fmri
cwilcox | November 23, 2008Well, we might not be able to prove 'love at first sight', but hopeless romantics out there can defend their belief in long-lasting true love - physiologically.
Cynics and single girls tend to argue that love fades in a relationship, and married couples don't really feel the same way about each other as they once did. Well, that's not necessarily true.
A new study, presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience, has found that couples that have been together for a long time and claim to be "madly in love" still actually are, at least as far as brain scans can tell.
Most…
neurophilosophy | September 11, 2008Hallucinations are often associated with psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia or with LSD and related drugs. Hearing voices is a characteristic symptom which is reported by about 70% of schizophrenic patients, as well as by some 15% of patients with mood disorders such as depression; and those under the influence of LSD often experience extreme spatial distortions and surreal visions.
Most common are auditory and visual hallucinations, but the other senses can also produce mirages. Temporal lobe epilepsy or brain injury can lead to phantosmia, or olfactory hallucinations, during…
neurophilosophy | June 30, 2008We are being constantly bombarded with news stories containing pretty pictures of the brain, with headings such as "Brain's adventure centre located". Journalists now seem to refer routinely to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as "mind reading", and exaggerated claims about its powers abound, as do misleading, irresponsible and downright ridiculous stories about the technology.
Take, for example, this article by Jeffrey Goldberg in The New Atlantic:
The preliminary findings began to arrive a few days later, in a series of e-mails..."Carter: big amygdala response on both sides…
edyong | March 29, 2008Bad experiences can be powerful learning aids for our sense of smell. A new study reveals that electric shocks can make people more sensitive to the differences between very similar chemicals that previously smelled identical.
Every day, thousands of different molecules waft past our nose. Many of these are uncannily similar and some are more important to others. Wen Li from Northwestern University wanted to see how people learn to distinguish the critical smells from the unimportant ones.
Smell the difference
Working in the lab of smell guru, Jay Gottfried, Li attempted to train 12…
edyong | March 5, 2008Modern brain-scanning technology allows us to measure a person's brain activity on the fly and visualise the various parts of their brain as they switch on and off. But imagine being able to literally see what someone else is thinking - to be able to convert measurements of brain activity into actual images.
It's a scene reminiscent of the 'operators' in The Matrix, but this technology may soon stray from the realm of science-fiction into that of science-fact. Kendrick Kay and colleagues from the University of California, Berkeley have created a decoder that can accurately work out the one…
ddobbs | February 27, 2008A jazz player's brain: Brain activation while improvising. Blue areas are deactivated comparable to normal, orange and read are ramped up. From PLOS One.
An intriguing finding: While improvising, jazz players seem to turn OFF the part of the brain that (to quote a new study just published in PLOS One) "typically mediate self-monitoring and conscious volitional control of ongoing performance." They're in what athletes call the zone, where they navigate the oncoming musical terrain by a sort of flexible trained instinct, like boulder-hopping downhill: Think about it and you stumble. Lovely…
dmunger | August 30, 2007When Greta and I were married, we had to go through a series of interviews with the pastor. For the most part, these were benign, but there was a bit of a moment of tension when he asked these questions:
Pastor: Who's more intelligent?
Greta and Dave: We're the same. [So far, so good]
Pastor: Who's more emotional?
Dave: She is. [Oops!]
The pastor and I chuckled, but Greta gave me a rather icy stare. Was I just confirming the "women are more emotional" stereotype, or was I making a real observation about her behavior? Perhaps more importantly, was I dooming our relationship to failure,…