Attention to the Unseen

Lydia Denworth writes: Neuroscientists usually investigate one brain at a time. They observe how neurons fire as a person reads certain words, for example, or plays a video game. As social animals, however, those same scientists do much of their work together—brainstorming hypotheses, puzzling over problems and fine-tuning experimental designs. Increasingly, researchers are bringing that reality into how they study brains. Collective neuroscience, as some practitioners call it, is a rapidly growing field of research. An early, consistent finding is…

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Medical Xpress reports: Do intelligent people think faster? Researchers at the BIH and Charité—Universitätsmedizin Berlin, together with a colleague from Barcelona, made the surprising finding that participants with higher intelligence scores were only quicker when tackling simple tasks, while they took longer to solve difficult problems than subjects with lower IQ scores. In personalized brain simulations of the 650 participants, the researchers could determine that brains with reduced synchrony between brain areas literally “jump to conclusions” when making decisions, rather…

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PsyPost reports: Researchers have shown that the brain’s primary auditory cortex is more responsive to human vocalizations associated with positive emotions and coming from our left side than to any other kind of sounds. This bias can be explained by the way our brain is organized, but its evolutionary significance is not yet known. Sounds that we hear around us are defined physically by their frequency and amplitude. But for us, sounds have a meaning beyond those parameters: we may…

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James Fox writes: In February 2015, a Scottish woman uploaded a photograph of a dress to the internet. Within 48 hours the blurry snapshot had gone viral, provoking spirited debate around the world. The disagreement centred on the dress’s colour: some people were convinced it was blue and black while others were adamant it was white and gold. Everyone, it seemed, was incredulous. People couldn’t understand how, faced with exactly the same photograph of exactly the same dress, they could…

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Changes in the synapses between neurons is responsible for learning and memory. KTSDESIGN/Science Photo Library via Getty Images By John Katsaras, University of Tennessee; Charles Patrick Collier, University of Tennessee, and Dima Bolmatov, University of Tennessee Your brain is responsible for controlling most of your body’s activities. Its information processing capabilities are what allow you to learn, and it is the central repository of your memories. But how is memory formed, and where is it located in the brain? Although…

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Shutterstock By Christina Maher, University of Sydney The technology to decode our thoughts is drawing ever closer. Neuroscientists at the University of Texas have for the first time decoded data from non-invasive brain scans and used them to reconstruct language and meaning from stories that people hear, see or even imagine. In a new study published in Nature Neuroscience, Alexander Huth and colleagues successfully recovered the gist of language and sometimes exact phrases from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain…

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R. Douglas Fields writes: Dazzling intricacies of brain structure are revealed every day, but one of the most obvious aspects of brain wiring eludes neuroscientists. The nervous system is cross-wired, so that the left side of the brain controls the right half of the body and vice versa. Every doctor relies upon this fact in performing neurological exams, but when I asked my doctor last week why this should be, all I got was a shrug. So I asked Catherine…

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Researchers at the Champalimaud Foundation and the University of Minho, in Portugal, have found evidence of resonant waves in rat brain activity using ultrafast and ultrahigh field magnetic resonance imaging. Their work demonstrates from simple fundamental principles how such waves – much in the manner of sound vibrations in a guitar chamber – can form connections between distant brain areas, which are key for healthy brain function. It’s been over 20 years since neuroimaging studies – using functional magnetic resonance…

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