tag > NeuroScience
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Troxler effect: Stare at the cross for 10 seconds. Your brain will make the colors disappear.
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Neurons are fickle. Electric fields are more reliable for information.
A new study suggests that electric fields may represent information held in working memory, allowing the brain to overcome “representational drift,” or the inconsistent participation of individual neurons
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Meet the psychobiome - Mounting evidence that gut bacteria influence the nervous system inspires efforts to mine the microbiome for brain drugs.
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Seeing a Bayesian Ghost: Sensorimotor Activation Leads to an Illusory Social Perception
• Expecting a response to a social action can lead to an illusion of another person
• The brain does not merely respond to social signals but anticipates social behavior
• Sensorimotor activity indicates top-down predictions that outweigh sensory input
• Illusory social perception is associated with sensorimotor and parietal activity
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The Rhythms of the Brain Shape Our Perceptions
Focusing on what's important - this is one of the main tasks of our brain. After all, countless amounts of information are constantly flooding our senses. But how do we manage to separate the important from the unimportant? It has long been known that oscillatory neural activity is a key factor for this attentional selection in the mammalian brain. Scientists from the German Primate Center in Göttingen and the University of Melbourne have now investigated how this works. They found that coupling lower frequencies of oscillations with higher ones allows fine-tuning the brain and is thus the basis for higher cognitive functions, such as selective attention.
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The lung's microbial flora regulates the brain's immune reactivity
In its vital function of providing the body with oxygen, the lung is connected to the outside environment by a large exchange surface. This boundary between lung tissue and outside air is inhabited by a specific microbial flora, the so-called lung microbiome. The exact function of this microbiome has been scarcely researched. A scientific team led by Profs. Alexander Flügel and Francesca Odoardi at the Institute for Neuroimmunology and Multiple Sclerosis Research, University Medical Center Göttingen, have shown a close relationship between the lung microbiome and the brain. The researchers found out that the lung microbiome regulates the activity of microglia, the "brain's immune cells." This newly ascertained lung-brain axis is significant for disease processes: the exact composition of the lung microbiome determines the susceptibility of developing an autoimmune inflammation in the brain such as occurs in multiple sclerosis. The experimental results of this work were published today, 23 February 2022, in the online edition of the journal Nature.
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Take-Home Messages: •This paper describes neurophysiological, psychophysical, and behavioral observations from laboratory studies involving human and animal subjects. •Absorption of a single microwave pulse impinging on the head may be perceived as an acoustic zip, click, or knocking sound. •A train of microwave pulses may be sensed as an audible buzz, chirp, or tune by humans. •Mechanistic studies show absorption of microwave pulses by soft tissues in the head launches a thermoelastic pressure wave that travels in the brain •Depending on the power of the impinging microwave pulses, the level of induced sound pressure could be considerably above the threshold of auditory perception. •The microwave auditory effects and associated pressure waves could potentially render damage to brain tissues to cause lethal or nonlethal injury.
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All games include three tiers of action - According to Professor Kevin Werbach
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Perceptual reality monitoring: Neural mechanisms dissociating imagination from reality (twitter thread)
Increasing evidence shows that internally generated experience e.g. memory, dreaming and imagery, relies on similar neural mechanisms as externally triggered perception. This overlap complicates perceptual reality monitoring: deciding what is real and what is imagined. In this review, we explored how perceptual reality monitoring might be implemented in the brain.
Related: The relationship between "Reality" & "Imagination" - as Imagined by Neuroscientist
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Scientists propose putting nanobots in our bodies to create ‘global superbrain’
An international team of scientists led by members of UC Berkeley and the US Institute for Molecular Manufacturing predicts that exponential progress in nanotechnology, nanomedicine, artificial intelligence (AI) and computation will lead this century to the development of a human ‘brain-cloud interface’ (B-CI). Writing in Frontiers in Neuroscience, the team said that a B-CI would connect neurons and synapses in the brain to vast cloud computing networks in real time.
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Are We “Brain Washed” during Sleep? - New BU study reveals the first-ever images of cerebrospinal fluid washing in and out of the brain during sleep
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Breathing Matters - Jack Feldman, a distinguished professor of neurobiology at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, shares the series of remarkable revelations he has made about breathing and the brain
Related: A conversation about breathing with Neurobiologist Jack Feldman
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"Most of our failures in understanding one another have less to do with what is heard than with what is intended and what is inferred." - George Armitage Miller
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Neural hydroponics as qualia engineering
- Thinking about our peripheral nervous system as a root system. our sensory experience as the nutrients.
- With hydroponics, we can fine tune the nutrient mix to grow better plants. need the equivalent for our sensory system and the mind.
- "Qualia is all that you perceive, engineering is how to transform that space". neural hydroponics as qualia engineering.
- "Are psychedelics the short-term neural hydroponics?" They’re one of them also, the media you consume, people you spend time with, places you frequent longer-term: meditation, environment, values, beliefs
- I like the idea of being intentional about the sensory experiences (qualia) that help you grow
also what frameworks and technologies could assist with this.
