Telling apart identical twins can be embarrassingly difficult at first, so it’s pretty nice to be able to tell apart the rest of the population from one another. But what about those people we see that we give a second glance because they resemble a classmate? Or what about stunt doubles? In the movies, stunt doubles resemble the main actors so closely that we can’t see the difference. But in real life, if we saw Johnny Depp and his stunt double side by side, we would easily be able to see who’s who. This is because of the way the brain recognizes faces.
It’s every student’s favorite time of the semester: midterm week. As you are freaking out about the upcoming exams that you have, you notice that others around you are relatively calm. You envy them and their ability to cope with stress. But here’s the thing: keeping calm under pressure isn’t a character trait or ability, it’s a skill that you can teach yourself in minutes. You’re probably thinking that that sounds ridiculous, but by following a few simple steps one can easily improve one’s ability to manage stress.
Using technology similar to that found in a lie detector, Corey McCall, a Stanford University doctoral candidate, is creating a video game controller that registers signals about a players respiration, pulse, and perspiration. In Gregory Kovacs’s lab, in association with Texas Instruments, a prototype was constructed.
As a player gets more excited, all of signals the device registers change. Consider physical activity or watching an interesting movie, surprising these have similar autonomous nervous responses. As your interest or involvement increases your respiration rate decreases, pulse increases, and perspiration increases.
Many homeless men have suffered a traumatic brain injury in their life, according to a recent study conducted by researchers at St. Michael’s Hospital.
After collecting data from over 100 men aged 27 to 81 from a shelter in downtown Toronto, researchers found that nearly half of the homeless men surveyed had suffered a traumatic brain injury. Of those who had suffered a traumatic brain injury, 87 percent experienced the injury prior to becoming homeless.
I am assuming that whoever is reading this right now has had a dream before. Am I right? But have you ever had a dream with a person in it whom you have never seen before in your life? It may seem that way, but it is impossible. It is believed that the human brain is incapable of “creating” a new face. Every person you dream of has been someone you have either known personally or merely came across looking through your friend’s Facebook photos. Even those whom you do not consciously notice but still look at as you pass by may be an implanted image in your brain and show up later when you are dreaming.
Sigmund Freud is most famous for his definition and study of dreams. He taught about the unconscious and based it on repression and how some ideas and events in one’s life are repressed and brought up later in life. Freud believed in a cycle where these repressed ideas remain in the mind while removed from consciousness. They reappear and become a part of our consciousness only at specific times, for example, in our dreams.
I think I’m funny. Some people say I’m funny. But when the moment presents itself where its my time to shine, all lights on me, this ‘one’ is going to be a knee slapper…nope, not so much. The first time I realized I wasn’t funny was in the eleventh grade in my calculus class. My teacher’s name was Mr. Butke and he easily is ranked in my top 3 ‘all-time’ of the math professors I’ve encountered in my lifetime. He had a mustache that covered his mouth and you never knew whether he was smiling, smirking, or grimacing at you. It kept you guessing, I liked that. He also presented stories of how he slayed cobras in Kenyan villages while pursuing a multi-purpose cure for malaria, encephalitis’ of sorts, and maybe AIDS. Bottom line, he was memorable and his stage presence resonated with my classmates and I.
Numbers. Those arithmetical values that allow us to analyze and measure our surroundings. Without them, our understanding of the world we live in would be far less interesting. But what may be even more interesting is the way we process those numbers and how closely related that process is to spatial reasoning. The connection between space and numbers, specifically how we materialize values in our heads through mental number lines has been studied over the years, revealing that spatial orientation is incredibly important to this hypothetical number line. One study led by cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene investigated how number magnitude is spatially organized in our minds and introduced the phenomenon of Spatial-Numerical Association of Response Codes, or the SNARC effect for short.
Philosophers since the time of Plato have considered the extent to which we can truly perceive the physical world, or the so called ‘mind independent’ universe. Modern science has given us further insight into the question, through experiments designed to understand the way in which our brain receives and manipulates sensory information. While it has been known for some time that human perception is subject to various priming effects and spatiotemporal biases, psychologists at the University of California, Berkeley have discovered that visual perception is also influenced by something called the ‘continuity field.’
To put it simply, the continuity field is what allows us to view our surrounding environment as a continuous perception. In his recent article in Nature Neuroscience, David Whitney and his colleagues have shown that our perception of the orientation of a certain object in our visual field is actually strongly biased towards the orientation of that object 10 seconds prior. This means that our brain ‘smoothes out’ small changes in the physical world so that we perceive a continuous image. Without the influence of this continuity field, we would be hypersensitive to the smallest changes in our visual field, and presumably have trouble determining which changes in our surroundings would be most relevant to our immediate needs.
For years, the brain of a child with autism has been a mystery. Doctors and parents wondered about the cause of autism, and it seemed that they would never get those answers. Autism is characterized on a spectrum with various expressions of difficulty with social interaction including difficulty with verbal and nonverbal communication. Children with ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder, the official title of ‘autism’ after the May 2013 publication of the DSM-5) are associated with difficulties with motor coordination, attention, intellectual disabilities, and physical health problems like sleep and gastrointestinal problems. Autism is usually presented by age three and the process of diagnosing autism continues to change, according to the Autism Speaks foundation.
Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of NIMH at the NIH says that “while autism is generally considered a developmental brain disorder, research has not identified a consistent or causative lesion.” The newest reports show that the architecture of the autistic brain is “speckled with patches of abnormal neurons.” In the study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, there is evidence that the brain irregularities of children with autism are due to abnormal prenatal development.
Ever wonder why children can learn certain things, such as languages, faster than adults? There is a time in every human’s life called the critical period, and it takes place during the most intense period of development, childhood. During this time a child’s brain has high neuroplasticity, almost like a sponge. Many new pathways are formed as the child experiences new things. It has always been believed that when our critical period ends it never comes back but recent study has been done with the drug Valproate that increased neural plasticity in adults and may have reopened this critical period.
Valproate is a drug most commonly used for bipolar disorder and epilepsy. It is also known to inhibit an enzyme called histone- deacetylase, or HDAC. HDAC is an enzyme in the brain that slows down neural plasticity. Inhibition of this enzyme by Valproate allows the reopening of pathways in the brain, increasing neuroplasticity, thus reopening the critical period.