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Spend some time on the internet and you should became an expert at both detecting and delivering sarcasm. According to research into the subject, that could benefit your brain.
Actually, scientists are finding that the ability to detect sarcasm really is useful. For the past 20 years, researchers from linguists to psychologists to neurologists have been studying our ability to perceive snarky remarks and gaining new insights into how the mind works. Studies have shown that exposure to sarcasm enhances creative problem solving, for instance. Children understand and use sarcasm by the time they get to kindergarten. An inability to understand sarcasm may be an early warning sign of brain disease.
Sarcasm detection is an essential skill if one is going to function in a modern society dripping with irony. “Our culture in particular is permeated with sarcasm,” says Katherine Rankin, a neuropsychologist at the University of California at San Francisco. “People who don’t understand sarcasm are immediately noticed. They’re not getting it. They’re not socially adept.”
Bless their hearts. This article from Smithsonian looks at various studies and what they tell us about how we use, misuse, and abuse sarcasm. Link
With four teenagers at home, I witness every day the strange thought processes they have. We’ve learned from recent research that the human brain undergoes immense changes during adolescence, which are often not finished until the mid-20s. National Geographic looks beyond that research into why the brain goes through such changes in adolescence, and finds it has to do with our evolutionary past. The risks teenagers take are in some ways very adaptive.
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)
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
Medical researchers have developed tiny electrodes from silk and thin sheets of metal that can be surgically implanted on the brain. They can gather data and send out electrical signals without causing damage to the patient:
“These implants have the potential to maximize the contact between electrodes and brain tissue, while minimizing damage to the brain,” said Dr. Walter Koroshetz of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, part of the National Institutes of Health, which helped pay for the study.
“They could provide a platform for a range of devices with applications in epilepsy, spinal cord injuries and other neurological disorders.”
For instance, such a sensitive electrode could detect a seizure as it starts and deliver pulses to counter it. Brain signals might be routed to prosthetics for people with spinal cord and other injuries.
Link via Nerdesque | Image: Reuters
When a conscious person answers a yes or no question, certain parts of the brain become active. A new medical study revealed that people thought to be in a vegetative state demonstrate the same brain response, even if they can’t express themselves:
In the current experiment, the researchers found that three other patients identified as vegetative showed similar responses. To open a channel of communication, they instructed one of them, the 29-year-old man, to associate thoughts about tennis with “yes” and thoughts about being in his house with “no.”
They then asked questions, repeating the procedure numerous times, switching the associations — tennis with yes, then with no — to make sure the patient was in fact making conscious choices. The researchers had previously tested the technique in healthy volunteers.
“We asked basic biographical questions, like ‘Is your father’s name Thomas?’ and ‘Have you ever been to the United States?’ ” said Adrian M. Owen, a neuroscientist at the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, England, who developed the method and was a co-author of the paper. “We then checked whether the answers were correct. They were.”
Video at the link.
Link via Popular Science | Image: New York Times
Previously on Neatorama:
Man Actually Conscious Throughout Two Decades of “Coma”
Is This Man Fully Alert and Communicating – or Not?
A team of European computer researchers are building a computer that will simulate the way that neurons work. They hope that successful development could aid in nanotechnology and smart pharmaceutical control systems. Here’s how it works:
What distinguishes the current project is that it will make use of stable “cells” featuring a coating that forms spontaneously, similar to the walls of our own cells, and uses chemistry to accomplish the signal processing similar to that of our own neurons.[...]
The group’s approach hinges on two critical ideas.
First, individual “cells” are surrounded by a wall made up of so-called lipids that spontaneously encapsulate the liquid innards of the cell.
Recent work has shown that when two such lipid layers encounter each other as the cells come into contact, a protein can form a passage between them, allowing chemical signalling molecules to pass.
Second, the cells’ interiors will play host to what is known as a Belousov-Zhabotinsky or B-Z chemical reaction. Simply put, reactions of this type can be initiated by changing the concentration of the element bromine by a certain threshold amount.
Link via Popular Science | Image: US Department of Health and Human Services
The picture above is a 3D image of some of the neural connections in an owl-monkey’s brain. The Human Connectome Project of the US National Institutes for Health is currently engaged in a similar, but more ambitious project: to map every connection in the human brain. It’s like a circuit map for neurologists:
The complexity of the brain and a lack of adequate imaging technology have hampered past research on human brain connectivity. The brain is estimated to contain more than 100 billion neurons that form trillions of connections with each other. Neurons can connect across distant regions of the brain by extending long, slender projections called axons — but the trajectories that axons take within the human brain are almost entirely uncharted.[...]
The field of neuroscience emerged in the late 19th century, when scientists observed individual brain cells for the first time. Since then, researchers have made breathtaking progress in understanding the anatomy, cell biology, physiology and chemistry of the brain in both health and disease. Yet many fundamental questions remain unanswered, including how brain function translates into mental function and why brain function declines with age. Advances in neuroimaging, genomics, computational neuroscience and engineering have put us on the brink of another great era in neuroscience, when we can expect to make unprecedented discoveries regarding normal brain activity, disorders of the brain and our very sense of self.
Press Release and Article Link via GearFuse | Image: Van Wadeen
Brandon Keim writes in Wired that scientists are getting closer to reconstructing images that duplicate what the brain actually sees through visual input. Though it’s not actually brain-reading, it’s a small step in that direction:
To construct their model, the researchers used an fMRI machine, which measures blood flow through the brain, to track neural activity in three people as they looked at pictures of everyday settings and objects.
As in the earlier study, they looked at parts of the brain linked to the shape of objects. Unlike before, they looked at regions whose activity correlates with general classifications, such as “buildings” or “small groups of people.”
Once the model was calibrated, the test subjects looked at another set of pictures. After interpreting the resulting neural patterns, the researchers’ program plucked corresponding pictures from a database of 6 million images.
Image: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services
Neuroscientist Craig Bennett bought a salmon to test an fMRI machine and work out some protocols.
So, as the fish sat in the scanner, they showed it “a series of photographs depicting human individuals in social situations.” To maintain the rigor of the protocol (and perhaps because it was hilarious), the salmon, just like a human test subject, “was asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.”
The salmon, as Bennett’s poster on the test dryly notes, “was not alive at the time of scanning.”
Those involved got a laugh out of the situation, until the scans came back and showed that activity was detected in different areas of the brain when the fish was “shown” the pictures. Remember, the fish was dead.
The result is completely nuts — but that’s actually exactly the point. Bennett, who is now a post-doc at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his adviser, George Wolford, wrote up the work as a warning about the dangers of false positives in fMRI data. They wanted to call attention to ways the field could improve its statistical methods.
Which is not to say that scans aren’t a useful research tool, but that they must be carefully monitored to avoid false positive results. Link -via reddit
Or to be more precise, Dr. Tracy Alloway of the University of Stirling in Scotland says that in a study, Facebook users showed increased working memory, whereas Twitter users showed decreased working memory. She concluded that Facebook has more mentally intensive activities, but Twitter’s communications are too brief to require substantial brain activity:
Dr. Alloway has developed a working memory training programme for slow-learning children aged 11 to 14 at a school in Durham, and she found out that Facebook did wonders for working memory, improving the kids’ IQ scores, while YouTube and Twitter’s steady stream of information was not healthy for working memory. Also, playing video games, especially those that involve planning and strategy, can also be beneficial.
Link via The Presurfer
Image: U.S. Department of Energy
A biotech company named InSightec is developing a surgical technique that uses focused ultrasound waves instead of scalpels to destroy tumors:
Machinery like this had previously been used to treat some cancers, for example in the uterus and breast. But until now, the distorting effects brought about by the skull’s thickness has made it impossibly tricky to focus the beams onto the brain while also maintaining the required accuracy.
InSightec’s technology solves that by using over a thousand individually focused transducers, which broadcast the ultrasonic beams. But it’s not like shooting a laser into a person’s head–rather, the beams raise the temperature of the location being treated by about forty degrees, or just enough to kill the diseased cells. A built-in cooling system keeps the brain from
cooking like an eggoverheating.
Computer security expert Tadayoshi Kohno says that biotechnology that has a neural interface, such as advanced prosthetic limbs, may make the brain accessible to hackers in the future:
In some cases, patients might even want to hack into their own neural device. Unlike devices to control prosthetic limbs, which still use wires, many deep brain stimulators already rely on wireless signals. Hacking into these devices could enable patients to “self-prescribe” elevated moods or pain relief by increasing the activity of the brain’s reward centers.
Despite the risks, Kohno said, most new devices aren’t created with security in mind. Neural engineers carefully consider the safety and reliability of new equipment, and neuroethicists focus on whether a new device fits ethical guidelines. But until now, few groups have considered how neural devices might be hijacked to perform unintended actions. This is the first time an academic paper has addressed the topic of “neurosecurity,” a term the group coined to describe their field.
Dr. Steven Schlozman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, will present a public lecture on the neuropsychology of zombies, as well as that of zombie attack survivors:
And that’s the crux of one of Schlozman’s arguments: The story changes as the situation grows grimmer. Here, the professor draws on “mirror neuron” theory, which holds that humans are hard-wired to reflect the psychological states of the people around them. (Show a test subject a short film of a face displaying disgust, or pleasure, and regions of the brain associated with those feelings activate in the subject.)
Unable to relate to the hordes of undead, the survivors in zombie films enter a spiral of despair, feeding off the panic and hopelessness of the uninfected people around them.
If you’re in Boston on Monday night, check it out.
Link — Thanks, Tom Jackson!
