uwnews.org | University of Washington News and Information

uwnews.org | University of Washington News and Information: "Brain images of children with dyslexia taken before they received spelling instruction show that they have different patterns of neural activity than do good spellers when doing language tasks related to spelling. But after specialized treatment emphasizing the letters in words, they showed similar patterns of brain activity. These findings are important because they show the human brain can change and normalize in response to spelling instruction, even in dyslexia, the most common learning disability."

The Impact of Emerging Technologies: Big Brain Thinking - Technology Review

The Impact of Emerging Technologies: Big Brain Thinking - Technology Review: "Bill Newsome is obsessed with a lingering question: How does consciousness arise from brain function? He feels the best way to answer that question is by implanting an electrode into his own brain -- and seeing how the electric current changes his perception of the world."

When thinking can hurt

Scientists discover that the dendrites in the brains of Alzheimer's patients and sufferers from AIDS dementia "bead" -- when they receive signals from the neuron, they curl up and disappear, preventing communication with other neurons. As a result, thinking actually causes more damage to these people's brains. Remember that the next time you say "My brain hurts."

When thinking can hurt -- Newsday.com: "Gelbard and Bellizzi saw that the dendrites growing in the damaged brain were beading - creating a foxhole and disappearing. The synapse couldn't function properly. Then - surprise - the beading stopped and the dendrite's disappearing act was over. The synapse was also restored.

Gelbard and his colleagues realized that the beading - the disappearing act - was associated with functional deficits in the cell. When inflammation wasn't present, normal cell-to-cell communication flowed."

MRI - Brain Images That Show Structure And Function, Yale School Of Medicine

MRI - Brain Images That Show Structure And Function, Yale School Of Medicine: "Yale School of Medicine researchers report a novel technique for jointly studying structural and functional changes in the brain based upon an advanced statistical approach called joint independent component analysis. "

We are moving ever closer to the era of mind control

In this opinion piece, Steven Rose asks, "what if brain imaging could predict future behaviour, or indicate guilt or innocence of a crime?" He discusses fMRI "lie detectors," military interest in remote brain-scanning, and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), which can be used to affect thoughts and perceptions -- perhaps leading to a form of mind control.

Rose is a biology professor at the Open University and the author of the forthcoming Better Humans? The Politics of Human Enhancement and Life Extension, to be published by Demos and the Wellcome Trust this week. (The book is available as a free PDF -- just click on the preceding link.)


The Observer | Comment | We are moving ever closer to the era of mind control

Who Really Won the Super Bowl? by Marco Iacoboni

UCLA Neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni did an "instant science" experiment in which his team performed fMRI scans on subjects watching Super Bowl commercials, in an attempt to determine which commercials were most effective. Iacoboni looked for active "mirror neuron" areas -- the parts of the brain active when you make an action and also when you see somebody else making the same action. (Last week I blogged another neuroscientist's ruminations, also on Edge.org, on how mirror neurons form the basis for empathy and perhaps all of human culture. See V.S. Ramachandran: Mirror Neurons and the Brain in a Vat)

The results were published today, one day after the big game. With just five research subjects, the sample size is pretty small. Still, it was apparently enough that Iacoboni is willing to say which ads were the best and which performed the worst. Iacoboni writes that he'll have a more detailed analysis later today.

Who Really Won the Super Bowl?

Memory and the hippocampus: New research

Newswise | A Fork in Memory Lane: The Hippocampus and Recognition:

"Recollection, as defined by memory specialists, is the ability to call up specific details about an encounter, while familiarity is simply knowing that someone or something has been encountered before. Both are elements of recognition memory and both, new research suggests, are functions of the brain’s hippocampus.

Published in the Feb. 2 issue of the journal Neuron, the University of California, San Diego study contradicts a recent body of work which maintains that the hippocampus is involved only in recollection."