Want to find your mind? Learn to direct your dreams

AM I awake or am I dreaming?” I ask myself for probably the hundredth time. I am fully awake, just like all the other times I asked, and to be honest I am beginning to feel a bit silly. All week I have been performing this “reality check” in the hope that it will become so ingrained in my mind that I will start asking it in my dreams too. Read the rest of this entry »

The secrets of intelligence lie within a single cell

LATE at night on a sultry evening, I watch intently as the predator senses its prey, gathers itself, and strikes. It could be a polecat, or even a mantis – but in fact it’s a microbe. The microscopic world of the single, living cell mirrors our own in so many ways: cells are essentially autonomous, sentient and ingenious. In the lives of single cells we can perceive the roots of our own intelligence. Read the rest of this entry »

How your brain remembers the future

IT’S like remembering the future. Our brain generates predictions of likely visual inputs so it can focus on dealing with the unexpected.

Predictable sights trigger less brain activity than unfamiliar stimuli, bolstering the view that the brain is not merely reactive, but generates predictions based on the recent past. “The brain expects to see things and really just wants to confirm it now and again,” says Lars Muckli at the University of Glasgow, UK. Read the rest of this entry »

Mom and dad, stop stifling me – it’s damaging my brain

Overprotective parents inhibit more than their kids’ freedom: they may also slow brain growth in an area linked to mental illness.

Children whose parents are overprotective or neglectful are believed to be more susceptible to psychiatric disorders – which in turn are associated with defects in part of the prefrontal cortex.

To investigate the link, Kosuke Narita of Gunma University, Japan, scanned the brains of 50 people in their 20s and asked them to fill out a survey about their relationship with their parents during their first 16 years. Read the rest of this entry »

Mind tricks: Six ways to explore your brain

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How the human brain works

Giving the ‘unconscious’ a voice

THE inner voice of people who appear unconscious can now be heard. For the first time, researchers have struck up a conversation with a man diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. All they had to do was monitor how his brain responded to specific questions. This means that it may now be possible to give some individuals in the same state a degree of autonomy.

“They can now have some involvement in their destiny,” says Adrian Owen of the University of Cambridge, who led the team doing the work. Read the rest of this entry »

Sleep success: How to make ZZZs = memory

Sounds played as you sleep can reinforce memories, suggest Ken Paller and his colleagues at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.

They asked people to memorise which images and their associated sounds – such as a picture of a cat and a miaow – were associated with a certain area on a computer screen and then to take a nap. They played half the group the sounds in their sleep, and these people were better at remembering the associations than the rest when they woke up. Read the rest of this entry »

Clever fools: Why a high IQ doesn’t mean you’re smart

IS GEORGE W. BUSH stupid? It’s a question that occupied a good many minds of all political persuasions during his turbulent eight-year presidency. The strict answer is no. Bush’s IQ score is estimated to be above 120, which suggests an intelligence in the top 10 per cent of the population. But this, surely, does not tell the whole story. Even those sympathetic to the former president have acknowledged that as a thinker and decision-maker he is not all there. Even his loyal speechwriter David Frum called him glib, incurious and “as a result ill-informed”. The political pundit and former Republican congressman Joe Scarborough accused him of lacking intellectual depth, claiming that compared with other US presidents whose intellect had been questioned, Bush junior was “in a league by himself”. Bush himself has described his thinking style as “not very analytical”. Read the rest of this entry »

Brain scanners can tell what you’re thinking about

WHAT are you thinking about? Which memory are you reliving right now? You may think that only you can answer, but by combining brain scans with pattern-detection software, neuroscientists are prying open a window into the human mind.

In the last few years, patterns in brain activity have been used to successfully predict what pictures people are looking at, their location in a virtual environment or a decision they are poised to make. The most recent results show that researchers can now recreate moving images that volunteers are viewing – and even make educated guesses at which event they are remembering. Read the rest of this entry »

Instant Expert: Mental Health

When the heart breaks down, it beats erratically or not at all. A bone can chip or snap. But when the complex network of neurons in our brain malfunctions, the result can be a near-endless variety and combinations of mental illnesses.

It’s normal to sometimes be sad, happy, anxious, confused, forgetful or fearful, but when a person’s emotions, thoughts or behaviour frequently trouble them, or disrupt their lives, they may be suffering from mental illness. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), about 450 million people worldwide are affected by mental, neurological or behavioural problems at any time. Read the rest of this entry »

An App so You’ll Never Forget

A language-learning application that’s already big in Japan is coming to the U.S. in the form of a new iPhone app. Smart.fm, based in Tokyo, says that the adaptive-learning algorithms behind its software can help users memorize all kinds of information.

Smart.fm is one of several companies selling software designed to help users remember. The company’s algorithms were inspired by research that shows people remember information more effectively they try to memorize it at key times, says founder and chairman Andrew Smith Lewis. Read the rest of this entry »

Intelligence Explained

Tracking and understanding the complex connections within the brain may finally reveal the neural secret of cognitive ability.

A series of black-and-white snapshots is splayed across the screen, each capturing a thin slice of my brain. The gray-scale pictures would look familiar to anyone who has seen a brain scan, but these images are different. Andrew Frew, a neuroscientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, uses a cursor to select a small square. Thin strands like spaghetti appear, representing the thousands of neural fibers passing through it. A few clicks of the cursor and Frew refines the tract of fibers pictured on the screen, highlighting first my optic nerve, then the fibers passing through a part of the brain that’s crucial for language, then the bundles of motor and sensory nerves that head down to the brain stem. Read the rest of this entry »

Wires Inserted Into Human Brain Reveal Speech Surprise

A rare set of high-resolution readouts taken directly from the wired-in brains of epileptics has provided an unprecedented look at how the brain processes language.

Though only a glimpse, it was enough to show that part of the brain’s language center handles multiple tasks, rather than one.

“If the same part of the brain does different things at different times, that’s a thunderously complex level of organization,” said Ned Sahin, a cognitive scientist at the University of California, San Diego. Read the rest of this entry »

Forgotten Memories Are Still in Your Brain

For anyone who’s ever forgotten something or someone they wish they could remember, a bit of solace: Though the memory is hidden from your conscious mind, it might not be gone.

In a study of college students, brain imaging detected patterns of activation that corresponded to memories the students thought they’d lost.

“Even though your brain still holds this information, you might not always have access to it,” said neurobiologist Jeffrey Johnson of the University of California, Irvine. His remarks appeared in the study he co-authored, published Wednesday in Neuron. Read the rest of this entry »

The biggest questions ever asked

New Scientist tackles eight of the deepest challenges faced by science – from reality and consciousness, to free will and death.

1. What is reality?

Can we be sure that the world we experience is not just a figment of our imaginations, asks Roger Penrose.

WHAT do we understand by “reality”? For those of us who consider ourselves hard-headed realists, there is a kind of common-sense answer: “Reality consists of those things – tables, chairs, trees, houses, planets, animals, people and so on – which are actual things made of matter.” We might tend to include some more abstract-seeming notions such as space and time, and the totality of all such “real” things would be referred to as “the universe“. Read the rest of this entry »

Look Ma, No Pen! Electrical Impulses Can Reproduce Handwriting

Someday, instead of typing your text message on a cramped iPhone keyboard, neuroscientist Michael Linderman says you’ll be scrawling your thoughts in the air.

Linderman and colleagues have figured out how to translate electrical impulses from muscles in the forearm and hand into written language. Using pattern-recognition algorithms and a technique called electromyography, the researchers can recognize and reproduce a person’s unique handwriting pattern from the movement of their hands. Eventually, they hope to create a fingerless glove equipped with electrode sensors that can automatically translate hand motions into digital or handwritten text. Read the rest of this entry »

Brain Surgery Using Sound Waves

A revolutionary new approach to neurosurgery avoids both radiation and a scalpel.

A new ultrasound device, used in conjunction with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), allows neurosurgeons to precisely burn out small pieces of malfunctioning brain tissue without cutting the skin or opening the skull. A preliminary study from Switzerland involving nine patients with chronic pain shows that the technology can be used safely in humans. The researchers now aim to test it in patients with other disorders, such as Parkinson’s disease.

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Why We Stare, Even When We Don’t Want To

The stares of strangers endured by Connie Culp, recent face transplant recipient, might have little to do with cruelty or lack of empathy. These responses are likely a result of neurologic, biologic and evolutionary factors.

Prior to her operation, the center of Culp’s face was blank skin traversed by a single raw scar where she once had a nose, upper lip and cheeks. The disfigurement made her the target of something perhaps even less fixable: millions of years of evolutionary uncouth. When she went out in public, people gaped at her. After her operation, her face still looks unusual and the stares continue.
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Synchronized Brain Waves Focus Our Attention

Separate brain regions firing in unison may be what keeps us focused on important things while we ignore distractions.

A deluge of visual information hits our eyes every second, yet we’re able to focus on the minuscule fraction that’s relevant to our goals. When we try to find our way through an unfamiliar area of town, for example, we manage to ignore the foliage, litter and strolling pedestrians, and focus our attention on the street signs.

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How Television Affects Your Brain

What Makes Us Happy?

The (Scientific) Pursuit of Happiness

The Harvard Study of Adult Development, begun in 1937, has been following the lives of 268 men, from college to death, to learn what makes for a good life.

Dr. George Vaillant, a professor at Harvard Medical School, has been the director of the study for 42 years. In this excellent short video from The Atlantic, he discusses lessons he learned about fame, ambition, and happiness along the way. In the end, his expansive empirical studies confirmed what John Lennon told us a few decades ago:

“The job isn’t conforming, it isn’t keeping up with the Jones’. It is playing and working and loving. And loving is probably the most important. Happiness is love. Full stop.”

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Your Mind is not restricted to ‘Inside The Head’

Controversial scientist Rupert Sheldrake tells how more and more evidence is suggesting that the mind is not restricted to ‘inside the head’

We have been brought up to believe that the mind is located inside the head. But there are good reasons for thinking that this view is too limited. Recent experimental results show that people can influence others at a distance just by looking at them, even if they look from behind and if all sensory clues are eliminated. And people’s intentions can be detected by animals from miles away. The commonest kind of non-local interaction mental influence occurs in connection with telephone calls, where most people have had the experience of thinking of someone shortly before they ring. Controlled, randomized tests on telephone telepathy have given highly significant positive results. Research techniques have now been automated and experiments on telepathy are now being conducted through the internet and cell phones, enabling widespread participation.

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Irish Student Hoaxes World’s Media With Fake Quote

Web hoaxes and the pitfalls of quick journalism

When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.

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The Truth Is Out There: Top Academics In Search of Paranormal Phenomena

Paranormal phenomena aren’t just for Fox Mulder, Melinda Gordon, and Rod Serling. Even top academics can’t resist a good ghost story. And maybe that’s for the better: Brilliant ideas often seem crazy at first. Scientific American dubbed the Wright Brothers “the Lying Brothers” despite test flights witnessed by trainloads of startled onlookers. More obscure findings can fare worse: Germs, quarks, black holes, and continental drift were all once considered laughable. Still, impeccably credentialed scientists persist, as Lewis Carroll’s White Queen says, in trying to believe a few impossible things before breakfast—or after they’ve received tenure.

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The next step: The study of energy and heat to create an entirely new theory for how Intelligence works

The U.S. military’s premiere research agency is already trying to use math to predict human behavior and neuroscience to replicate a primate’s brain. The next step: Lean on the study of energy and heat to create an entirely new theory for how intelligence actually works.

The idea behind Darpa’s latest venture, called “Physical Intelligence” (PI) is to prove, mathematically, that the human mind is nothing more than parts and energy. In other words, all brain activities — reasoning, emoting, processing sights and smells — derive from physical mechanisms at work, acting according to the principles of “thermodynamics in open systems.” Thermodynamics is founded on the conversion of energy into work and heat within a system (which could be anything from a test-tube solution to a planet). The processes can be summed up in formalized equations and laws, which are then used to describe how systems react to changes in their surroundings.

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Mirror Neurons aid understand intentions of others

A newly discovered type of brain cell may help us prep for social interactions.

The cells are a special type of “mirror neurons,” which are thought to aid understanding of the actions and intentions of others. Mirror neurons fire both when you do something, like grab a bottle of wine, and when you watch another person do the same thing. Instead of carrying out a step-by-step reasoning process to figure out why a friend is grabbing a bottle of wine, we instantly understand what’s going on inside his head because it’s going on in our heads too.

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Social connections, not digital ones, keep your frontal lobe engaged.

Rebalance Your Brain

Yes, we love the way our computers, PDAs, video games, and iPods have revolutionized our lives and let us stay connected and entertained 24/7. But there may be a downside for our health, says Dr Gary Small, author of iBrain: Surviving the Technological Alteration of the Modern Mind.

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Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business

At the age of 40, King Gillette was a frustrated inventor, a bitter anticapitalist, and a salesman of cork-lined bottle caps. It was 1895, and despite ideas, energy, and wealthy parents, he had little to show for his work. He blamed the evils of market competition. Indeed, the previous year he had published a book, The Human Drift, which argued that all industry should be taken over by a single corporation owned by the public and that millions of Americans should live in a giant city called Metropolis powered by Niagara Falls. His boss at the bottle cap company, meanwhile, had just one piece of advice: Invent something people use and throw away.

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It’s what you do that counts—not what you say you’d do

The price of prejudice

NOBODY likes to admit an uncomfortable truth about himself, especially when charged issues such as race, sex, age and even supersized waistlines come into play. That makes the task of the behavioural scientist a difficult one. Not only may participants in a study be lying to those running a test, but they may also, fundamentally, be lying to themselves.

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Gesticulating helps children to learn – A handwaving approach to arithmetic

HUMAN language is the subject of endless scientific investigation, but the gestures that accompany speech are a surprisingly neglected area. It is sometimes jokingly said that the way to render an Italian speechless is to tie his wrists together, but almost everyone moves their hands in meaningful ways when they talk. Susan Goldin-Meadow of the University of Chicago, however, studies gestures carefully—and not out of idle curiosity. Introspection suggests that gesturing not only helps people communicate but also helps them to think. She set out to test this, and specifically to find out whether gestures might be used as an aid to children’s learning. It turns out, as she told the AAAS, that they can.

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6 Minutes to a Better Memory

For a quick and easy boost to your brainpower this weekend, pull down the shades, close your eyes, and catch some daytime ZZZs.

People who take daytime naps outperform non-nappers on memory exercises. And, surprisingly, a mere 6 minutes of shut-eye is enough to refresh the mind. Read the rest of this entry »

Take Note: Doodling Can Help Memory

It actually keeps us on track with boring tasks, study suggests

You might look like you’re not paying attention when you doodle, but science says otherwise.

Researchers in the United Kingdom found that test subjects who doodled while listening to a recorded message had a 29 percent better recall of the message’s details than those who didn’t doodle. The findings were published in Applied Cognitive Psychology.

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How your friends’ friends can affect your mood

Your behaviour is influenced by others far more strongly than you might think, even if you’ve never met them.

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