When you listen to music, multiple areas of your brain become engaged and active. But when you actually play an instrument, that activity becomes more like a full-body brain workout. What’s going on? In this video, Anita Collins explains the fireworks that go off in musicians’ brains when they play, and examines some of the long-term positive effects of this mental workout.
Since the dawn of human evolution, our world has been driven by creative flashes of inspiration. Creativity often appear as a spontaneous burst of new ideas but it is really the ability to derive new ideas from old ones – the reassembly of information that we already possess. While everyone can learn to be creative to some degree, new research is revealing that the extent to which we inherit our creativity may be greater that previously thought.
This Thursday, November 27, I will be giving a public talk on creativity and how we can foster it. The talk will take place at The Blue Box Creative Therapy Centre in Limerick city centre. Entrance is free; donations to this worthy cause are welcome.
Enjoying more blogs from Society For Neuroscience Annual Meeting
I’m sure that you would like to improve on this terrible pun–feel free to chime in in the comments! And now let’s move beyond the acronym: this post is about a poster that was shown at #SfN14 on Monday morning, November 17, during the session on Executive function: Decision making.
358.21/SS34. Disrupting inhibition in posterior parietal cortex reduces decision accuracy. K. ODOEMENE, A. M. BROWN, M. T. KAUFMAN, A. K. CHURCHLAND
The authors, from Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY, are interested in understanding how sensory information is used by the brain to inform decision making. They trained mice on a visual discrimination task in which the animals had to learn to recognize that a slowly flashing light was associated with a water reward in one location and a faster flash with a reward at another place. They then injected a viral vector encoding a protein known as a DREADD: a designer receptor exclusively activated by a designer drug…
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This is one of the first years I haven’t attended the Society For Neuroscience annual conference. I am catching up via social media instead.
303.Poster session. Oscillations: EEG.
Monday, Nov 17, 2014, 8 AM-12 PM.
I really enjoy poster sessions and the unique opportunities for interacting with the authors that they offer. This morning, I spent some time at the session on brain oscillations as studied by EEG. Here are highlights from a couple of posters (three, actually) that I had the opportunity to discuss with their authors. My apologies to the presenters whose posters I did not cover. Note that any inaccuracy or outright misunderstanding in what follows is my responsibility alone!
303.03/C39. Phase dependency of long-range neuronal transmission in entrained neuronal networks: A combined tACS-TMS-EEG study. K. D. FEHÉR, Y. MORISHIMA.
303.05/C41. A method for removing tACS artifacts from EEG data. Y. MORISHIMA, K. D. FEHÉR.
The authors of these posters, from the University of Bern, Switzerland, have combined seemingly for the first time transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), a noninvasive approach to modulate brain rhythms, together…
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Healthinnovations- Latest Innovative Health & Medical News
In the largest collaborative study so far, an international team of researchers from the European EuroEPINOMICS consortium, including scientists from VIB and Antwerp University identified novel causes for severe childhood epilepsies. The researchers analyzed the genetic information of 356 patients and their parents. In their analysis, the research teams looked for genes that had acquired new mutations in the children with severe epilepsies when compared to the DNA of the parents. The results of the opensource study were published in the American Journal of Human Genetics.
In total, they identified 429 new mutations and in 12% of children, these mutations were considered unequivocally causative for the patient’s epilepsy. In addition to several known genes for childhood epilepsies, the research team found strong evidence for additional novel genes, many of which are involved in the function of the synapse, the main structure in the nervous system that allows for communication…
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Yellow shows regions of increased sensation while blue areas represent decreased feeling in these composite images. Image courtesy of Lauri Nummenmaa, Enrico Glerean, Riitta Hari, and Jari Hietanen.
More than 700 participants in Finland, Sweden and Taiwan participated in experiments aimed at mapping their bodily sensations in connection with specific emotions. Participants viewed emotion-laden words, videos, facial expressions and stories. They then self-reported areas of their bodies that felt different than before they’d viewed the material. By coloring in two computer-generated silhouettes — one to note areas of increased bodily sensation and the second to mark areas of decreased sensation — participants were able to provide researchers with a broad base of data showing both positive and negative bodily responses to different emotions.
Researchers found statistically discrete areas for each emotion tested, such as happiness, contempt and love, that were consistent regardless of respondents’ nationality. Afterward, researchers applied controls to reduce the risk that participants may have been biased by sensation-specific phrases common to many languages (such as the English “cold feet” as a metaphor for fear, reluctance or hesitation). The results are published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Can digital literacy delay cognitive decline?
Researchers think it might. In a recently published study in The Journals of Gerontology, Series A: Biological Sciences and Medical Sciences they found that digital literacy — the ability to engage, plan, and execute digital actions such as web browsing and exchanging e-mails — is an independent protective factor against cognitive decline.
Using data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing, they followed 6,442 participants in the UK between the ages of 50 and 89 for eight years. The data measured delayed recall from a 10-word-list learning task across five separate measurement points. Socioeconomic status, including wealth and education, comorbidities, and baseline cognitive function were included in the models.
Higher wealth, education and digital literacy improved delayed recall, while people with functional impairment, diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, depressive symptoms or no digital literacy showed decline.
Those who reported being nonusers of Internet/E-mail and intermittent…
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During my recent sabbatical I had the pleasure of speaking to the staff of Mount Barker High School in Adelaide.
by
Jenni Cook
Assistant Principal
On the first day back at school this term staff enjoyed a presentation from Neuroscientist, Professor Billy O’Connor, a passionate researcher into neuroscience and education.
Billy is the head of Teaching and Research in Physiology at the University of Limerick Graduate Entry Medical School, and was on sabbatical at Flinders University. We were fortunate enough to have him visit us on his last day in Australia.
Billy talked about recent research into the neuroplasticity of the brain and how it is possible to rewire the pathways of the brain through ‘exercise’, much as we exercise any muscle to build its strength.
Research shows that during adolescence the brain is rewiring itself as children become adults. During this process there can be feelings of loss and grief, uncertainty and confusion and excessive emotions. As we all know, adolescents can sometimes be temperamental!
The last part of…
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The eminent geneticist Richard Dawkins caused controversy last week with his remarks that it would be immoral to carry on with a pregnancy if the mother knew the foetus had Down’s syndrome. His remarks implied that a child with Down’s syndrome has little to add to the world and the condition overshadows any achievement the child might make.
As a neuroscientist and Professor myself I would suggest that he has missed something important namely that human happiness/ mental health /quality of life/ well-being is not determined by what happens/does not happen to us or indeed by what we have/don’t have.
Genetics may be difficult but humans are even more complex!
It is an astonishing fact that the recipe for human happiness can be summarised into just one sentence and here it is. Happiness is determined by an ability to engage and respond appropriately to the people, things and events that surround us. Notice from this, that your own happiness depends on YOU alone and not the people, things and events that surround you.
What is empathy?
The ability to engage and respond appropriately to people, things and events is the basis of empathy. Furthermore, the quality of your engagement and the appropriateness of your response determine your level of empathy. Empathy allows human beings to not only interact with each other effectively, but also to predict the actions, intentions, and feelings of others. A useful trait indeed for a happy life.
Where is empathy in the brain?
The recent discovery of mirror neurons – a cluster of neurons that help connect us emotionally to other people, respond sympathetically towards others and allow us to anticipate others intentions is believed to be the basis of human empathy
Empathy – you either use it or lose it.
How can we learn to better engage and respond? The recent discovery that the practice of meditation changes the shape of those brain areas involved in empathy – allowing those discrete areas in the brain to grow or change – by adding a tiny fraction of the brain’s neural circuitry and eliminating old ones. This finding has established a new field of contemplative neuroscience – the brain science of meditation – and it helps to explain how meditation acts to improve mental health by cultivating the empathy needed to lead a more compassionate and loving outlook in life.
Happiness or heartbreak.
I do think that Professor Dawkins’s statement might be of some benefit if it opens up a debate on how we deal with what life serves up to each of us. At various times we may experience a great deal of stress in our lives and in this we are not alone. The question is – as events and worries beset us, are we going to turn more and more to quick fixes to handle our dis-stress?
Probably the most important lesson to be taken from Richard Dawkins/ Down’s syndrome controversy is the realization that the stresses of life and how we manage them IS the difference between happiness and heartbreak.
I look forward to developing this theme in greater detail including drug-free tips on how the avoid worry and stress in future posts.
Other posts on this topic
Emotions are habits, so pick up a good one
Mental health and well-being for mind and brain
What can neuroscience teach us about consciousness,mental health and well-being?
Your brain and the art of confusion
The team used diffusion tensor imaging (DTI, also called diffusion MRI) to look at five white-matter tracts in the brains of the 24 participants. This method analyzes water diffusion into tissues. For white matter, less water diffusion means the tissue is more fibrous and compact, both desirable traits. This image shows an MRI of white matter in the human brain. The image is for illustrative purposes only, and is not connected to the research. Credit Kubicki et al.
A new study of 9 and 10-year-olds finds that those who are more aerobically fit have more fibrous and compact white-matter tracts in the brain than their peers who are less fit. “White matter” describes the bundles of axons that carry nerve signals from one brain region to another. More compact white matter is associated with faster and more efficient nerve activity. The team reports its findings in the open-access journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience.
In a new study published in The Journal of Neuroscience, researchers report that the amygdala — a part of the brain associated with decision making, memory and emotion — plays a part in telling us who to trust almost instantly.
The latest research on sports concussions in teens has been the focus of recent study.
Depression is known to be a common symptom of Parkinson’s disease, but remains untreated for many patients, according to a new study.
Following another person’s gaze can reveal a wealth of information critical to social interactions and also to safety. Gaze following typically emerges in infancy, and new research looking at preterm infants suggests that its visual experience, not maturational age, that underlies this critical ability.
fMRI scans reveal brain differences in risk-taking teens
Children and adolescents with autism have a surplus of synapses in the brain, and this excess is due to a slowdown in a normal brain “pruning” process during development, according to a study by neuroscientists at Columbia University Medical Center (CUMC).
While much attention has focused on the link between violent video game playing and aggression among youths, a new study finds significantly increased signs of depression among preteens with high daily exposure to violent video games.
An imaging study of chronic users of codeine-containing cough syrups (CCS) has found deficits in specific regions of brain white matter and associates these changes with increased impulsivity in CCS users.
New treatments for multiple sclerosis (MS) using common anti-psychotic agents have been discovered by Victoria University of Wellington researchers.
People with schizophrenia struggle to turn goals into actions because brain structures governing desire and emotion are less active and fail to pass goal-directed messages to cortical regions affecting human decision-making, new research reveals.
inside-the-brain.com 