Do Drum Rhythms Affect Brain Rhythms?

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MIckey Hart

Today is Mickey Hart’s birthday, and now at 70 years young he shows no signs of slowing!

In July I shared a bit about “Drum Ki” his fine art collection that utilizes sophisticated technology to create a new medium translating rhythm to visual art. The image you see above “The Sermon” is part of this collection and hangs on my office wall as a daily reminder about the meaning of rhythm in our lives.

Now not only can you see Mickey Hart’s rhythmic art, but the brain that creates it. Watch the Grateful Dead Drummer’s brain scanned with an EEG while he plays drums!  UCSF neuroscientist Adam Gassaley is working with Hart to investigate if enhancing someone’s sense of timing might improve their cognition. VIDEO– Learn more in this ABC News report.

Research has shown that music training improves the brain’s ability to recognize, perceive, and make…

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Guest Blog for August

Read my guest post today on the Neuroscience Ireland website.

Neuroscience Ireland Guest Blog

THE SECRET TO A HAPPY LIFE – STAY FOCUSSED

Relying on our memories leaves us open to chronic unhappiness – so what can we do about it?

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Each person is actually two ‘selves’

Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 book ‘Thinking, Fast and Slow’ is a brilliant, wide-ranging summary of decades of research into how people make decisions and is well worth a read. Kanehman proves in a series of ‘thought experiments’ conducted on literally millions of individiuals over many years that – odd as it may seem – we are not our moment-to-moment ‘experiencing selves’ who actually do our living but are in fact  our ‘remembering  selves.’ 

Relying on our memories can be a major cause of suffering

Chronic unhappiness is due to what he regards as a deeply unfortunate disjunction between the ‘experiencing self’ and the ‘remembering self.’ He argues that when it comes to it – our ‘experiencing self’…

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Inside The Extrovert Brain

Dopamine Pathways. In the brain, dopamine plays an important role in the regulation of reward and movement. As part of the reward pathway, dopamine is manufactured in nerve cell bodies located within the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and is released in the nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal cortex. Its motor functions are linked to a separate pathway, with cell bodies in the substantia nigra that manufacture and release dopamine into the striatum (Image Source: WIkipedia)

Dopamine Pathways. In the brain, dopamine plays an important role in the regulation of reward and movement. As part of the reward pathway, dopamine is manufactured in nerve cell bodies located within the ventral tegmental area (VTA) and is released in the nucleus accumbens and the prefrontal cortex. Its motor functions are linked to a separate pathway, with cell bodies in the substantia nigra that manufacture and release dopamine into the striatum (Image Source: Wikipedia)

A recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience focused on the neurotransmitter dopamine  – —the “pleasure chemical” – in the extroverted brain, finding that the reason extroverts seem to experience stronger positive emotions may be all about how their brains process the memory of rewards.

Reference:

Depue R.A. and Fu Y. Front. On the nature of extraversion: variation in conditioned contextual activation of dopamine-facilitated affective, cognitive, and motor processes. Hum. Neurosci. 13 June 2013

Robot Uses Steerable Needles to Treat Brain Clots

The image shows the robotic needle test on a phantom blood clot.

This image shows the robotic needle test with phantom blood clot made out of gelatin. Credited to Joe Howell / Vanderbilt.

Surgery to relieve the damaging pressure caused by hemorrhaging in the brain is a perfect job for a robot.

That is the basic premise of a new image-guided surgical system under development at Vanderbilt University. It employs steerable needles about the size of those used for biopsies to penetrate the brain with minimal damage and suction away the blood clot that has formed.

The system is described in an article accepted for publication in the journal IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering. It is the product of an ongoing collaboration between a team of engineers and physicians headed by Assistant Professor Robert J. Webster III and Assistant Professor of Neurological Surgery Kyle Weaver.

Read more on this story here.

20 Potential Technological Advances in the Future of Medicine: Part II.

ScienceRoll

As I mentioned in the first part of this series, the job of a medical futurist is to give a good summary of the ongoing projects and detect the ones with the biggest potential to be used in everyday medical practices and to determine the future of medicine. Here is the second part of the list of 20 technological advances:

11) Switching from long and extremely expensive clinical trials to tiny microchips which can be used as models of human organs or whole physiological systems provides clear advantages. Drugs or components could be tested on these without limitations which would make clinical trials faster and even more accurate (in each case the conditions and circumstances would be the same). The picture below shows a microchip with living cells that models how a lung works. Obviously, we need more complicated microchips that can mimic the whole human body, but this…

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The Brain Science Of Learning (Podcast)

orbitEarlier this year I was interviewed by Radio Adelaide’s Ewart Shaw, host of the weekly ORBIT – the ideas in education radio show on what we already know about the learning process in the brain.

During the course of the interview I discussed recent scientific findings linking education with neuroscience around the emerging field of neuroeducation, including the educational relevance of factors such as exercise, motivation and stress and how they are informing the teaching/learning process in the classroom.

You can download a podcast of the interview from this link.

Why you shouldn’t cram your brain before an exam

Synapses

It’s well known that synapses in the brain, the connections between neurons and other cells that allow for the transmission of information, grow when they’re exposed to a stimulus. Now new research from the lab of Carnegie Mellon Associate Professor of Biological Sciences Alison L. Barth has shown that in the short term, synapses get even stronger than previously thought, but then quickly go through a transitional phase where they weaken.

“When you think of learning, you think that it’s cumulative. We thought that synapses started small and then got bigger and bigger. This isn’t the case,” said Barth. “Based on our data, it seems like synapses that have recently been strengthened are peculiarly vulnerable — more stimulation can actually wipe out the effects of learning.”

Psychologists know that for long-lasting memory, spaced training — like studying for your classes after very lecture, all semester long — is superior to cramming all night before the exam. This study shows why. Right after plasticity, synapses are almost fragile — more training during this labile phases is actually counterproductive.

Read this story in full

Weekly Neuroscience Update

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Composite of the scans of 20 individuals. Regions in yellow and red are linked to the parietal lobe of the brain’s right hemisphere.

Scientists say they have published the most detailed brain scans “the world has ever seen” as part of a project to understand how the organ works.

Psychologists at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) have discovered that changes in patterns of brain activity during fearful experiences predict whether a long-term fear memory is formed.

New findings about how the brain functions to suppress pain have been published in the leading journal in the field Pain, by National University of Ireland Galway (NUI Galway) researchers. For the first time, it has been shown that suppression of pain during times of fear involves complex interplay between marijuana-like chemicals and other neurotransmitters in a brain region called the amygdala.

Some of the dramatic differences seen among patients with schizophrenia may be explained by a single gene that regulates a group of other schizophrenia risk genes. These findings appear in a new imaging-genetics study from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).

Research published in the March 2013 journal GENETICS explains a novel interaction between aging and how neurons dispose of unwanted proteins and why this impacts the rising prevalence of dementia with advancing age.

The brain adds new cells during puberty to help navigate the complex social world of adulthood, two Michigan State University neuroscientists report in the current issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The first large, population-based study to follow children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder into adulthood shows that ADHD often doesn’t go away and that children with ADHD are more likely to have other psychiatric disorders as adults. They also appear more likely to commit suicide and to be incarcerated as adults.

The infant brain does not control its blood flow in the same way as the adult brain, researchers have discovered.

Hypnosis has begun to attract renewed interest from neuroscientists interested in using hypnotic suggestion to test predictions about normal cognitive functioning. To demonstrate the future potential of this growing field, guest editors Professor Peter Halligan from the School of Psychology at Cardiff University and David A. Oakley of University College London, brought together leading researchers from cognitive neuroscience and hypnosis to contribute to this month’s special issue of the international journal, Cortex.

The Art of the Brain

Hippocampus

Greg Dunn  swapped the life of a scientist for that of artist when he finished his Ph.D. in neuroscience at Penn in 2011.

Cerebellum – a region of the brain important for movement, balance, and motor memory

He has sold commissioned works to research labs and hospitals, and he says his prints are popular with neuroscientists, neurologists, and others with a special interest in the brain, including people with neurodegenerative disorders.

Developing cortex

This painting shows the developing human cerebral cortex, at about week 15 of gestation.