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Category: Neuroscience

Mitch McConnell may be experiencing focal seizures, doctors suggest

Mitch McConnell may be experiencing focal seizures, doctors suggest

The New York Times reports: A four-line letter, signed by the attending physician of Congress and released by Senator Mitch McConnell on Thursday, suggested that his recent spells of speechlessness were linked to “occasional lightheadedness” perhaps brought on by his recovery from a concussion last winter or “dehydration.” But seven neurologists, relying on what they described as unusually revealing video of Mr. McConnell freezing up in public twice recently, said in interviews Thursday and Friday that the episodes captured in…

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Another path to intelligence

Another path to intelligence

James Bridle writes: It turns out there are many ways of “doing” intelligence, and this is evident even in the apes and monkeys who perch close to us on the evolutionary tree. This awareness takes on a whole new character when we think about those non-human intelligences which are very different to us. Because there are other highly evolved, intelligent, and boisterous creatures on this planet that are so distant and so different from us that researchers consider them to…

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We may have found the part of the brain where conscious experience lives

We may have found the part of the brain where conscious experience lives

Science Alert reports: New research sheds light on a tricky idea of consciousness: There’s a difference between what the brain takes in and what we’re consciously aware of taking in. Scientists now think they’ve pinpointed the brain region where that conscious awareness is managed. The team, from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel and the University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley), in the US, found sustained brain activity in the occipitotemporal area of the visual cortex in the back…

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Tickled rats reveal brain structure that controls laughter

Tickled rats reveal brain structure that controls laughter

Science reports: Do rats like to be tickled? The furry rodents can be quite fun-loving, scientists say. And yes, under the right circumstances, they do enjoy a bit of rough-and-tumble play, letting out high-pitched squeaks akin to human laughter. Now, researchers say they have identified the area of the brain responsible for this playfulness. The discovery, reported today in Neuron, represents “a fantastic step forward” for understanding the neural basis of play and laughter, says Sergio Pellis, a neuroscientist at…

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Interesting brains

Interesting brains

Meghan Rosen writes: You’d never guess that Elyse G. has a black hole in her brain. Meet her on the street, and it’d be impossible to tell she’s lacking a chunk of neural tissue about the size of a small fist. Looking at her brain scans is a different story. It’s as if someone has knocked over a bottle of ink. The darkness pools inside her skull near her left ear, a puddle of fuliginous black. Inside the splotch, there’s…

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Decades-long bet on consciousness ends as philosopher beats neuroscientist

Decades-long bet on consciousness ends as philosopher beats neuroscientist

Nature reports: A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is still an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner. What ultimately helped to settle the bet…

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The more people enjoy music, the more their brain activity mirrors that of the musicians

The more people enjoy music, the more their brain activity mirrors that of the musicians

Robert Martone writes: When a concert opens with a refrain from your favorite song, you are swept up in the music, happily tapping to the beat and swaying with the melody. All around you, people revel in the same familiar music. You can see that many of them are singing, the lights flashing to the rhythm, while other fans are clapping in time. Some wave their arms over their head, and others dance in place. The performers and audience seem…

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Brain waves synchronize when people interact

Brain waves synchronize when people interact

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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Intelligent brains take longer to solve difficult problems, shows simulation study

Intelligent brains take longer to solve difficult problems, shows simulation study

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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Our brain prefers positive vocal sounds that come from our left

Our brain prefers positive vocal sounds that come from our left

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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Why color is in the eye of the beholder

Why color is in the eye of the beholder

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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Is it real or imagined? How your brain tells the difference

Is it real or imagined? How your brain tells the difference

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy? Those aren’t just lyrics from the Queen song “Bohemian Rhapsody.” They’re also the questions that the brain must constantly answer while processing streams of visual signals from the eyes and purely mental pictures bubbling out of the imagination. Brain scan studies have repeatedly found that seeing something and imagining it evoke highly similar patterns of neural activity. Yet for most of us, the subjective experiences they produce are…

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Scientists observe a surge of activity correlated with consciousness in the dying brain

Scientists observe a surge of activity correlated with consciousness in the dying brain

PsyPost reports: A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has presented preliminary findings suggesting there can be a surge of brain activity linked to consciousness during the dying process. The new study aimed to investigate the brain activity of patients during the dying process, particularly focusing on whether there are any neural correlates of consciousness. Near-death experiences (NDEs) have been reported by some cardiac arrest survivors and are described as highly vivid and real-like…

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Memories may be stored in the membranes of your neurons

Memories may be stored in the membranes of your neurons

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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A chance event one million years ago changed human brains forever

A chance event one million years ago changed human brains forever

Science Alert reports: Like treasured recipes passed down from generation to generation, there are just some regions of DNA that evolution doesn’t dare tweak. Mammals far and wide share a variety of such encoded sequences, for example, which have remained untouched for millions of years. Humans are a strange exception to this club. For some reason, recipes long preserved by our ancient ancestors were suddenly ‘spiced up’ within a short evolutionary period of time. Because we’re the only species in…

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How close are we to reading minds? A new study decodes language and meaning from brain scans

How close are we to reading minds? A new study decodes language and meaning from brain scans

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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