Inside A Glass Brain

March 17, 2014March 17, 2014Leave a comment

Philip Rosedale, creator of Second Life, and Adam Gazzaley, a neuroscientist at the University of California San Francisco, have developed a way for people to see each thought as it flies through the mind. Entitled “The Glass Brain,” the project was on display at SXSW 2014 and provided attendees the opportunity to see how their brains react to assorted stimuli.

This is an anatomically-realistic 3D brain visualization depicting real-time source-localized activity (power and “effective” connectivity) from EEG (electroencephalographic) signals. Each color represents source power and connectivity in a different frequency band (theta, alpha, beta, gamma) and the golden lines are white matter anatomical fiber tracts. Estimated information transfer between brain regions is visualized as pulses of light flowing along the fiber tracts connecting the regions.

The Teenage Brain Explained

March 14, 2014Leave a comment

Can the damaged brain repair itself?

February 26, 2014Leave a comment

After a traumatic brain injury, it sometimes happens that the brain can repair itself, building new brain cells to replace damaged ones. But the repair doesn’t happen quickly enough to allow recovery from degenerative conditions like motor neuron disease (also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS). In this video, regenerative neurologist Siddharthan Chandran walks through some new techniques using special stem cells that could allow the damaged brain to rebuild faster.

What Songbirds Can Teach Us About Learning and the Brain

February 25, 2014February 25, 20141 Comment

All known languages require the following features:

1. Sufficient brain space to house the dictionary and grammar.

2. Specific features of the vocal apparatus including the vocal cords, the muscles of the tongue and mouth enabling articulation.

3. An ability to control breathing which allows for long fluent articulate phrases and the ability to modulate intonation subtly over the length of a single breadth.

Our nearest primate relatives (i.e. monkeys and apes) do not have any such control which explains why attempts to train them to speak have been so unsuccessful.

Birds alone can imitate human speech. The birds brain, vocal apparatus, or syrinx (literally, ‘flute’) and their ability to control their breathing explains why.

Zooming In On The Human Brain

February 21, 2014Leave a comment

A visually compelling tour of the human brain, from anatomy to cells to genes and back.

Amputee Feels in Real-Time with Bionic Hand

February 6, 2014Leave a comment

Dennis Aabo Sørensen is the first amputee in the world to feel sensory rich information — in real-time — with a prosthetic hand wired to nerves in his upper arm. Sørensen could grasp objects intuitively and identify what he was touching while blindfolded.
Sørensen participated in the clinical study for one month in early 2013. The results are published in Science Translational Medecine.

The Neuroscience of Stress: Two Ways Your Brain Responds to Stress

January 30, 2014Leave a comment

Sometimes it feels like our brain is wired to make stressful situations feel worse than they are. Here Rick Hanson, PhD talks about our three core needs and how these affect the brain.

Inside The Sleeping Brain

January 19, 2014January 19, 2014Leave a comment

Russell Foster, Professor of Circadian Neuroscience, studies sleep and its role in our lives, examining how our perception of light influences our sleep-wake rhythms. The research on light perception hits home as we age — faced with fading vision, we also risk disrupted sleep cycles, which have very serious consequences, including lack of concentration, depression and cognitive decline. The more we learn about how our eyes and bodies create our sleep cycles, the more seriously we can begin to take sleep as a therapy.

Understanding how your brain works helps you learn better

January 13, 2014January 13, 2014Leave a comment

Evidence is accumulating that knowledge about the brain empowers learning. This is because understanding how your brain learns and remembers fosters a sense of autonomy (i.e. making your learning independent of someone/something else) and autonomy is recognised as a key factor in effective learning.

This 10 minute video can provide you with insights into how to prime your brain for effective learning and it may help if you are worried about exams and feel that you are not learning optimally.

Comments are welcome.