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Category: Neuroscience

The study of the mind needs a Copernican shift in perspective

The study of the mind needs a Copernican shift in perspective

Pamela Lyon writes: In On the Origin of Species (1859), Charles Darwin draws a picture of the long sweep of evolution, from the beginning of life, playing out along two fundamental axes: physical and mental. Body and mind. All living beings, not just some, evolve by natural selection in both ‘corporeal and mental endowments’, he writes. When psychology has accepted this view of nature, Darwin predicts, the science of mind ‘will be based on a new foundation’, the necessarily gradual…

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Neuron bursts can mimic famous AI learning strategy

Neuron bursts can mimic famous AI learning strategy

Allison Whitten writes: Every time a human or machine learns how to get better at a task, a trail of evidence is left behind. A sequence of physical changes — to cells in a brain or to numerical values in an algorithm — underlie the improved performance. But how the system figures out exactly what changes to make is no small feat. It’s called the credit assignment problem, in which a brain or artificial intelligence system must pinpoint which pieces…

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How animals map three-dimensional spaces surprises brain researchers

How animals map three-dimensional spaces surprises brain researchers

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: Leaping, scurrying, flying and swimming through their natural habitats, animals compile a mental map of the world around them — one that they use to navigate home, find food and locate other points of vital interest. Neuroscientists have chiseled away at the problem of how animals do this for decades. A crucial piece of the solution is an elegant neural code that researchers uncovered by monitoring the brains of rats in laboratory settings. That landmark discovery was…

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How the world’s biggest brain maps could transform neuroscience

How the world’s biggest brain maps could transform neuroscience

Nature reports: Imagine looking at Earth from space and being able to listen in on what individuals are saying to each other. That’s about how challenging it is to understand how the brain works. From the organ’s wrinkled surface, zoom in a million-fold and you’ll see a kaleidoscope of cells of different shapes and sizes, which branch off and reach out to each other. Zoom in a further 100,000 times and you’ll see the cells’ inner workings — the tiny…

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The brain has a team of conductors orchestrating consciousness

The brain has a team of conductors orchestrating consciousness

Morten L Kringelbach writes: The execution of any musical symphony is a difficult task, demanding significant skills from each musician. Perhaps the hardest task lies with the conductor who must orchestrate the musicians so the music comes alive cohesively and speaks to our deepest emotions. The human brain is like an orchestra: different regions perform different types of processing, much like the individual musicians who must read the music, play their instruments, and also listen and adapt to the sounds…

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Is your brain hardwired for numbers?

Is your brain hardwired for numbers?

Catherine Offord writes: Earlier this year, Brian Butterworth decided to figure out how many numbers the average person encounters in a day. He picked a Saturday for his self-experiment—as a cognitive neuroscientist and professor emeritus at University College London, Butterworth works with numbers, so a typical weekday wouldn’t have been fair. He went about his day as usual, but kept track of how frequently he saw or heard a number, whether that was a symbol, such as 4 or 5,…

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The act of smelling

The act of smelling

Jude Stewart writes: If all our genius lies in our nostrils, as Nietzsche remarked, the nose is an untrained genius, brilliant but erratic. The human nose can detect a dizzying array of smells, with a theoretical upper limit of one trillion smells—yet many of us are incapable of describing these smells in words more precise than smelly and fragrant. Our auditory and visual receptors offer little mystery—they were mapped and explained by scientists many decades ago—but human olfactory receptors were…

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How memories persist where bodies and even brains do not

How memories persist where bodies and even brains do not

Thomas R Verny writes: I began exploring the concept of cellular memory – the idea that memory can be stored outside the brain, in all the body’s cells – after reading an article on Reuters headlined ‘Tiny Brain No Obstacle to French Civil Servant’ in 2007. It seems that a 44-year-old French man had gone to hospital complaining of a mild weakness in his left leg. Doctors learned that the patient ‘had a shunt inserted into his head to drain…

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Is there a symmetry between metacognition and mindreading?

Is there a symmetry between metacognition and mindreading?

Stephen M Fleming writes: In 1978, David Premack and Guy Woodruff published a paper that would go on to become famous in the world of academic psychology. Its title posed a simple question: does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? In coining the term ‘theory of mind’, Premack and Woodruff were referring to the ability to keep track of what someone else thinks, feels or knows, even if this is not immediately obvious from their behaviour. We use theory…

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The easy part of the hard problem of consciousness

The easy part of the hard problem of consciousness

Tam Hunt writes: How does consciousness arise? What might its relationship to matter be? And why are some things conscious while others apparently aren’t? These sorts of questions, taken together, make up what’s called the “hard problem” of consciousness, coined some years ago by the philosopher David Chalmers. There is no widely accepted solution to this. But, fortunately, we can break the problem down: If we can tackle what you might call the easy part of the hard problem, then…

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How computationally complex is a single neuron?

How computationally complex is a single neuron?

Allison Whitten writes: Our mushy brains seem a far cry from the solid silicon chips in computer processors, but scientists have a long history of comparing the two. As Alan Turing put it in 1952: “We are not interested in the fact that the brain has the consistency of cold porridge.” In other words, the medium doesn’t matter, only the computational ability. Today, the most powerful artificial intelligence systems employ a type of machine learning called deep learning. Their algorithms…

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The brain doesn’t work the way you think it does

The brain doesn’t work the way you think it does

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: Neuroscientists are the cartographers of the brain’s diverse domains and territories — the features and activities that define them, the roads and highways that connect them, and the boundaries that delineate them. Toward the front of the brain, just behind the forehead, is the prefrontal cortex, celebrated as the seat of judgment. Behind it lies the motor cortex, responsible for planning and coordinating movement. To the sides: the temporal lobes, crucial for memory and the processing of…

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Animals count and use zero. How far does their number sense go?

Animals count and use zero. How far does their number sense go?

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: An understanding of numbers is often viewed as a distinctly human faculty — a hallmark of our intelligence that, along with language, sets us apart from all other animals. But that couldn’t be further from the truth. Honeybees count landmarks when navigating toward sources of nectar. Lionesses tally the number of roars they hear from an intruding pride before deciding whether to attack or retreat. Some ants keep track of their steps; some spiders keep track of…

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Do wild animals get PTSD? Scientists probe its evolutionary roots

Do wild animals get PTSD? Scientists probe its evolutionary roots

By Sharon Levy, Knowable Magazine Every few years, snowshoe hare numbers in the Canadian Yukon climb to a peak. As hare populations increase, so do those of their predators: lynx and coyotes. Then the hare population plummets and predators start to die off. The cycle is a famous phenomenon among ecologists and has been studied since the 1920s. In recent years, though, researchers have come to a startling conclusion: Hare numbers fall from their peak not just because predators eat…

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Why your sleeping brain replays new rewarding experiences

Why your sleeping brain replays new rewarding experiences

Jim Davies writes: During this Olympics, I’ve been rooting for Kelleigh Ryan, who is on the women’s foil team. She’s from Ottawa, where I live. Whenever she scored a point, she’d emit a victory scream, probably feeling a rush of pleasure. Watching her on television, I did, too. Getting better at something involves emotion. When we do well, we have good feelings—pride, pleasure, excitement—and these emotions help reinforce whatever behaviors we just engaged in. Similarly, the pain of failure makes…

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New research finds time spent among trees might help kids’ brains grow and develop

New research finds time spent among trees might help kids’ brains grow and develop

Science Alert reports: As a child grows and develops, the neurons in their brain are said to branch like trees. Being around this very type of foliage could actually help the process along. A long-term study among 3,568 students in London, between the ages of 9 and 15, has found those kids who spent more time near woodlands showed improved cognitive performance and mental health in adolescence. On the other hand, other natural environments, like grasslands or lakes and rivers,…

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