thinker_jeff

Faces of people who get tarred in the press or blasted behind their backs in snarky gabfests may literally stand out in the crowd. People find it particularly easy to see the faces of individuals about whom they’ve heard nasty or unpleasant gossip, reports a team led by psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett of Northeastern University in Boston. “Encountering negative gossip about someone makes it easier to register that person’s face than neutral or positive gossip does,” says Feldman Barrett. Not only does the new study show that disapproving gossip quickly gets associated with a matching face, but that this connection operates outside conscious awareness, remarks cognitive neuroscientist Moshe Bar of Harvard Medical School. “A negative bias that originated in gossip made corresponding faces pop out in conditions where observers would have otherwise remained unconscious of those faces,” Bar says. A gossip-schooled eye for bad eggs provides social protection, the researchers propose, by extending opportunities to scrutinize potential liars and cheats. That argument fits with a previous proposal that gossip enabled the evolution of larger social groups in which people used spoken language to learn whom to befriend and whom to avoid. To explore gossip’s influence on seeing faces, Feldman Barrett's team turned to a visual effect known as binocular rivalry. Volunteers looked into a device that presented an image of a person’s face to one eye and an image of a house to the other eye. Visual information from one eye at a time reaches consciousness, with the brain alternating between bringing face and house images into the mind’s eye for varying amounts of time. In one experiment, 66 college students viewed houses paired with faces that they had previously learned to associate with negative, positive or neutral acts. These behaviors, described in written sentences, included “threw a chair at his classmates,” “helped an elderly woman with her groceries” and “passed a man on the street.” Feldman Barrett compares this “stripped-down” presentation of gossip to reading about someone in a newspaper or magazine. By pressing computer keys, volunteers reported perceiving faces linked to negative gossip for substantially longer periods of time than positively or neutrally tinged mugs. In a second experiment, 51 college students viewed houses paired with faces that they had learned to associate either with different types of gossip or personal experiences. The latter instances included “had a root canal performed,” “felt the warm sunshine” and “drew the curtains.” Again, volunteers saw faces linked to negative gossip for a longer time than any others, including those faces that had been related to upsetting personal experiences. Studies in which volunteers hear a stranger or friend speak poorly of someone shown in a picture might amplify the visual impact of negative gossip, she adds. Such investigations are eagerly awaited — inquiring minds want to know. Link: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/74498/title/Eyes_take_gossip_to_heart

Marat's explanation does have supported studies. Your assumption is based on normal human brain without sensory defect. Unfortunately brains have a great deal of plasticity, which causes the brain of the blind person to map the neural network abnormally.

The unihemispheric sleep means that one of the hemisphere sleeps while another hemisphere remains awake. But this study doesn't need unihemispheric sleep. Here is the Abstract: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v472/n7344/full/nature10009.html "In an awake state, neurons in the cerebral cortex fire irregularly and electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings display low-amplitude, high-frequency fluctuations. During sleep, neurons oscillate between 'on' periods, when they fire as in an awake brain, and 'off' periods, when they stop firing altogether and the EEG displays high-amplitude slow waves. However, what happens to neuronal firing after a long period of being awake is not known. Here we show that in freely behaving rats after a long period in an awake state, cortical neurons can go briefly 'offline' as in sleep, accompanied by slow waves in the local EEG. Neurons often go offline in one cortical area but not in another, and during these periods of 'local sleep', the incidence of which increases with the duration of the awake state, rats are active and display an 'awake' EEG. However, they are progressively impaired in a sugar pellet reaching task. Thus, although both the EEG and behaviour indicate wakefulness, local populations of neurons in the cortex may be falling asleep, with negative consequences for performance."

You've got your point that he described mainly about his experience to learn the art of cooking. But Mattolsen's experience has something uncommon - he was able to visualize a flavor in his brain simply by projecting the components of something. The visual imagery about something unable to see might be similiar as the visual feedback in the article.

I wish I could taste the food you cooked.

Easily distracted people can stop blaming their lack of focus on the royal wedding, Facebook feeds and hilarious YouTube videos of honey badgers. Rather, a small network of cells in the back left part of the brain may be the culprit, researchers report in the May 4 Journal of Neuroscience. Knowing how the brain focuses on what’s important — and filters out noise — may help scientists come up with ways to counteract attention disorders. “Attention has a huge effect on our lives,” says cognitive neuroscientist Carmel Mevorach of the University of Birmingham in England, who was not involved in the study. “Everything we do — literally, everything we do — is affected by attention.” In this age of information overload, appropriating attention is a challenge, says study coauthor Ryota Kanai of University College London, and some people are much more susceptible to distractions. Kanai and his colleagues wanted to know if brain differences could explain why some people are easily distracted while others stay focused. For the study, 145 volunteers filled out a survey called the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire, which asks people to rate how frequently they experience mental lapses such as forgetting what they came to a shop to buy or bumping into people. Volunteers’ answers were used to calculate each person’s overall susceptibility to distraction in everyday life. (Incidentally, scores on the same questionnaire also predict how many car accidents someone has.) Brain scans revealed a difference between people at the two ends of the “distractibility” spectrum: Easily distracted people had denser tissue in a region called the superior parietal cortex on the left side of the head, signaling that there are more nerve cells there. “The idea that you can actually ask people to rate their distractibility and that it can lead to a particular place in the brain is quite interesting,” Mevorach says. The finding that people who have trouble paying attention actually have more brain tissue in that region is somewhat counterintuitive, but bigger isn’t always better. As the brain matures, Kanai says, irrelevant nerve cell connections are pruned, so easily distracted people could be missing some brain refinement important for attention control. To test whether this brain region actually influenced distraction — and wasn’t just associated with it — Kanai and his colleagues temporarily disrupted brain function there in 15 volunteers using a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation. In what Kanai calls a “psychologist’s version of Where’s Waldo?” people hunt for a circle and filter out irrelevant details, such as a distracting red diamond. With dampened brain activity in the left superior parietal cortex, people took longer to find the target than when brain activity was not reduced, suggesting that this brain region influences attention. Dampening activity in an unrelated part of the brain didn’t have an effect. Although the new results are convincing, there is still a lot to learn about how the brain pays attention, says neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley of the University of California, San Francisco. “All of these things are pieces of the puzzle of how a very complicated brain interacts with our environment.” Link: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/73838/title/Blame_brain_cells_for_lack_of_focus

This website is not a resource for scientific issues. It claims - "Boredpanda.com is a highly visual oddities magazine dedicated to showcasing the world’s most creative artworks, offbeat products and everything that’s really weird or wonderful." http://www.boredpanda.com/about/ So please wake up.

For the mission like this low noise is not enough. The low radar visibility was essential to pass through the defense system of Pakistani air force. My knowledge about Stealth Airplane is very limited. It sounds that the shape of the Airplane and the coating on the surface are two of the most important features. B-2, F-22 and F-35 are the best examples for such features. However, to helicopter, the rotor blades may be the most visible parts by radar because they rotate to all the directions. Therefore, you cannot hide the blades by the shape but only can reduce the surface reflection by coating. The question is: is that enough to be Stealth Helicopter? I'm waiting for a better explanation than mine.

Here is where my question comes from - Quote from Yahoo News: "A picture of the tail rotor of the chopper that the Navy Seals' Team Six detonated revealed unfamiliar features. Reports say it could be a new, secret helicopter. When the Team Six members reached Osama bin Laden's compound in Abbottabad one of the choppers made a "controlled but hard landing," according to reports, probably due to higher than expected temperatures. Temperatures affects the density of the air, and low density makes it harder for the rotor to sustain the weight of the chopper, especially if it was near its maximum weight (being packed with soldiers and fuel to fly in from Afghanistan). Abbottabad is about 1200 meters above the sea level, and altitude also affects air density. (See pictures of the elite force which killed Osama bin Laden.) So what machine exactly experienced the hard landing described above? Short answer: we don't know for sure. Long answer: It seems that the tail rotor visible in the picture belongs to a highly modified version of the H-60, the chopper of choice of the special forces for more than 30 years. Aviation Week doesn't beat around the bush, claiming: "A previously undisclosed, classified stealth helicopter apparently was part of the U.S. task force that killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan on May 1." Link: http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/httpnewsfeedtimecom20110504couldthebinladenraidhaverevealedasecretnewhelicopterxidrssfullnationyahoo

Yes, it is possible. There is another possibility which has not been ruled out. The first settled generation of the birds in a city might be a group of smarter birds than others. Mightbe they had bigger brains than those in countryside since beginning. I come up this assumption because I have seen similar thing happened in humans. Some people born in countryside love to move into a city but other country people want to stay away from city. In my personal observation, the country people who love to stay in a city are typically smarter ones. To be clear, I don't want to be offensive to anybody. There are always some smart people loving to live in countryside. My personal impression might not be accurate either.

It can take smarts to survive in the big city. Especially for birds. The urban environment is very different from the one in which their ancestors were born and fledged. But do city birds really need more gray matter to make it? Scientists surveyed 82 species of passerine birds, including sparrows and anything that perches, in and around 12 cities in central Europe.* They classified the birds as those that breed in the heart of the city or those that avoid the hustle and bustle. And then they compared the bird brains.The results? Birds that prosper on the city streets have larger brains than their pastoral relations. So it seems that novel environments, including urban landscapes, may select for street smarts—at least for birds that flock toward the city lights. Urban areas continue to spread. So to survive, our feathered friends may need to expand their minds as they spread their wings. Link: http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=urban-birds-boast-big-brains-11-04-27

Some parts of a rat’s brain can fall asleep even while the animal plays and seems wide awake, a new study shows. Researchers at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and their colleagues in Italy kept rats up four hours past the rodents’ usual bedtime. Even though the rats stayed awake, electrodes implanted in their brains showed that some brain cells went to sleep while neighboring ones remained active, the team reports in the April 28 Nature. Rats with sleeping neurons were also prone to making mistakes during slightly difficult tasks, a finding that may have implications for sleep-deprived people. “And it would be very insidious because nobody would be able to tell there was anything wrong with you,” says Giulio Tononi, the University of Wisconsin neuroscientist who led the work. The rats in the study weren’t “staring off into the void or anything,” he says. The findings add to a growing body of evidence that sleep doesn’t necessarily involve the whole brain at one time. Many scientists previously thought that a central control center determined when the brain sleeps and wakes. But researchers have been building a case for the past two decades that sleep may originate in single cells and eventually spread all over the brain. As far as the researchers could tell, the rats were fully awake and playing with objects the researchers had supplied to keep the animals up past their bedtimes. Only the electrodes implanted in two parts of the brain recorded the neuron naps. But just because the rats weren’t nodding off doesn’t mean their brains were working well. The team tested the sleep deprived rats’ ability to reach through a plexiglass wall and grasp a sugar cube. The task involves some coordinated moves, such as rotating the wrist, that aren’t part of a rat’s normal repertoire, so if the animals’ brains aren’t firing on all cylinders, the grab could fail. When brain cells in the motor cortex — a part of the brain that controls movement — fell asleep, rats failed in attempts to grab the sugar cubes for several hundred milliseconds afterward. But sleeping neurons in the parietal cortex, which is not involved in the task, did not lead to mistakes. If the finding applies to people it could mean that lost sleep is even more dangerous than previously believed, leading to slips of the tongue, driving mistakes, errors of judgment or other problems. “So many humans are walking around with a sleep debt,” says Christopher Colwell, a neuroscientist at UCLA. “This is probably part of the everyday situation for a lot of people.” Link: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/73636/title/Half-asleep_rats_look_wide_awake

Did I say that people who are nudists are unethical? This is your mis-understanding. The unethical reaction caused by observing nude individual happens in countless rape cases all over the world. Again, I don't think that I need to prove my opinion in this section as I do in the sections of THE SCIENCE. If the Administrator thinks that is the rule, I am not going to say anymore in the section. Take ease!

To be honest, this is not my science and I don't think that I need to prove anything. If you think that you can prove your opinion, please provide any proof that "a great many people" are great.

There are many disadvantages to do so as others pointed out, however, the primary reason is that the expose of sexual organs provides the stimulus which harms the family-based ethical system. You can't raise your kids outside of the ethical system which has been evolved. The nude societies had been eliminated by the cultural evolution, which means such societies were weaker than the existing ones. Clothes are for being warm, ethical, secured to harmful environment, and informative in the culture. But, it can be addictive, which happens in our societies everywhere.

I think that this statement has to be limited in the world of Christianity. Look the suicide rates in Middle East, and look the suicide rate in Japan especially in their past. In fact their religious belief have been too strong and over developed.

I am not expert for this issue at all. One thing I can say is that the experience of repressing aggression should follow the rule of leaning. More times you repressed, easier for you to repress it. That's why the aging can cause less aggressive behavior.

Scary topic! I think that should be banned.

Yes.

I guess what you are talking about is myelination. This developing process should be completed in the adolescent stages of life. To the subjects in this research, both of the olders and youngers are well done for that, which means no difference between them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myelination

Good question. Logically it is possibly related to the biological effect in this research. There are three possibilities underpinning the difficulty of multitasking for olders. The first, it could be the functional degeneration in the memory system, especially in the working memory system. That means the neural connections between the multitasks are weaker than youngers'. The second possibility could be that attentional function in older's brain is somehow stronger than in younger's. Because the olders focus the current event so much they are not so easy to redraw their attention from that. The stronger attention should help to think deeper on the current event. The third one could be the combination of the first and the second, which means the olders have the functional degeneration in memory system and the reinforced attentional function. We need more research to confirm the possibilities.

ScienceDaily (Apr. 12, 2011) — Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco have pinpointed a reason older adults have a harder time multitasking than younger adults: they have more difficulty switching between tasks at the level of brain networks. Juggling multiple tasks requires short-term, or "working," memory -- the capacity to hold and manipulate information in the mind for a period of time. Working memory is the basis of all mental operations, from learning a friend's telephone number, and then entering it into a smart phone, to following the train of a conversation, to conducting complex tasks such as reasoning, comprehension and learning. "Our findings suggest that the negative impact of multitasking on working memory is not necessarily a memory problem, per se, but the result of an interaction between attention and memory," said the senior author of the study, Adam Gazzaley, MD, PhD, UCSF associate professor of neurology, physiology and psychiatry and director of the UCSF Neuroscience Imaging Center. The finding, reported in the online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (week of April 11, 2011), complements findings by the Gazzaley lab focused not on interruptions, or multitasking, but on distractions. This research showed that the brain's capacity to ignore distractions, or irrelevant information, diminishes with age and that this, too, impacts working memory. Researchers know that multitasking negatively impacts working memory in both young and older adults. However, anecdotal accounts of "senior moments" -- such as forgetting what one wanted to retrieve from the refrigerator after leaving the couch -- combined with scientific studies conducted at UCSF and elsewhere indicate that the impact is greater in older people. In the current study, scientists compared the working memory of healthy young men and women (mean age 24.5) and older men and women (mean age 69.1) in a visual memory test involving multitasking. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers tracked blood flow in the participants' brains to identify the activity of neural circuits and networks. Participants were asked to view a natural scene and maintain it in mind for 14.4 seconds. Then, in the middle of the maintenance period, an interruption occurred: an image of a face popped up and participants were asked to determine its sex and age. They were then asked to recall the original scene. As expected, older people had more difficulty maintaining the memory of the original image. The fMRI analysis revealed why. When the young and older adults were interrupted, their brains disengaged from a memory maintenance network and reallocated neural resources toward processing the interruption. However, the younger adults re-established connection with the memory maintenance network following the interruption and disengaged from the interrupting image. The older adults, on the other hand, failed both to disengage from the interruption and to reestablish the neural network associated with the disrupted memory. "These results indicate that deficits in switching between functional brain networks underlie the impact of multitasking on working memory in older adults," said lead author Wesley C. Clapp, PhD, a postdoctoral fellow in the Gazzaley lab. The lab's parallel research on the impact of distractions on working memory broadens the perspective of what happens in the aging brain. The ability to ignore irrelevant information -- such as most of the faces in a crowded room when looking for a long-lost friend -- and to enhance pertinent information such as the face of a new acquaintance met during the search for the old friend -- is key to memory formation. "The impact of distractions and interruptions reveals the fragility of working memory," said Gazzaley, who also is a member of the W. M. Keck Center for Integrative Neuroscience at UCSF. "This is an important fact to consider, given that we increasingly live in a more demanding, high-interference environment, with a dramatic increase in the accessibility and variety of electronic media and the devices that deliver them, many of which are portable." In addition to the research studies, Gazzaley's team is exploring the potential of software brain-training programs to help older people improve their ability to mentally process tasks simultaneously. "The ability to dynamically update working memory is critical to cognitive function," he said. The study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the American Federation of Aging Research and a University of California Presidential Postdoctoral fellowship to Clapp. The other co-authors were Michael T. Rubens and Jasdeep Sabharwal of the Gazzaley lab. Link: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/04/110411152522.htm

The qualified scientific study is typically published in creditable scientific journals, such as Journals of Coginitive Neuroscience. It should be peer reviewed by creditable scientists in the field. And it can hold up against independent re-test. The characteristic of dreaming defines if the dream is illogical imagination, or regular imagination, or meaningful combination of the experience, etc.

If you said that your answer is in a huge libray, it would be a waste of time for sure. That was not what I said. My comment was no qualified scientific studies for characteristic of dreaming which explains if dream is imagination or meaningful experience.

If you haven't read these in detail, you shouldn't ask me to read anyway. Do you think that your time is more valuable than mine? I can read the qualified research papers in full text for discussion, same as what I did for SM in another topic. However, if I felt someone not scientifically serious in discussion, I wouldn't spend my time for that.