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Creativity Motivation – What is motivation – Corey K Katir
Advertising From http://www.creativitymotivation.com Describes motivation process for creativity with emphasis on intrinsic motivation by Corey K Katir The Brain: Hidden Epidemic: a(c)Tapeworms Living Inside People’s Brains
From discovermagazine.com Theodore Nash sees only a few dozen patients a year in his clinic at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. Thatas pretty small as medical practices go, but what his patients lack in number they make up for in the intensity of their symptoms. Some fall into comas. Some are paralyzed down one side of their body. Others canat walk a straight line. Still others come to Nash partially blind, or with so much fluid in their brain that they need shunts implanted to relieve the pressure. Some lose the ability to speak; many fall into violent seizures.
Underneath this panoply of symptoms is the same cause, captured in the MRI scans that Nash takes of his patientsa brains. Each brain contains one or more whitish blobs. You might guess that these are tumors. But Nash knows the blobs are not made of the patientas own cells. They are tapeworms. Aliens.
A blob in the brain is not the image most people have when someone mentions tapeworms. These parasitic worms are best known in their adult stage, when they live in peopleas intestines and their ribbon-shaped bodies can grow as long as 21 feet. But thatas just one stage in the animalas life cycle. Before they become adults, tapeworms spend time as larvae in large cysts. And those cysts can end up in peopleas brains, causing a disease known as neurocysticercosis.
aNobody knows exactly how many people there are with it in the United States,a says Nash, who is the chief of the Gastrointestinal Parasites Section at NIH…
Image: A human brain overrun with cysts from Taenia solium, a tapeworm that normally inhabits the muscles of pigs. Courtesy of Theodore E. Nash , M.D.
The Brain: Can a Brain Scan Tell You What Drugs to Take and Choices to Make?
From discovermagazine.com
Ahmad Hariri stands in a dim room at the Duke University Medical Center, watching his experiment unfold. There are five computer monitors spread out before him. On one screen, a giant eye jerks its gaze from one corner to another. On a second, three female faces project terror, only to vanish as three more female faces, this time devoid of emotion, pop up instead. A giant window above the monitors looks into a darkened room illuminated only by the curve of light from the interior of a powerful functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner. A Duke undergraduateaweall call him Rossais lying in the tube of the scanner. Heas looking into his own monitor, where he can observe pictures as the apparatus tracks his eye movements and the blood oxygen levels in his brain.
Ross has just come to the end of an hour-long brain scanning session. One of Haririas graduate students, Yuliya Nikolova, speaks into a microphone. aOkay, weare done,a she says. Ross emerges from the machine, pulls his sweater over his head, and signs off on his paperwork.
As heas about to leave, he notices the image on the far-left computer screen: It looks like someone has sliced his head open and imprinted a grid of green lines on his brain. The researchers will follow those lines to figure out which parts of Rossas brain became most active as he looked at the intense pictures of the women. He looks at the brain image, then looks at Hariri with a smile. aSo, am I sane?a
Hariri laughs noncommitally. aWell, that I canat tell you.a
True enough: On its own, Rossas brain canat tell Hariri much. But a thousand brains? Thatas another matter…
The Brain: The Connections May Be the Key
From discovermagazine.com
If I didnat know Sebastian Seung was a neuroscientist, I would have pegged him as a computer game designer. His onyx-black hair seems frozen in a windstorm. He wears black sneakers, jeans, and a frayed bomber jacket over an untucked shirt covered in fluorescent blobs. If someone had blindfolded me on Vassar Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, led me into Building 46 on the campus of MIT, past the sign that says Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, taken me up in the elevator to the fifth floor and whisked off the blindfold in Seungas lab, I still wouldnat have guessed he had anything to do with brains. There are no specimens floating in jars on the shelves. There are no electrodes plugged into the heads of sea slugs. Instead, I see a dozen young men gazing at monitors, some pushing their computer mice, others drawing tethered pens across digital tablets to manipulate 3-D images, each packed with more megabytes than a feature film on a Blu-ray Disc.
And there is Seung himself, gazing over the shoulder of postdoc Daniel Berger, whose monitor looks like a science fiction forest, with branches and trunks colored turquoise and cherry, floating unrooted in space. I almost find myself wondering when Seungas next game will hit the stores.
But appearances to the contrary, Seung is an expert on the web of neurons that make up the brain. And the images heas creating are part of an ambitious attempt to understand how the connections between those brain cells give rise to the mind. aHow do you put together dumb cells and get something smart?a he asks.
Neuroscientists know that the brain contains some 100 billion neurons and that the neurons are joined together via an estimated quadrillion connections. Itas through those links that the brain does the remarkable work of learning and storing memory. Yet scientists have never mapped that whole web of neural contact, known as the connectome. It would be as if doctors knew about each of our bones in isolation but had never seen an entire skeleton. The sheer complexity of the connectome has put such a map out of reach until now…
Image: Each branch of each neuron is studded with hundreds of little spines. R. Schalek, B. Kasthuri, K. Hayworth, J. Tapia, J. Lichtman/Harvard and D. Berger, S. Seung/MIT
The Brain: The Troublesome Bloom of Autism
From discovermagazine.com
Eric Courchesne managed to find a positive thing about getting polio: It gave him a clear idea of what he would do when he grew up. Courchesne was stricken in 1953, when he was 4. The infection left his legs so wasted that he couldnat stand or walk. aMy mother had to carry me everywhere,a he says. His parents helped him learn how to move his toes again. They took him to a pool to learn to swim. When he was 6, they took him to a doctor who gave him metal braces, and then they helped him learn to hobble around on them. Doctors performed half a dozen surgeries on his legs, grafting muscles to give him more strength.
Courchesne was 11 when the braces finally came off, and his parents patiently helped him practice walking on his own. aThrough their encouragement, I went on to have dreams beyond what youad expect,a he says. He went to college at the University of California, Berkeley. One day he stopped to watch the gymnastics team practicing, and the coach asked him to try out. Before long Courchesne was on the team, where he won the western U.S. championship in still rings.
When Courchesne wasnat competing at gymnastics, he was studying neuroscience. aI understood a neurological disorder firsthand, and I wanted to help other children,a he says. Fortunately, the polio outbreak that snared him in 1953 was the last major one in the United States; a vaccine largely eliminated the disease in this country. But in the mid-1980s, as a newly minted assistant professor of neuroscience at the University of California, San Diego, Courchesne encountered a 15-year-old with another kind of devastating neurological disorder: autism…
The Brain: Our Strange, Important, Subconscious Light Detectors
From discovermagazine.com
iStockphoto
There was no way the blind mice could see, yet somehow, they could. The year was 1923, and a Harvard grad student named Clyde Keeler had set out to compare eyes from different animals, starting with mice that he bred in his dorm room. Keeler cut open one mouseas eye and put it under a microscope. Immediately he realized something was wrong. Missing from the eye was the layer of rods and cones, the photoreceptors that catch light. Turning back to his colony, Keeler realized that half of his animals were blind. Somehow a mutation had arisen, wiping out their rods and cones.
The mutation had blinded those mice with surgical precision, yet for reasons lost to history, Keeler got the strange idea to shine a light in their eyes anyway. Based on everything that scientists knew about mammalian eyes, nothing should have happened. After all, the mice had no way to capture light and relay it to the retinal ganglion cells, the neurons that normally pass visual signals on to the brain. And yet something did happen: The mouse pupils shrank.
Keeler struggled to find an explanation. aWe may suppose that a rodless mouse will not see in the ordinary sense,a he wrote in one journal article. But for pupils to shrink, such mice had to have some kind of cell besides rods and conesaone that scientists knew nothing aboutathat could also capture light and send a signal to the brain.
The Brain: Sewing Audio to Video, and Rubber Hands Onto People
From discovermagazine.com I donat usually stream Netflix onto my television to probe the a”inner workings of my mind, but it had that effect not long ago. a”While I was catching an old episode of Law & Order: Criminal Intent, the actorsa voices lagged a fraction of a second behind the movement a”of their mouths, making me so disoriented it completely ruined the show. Soon my irritation turned to puzzlement, and some self-observation allowed me to track my frustration to a precise source. I didnat care that the ominous soundtrack rose half a second late when Vincent DaOnofrio and Kathryn Erbe crept into the subway tunnel where they a(c)were about to find a body. I didnat care that the showas trademark duh-dung! sound marking a new scene was still duh-dung-ing after the scene started. It was only when people talked that I went batty. I would watch the characters speak, and then Iad switch to listening to them, and then Iad watch them speak again. I just couldnat meld the two streams of information in my head.
Thanks to Netflix, I was confronted with one of the most crucial tricks that the human brain uses to make sense of the world: combining input from all five senses into a single, coherent experience, updated many times a second in virtually real time. Because the techniques our brains use to meld the senses are far from perfect, it turns out, we can fall prey to a variety of illusionsaand to maddening confusion when Netflix delivers audio and video out of sync.
One of the most famous such illusions is known as the McGurk Effect, named for its discoverer, Harry McGurk, a developmental psychologist at the University of Surrey in England. In the 1970s he filmed people repeatedly making the sound ga. Then he had a new audio track laid over the film so that ga was replaced with the sound ba. The new audio and video were perfectly in sync. Many people who watched the movie were sure that the speakers were actually saying da, a different syllable entirely. If they closed their eyes, they heard the correct ba. When they opened their eyes, it became da again. (If you donat know about the McGurk Effect, you may want to experience it via this very impressive video)…
The Brain: Maybe You Do Need a Hole in Your Headato Let the Medicine In
From discovermagazine.com Neuroscientists these days regularly make spectacular discoveries about how the brain gets sick. They know much more today about brain cancer, Alzheimeras disease, Parkinsonas disease, and a host of other neurological disorders than they did just a few years ago. And from such discoveries come all sorts of encouraging possibilities for treating or even curing these diseases. If a”only we could break down some rogue protein or bind a drug to a”a troublesome receptor, it seems as if all would be well. Thereas just one little hitch: Even if scientists invented the perfect cure, they a(c)probably couldnat get it into the brain to do its work.
Drugs can cross easily out of the bloodstream into most organs of the body. The brain is a glaring exception because it is protected by an intricate shield known as the blood-brain barrier. The blood-brain barrier serves a vital function: It keeps our brains free for the most part from infections or toxins that find their way into other parts of the body. Unfortunately, the brainas barrier also gets in the way of most medicines that could help heal it. Neurologists sometimes open up the skull and inject drugs directly. That brute-force approach can work in an emergency, but it is hardly a practical solution for people who need to take drugs every day at home.
There is reason for hope that the blood-brain barrier will not block medicineas path forever, though. Some scientists are working on ways to penetrate itaeither by sneaking drugs through the barrier or by temporarily opening channels through which the drugs can pass…
The Brain: The Language Fossils Buried in Every Cell of Your Body
From discovermagazine.com It is a shame that grammar leaves no fossils behind. Few things have been more important to our evolutionary history than language. Because our ancestors could talk to each other, they became a powerfully cooperative species. In modern society we are so submerged in wordsaspoken, written, signed, and textedathat they seem inseparable from human identity. And yet we cannot excavate some fossil from an Ethiopian hillside, point to a bone, and declare, aThis is where language began.a
Lacking hard evidence, scholars of the past speculated broadly about the origin of language. Some claimed that it started out as cries of pain, which gradually crystallized into distinct words. Others traced it back to music, to the imitation of animal grunts, or to birdsong. In 1866 the Linguistic Society of Paris got so exasperated by these unmoored musings that it banned all communication on the origin of language. Its English counterpart felt the same way. In 1873 the president of the Philological Society of London declared that linguists ashall do more by tracing the historical growth of one single work-a-day tongue, than by filling wastepaper baskets with reams of paper covered with speculations on the origin of all tongues.a
A century passed before linguists had a serious change of heart. The change came as they began to look at the deep structure of language itself. MIT linguist Noam Chomsky asserted that the way children acquire language is so effortless that it must have a biological foundation. Building on this idea, some of his colleagues argued that language is an adaptation shaped by natural selection, just like eyes and wings. If so, it should be possible to find clues about how human language evolved from grunts or gestures by observing the communication of our close primate relatives.
This line of thinking raised an exciting possibility: Perhaps language left a fossil record after allanot in buried bones, but in our DNA. Yet for years biologists could not find a single gene involved in language…
The Brain: “I See,” Said the Blind Man With an Artificial Retina
From discovermagazine.com For 100 million people around the globe who suffer from macular degeneration and other diseases of the retina, life is a steady march from light into darkness. Until recently some types of retinal degeneration seemed as inevitable as the wrinkling of skin or the graying of hairaonly far more terrifying and debilitating. But recent studies offer hope that eventually the darkness may be lifted. Some scientists are trying to inject signaling molecules into the eye to stimulate light-collecting photoreceptor cells to regrow. Others want to deliver working copies of broken genes into retinal cells, restoring their function. And a number of researchers are taking a fundamentally different, technology-driven approach to fighting blindness. They seek not to fix biology but to replace it, by plugging cameras into peopleas eyes…
Image: human retina. Source: iStockphoto.
The Brain: A Body Fit for a Freaky-Big Brain
From discovermagazine.com
In 1758 the Swedish taxonomist Carolus Linnaeus dubbed our species Homo sapiens, Latin for awise man.a Itas a matter of open debate whether we actually live up to that moniker. If Linnaeus had wanted to stand on more solid ground, he could have instead called us Homo megalencephalus: aman with a giant brain.a
Regardless of how wisely we may use our brains, thereas no disputing that they are extraordinarily big. The average human brain weighs in at about three pounds, or 1,350 grams. Our closest living relatives, the chimpanzees, have less than one-third as much brainajust 384 grams. And if you compare the relative size of brains to bodies, our brains are even more impressive.
As a general rule, mammal species with big bodies tend to have big brains. If you know the weight of a mammalas body, you can make a fairly good guess about how large its brain will be. As far as scientists can tell, this rule derives from the fact that the more body there is, the more neurons needed to control it. But this body-to-brain rule isnat perfect. Some species deviate a little from it. A few deviate a lot. We humans are particularly spectacular rule breakers. If we were an ordinary mammal species, our brains would be about one-sixth their actual size…
Image courtesy of Byron Eggenshwiler.
The Brain: A Tiny Key to a Terrible Lock
From discovermagazine.com
For tens of millions of Americans, pain is not just an occasional a”nuisanceaa stubbed toe, a paper cutabut a constant and torturous companion. Chronic pain can be focused on an arthritic knee or a bad back, diffused throughout the body, or even located virtually in an amputated limb. It can linger for years. And it can transform the world so that merely the light brush of a finger is an agonizing experience. The daily devastation can be so intense that people with chronic pain are up to six times as likely as those who are pain-free to report suicidal thoughts.
Despite the toll, chronic pain has been relatively neglected by a”doctors. Perhaps thatas because it seems less real to them than other, more tangible medical disorders. With no equivalent of a stethoscope a”or thermometer to measure pain objectively, they have had to rely a”entirely on their patientsa testimony.
As neuroscientists learn more about the biological basis of pain, the situation is finally beginning to change. Most remarkably, unfolding research shows that chronic pain can cause concrete, physiological changes in the brain. After several months of chronic pain, a personas brain begins to shrink. The longer people suffer, the more gray matter they lose.
With that bad news, though, comes a message of hope. In documenting the damage that chronic pain causes, neuroscientists are also beginning to decipher how it comes to exist in the first place. Those insights suggest better treatments and cures…
Image credit: Bryon Eggenschwiler.
The Brain Is Made of Its Own Architects
From discovermagazine.com
In the 1940s, the Nobel prizeawinning neurobiologist Roger Sperry performed some of the most important brain surgeries in the history of science. His patients were newts.
Sperry started by gently prying out newtsa eyes with a jeweleras forceps. He rotated them 180 degrees and then pressed them back into their sockets. The newts had two days to recover before Sperry started the second half of the procedure. He sliced into the roof of each newtas mouth and made a slit in the sheath surrounding the optic nerve, which relays signals from the eyes to the brain. He drew out the nerve, cut it in two, and tucked the two ragged ends back into their sheath.
A month later Sperryas subjects could see again. The experiment revealed that nerve cells, or neurons, possess a tremendous capacity for wiring themselves. Neurons grow branches known as dendrites for receiving signals, and sprout long outgrowths called axons to relay the signals to other neurons. Axons in particular can travel spectacular distances to reach astonishingly precise targets. They can snake through the brainas dense thicket, pushing past billions of other neurons, in order to form tight connections, or synapses, with just the right partners.
To better treat wiring disorders, scientists are trying to understand how neurons form circuits. But almost 70 years after Sperryas newt surgery, the wiring question remains one of the deepest mysteries in neuroAscience. One reason why is that the wiring problem is actually a series of problems, each of which our neurons may solve in several ways…
Image: iStockphoto
The Brain: Memories Are Crucial for Looking Into the Future
From discovermagazine.com One day not long ago a 27-year-old woman was brought to the a”Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, sleepy and confused. Fani Andelman, a neuropsychologist at the center, and colleagues gave the woman a battery of psychological tests to judge her state of mind. At first the woman seemed fine. She could see and speak clearly. She could understand the meaning of words and recall the faces of famous people. She could even solve logic puzzles, including a complex test that required her to plan several steps ahead. But her memory had holes. She could still remember recent events outside her own life, and she could tell Andelman details of her life up toi>>? 2004. Beyond that point, however, her autobiography was in tatters. The more doctors probed her so-called episodic memoryathe sequential recollection of personal events from the pastathe more upset she became. As for envisioning her personal future, that was a lost cause. Asked a”what she thought she might be doing anytime beyond the next day, she couldnat tell them anything at all. The patient, Andelman realized, hadnat just lost her past; she had lost her future as well. It was impossible for her to imagine traveling forward in time. During her examination, the woman offered an explanation for her absence of foresight. aI barely know where I am,a she said. aI donat picture myself in the future. I donat know what Iall do when I get home. You need a base to build the future.a The past and future may seem like different worlds, yet the two are intimately intertwined in our minds. In recent studies on mental time travel, neuroscientists found that we use many of the same regions of the brain to remember the past as we do to envision our future lives. In fact, our need for foresight may explain why we can form memories in the first place. They are indeed aa base to build the future.a And together, our senses of past and future may be crucial to our speciesa success. Endel Tulving, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto, first proposed a link between memory and foresight in 1985. It had occurred to him as he was examining a brain-injured patient. aN.N.,a as the man was known, still had memories of basic facts. He could explain how to make a long-distance call and draw the Statue of Liberty. But he could not recall a single event from his own life. In other words, he had lost his episodic memory. Tulving and his colleagues then discovered that N.N. could not imagine the future. aWhat will you be doing tomorrow?a Tulving asked him during one interview. After 15 seconds of silence, N.N. smiled faintly. aI donat know,a he said. aDo you remember the question?a Tulving asked. aAbout what Iall be doing tomorrow?a N.N. replied. aYes. How would you describe your state of mind when you try to think about it?a N.N. paused for a few more seconds. aBlank, I guess,a he said. The very concept of the future, seemed meaningless to N.N. aItas like being in a room with nothing there and having a guy tell you to go find a chair,a he explained.
On the basis of his study of N.N., Tulving proposed that projecting ourselves into the future requires the same brain circuitry we use to remember ourselves in the past. Over the past decade, as scientists have begun to use fMRI scanners to probe the activity of the brain, they have found support for his hypothesis. Last year, for example, Tulving and his colleagues had volunteers lie in an fMRI scanner and imagine themselves in the past, present, and future. The researchers saw a number of regions become active in the brains of the volunteers while thinking of the past and future, but not the present…
The Brain: The Trouble With Teens
From discovermagazine.com
Teenagers are a puzzle, and not just to their parents. When kids pass from childhood to adolescence their mortality rate doubles, despite the fact that teenagers are stronger and faster than children as well as more resistant to disease. Parents and scientists alike abound with explanations. It is tempting to put it down to plain stupidity: Teenagers have not yet learned how to make good choices. But that is simply not true. Psychologists have found that teenagers are about as adept as adults at recognizing the risks of dangerous behavior. Something else is at work.
Scientists are finally figuring out what that asomethinga is. Our brains have networks of neurons that weigh the costs and benefits of potential actions. Together these networks calculate how valuable things are and how far weall go to get them, making judgments in hundredths of a second, far from our conscious awareness. Recent research reveals that teen brains go awry because they weigh those consequences in peculiar ways.
Neuroscientist B. J. Casey and her colleagues at the Sackler Institute of the Weill Cornell Medical College believe the unique way adolescents place value on things can be explained by a biological oddity. Within our reward circuitry we have two separate systems, one for calculating the value of rewards and another for assessing the risks involved in getting them. And they donat always work together very well…
The Brain: Seeing the Person Behind the Face
From discovermagazine.com Imagine that an eccentric psychologist accosts you. In his hand is a piece of paper with 20 pictures of roses. One of the pictures shows a rose in the flower bed you just passed, he says, and he asks you to pick its picture out from his lineup. The challenge would seem absurdabut if you were to change the roses to faces, nearly everyone could meet it. Most of us have a powerful ability to recognize faces, and yet we hardly ever take note of it. We can commit a face to memory with a single viewing, and even if we see that face only once its memory can stay fresh for years. The faces we remember so easily may differ only in subtle tweaks of geometry: the ratio of distances between different landmarks such as the eyes and the mouth, for example. A small fraction of people, however, cannot recognize facesaeven the faces of their parents, spouses, and children. Prosopagnosia, as this condition is known, can affect people from birth or be triggered later in life by injuries to the brain. It strikes an estimated 2 percent of Americans and is often accompanied by other types of recognition impairments, including difficulty recognizing places and objects, such as cars. Despite the millions of people who suffer from prosopagnosia, it remains an obscure disorder, probably due to the skill with which face-blind people quietly compensate for their condition…
The Brain: Is Music for Wooing, Mothering, Bondingaor Is It Just “Auditory Cheesecake”?
From discovermagazine.com
Image: iStockphoto
See more writing from Discover blogger Carl Zimmer in his new ebook, Brain Cuttings: Fifteen Journeys Through the Mind. For more information, visit his website.
When Charles Darwin listened to music, he asked himself, what is it for? Philosophers had pondered the mathematical beauty of music for thousands of years, but Darwin wondered about its connection to biology. Humans make music just as beavers build dams and peacocks show off their tail feathers, he reasoned, so music must have evolved. What drove its evolution was hard for him to divine, however. aAs neither the enjoyment nor the capacity of producing musical notes are faculties of the least direct use to man in reference to his ordinary habits of life, they must be ranked among the most mysterious with which he is endowed,a Darwin wrote in 1871.
Today a number of scientists are trying to solve that mystery by looking at music right where we experience it: in the brain. They are scanning the activity that music triggers in our neurons and observing how music alters our biochemistry. But far from settling on a single answer, the researchers are in a pitched debate over music. Some argue that it evolved in our ancestors because it allowed them to have more children. Others see it as merely a fortunate accident of a complex brain…
The Brain: The “Router” in Your Headaa Bottleneck of Processing
From discovermagazine.com
Pop quiz: what is 357 times 289? no pencils allowed. no calculators. Just use your brain.
Got an answer yet? Got it now? How about now? Chances are you still donat. As you solved the problem one step at a time, you lost track of the numbers. Maybe you tried to start over, lost track again, and eventually gave up in frustration before you could discover that the answer was 103,173. I used a calculator to get that, I confess…
Our mutual failure is absurd. The brain is, in the words of neuroscientist Floyd Bloom, athe most complex structure that exists in the universe.a Its trillions of connections let it carry out all sorts of sophisticated computations in very little time. You can scan a crowded lobby and pick out a familiar face in a fraction of a second, a task that pushes even todayas best computers to their limit. Yet multiplying 357 by 289, a task that demands a puny amount of processing, leaves most of us struggling.
For psychologists, this kind of mental shortcoming is like a crack in a wall. They can insert a scientific crowbar and start to pry open the hidden life of the mind. The fact that we struggle with certain simple tasks speaks volumes about how we are wired. It turns out the evolution of our complex brain has come at a price: Sometimes we end up with a mental traffic jam in there…
The Brain: “Ringing in the Ears” Actually Goes Much Deeper Than That
From discovermagazine.com
See Carl Zimmer’s new ebook, Brain Cuttings, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and carlzimmer.com.
In some of the worldas oldest medical textsAAapapyrus scrolls from ancient Egypt, clay tablets from Assyriaapeople complain about noise in their ears. Some of them call it a buzzing. Others describe it as whispering or even singing. Today we call such conditions tinnitus. In the distant past, doctors offered all sorts of strange cures for it. The Assyrians poured rose extract into the ear through a bronze tube. The Roman writer Pliny the Elder suggested that earthworms boiled in goose grease be put in the ear. Medieval Welsh physicians in the town of Myddfai recommended that their patients take a freshly baked loaf of bread ($) out of the oven, cut it in two, aand apply to both ears as hot as can be borne, bind and thus produce perspiration, and by the help of god you will be cured.a
Today tinnitus continues to resist medicineas best efforts, despite being one of the more common medical disorders. Surveys show that between 5 and 15 percent of people say they have heard some kind of phantom noise for six months or more; some 1 to 3 percent say tinnitus lowers their quality of life. Tinnitus can force people to withdraw from their social life, make them depressed, and give them insomnia.
Some modern doctors prescribe drugs like lidocaine. Others offer patients cognitive therapy. Some have people listen to certain sounds, others apply magnetic pulses to the brain and even implant electrodes in the brain stem. Although many treatments have shown some promise, none is consistently effective. Recent research suggests why: Tinnitus is a lot more complicated than just a ringing in the ears. It is more like a ringing across the brain…
The Brain: The Places in the Brain Where Space Lives
From discovermagazine.com
The great philosopher Immanuel Kant believed that nothing matters more to our existence than space. Every experience we haveafrom the thoughts in our heads to the stars we see wheeling through the skyamakes sense only if we can assign it a location. aWe never can imagine or make a representation to ourselves of the nonA-existence of space,a he wrote in 1781.
The nonexistence of space may certainly be hard to imagine. But for some people it is part of everyday life. Strokes can rob us of space. So can brain injuries and tumors. In 1941, neurologists Andrew Paterson and O. L. Zangwill, working in Edinburgh, Scotland, published an account of a 34-year-old patient who had been hit in the head by a mortar fragment. The injury wiped out his sense of the left half of his world. Paterson and Zangwill described how the man aconsistently failed to appreciate doors and turnings on his left-hand side even when he was aware of their presence.a He also aneglected the left-hand side of a picture or the left-hand page of a book despite the fact that his attention was constantly being drawn to the oversight.a The patient could play checkers but ignored the pieces on the left side of the board. aAnd when his attention was drawn to the pieces on this side,a the doctors wrote, ahe recognized them but immediately thereafter forgot them.a
This condition, called spatial neglect, challenges our intuitive notions of how we understand the world. But by mapping how people lose some of their sense of space, neuroscientists are gaining new insights into how we build that sense in the first place…
The Brain: What Happens to a Linebacker’s Neurons?
From discovermagazine.com A blow to the head can change the neural architecture of the brain from elastic to brittle, with devastating consequences.
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The mouse eye captures images via rods and cones in its retina. But behind that
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