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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.
Is the glass half empty or half full? Well, if you’re anything like the average American, then chances are you’re biased toward optimism.
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)
Tatiana and Krista Hogan of British Columbia are twin 4-year-olds who are joined at the skull. They are too young for thorough testing, but they have given hints that they share some information between their brains!
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)
Graphic: James W. Lewis and Jen Christiansen
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.
One way mammals are different from most animals is their large brains, in relation to the rest of the body. A new study says that the larger brains were developed for the sense of smell. CT scans of 190-million-year-old mammal fossils indicate that much of the the brain growth was in the area dedicated to the sense of smell.
“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)
Graduation Brain Cell – $9.95
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!
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Have you ever wanted to play X Box games just by thinking about moving the character on the screen? Well, now we are one step closer to making that dream a reality with an experiment conducted at Washington University in St. Louis. Patients were able to send signals from their brain directly to a computer to control a cursor on the screen. This will lead to incredible advances in medicine, computing and most importantly…. instantly Tweeting from your brain.
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.
Lefty or righty? A new study links a larger anterior cingulate cortex (left) to politically liberal views and a larger right amygdala to conservatism. Image: R. Kanai et al., Current Biology, 21 (26 April 2011)
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.
Literature is filled with examples of the pain of heartbreak, but leave it to science to prove that to our brain, the pain of getting dumped and getting burned is actually one and the same:
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.
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
Brain scanning technology is teaching us how very versatile or brains are. For example, what is happening in the visual cortices of people who have been blind since birth? A series of experiments in which blind subjects were monitored while performing different linguistic exercises show that those parts of our brains are put to work for other tasks!
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
The U.S.A. Memory Championship pits mental athletes against each other to see who can recall long strings of information. Ed Cooke, a competitor from England, insists they aren’t savants, just trained memory experts. Joshua Foer (of Atlas Obscura) became involved in the Memory Championship when he wrote an article about the event.
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)
Comments Off The following is an article from the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research.
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.
Got a crotchety old guy who kept telling you that youngsters today are getting dumber by the minute (right before he told you to get off his lawn)?
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
Imagine living without fear – and I mean any fear. That’s what happened to a woman called S.M. whose amygdala was damaged by a disease.
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."
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.
__________________________
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.
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Surely you’ve heard someone say that humans only use 10% of our brains (and some people even less), but that turns out to be a just myth:
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
Zombie Brain Gelatin Mold – $6.95
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
Hate cockroaches? Consider this before the next time you grab a can of Raid: one day, cockroaches may just save your life.
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.”
Why do men ogle? It’s not their fault. They can’t help it. Blame biology instead:
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.
Why don’t people like modern classical music? Blame the human brain: it can’t comprehend it as music!
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.
In Leonardo DiCaprio’s latest movie Inception, characters can enter other people’s dreams – in reality, science isn’t that far behind:
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.
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.
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
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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:
Cold
Blooded Ice Tray makes ice cubes shaped like vampire fangs! $7.95
See many more cool ice trays over at the NeatoShop: Link
The short answer is that our brains are programmed to see the world in three dimensions instead of two. There are more details at Discover magazine, as well as a gallery of colorful optical illusions. For example, these two Rubik’s cubes do NOT have the same colors. The “blue” squares in the left picture and the “yellow” squares in the right picture are gray.
I took samples from each and put them on a white field to make sure. Link
Remember the old Public Service Announcement "This is Your Brain on Drugs?" Well, forget drugs – there’s a new and more insidious danger for your brain: computers.
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
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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
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