Because the brain is so complex, researchers are forced to devise all manner of different types of tests in trying to understand not just how it works, but which parts of it do what. To that end, a diverse group of scientists from several universities across the U.S. got together to work on the problem of which parts of the brain, if any specifically, are involved in analyzing and making moral judgments. To find out, or at least learn more, they devised three experiments meant to test the busyness of the brain, measured by blood flow, to certain regions, when presented with immoral situations. They have published the results of what they found in the journal Frontiers in Evolutionary Neuroscience.
Cells develop and thrive by turning genes on and off as needed in a precise pattern, a process known as regulated gene transcription. In a paper published in the Nov. 9 issue of the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers at the University of California, San Diego School of Medicine say this process is even more complex than previously thought, with regulated genes actually relocated to other, more conducive places in the cell nucleus.
This is bi-stable visual stimuli used for awareness studies. Left diagram shows a classical example, the Necker cube, where the surface depth perception switches over time. On the right, a binocular rivalry stimulus is shown. By putting one grating in one eye and the other grating in the other eye, our percept starts to switch between the two gratings. Interestingly, as in our main stimuli, the unpatterned donut region also takes over the left grating when the right stimulus is perceived. They are ideal and widely used tools to investigate the neural correlate of visual awareness because our percept switches while the physical stimulus remains constant. Credit: MPI for Biological Cybernetics
Earlier this year, Senator Tom Coburnpublished a report called “Under the Microscope,” in which he criticized the funding of any research he couldn’t immediately understand as important. Of particularly dubious value, in Coburn’s opinion, are the behavioral and social sciences—including my own field, psychology. Following his report, Coburn proposed eliminating theNational Science Foundation’s funding for these “human” sciences, writing: “…do any of these social studies represent obvious national priorities that deserve a cut of the same pie as astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth science, physics and oceanography?” Mo Brooks, the chair of a congressional panel considering such cuts, echoed this opinion. Brooks explicitly claimed that the human sciences have yet to prove their worth.
A new study published last week in Science reveals the discovery of a brain pathway that helps us link events that happen close together and play a role in memories.The research, led by Dr. Junghyup Suh from the Massachusetts Institute ofTechnology found the connection between the hippocampus and the entorhinal cortex. The entorhinal cortex receives the information from areas around the brain and then passes the information to the hippocampus.
Sperm whales, Earth’s biggest-brained animals, live in far-flung clans with lifestyles so different and vocalizations so complex that it’s natural to think they have culture.
But is that really true? Might sperm whales simply be following genetic instructions? Could their “culture” really be a set of instinctive, mechanical imperatives?
Researchers led by Hal Whitehead of Dalhousie University and Luke Rendell of Scotland’s St. Andrews University, two of the world’s foremost sperm whale biologists, have asked just this question.
Half a million years ago, the human brain started expanding. Bigger brains need more energy to keep trucking, but scientists have been stumped as to where we found this extra juice when our metabolic rate, which is how we churn out energy, is on par with our pea-brained cousins.
One recent theory suggests that our brain’s need for energy was fed by a smaller gut, since an easier-to-digest diet would free up energy from the gut to build up the brain. New research suggests this might not be the case, that storing energy in our fat deposits is more important.
When we gaze at a shape and then the shape disappears, a strange thing happens: We see an afterimage in the complementary color. Now a Japanese study has observed for the first time an equally strange illusion: The afterimage appears in a “complementary” shape—circles as hexagons, and vice-versa.
Conciousness and healthy brain function appear to emerge not from neurons, but from the networks linking them together. Scientists are only just beginning to map that complex network and understand how it works. Whereas previous studies have shown that some regions of the human brain have more connections than others, until now no one has known exactly how those “hubs” interact.
We are social animals. So you might assume our brains are built to excel when we cooperate with each other, as opposed to when we function in isolation. Now research with another animal supports that notion.
In science fiction and fantasy tales, there is a long running fascination with the idea of dramatically diminishing or growing in stature. In the 1989 classic, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Rick Moranis invents a device which accidentally shrinks both his own and the neighbor’s children down to a quarter-of-an-inch tall. Preceding this by more than 100 years, Lewis Carroll wrote about a little girl who, after tumbling down a rabbit hole, nibbles on some cake and then grows to massive proportions. Nearly 300 years ago, Jonathan Swift described the adventures of Gulliver while on the island of Lilliputan, on which he is a giant, and then on the island of Brobdingnag, where everyone else is a giant.
Like chimpanzees, dolphins are large-brained and highly social animals, but can they recognize themselves in a mirror? Psychologist and dolphin researcher Diana Reiss discusses her work with dolphin communication and cognition.
Knowledge about the development of the nervous system is of the greatest importance for us to understand the function of the brain and brain disorders. Researchers at Uppsala University have examined the key step when genes are read and found that genes that are active in the brain are transcribed with a special mechanism. The findings, reported in the journal Nature Structural and Molecular Biology, can be of importance in our understanding of the genetic causes of certain brain diseases.
Modern brain-imaging techniques have given researchers an unprecedented level of detail about the structure of the brain, but are they any closer to puzzling out how the brain really works? Harvard neuroscientist Jeff Lichtman talks about the limitations of brain imaging, and the challenges of trying to use imaging techniques to decode the brain’s behavior.
“We’ve known for a while that the brain has some regions that are ‘rich’ in the sense of being highly connected to many other parts of the brain,” said Olaf Sporns, professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in IU’sCollege of Arts and Sciences. “It now turns out that these regions are not only individually rich, they are forming a ‘rich club.’ They are strongly linked to each other, exchanging information and collaborating.”
The cerebellum is far more intensively involved in helping us navigate than previously thought. To move and learn effectively in spatial environments our brain, and particularly our hippocampus, creates a “cognitive” map of the environment. The cerebellum contributes to the creation of this map through altering the chemical communication between its neurones. If this ability is inactivated, the brain is no longer able to to create an effective spatial representation and thus navigation in an environment becomes impaired. The details of these observations were recently published inScience by the Ruhr University neuroscientist, Marion André who is a student of the International Graduate School of Neuroscience( IGSN), along with her colleagues in France.
Human memory has historically defied precise scientific description, its biological functions broadly but imperfectly defined in psychological terms. In a pair of papers published in the November 2 issue of The Journal of Neuroscience, researchers at the University of California, San Diego report a new methodology that more deeply parses how and where certain types of memories are processed in the brain, and challenges earlier assumptions about the role of the hippocampus.
Instinctive mothering behavior towards care of newborns has long been recognized as a phenomenon in humans and animals, but now research at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem has shown that motherhood is associated with the acquisition of a host of new behaviors that are driven, at least in part, by alterations in brain function.
Neurons in the brain play a role as an electric wire conveying an electrical signal. Because this electric wire is connected with various joints (synapse), various brain functions can occur. A neuron which has dendritic trees on it, receives the signals with many synapses located on those dendritic trees, and carries out functions by combining the received signals.
