unusual or unexpected.

Seeking sensation isn’t necessarily impulsive. You might plan a sensation-seeking experience—a skydive or a fast drive—quite deliberately, as my son did. Impulsivity generally drops throughout life, starting at about age 10, but this love of the thrill peaks at around age 15. And although sensation seeking can lead to dangerous behaviors, it can also generate positive ones: The urge to meet more people, for instance, can create a wider circle of friends, which generally makes us healthier, happier, safer, and more successful.

The entire article is available now in the October issue of National Geographic magazine. Link

(Image credit: Kitra Cahana)

Can this be the scientific basis for vampires staying young forever? Researchers at Stanford studying the effect of the age of blood donors have discovered something quite interesting (in mice, anyhow):

Researchers at Stanford University just published a study in Nature that may give new hope to those looking to stop the effects of aging on the brain. The study found that when blood from a young mouse was injected into an older mouse, that older mouse enjoyed what could almost be termed a "rejuvenation effect": it began producing more neurons, firing more activity across synapses, and even suffered less inflammation.

Interestingly, performing the reverse, in which a young mouse was injected with blood (or, more accurately, plasma, which is the parts of blood without blood cells), resulted in young mice with distinctly elderly attributes--increased inflammation, a reduction in the production of new neurons, that kind of thing.

Here we explain most of the mysteries concerning the brain.

We report the “Cingular Theory of Uni?cation,” which postulates that one brain region— the “cingulate cortex”—is the alpha and omega, responsible for all of humankind’s functions. We believe that this theory not only explains the available data, but also prophesizes exponential growth in cingulate research that will dominate all neuroscience research. We provide humble advice on how to avoid such an apocalyptic future.

The History and Mystery of the Cingulate Cortex

Since the discovery of the small strip of brain called the cingulate cortex in the early 19th century, research has progressed from a trickle of studies to a torrent of investigations threatening to flood the field of neuroscience completely. In these ensuing years the cingulate has been found to play a vital role in almost all human emotions and behaviors, from error prediction to pain perception, and from political persuasion to one’s feeling of optimism. But with so many functions, it has been difficult to answer this simple question: what exactly is the role of the cingulate?

The Mystery and History of the Cingulate Cortex

The cingulate cortex resides in a ring-like strip of brain tissue in the center fold of the neocortex surrounding the lateral ventricles. The shape of this brain region presumably inspired the German physiologists1 who discovered it to name it the “cingulate,” derived from the Latin cingulum, meaning a belt worn by Roman soldiers to protect their groin. But like many great discoveries, it took much time for the cingulate to grab hold of the conservative scientific community. Since the early 1900s, sporadic reports have described the neural correlates of the cingulate cortex. However, compared to flood of motor, visual and auditory papers, the cingulate reports were a mere trickle. The fault was not of the carpenters, but of the tools that they were using.

MRI to the Rescue

The belt had to wait for the invention of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which would emerge as the savior and restore the cingulate to its throne. In a matter of a few short years, the fundamental role of this brain area became widely discussed. By the early 21st century the cingulate cortex had been found to be involved in loneliness (Eisenberger et al., 2004), religious experiences (Beauregard and Paquette, 2006), political leanings (Amodio et al., 2007), stimulus-reward associations (Takenouchi et al., 1999; Cardinal et al., 2003), motor planning (Shima and Tanji, 1998), error detection (Devinsky et al., 1995), pain perception (Harris et al., 2007), social exclusion (Eisenberger et al., 2004), reward expectancy (Shidara and Richmond, 2002), sleep (Rolls et al., 2003), the placebo effect (Wager et al., 2004), optimism (Sharot et al., 2007), political liberalism (Amodio et al., 2007) and work from our group on neuroprosthetic models (Marzullo et al., 2006a).

The Cingulate Cortex to the Rescue

We do not believe this to be a comprehensive list. Quite to the contrary, we hypothesize that the reason why so many aspects of human behavior appear to have a neural correlate in the cingulate is due to one simple fact:

The cingulate cortex is responsible for everything.

We call this the “Cingular Theory of Unification” which unifies all of the existing discoveries into one simple framework. One implication of this hypothesis is that since more and more researchers will find this brain region attractive, the amount of publications should grow unabated.

Our Triumph, and How We Did It

To test our theory, we retrieved the number of abstracts that referenced the words “cingulate cortex” in a popular scientific paper repository Pubmed and created a histogram of cingulate references by grouping the number of citations by year. We then tested the curve against traditional growth functions and fit the model to the function with the strongest statistical fit. As controls, we also repeated the experiment for the motor cortex and the auditory cortex, two historical heavyweights of brain science research.

Figure 1. Number of abstracts for three cortical areas (1950-2007). The total number of abstracts from 1950 to 2007 which mention one of the three cortical areas are displayed. Note that in 2007, the number of abstracts that mentioned “Cingulate” ?nally overtook the mighty motor cortex. The R2 values of an exponential regression fit were 0.90, 0.97, and 0.54 for the number of motor, cingulate, and auditory papers respectively.

Figure 1 shows the results of our analysis. There is an initial increase during the 1950s for both the auditory and motor cortices, most probably due to the advent and progress of extracellular recording and stimulation methods. Compared to these cortical areas, the cingulate is a late bloomer, only beginning to rapidly increase during the early 1990s.

But this late surge is extremely dramatic. In fact, the cingulate cortex begins to surpass the auditory cortex in the late 1980s and finally overtakes the mighty motor cortex in 2007. These trends were best modeled as exponential fits using least-squares estimation. Of the three, the cingulate cortex had the best fit (R2 = 0.97) and also the most explosive growth. It should be emphasized that such a high R2 value is almost unheard of in the scientific community. With such a strong fit, we three sophomoric prophets can predict the future of neuroscience.

Figure 2. Projected publications for three cortical areas (1970-2027). Using our exponential model, we predict that the number of citations for the cingulate cortex in the year 2027 will be on the order of 13,500! That is a 15-fold increase in publications from the 900 in 2007, whereas the motor and auditory cortices will have a more reasonable and sustainable number of publications.

Using this model, we conservatively attempted to predict the next 20 years of research for these three fields of study. Figure 2 shows our estimates from now to the year 2027.2 We are beginning to see an alarming trend: cingulate cortex publications will increase by a factor of 15, whereas motor and auditory research will only increase by a factor of 1.53. If we extend our model to predict towards the end of the 21st century, though merely a prophetical projection, the cingulate cortex will dominate > 99% of all neuroscience research.

The Cingularity

We predict that between 2050 and 2100, there will be more cingulate publications than there are cells in the cingulate cortex itself. At this point, we fear that the “Cingularity” will be reached, and the cingulate cortex will become self-aware.

This trend does not have to continue! As intelligent, sentient beings we have the power to stop our very own cingulate cortices from taking over America, and indeed, the entire world. If the cingulate decides to use its powers for for evil, future human success may be neither assumed nor assured.3 We hereby pronounce that we should use the best of our energies and skills to determine not what the cingulate does, but how the cingulate does all it does, and indeed, what its true intentions really are.

Even though the original discoverers did not realize that the cingulate cortex was at the apex of the functional hierarchical model of the brain, they could not have chosen a more appropriate name. For it truly lives up to a cingulum by tying together every human’s needs, wants, hopes, desires, hates, loves and fears.

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Dr. Régis Olry and Dr. Stanley Finger for their help in finding historical references on the discovery of the cingulate cortex. as well as Dr. Manfred Spitzer for his encouragement in publication and the translation of the original text into German. Results from this study were previously presented at the 2007 annual Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego, California.

Appendix

We wholeheartedly encourage other scientists to investigate this trend against their pet neocortical area. Simply go to pubmed.org, search for a cortical area (e.g. “motor cortex”), save all output to a txt file, and run the following code in Matlab with the following function, for example: fff( ‘/motorcortex.txt’). A histogram will then be generated for you.

function [ n ] = fff( input_args )
%FFF Summary of this function goes here
% Detailed explanation goes here

file = textread( input_args ,’%s’,
’delimiter’,’/n’,’whitespace’,’’);
iYear = 1;
for i=1:length(file)
i19 = findstr( file{i}, ’19’ );
i20 = findstr( file{i}, ’20’ );

if length(i19) > 0
try
year{ iYear } = file{i}(i19:i19+3);
iYear = iYear + 1;
end
end

if length(i20) > 0
try
year{ iYear } = file{i}(i20:i20+3);
iYear = iYear + 1;
end
end

end
iYear = 1;

for i = 1:length( year )

tm = str2num(year{i} );
if size(tm,1) > 0
try
y( iYear ) = tm;
iYear = iYear + 1;
catch
disp(‘error’); disp(i);
end
end
end
cingulate = y(y<2008 & y>1949);

edges = [1950:2007];
n = histc( cingulate, edges );

figure;
bar( edges, n );
size( year );

Notes

1. Karl Friedrich Burdach (Vom Baue und Leben des Gehirns und Rückenmarkes. Leipzig: in der Dyck’schen Buchhandlung, 3 vols., 1819–26) or Adolf Pansch (Die Furchen und Wülsche im Grosshirn des Menschen. Zugleich eine Erluterung zu dem Hirnmodell. Berlin, 1879)

2. We also ran the analysis on the visual cortex. In 2007, the visual cortex was still king, with 911 publications to the cingulate’s 893. However, the cingulate will not be deterred. For example, in 1970, there were 343 visual cortex publications, compared to only 6 (!) cingulate cortex papers. We predict 2008 will be the year even the mightiest of mighty, the visual cortex, is finally dethroned by the warlike cingulate cortex, the Beowulf of our age. By 2027, the visual cortex will only increase by a mere factor of 3, compared to the cingulate’s 15.

3. Such dire predictions are in full agreement with previous work from our group examining the ability of rat brains to control the stock market (Marzullo et al., 2006b).

(YouTube link)

References

“Neurocognitive Correlates of Liberalism and Conservatism,” D.M. Amodio, J.T. Jost, S.L. Master and C.M. Yee, Nature Neuroscience, vol. 10, no. 10, October 2007, pp. 1246–7.

“Neural Correlates of a Mystical Experience in Carmelite Nuns,” M. Beauregard and V. Paquette, Neuroscience Letters, vol. 405, no. 3, September 25, 2006, pp.186–90.

“Role of the Anterior Cingulate Cortex in the Control over Behavior by Pavlovian Conditioned Stimuli in Rats,” R.N. Cardinal, J.A. Parkinson, H.D. Marbini, A.J. Toner, T.J. Bussey, T.W. Robbins and B.J. Everitt, Behavioral Neuroscience, vol. 3, pp. 566–87.

“Contributions of Anterior Cingulate Cortex to Behaviour,” O. Devinsky, M. Morrell and B. Vogt, Brain, vol. 118, 1995, pp. 279–306.

“Does Rejection Hurt? An fMRI Study of Social Exclusion,” N. Eisenberger, M. Lieberman and K. Williams, Science, vol. 302, 2004, pp. 290–2.

“Decreased Central µ-Opioid Receptor Availability in Fibromyalgia,” R. Harris, D. Clauw, D. Scott, S. McLean, R. Gracely and J. Zubieta, Journal of Neuroscience, vol. 37, 2007, pp. 10000–6.

“Suitability of the Cingulate Cortex for Neural Control,” T.C. Marzullo, C.R. Miller and D.R. Kipke, IEEE Transactions on Neural Systems and Rehabilitation Engineering, vol. 14, 2006, pp. 401–9.

“Stock Market Behavior Predicted by Rat Neurons,” T.C. Marzullo, E. Rantze and G.J. Gage, Annals of Improbable Research, vol. 12, 2006, pp. 22–5.

“Activity of Primate Subgenual Cingulate Cortex Neurons Is Related to Sleep,” E.T. Rolls, K. Inoue and A. Browning, Journal of Neurophysiology, vol. 90, no. 1, 2003, pp. 134–42.

“Neural Mechanisms Mediating Optimism Bias,” T. Sharot, A. Riccardi, C. Raio and E. Phelps, Nature, vol. 450, 2007, pp.102–5.

“Anterior Cingulate: Single Neuronal Signals Related to Degree of Reward Expectancy,” M. Shidara and B.J. Richmond, Science, vol. 296, no. 5573, 2002, pp. 1709–11.

“Role for Cingulate Motor Area Cells in Voluntary Movement Selection Based on Reward,” K. Shima and J. Tanji, Science, vol. 282, no. 5392, 1998, pp. 1335–8.

“Emotional and Behavioral Correlates of the Anterior Cingulate Cortex During Associative Learning in Rats,” K. Takenouchi, H. Nishijo, T. Uwano, R. Tamura, M. Takigawa and T. Ono, Neuroscience, vol. 93, 1999, pp. 1271–87.

“Placebo-Induced Changes in fMRI in the Anticipation and Experience of Pain,” T.D. Wager, J.K. Rilling, E.E. Smith, A. Sokolik, K.L. Casey, R.J. Davidson, S.M. Kosslyn, R.M. Rose and J.D. Cohen, Science, vol. 303, no. 5661, 2004, pp. 1162–7.

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the May-June 2008 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

(Video Link)

Football is definitely back this fall, but will the players show up after seeing this insightful video about what playing in the NFL does to your brain? Former player Dave Duerson donated his brain to the NFL Brain Bank so researchers can clearly see what happens when you knock your head around for a living, and the results aren’t very pretty. But did anyone really think being a professional football player would be good for your mental health? I think not.

Link

Recent advances in genetic research have allowed scientists to grow the brain of one animal inside he body of an entirely different species. Is this the dawning of a new era or a scene out of

The idea of splicing animals together isn’t a new one The ancient Greeks fashioned a chimera out of a snake, a goat, and a lion; the Japanese made a baku out of an ox, an elephant, and a tiger. Even today, people are inventing new creatures -only now, they’re using a lot more than their imaginations.

Just ask biologist Todd Streelman. Inside his lab at Georgia Tech, Streelman successfully bred a living animal with the brain of anther species. He started with a cichlid, a type of fish found in Lake Malawai, at the southern tip of Africa’s Great Rift Valley. Over the past 500,000 years, hundreds of different species of the cichlid have evolved from a single ancestor, with each new species developing a distinct set of jaws, teeth, brain, and behaviors to fit their respective environments. Streelman took two species of cichlid fish -rock-dwelling cichlids and sand-dwelling cichlids- and figured out a way to grow a sand-dweller’s brain inside the skull of a rock-dweller. From a distance, that might seem like a simple trick in cross-pollination. But it’s no small feat when you consider that the brains of the two creatures are as different as those of chimpanzees and humans.

Todd Streelman

ANIMAL CROSSING

How’d he do it? The trick to Streelman’s success was figuring out how (and when) the brains of different species distinguish themselves during embryonic development. In the earliest stages of life, the brain of almost every animal starts out looking the same. It begins as a small sheet of rapidly dividing cells that are not yet designed for different functions. But this sheet of cells eventually rolls into a tube, and the cells turn into different types of neurons. The neurons then slowly forms connections uniquely tailored to the creature’s lifestyle. In humans, for example, the brain develops a large cerebral cortex capable of processing language and consciousness. In various species of cichlid fish, the forebrain changes and grows depending on its future environment. More specifically, the sand-dweller’s forebrain develops a large hind region for surviving in open water, while the rock-dweller’s forebrain develops a large front region to navigate Lake Malawi’s murky, cavernous bottom.

In both species, the size and shape of the forebrain is determined by the expression of a gene called Wnt1. In sand-dwellers, this gene sends out a strong signal, while in rock-dwellers, Wnt1′s signal is weak. As part of his study, Streelmen took rock-dweller embryos and placed them in water treated with lithium chloride -a salt that’s known to increase the strength of the Wnt1 signal. This caused the rear section of the rock-dweller’s brain to grow until its brain looked like that of a sand-dweller. In other words, by simply  changing the expression of a single gene, Streelman was able to Frankenstein a new fish.

Cichlid embryo

OF MICE AND MEN

While Streelman has proven that he can grow one species’ brain inside another’s body, there’s no telling if his patchwork creations can survive in their natural environments. To date, most attempts to manipulate neural development in animals have led to brains that look promising in the land but fail to function in the real world. In 2002, for instance, researchers manipulated a mouse’s genetic signals to increase the size of its cerebral cortex. The cortex grew dramatically, forming folds indicative of the intelligence in high-order mammals and humans. But the mutation proved fatal, and the mouse died before it was born.

Some scientists posit that the mouse’s death may have had more to do with the complex relationship between the animal and environment and less to do with ill-suited manipulation. Georg Striedner, and evolutionary biologist at the University of California at Irvine, has found that many animals go through a phase during early development in which they’re particularly vulnerable to injury, starvation, or disease. In order for an animal to survive, something in their external world has to protect them. For instance, many species go through a prolonged period of rapid cell division before their brains become neurons. This ultimately leads to a larger brain, but it also means that the animal’s brain is not fully formed at birth. Parrots are a good example. After parrots hatch, their brains aren’t particularly developed, which forces the babies to rely on their mothers for food. That means that the mothers’ feeding behaviors must have evolved at the exact same time that parrots evolved to have larger brains. Otherwise, parrots would have never become so smart.

Cichlid fish

The process of evolving new traits is clearly complicated. Labs can create animals with shiny new traits, but that doesn’t mean the animals can handle the complexity of the world around them. As for Streelman’s fish, no one knows how their manipulated brains will affect their behavior -or, for that matter, how they’ll fare in nature. In many ways, though, that isn’t the point. The goal of Streelman’s research isn’t to grow new and funky animals; it’s to learn how animals evolve. By discovering the relationship between the animal’s genome and its brain development, scientists ultimately hope to pinpoint the genetic basis of of human thought and behavior. It just may be that, along the way, creatures like the chimera and the baku become more than the stuff of ancient folklore.

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The article above, written by Adam K. Raymond, is reprinted with permission from the March-April 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!

It’s not going to be beating anyone at Jeopardy any time soon, but scientists have created an artificial brain derived from rat cells. The brain is capable of 12 second short term memory and will be used to study how neural networks store data.

Developed by a team at the University of Pittsburgh, the brain was created in an attempt to artificially nurture a working brain into existence so that researchers could study neural networks and how our brains transmit electrical signals and store data so efficiently. The did so by attaching a layer of proteins to a silicon disk and adding brain cells from embryonic rats that attached themselves to the proteins and grew to connect with one another in the ring seen above.

Link

Here’s an interesting article by Tali Sharot of TIME Magazine about science of optimism, and how may just be hardwired by evolution into our brain as a survival mechanism against the knowledge of certain death:

To think positively about our prospects, we must first be able to imagine ourselves in the future. Optimism starts with what may be the most extraordinary of human talents: mental time travel, the ability to move back and forth through time and space in one’s mind. Although most of us take this ability for granted, our capacity to envision a different time and place is in fact critical to our survival.

It is easy to see why cognitive time travel was naturally selected for over the course of evolution. It allows us to plan ahead, to save food and resources for times of scarcity and to endure hard work in anticipation of a future reward. It also lets us forecast how our current behavior may influence future generations. If we were not able to picture the world in a hundred years or more, would we be concerned with global warming? Would we attempt to live healthily? Would we have children?

While mental time travel has clear survival advantages, conscious foresight came to humans at an enormous price — the understanding that somewhere in the future, death awaits. Ajit Varki, a biologist at the University of California, San Diego, argues that the awareness of mortality on its own would have led evolution to a dead end. The despair would have interfered with our daily function, bringing the activities needed for survival to a stop. The only way conscious mental time travel could have arisen over the course of evolution is if it emerged together with irrational optimism. Knowledge of death had to emerge side by side with the persistent ability to picture a bright future.

Link (Image: Noma Bar)

Twins joined at the head — the medical term is craniopagus — are one in 2.5 million, of which only a fraction survive. The way the girls’ brains formed beneath the surface of their fused skulls, however, makes them beyond rare: their neural anatomy is unique, at least in the annals of recorded scientific literature. Their brain images reveal what looks like an attenuated line stretching between the two organs, a piece of anatomy their neurosurgeon, Douglas Cochrane of British Columbia Children’s Hospital, has called a thalamic bridge, because he believes it links the thalamus of one girl to the thalamus of her sister. The thalamus is a kind of switchboard, a two-lobed organ that filters most sensory input and has long been thought to be essential in the neural loops that create consciousness. Because the thalamus functions as a relay station, the girls’ doctors believe it is entirely possible that the sensory input that one girl receives could somehow cross that bridge into the brain of the other. One girl drinks, another girl feels it.

The New York Times magazine has an extensive article on Tatiana and Krista, covering their lives, medical condition, and the very rare opportunity they may present to learn about how the human brain works. Link | video

(Image credit: Stephanie Sinclair/VII, for The New York Times)

Ah, love – the ultimate in human feelings that conquers all … or is it? Thanks to MRI studies, scientists have dissected the various brain regions that get activated when you feel passionate as well as other types of love.

Scientific American has the details:

Men and women can now thank a dozen brain regions for their romantic fervor. Researchers have revealed the fonts of desire by comparing functional MRI studies of people who indicated they were experiencing passionate love, maternal love or unconditional love. Together, the regions release neuro­transmitters and other chemicals in the brain and blood that prompt greater euphoric sensations such as attraction and pleasure. Conversely, psychiatrists might someday help individuals who become dangerously depressed after a heartbreak by adjusting those chemicals.

Passion also heightens several cognitive functions, as the brain regions and chemicals surge. “It’s all about how that network interacts,” says Stephanie Ortigue, an assistant professor of psychology at Syracuse University, who led the study. The cognitive functions, in turn, “are triggers that fully activate the love network.” Tell that to your sweetheart on Valentine’s Day.

Link – via Nerdcore

“We studied the outside features of these fossils for years,” said Tim Rowe, professor in the Jackson School of Geosciences and director of the Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory at The University of Texas at Austin, and lead author of the new study. “But until now, studying the brains meant destroying the fossils. With CT technology, we can have our cake and eat it, too.”

According to the study, other factors leading to larger brains in early mammals included greater tactile sensitivity and enhanced motor coordination. Fossils of some of the earliest mammals, such as Hadrocodium, bore full coats of fur, explaining the need for enhanced tactile sensitivity.

Researchers scanned a dozen early mammal fossil and more than 200 current species over ten years for this study. Link -via Geeks Are Sexy

(Image credit: Matt Colbert)

Are you still looking for the perfect gift for your favorite graduate?  Get them the Graduation Brain Cell from the NeatoShop.  Yes, I know they wanted cash.  Yes, this is an adorable neuron wearing a graduation cap instead. Come one, were you going to give them cash?  No, I didn’t think so!  At least this gift proves you are educated and fun.

The Graduation Brain Cell is also available in keychain form!

Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more Plush Toy fun!

Link

A temporary surgical implant enabled patients to “talk” to a computer. Just by thinking the words aloud in their head they were able to control a cursor on a computer screen. The brain-computer interface (BCI) technology could one day be used to help people who are unable to talk or have other physical disabilities due to brain injury. The technology could one day be used to read a person’s mind.

Link

What makes someone a conservative or a liberal? According to this new (and undoubtedly controversial) study, it’s their brain anatomy:

Cognitive neuroscientist Ryota Kanai and colleagues at University College London recruited 90 student volunteers and had them rate their political philosophy on a five-point scale ranging from very liberal to very conservative. Then the researchers used magnetic resonance imaging to get a look inside their brains. In a paper published online today in Current Biology, the team reports two main findings: political conservatives tend to have a larger right amygdala, a region involved in detecting threats and responding to fearful stimuli, whereas liberals tend to have a larger anterior cingulate cortex, an area that becomes active in situations involving conflict or uncertainty.

There was considerable overlap though. When the researchers looked only at the brain scans, Kanai says they could predict who was liberal and who was conservative with about 75% accuracy—much better than a coin toss but probably not good enough for any high-tech campaign tactics.

Kanai is at pains to make clear that the findings don’t mean political views are "hard-wired" into the brain. He acknowledges that the data don’t prove that these neuroanatomical differences actually cause political differences, but he suspects that they might play a role.

Link

In a new study using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers have found that the same brain networks that are activated when you’re burned by hot coffee also light up when you think about a lover who has spurned you.

In other words, the brain doesn’t appear to firmly distinguish between physical pain and intense emotional pain. Heartache and painful breakups are "more than just metaphors," says Ethan Kross, Ph.D., the lead researcher and an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor.

Link

The ninth song in the Symphony of Science series uses auto-tune to melodize scientists telling us about the amazing human brain. This creation features Robert Winston, Vilayanur Ramachandran, Jill Bolte Taylor, Bill Nye, Oliver Sacks, and the already-melodic Carl Sagan. Link -via Everlasting Blort

In the brains of people blind from birth, structures used in sight are still put to work — but for a very different purpose. Rather than processing visual information, they appear to handle language.

Linguistic processing is a task utterly unrelated to sight, yet the visual cortex performs it well.

“It suggests a kind of plasticity that’s even broader than the kinds observed before,” said Marina Bedny, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s a really drastic change. It suggests there isn’t a predetermined function an area can serve. It can take a wide range of possible functions.”

Brains: use ‘em if you got ‘em! Link

Cooke and all the other mental athletes I met kept insisting that anyone could do what they do. It was simply a matter of learning to “think in more memorable ways,” using a set of mnemonic techniques almost all of which were invented in ancient Greece. These techniques existed not to memorize useless information like decks of playing cards but to etch into the brain foundational texts and ideas.

It was an attractive fantasy. If only I could learn to remember like Cooke, I figured, I would be able to commit reams of poetry to heart and really absorb it. I imagined being one of those admirable (if sometimes insufferable) individuals who always has an apposite quotation to drop into conversation. How many worthwhile ideas have gone unthought and connections unmade because of my memory’s shortcomings?

At the time, I didn’t quite believe Cooke’s bold claims about the latent mnemonic potential in all of us. But they seemed worth investigating. Cooke offered to serve as my coach and trainer. Memorizing would become a part of my daily routine. Like flossing. Except that I would actually remember to do it.

Foer did his research on memory (which he shares) and then began to train his own. As his memorization skills improved, he decided to enter the U.S.A. Memory Championship himself. And then he won it. Link

(Image credit: Marco Grob for The New York Times)

Figure1. A reflex hammer. It was used to mechanically stimulate the subject’s skull.

An fMRI Study
by Kai M. Schreiber
Dept. of Physiology, University of Toronto
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

In 1796, Franz Joseph Gall described the cerebral organs that he believed were responsible for certain character traits.1 Since then, thanks to neural imaging studies, we have acquired detailed knowledge of the parts of the brain engaged in many cognitive functions.

So far, however, no one has attempted to locate the cortical seat of ignorance. Ignorance is arguably the most pervasive, mental attribute, and the one that makes us truly human. Unfortunately, ignorance is difficult to measure using common, imaging techniques, because the sophisticated machinery tends to saturate the ignorance system even before any stimuli are presented.

Here, I use functional mechanic resonance imaging, a technique developed specifically for this study, to locate the seat of ignorance in the human cortex.

First, I present evidence that there is a well defined neural ignorance system.

“General Ignorance,” Objectively Determined and Measured

While comparing the scores of random Joe Shmoes on a set of personality measures I had devised over the last few hours, I noticed strong positive correlations between some of them. I discarded the non-correlated ones and came up with the table shown here as Figure 2.

Experts tell me that the positive correlations of these measures must mean that there is some underlying general principle behind them, effected by some physical body. I call this underlying general principle General Ignorance (GI). The following set of numbers demonstrates how simple it is to assign numerical measurements that correspond to General Ignorance:

Figure 2. This set of numbers demonstrates how simple it is to assign numerical measurements that correspond to the qualitative quantity called General Ignorance. For an interpretation of the numbers, consult Figure 3.

It is unnecessary to assign labels to the chart, as the meanings and significance of the numbers are obvious.

Functional Mechanic Resonance Imaging (fMRI)

To overcome the aforementioned problems in imaging ignorance, I employed the following strategy. First, the subject was seated with a friend in the university cafeteria. During that first stage the conversation of the subject was recorded from a neighboring table using an HB pencil and letter-sized blank paper (80g/m). The subject then was brought into the experimental room.

For the fMRI experiment, the subject was seated comfortably and one of two texts—either her original conversation (baseline) or lines from a Shakespeare play (signal) —was read to her. It can be assumed that the subject was non-ignorant regarding her own previous utterances, whereas the Shakespeare quote had a high probability of eliciting an ignorance signal. This was confirmed by the subject’s self-report. [For some details about the procedure, see the accompanying article box called “fMRI on the Go - Try It Yourself!”]

While the subject was listening, her head was mechanically stimulated with short pulses delivered using a reflex hammer (see Figure 1). The locus of stimulation on the skull was varied systematically between trials. The subject’s response (verbal, body movement, threats) to each of these pulses was recorded quantitatively on a scale ranging from one to ten. A stronger response in the signal condition indicates a greater excitability of the ignorance system at this skull location. Figure 2 shows the typical result from the subject.

Figure 3. Activation of cortical areas due to mechanic stimulation of the skull. This image was created by overlaying two-dimensional gaussian patches centered on the locus of stimulation. The amplitude of the gaussians reflects the difference in strength of response between the signal and the baseline condition in each location.

Results

Figure 3 clearly shows that during perception of stimuli selective for the ignorance system, ignorance was most strongly enhanced by mechanical resonance stimulation over the frontal cortex. Therefore I conclude that the frontal lobe is the seat of General Ignorance.

It is interesting to compare GI across groups. Since the ignorance system is located in the tissue of the frontal lobe, its design must be specified in the genome. This could help explain certain phenomena of decision-making that related to politics and economy, which are a mystery otherwise. I have made up preliminary evidence, showing that bureaucrats are relatively more ignorant than Buddhist monks. If this result holds, we would have to drop all efforts to educate bureaucrats, since the effort will be demonstrably futile.

fMRI has proven to be a powerful new experimental technique, allowing the visualization of human cortical processing in vivo. While its temporal and spatial resolution both appear improvable, the simplicity and affordability of the equipment, and the continuing flow of published studies based on its output, easily justify purchase and use of the equipment.

Reference

1. For details, see “Phrenology and the Neurosciences: Contributions of F.J. Gall and J.G. Spurzheim,” Donald D. Simpson, ANZ [Australia and New Zealand] Journal of Surgery, vol. 75, no. 6, June 2005, pp. 475-82.

*****************

fMRI on the Go – Try It Yourself!

The great advantage of the fMRI [functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging] method (as
described in the main text) is its flexibility. It could even be used at the bedside with
clinical patients. To elicit an fMRI signal from yourself, read the following lines out loud while hitting yourself on the forehead with the open palm. If you feel dizziness or anger, you have successfully stimulated your ignorance circuits.

This double worship,
Where one part does disdain with cause, the other
Insult without all reason, where gentry, title, wisdom,
Cannot conclude but by the yea and no
Of general ignorance,—-it must omit
Real necessities, and give way the while
To unstable slightness: purpose so barr’d,
It follows, Nothing is done to purpose.

—William Shakespeare,
Coriolanus

_____________________

This article is republished with permission from the July-August 2007 issue of the Annals of Improbable Research. You can download or purchase back issues of the magazine, or subscribe to receive future issues. Or get a subscription for someone as a gift!

Visit their website for more research that makes people LAUGH and then THINK.

Well, he may be onto something: scientists discovered that our brains are actually shrinking!

The downsizing of human brains is an evolutionary fact that took science writer Kathleen McAuliffe by surprise.

"I said, ‘What? I thought it was getting bigger!’" she tells NPR’s Jacki Lyden. That was the story up to 20,000 years ago, she learned. Then, the brains of our ancestors reversed course and started getting smaller — and they’ve been shrinking ever since.

Cro-Magnon man, who lived in Europe 20,000 to 30,000 years ago, had the biggest brains of any human species. In comparison, today’s human brain is about 10 percent smaller. It’s a chunk of brain matter "roughly equivalent to a tennis ball in size," McAuliffe says.

The experts aren’t sure about the implications of this evolutionary trend. Some think it might be a dumbing-down process. One cognitive scientist, David Geary, argues that as human society grows increasingly complex, individuals don’t need to be as intelligent in order to survive and reproduce.

I don’t know about the science, but it sure explains Jersey Shore! Link

Photo: Emergency Inflatable Brain from the NeatoShop

She’s the fascinating subject of a medical investigation on the brain’s response to fearful stimuli:

S.M. also had exposure to fearful situations in her past. She was held up at gunpoint and at knifepoint and was almost killed during a domestic incident. S.M. told researchers she did not feel fear during these life-threatening situations. She was also aware that her inability to react to fearful stimuli was not normal.

"It’s very striking that she has only a rational response, not a physiological one," said Dr. Jon Shaw, professor of psychiatry at the University of Miami School of Medicine. "The body is not prepared for a physiological response because the amygdala has been taken out of the loop."

Link

Q: Does rubbing a boo-boo really make it better?

A: Yes! Pain signals are sent to the brain by special receptors, called nociceptors, which are sensitive enough to distinguish between a bruise and a scratch. If you rub or caress a wound, receptors for other types of sensations will start sending out their own signals -drowning out the pain signals of the nociceptors, like one voice getting lost in the crowd. The result? The pain lessens, and maybe even goes away. So let Mommy kiss that boo-boo!

Q: Can swearing help?

Yes again. There’s good scientific evidence to suggest that cursing like a sailor can numb your pain. In a recent study, participants were asked to hold their hand in icy water for as long as they could. They could either say the same neutral word over and over while their hand was in the water, or they could repeat a swear word of their choice. The people who cursed reportedly felt less pain, and they were able to keep their hand in the water longer. Scientists aren’t exactly sure what causes the phenomenon, but they’d swear by it.

Q: Why do you stub the same toe twice?

A: There’s more at work here than just bad luck. To understand why you stub the same toe twice, we need to look at the thalamus, the part of the brain that interprets pain signals. If the signals last for a while, the thalamus eventually starts to ignore them. This is called habituation. Unfortunately, when the thalamus starts to ignore pain, it also ends up ignoring other things, like where exactly a body part is in space. Not knowing exactly where your stubbed toe is can make you clumsy, and you can wind up hurting yourself again.

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The above article by Peter Hildebrand is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the November-December 2010 issue of mental_floss magazine.

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ entertaining website and blog for more fun stuff!

The structure of your individual brain has a lot to do with how you perceive optical illusions. Researchers at University College London asked subjects how they perceived illusions of size such as the one used in this video, and then measured the size of each subject’s visual cortex -the amount of brain matter devoted to processing vision.

The researchers then took MRIs of the subjects’ brains. What they discovered astonished them – there was an almost perfect link between the size of somebody’s visual cortex was and how much the optical illusion affected them. The smaller the visual cortex, the more a person was taken in by the optical illusion. Those with the largest visual cortices were also those most able to see the circles’ true sizes.

Read more, and see the different illusions used, at io9. Link -Thanks, Greg Ross!

Emergency Inflatable Brain – $6.95

Mental meltdown be gone! Emergency inflatable brain to the rescue!

If only it were that simple.

For more inflatable fun visit the NeatoShop.

William James, a psychologist in the 1800s, once metaphorically used the idea of 10% of the brain being all that was used at one time. This grew into the rumor that it was all the brain was overall and most of the rest was not understood or used as far as we know. Actually, the inactive neurons are just as important at any given moment as the ones actively firing at a point in time, and the 10% comes from varying areas at different times.

Read more human body myths at Environmental Graffiti: Link

If you’re hosting a Halloween party for zombies this year, this will your party a drop dead success – behold the Zombie Brain Gelatin Mold from the NeatoShop. The mold will produce a jiggly left hemisphere of the brain (the yummiest part, btw).

Link | More Fun Halloween Stuff

Experts from the School of Veterinary Medicine and Science have discovered powerful antibiotic properties in the brains of cockroaches and locusts which could lead to novel treatments for multi-drug resistant bacterial infections. They found that the tissues of the brain and nervous system of the insects were able to kill more than 90 per cent of MRSA and pathogenic Escherichia coli, without harming human cells.

Simon Lee, a postgraduate researcher presented their work at the Society for General Microbiology’s autumn meeting which is being held at The University of Nottingham between the 6 and 9 September 2010. The research has identified up to nine different molecules in the insect tissues that were toxic to bacteria.

Simon Lee said: “We hope that these molecules could eventually be developed into treatments for E. coli and MRSA infections that are increasingly resistant to current drugs. These new antibiotics could potentially provide alternatives to currently available drugs that may be effective but have serious and unwanted side effects.”

Link

You’re at a café with the woman in your life when your eyes move inexorably toward another woman walking by.

In one-fifth of a second, before the conscious mind has had a chance to react, the male brain has rendered judgment on whether the oncoming stranger is sexually hot.

If the ruling is favourable, physical manifestations are immediate.

Pupils dilate, heart rate spikes, testosterone surges and the eyes assume a vacant stare — sure signs that the “man trance” has set in.

For genetically preprogrammed men, the offence is as involuntary and natural as breathing, says brain researcher, neuropsychiatrist and author Louann Brizendine, whose book, The Male Brain, mounts a unique defence for such male indiscretions.

We are more visual, more driven to sexual pursuit and more predisposed to cheat than women, she writes.

Link – via Fark

For decades critics of modern classical music have been derided as philistines for failing to grasp the subtleties of the chaotic sounding compositions, but there may now be an explanation for why many audiences find them so difficult to listen to.

A new book on how the human brain interprets music has revealed that listeners rely upon finding patterns within the sounds they receive in order to make sense of it and interpret it as a musical composition.

While traditional classical music follows strict patterns and formula that allow the brain to make sense of the sound, modern symphonies by composers such as Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern simply confuse listeners’ brains.

Link

In one experiment, for example, researchers wired up a sleeper and connected him to a robot that was programmed to act out the motions of the dreamer. For example, the robot used data about the dreamer’s eye position to know in which direction to look.

Brain waves can be studied and translated into actions – for example, brain imaging technology can tell whether a person is having a nightmare or dreaming about flying, Barrett said.

Link

It’s common knowledge that people from different culture act differently, but according to Takahiko Masuda of the University of Alberta, they think differently as well. For example, here’s how Westerners and Asians interpret the two pictures above:

“North Americans try to identify the single important thing that is key to making a decision,” explains Dr. Takahiko Masuda, the study’s author, over the phone from his office at the University of Alberta. “In East Asia they really care about the context.”

He studied the eye movement of Americans and Japanese when analyzing a picture of a group of cartoon people. When asked to interpret the emotion of the person in the center, the Japanese looked at the person for about one second before moving on to the people in the background. They needed to know how the group was feeling before understanding the emotion of the individual.

The Americans (and Canadians in subsequent studies) focused 95% of their attention on the person in the center. Only 5% of their attention was focused on the background, and this, Dr. Masuda points out, didn’t influence their interpretation of the central figure’s emotion. For North Americans the foreground is all-important.

Link – via Holy Kaw!

Remote Control Zombie - $23.95

This is like me every morning: this Remote Control Zombie walks and moans on your command. All you have to do is push a button on the brain-shaped remote control and set the zombie plodding in search of braaaaaiinnnnss. Link

More Zombie items from the NeatoShop:

Zombie Mints	Zombie Brain Gelatin Mold	Glow-in-the-Dark Zombie Playset

Gin and Titonic Ice Tray - $6.95

It's going to be a scorcher this summer, so be sure to get yourself some ice cubes. These unusual ice cube trays from the NeatoShop make for great gifts and ice breakers at BBQ parties:

Ice Invaders Ice Tray

Cool Jazz Ice Tray

Cool Jewels Ice Tray

Cold Blooded Ice Tray makes ice cubes shaped like vampire fangs! $7.95

Stone Cold Ice Tray

Cool Shooters

Brain Freeze Ice Tray

See many more cool ice trays over at the NeatoShop: Link

I took samples from each and put them on a white field to make sure. Link

This is your brain on computers.

Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information.

These play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive. In its absence, people feel bored.

The resulting distractions can have deadly consequences, as when cellphone-wielding drivers and train engineers cause wrecks. And for millions of people like Mr. Campbell, these urges can inflict nicks and cuts on creativity and deep thought, interrupting work and family life.

While many people say multitasking makes them more productive, research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress.

And scientists are discovering that even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist. In other words, this is also your brain off computers.

Matt Richtel of The New York Times explains: Link

What do mad scientists use to chill their beverage? Now you can make your own diabolical ice brain (or is it brain ice?) with the Brain Freeze Ice Tray from the NeatoShop: Link | More wonderful and unusual ice trays

An 800 year old fossilized brain from an infant was discovered in Northwestern France. Because brain matter usually decomposes rapidly, scientists are excited because this particular brain is well preserved, with many of its cells still visible:

The paper describing this extraordinary artifact, which is due to be published in the journal NeuroImage next month, reads somewhat like a medieval murder mystery, with elements of archaeology, forensic science and neuropathology. The child’s skeletonised remains were exhumed in 1998 from a burial site in the city of Quimper, north-western France, in a wooden coffin with the head wrapped in leather and resting on a pillow. The coffin was dated by dendrochronology (tree-ring dating) to the mid- to late 13th century (1250-1275 AD), and the age of the child determined by examination of the teeth. After the remains were discovered, the brain was removed and immersed in a preservative formalin solution. Several years later, Christina Papageorgopolou of the University of Zurich’s Institute of Anatomy and her colleagues began to re-examine it

Link – via techmedicus

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geekazoid.

As soon as someone starts to practice a new sport, his brain begins to change, and the changes continue for years. Scientists at the University of Regensburg in Germany documented the process by scanning people as they learned how to juggle. After a week, the jugglers were already developing extra gray matter in some brain areas. Their brains continued to change for months, the scientists found.

So there may be hope for us non-athletes after all! Link

(image credit: Flickr user Jason Permenter)