It seems that - at least in mice - all it requires is one relatively minor manipulation of a tiny bit of brain and you can turn female mice into aggressive “pelvic thrusting lotharios.” We’re not sure yet if the reverse is true too.
“All the thinking until now was that female brains can produce feminine behaviors while male brains can produce masculine behaviors, with little or no cross talk between them,” says Marc Breedlove, a neuroscientist at Michigan State University in East Lansing. “These results do suggest that, at least for mice, the brain retains circuitry to display both masculine and feminine behaviors into adulthood.”
Inside Every Girl Mouse Brain Is a Swaggering Boy Mouse [Video]: Scientific American
It seems that emotionally charged memories are the most difficult to lose. (A fact that I don’t find particularly surprising.) Another recent study (whose link I seem to have lost) suggests that writing down negative memories helps to alleviate their burden - and writing down positive memories seems to remove the positive effects as well. Though writing down small notes on what you’re thankful for reinforced them. Perhaps we should all be keeping journals of our most negative memories, and keeping post-its of our happiest ones.
“Our findings add to accumulating evidence that emotion places limits on the ability to control the contents of the mind,” Payne said. “Our results suggest that even a relatively mild emotional reaction can undermine intentional forgetting. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that emotional memories can never be intentionally forgotten. If the motivation to forget is powerful enough, individuals might be able to overcome the effects of emotion by enlisting additional coping strategies.”
Read: The Memories You Want To Forget Are The Hardest Ones To Lose
It turns out that the so-called education videos such as Baby Einstein that show lots of trippy visuals with little to no dialog may actually hinder a baby’s linguistic abilities. Even shows like Spongebob Squarepants were better for children than these videos.
It seems that there are only so many hours in the day, and with a developing baby’s brain constantly growing new connections and pruning old unused ones, during infancy it’s very important that children be exposed to language.
The researchers believe the content of baby DVDs and videos is different from the other types of programming because it tends to have little dialogue, short scenes, disconnected pictures and shows linguistically indescribable images such as a lava lamp. By contrast, children’s educational programs, which make up the largest viewing category at this age, are, crafted and tested to meet developmental needs of preschool children.
Read: Infants’ Language Development May Be Hindered By Baby DVDs
Matthieu Ricard may be the happiest man on earth. He was born in France & became a biochemist, but left his life & career behind to become a Tibetan Buddhist Monk. Several years ago, he participated in a study in which his brain was scanned while he meditated on “peace.” They found that activity in his left prefrontal cortex was off the charts - 150% more than anyone they’d scanned before. And he could do it at will. Happiness, they found, is a skill.
Now Matthieu has written a book, Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill, in which he teaches us how to develop the skill of happiness.
Richard Davidson has been doing some some fascinating research in to brain lateralization - when he put a monk in an MRI machine, and asked him to meditate in “peace” he found that activity in the left prefrontal cortex was great than that of anyone he tested previously. Happiness, it seems is in the left hemisphere.
New research shows that this pattern shows up in activity in all sorts of animals, including the way a dog wags its tail.
Research has shown that in most animals, including birds, fish and frogs, the left brain specializes in behaviors involving what the scientists call approach and energy enrichment. In humans, that means the left brain is associated with positive feelings, like love, a sense of attachment, a feeling of safety and calm. It is also associated with physiological markers, like a slow heart rate.
At a fundamental level, the right brain specializes in behaviors involving withdrawal and energy expenditure. In humans, these behaviors, like fleeing, are associated with feelings like fear and depression. Physiological signals include a rapid heart rate and the shutdown of the digestive system.
Because the left brain controls the right side of the body and the right brain controls the left side of the body, such asymmetries are usually manifest in opposite sides of the body. Thus many birds seek food with their right eye (left brain/nourishment) and watch for predators with their left eye (right brain/danger).
In humans, the muscles on the right side of the face tend to reflect happiness (left brain) whereas muscles on the left side of the face reflect unhappiness (right brain).
Read: If You Want to Know if Spot Loves You So, It’s in His Tail - New York Times
This is one of the coolest optical illusions I’ve seen. Cooler even than the Big Spanish Castle. Stare at the center of the screen for 20 seconds and then look away.
Watch: Neave Strobe
Read the explanation: Motion aftereffect
Via: Omni Brain
This doesn’t really surprise me. If you see someone trip & fall, you feel it, you react to it as if it happened to you. Ever since they discovered mirror neurons, it’s been no secret that seeing, thinking about, and doing something are one thing to the brain.
The researchers predicted that when they gave the subjects a cue that they were about to perform a hard task, only the superior parietal cortex, known for its involvement in spatial attention, and the premotor cortex, known for planning movements, would activate. Then, the prefrontal cortex, known for its role in decision-making, would activate after the stimulus was presented. But they were wrong.
“We found that all of these regions began to activate when the subjects prepared to do the task, even the prefrontal, which is the region that makes the decision on what to do,” said Schumacher. “Activating the decision-making region even before the stimulus is presented seems to allow for a quicker response, it allows the brain to get a running start.”
Read: Preparation And Performance Are One Brain Process
The old axiom is “there is no blood test for mental illness.” Psychology has been considered a bit of a soft science, dominated by crackpots, wild theories and half truths - and that’s not entirely untrue. But now some scientists believe they’re on the verge of discovering a blood test for panic disorder.
“The ability to test for panic disorder is a quantum leap in psychiatry,” said the study’s lead author, Robert Philibert, M.D., Ph.D., professor of psychiatry in the UI Roy J. and Lucille A. Carver College of Medicine.
“Panic disorder will no longer be a purely descriptive diagnosis, but, as with cystic fibrosis, Down syndrome and other conditions, a diagnosis based on genetic information,” he said. “In addition, the finding could help us better understand the pathways that initiate, promote and maintain panic disorder.”
Read: Mental Health Conditions Could Be Detected By Blood Tests
This is interesting. Use of a drug can change a learned behavior - old fears can be wiped out.
When they tested the rats with both tones a day later, untreated animals were still fearful of both sounds, as if they expected a shock. But those treated with the drug were no longer afraid of the tone they had been reminded of under treatment. The process of re-arousing the rats’ memory of being shocked with the one tone while they were drugged had wiped out that memory completely, while leaving their memory of the second tone intact.
Read: news @ nature.com - Wipe out a single memory - Drug can clear away one fearful memory while leaving another intact.
I’m frequently frustrated when I can’t easily find information like price, but it seems hiding the price can avoid an almost literal sensation of pain when it comes to pricing. While I’m aware of other research on pricing, such as the Disrupt and Reframe technique, and some work by Robert Cialdini on which to present first, the more expensive or the less expensive item (the less expensive item - since you “anchor” the higher price, the lower price seems even lower by comparison - infomercials exploit this all the time), this is the first time I’m seeing research into the neuroscience of pricing.
… research by Carnegie Mellon neuroscientist George Loewenstein and others showing that high pricing caused higher activation levels in a brain area associated with pain. High priced items which lit up the insula were less likely to be bought by the subjects in Loewenstein’s experiment.
In an interview with Loewenstein, he pointed out that techniques that disguise the price of an item, like “luxury packages” of automotive options that never identify how much you are paying for specific items like leather seats or the better stereo, effectively reduce the negative activation and increase the probability of purchase.
Read: Neuromarketing » Price Tag Psychology