What do originality and invention look like in the brain? In this interview with New York Times columnist Carl Zimmer as part of Big Think’s partnership with 92Y’s Seven Days of Genius series, neuroscientist Heather Berlin explains current research into creative “flow states”, examining what happens in the brain when rappers and jazz musicians improvise.
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This Is Your Brain On Alcohol
Find out how alcohol molecules alter your brain with this video.
Music And The Brain
Jessica Grahn, Cognitive Neuroscientist, talks about the power of the human mind and how it can be transformed through music.
Building Ethical Brains
I was one of seven academics selected to write opinion pieces for the Royal Irish Academy’s Ethics & Society Opinion Series, as part of President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins’s Ethics Initiative.
The essay entitled Building ethical brains is published today on the Royal Irish Academy website at ria.ie and is a follow-up to my previous posts on the influence of science on society.
Some of the ideas in this essay are developed further in the weekly Irish Times ‘Unthinkable’ ideas/philosophy column under the headline: Is rewiring the brain the answer to ethics? – also published today in the Irish Times. In this article I argue that ignoring developments in neuroscience means neglecting a chance to become more ethical.
Interactive Brain Map
Visit Thinglink to learn about the five parts of the brain – the frontal lobe, parietal lobe, the cerebellum, the occipital lobe, and the temporal lobe.
5 Ways to Prepare The Doctors of The Future
Years ago when I was a medical student I felt that lexical knowledge was more important than actually being able to find the information I need. And now there are 23 million peer-reviewed papers on Pubmed.com so the skill of being able to find information is becoming even more important than ever.
I thought that medical curriculum should be redesigned in a way that now we can serve this new need for skills such as digital literacy. That is why I launched the world’s first university course focusing on social media, mobile health and the future of medicine. The course is still running with full house.
In my new video, I described methods that help us prepare students for becoming physicians who can take care of their patients in a technological world. Here is the video and then summaries of the 5 methods.
Developing e-learning platforms
I launched an e-learning…
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Image of the Week: Smartphone Microscope
Empathy, Engagement And The Brain
The failure to understand one’s own emotions and to recognize their impact on others is a source of much personal and intra-personal conflict. In contrast, the understanding of one’s own emotions allows for self-regulation of disruptive emotions and impulses and helps in adapting to changing circumstances.
Empathy is a particularly important emotion in considering other people’s feelings especially when making decisions and is therefore a basic component of all helpful human relationships including effective, therapeutic interventions.
The best healthcare providers know this; yet empathy is often lacking in professional practice as frequently reported by patients.
2014 in review
The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2014 annual report for this blog.
Here’s an excerpt:
The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 82,000 times in 2014. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 4 days for that many people to see it.
How playing an instrument benefits your brain
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.
inside-the-brain.com 