Meeting of the Mind » Neuroscience

Michael Tilson Thomas: Music and emotion through time

Brad Gulliford — Sun, 13 May 2012 05:42:45 +0000

In a TED Talk, Michael Tilson Thomas (now, among other appointments, the artistic director of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra) spoke of the emotional impact of (and its manipulation by) classical music (touching on, without mentioning, the insights of Hindemith).

At 15:00, Thomas poses a question with neuropsychological implications: What happens when the music stops?

To Thomas, it is the “intimate, personal side of music;” but it does pose the neuropsychological question of how a musical engram is configured synaptically: memory, cognition, cortex, hypothalamus, hippocampus, cingulate gyrus. It could be that music’s “power” comes from involving so many parts of the brain, probably more than text does–and probably there is research on this. How these would map to a relationship between cognition (if perception and appreciation of music could be adequately described by that single word) and memory.

Training causes brain restructuring

Brad Gulliford — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 16:59:08 +0000

Article in Slashdot (“news for nerds, stuff that matters”): You really are what you know: “There has been research for some time showing that London cab driver brains differ from other people’s, with considerable enlargement of those areas dealing with spacial relationships and navigation. Follow-up work showed it wasn’t simply a product of driving a lot (PDF). However, up until now it has been disputed as to whether the brain structure led people to become London cabbies or whether the brain structure changed as a result of their intensive training (which requires rote memorization of essentially the entire street map of one of the largest and least-organized cities in the world). Well, this latest study answers that. MRI scans before and after the training show that the regions of the brain substantially grow as a result of the training, and they’re quite normal beforehand. The practical upshot of this research is that — even for adult brains, which aren’t supposed to change much — what you learn structurally changes your brain. Significantly.”

The first comment is worth following the link to the main article.

Electronic mimicking of plasticity

Brad Gulliford — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 19:41:45 +0000

MIT researchers, as reported through CogNet, have devised a multi-transistor chip that re-creates neural activity through opening and closing of ion channels creating a gradient like a neuronal action potential. Action potentials have been simulated before, but this artificial creation of one is the key discovery. It should bring a whole new dimension to devices based on neural nets. The next step probably is scaling up to many multiples of the one synapse. Higher cognition is based on thousands of such connections, and large numbers of these silicon emulations would be necessary to address most cognitive neuroscience questions relevant to higher endeavors.

Brain scan to text

Brad Gulliford — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 17:54:25 +0000

Thanks to “Matching Images of Brain Activity with Complex thought,” a post in Science debate where we discuss science, which points to a PDF in Frontiers in human neuroscience, we have a report of Princeton psychology researchers generating one-word text from fMRIs of subjects reading words representing concrete items (e.g., “door,” “window,” “apartment.”) Given the predilection of the developing brain for single-word concrete expressions, this would seem an appropriate occasion in developing research. Given the predilection of library patrons for single-word searches, perhaps a neuropsychological library application is not that far off.

Reconstructing images from brain scans of the viewer is approached with a “coding” model at the Gallant Lab at the University of California at Berkeley (the “Research” section is a good “about” page, but their publications are of course more detailed.) Instead of trying to extend the interpretation process from brain scan to text, these researchers show subjects a movie clip, and then see what sense they can make of the fMRI scan. This seems more “honest” about the capabilities of the technology than trying to discern words from the process of subjects’ reading. Their Web site points out that fMRI measures hemodynamic, not neural, activity, so detailed reading seems unlikely. There is a YouTube video of an example of the lab’s work.

Key to engineers’ communication style?

Brad Gulliford — Fri, 06 May 2011 20:17:50 +0000

Since engineers lapse quickly in verbal communication and resort to the structures and models with which they are comfortable, this may be relevant, seriously: http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9475000/9475408.stm .

Mental models and the acceptance of replacement technologies

Brad Gulliford — Tue, 03 May 2011 18:02:49 +0000

A detailed look at the dynamics of mental models when dealing with new technology in Behaviour & information technology, a journal that can be forgiven for straying into cognitive neuroscience, because the papers are so interesting. :-{)}

Molecular model of memory advances by one protein

Brad Gulliford — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 21:15:45 +0000

The M3-muscarinic receptor must be activated for a molecular change resulting in learning (memory) , as reported by PhysOrg.com quoting PNAS. This is an inference from studying cognitive disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease; but its relevance to higher functions is the particular pathways it reveals (i.e., the receptor is cholinergic and is phosphorylated in the hippocampus) and thus supports efforts to map cognition and possibly enhance performance.

Cognitive Neuroscience Arena

Brad Gulliford — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 02:05:01 +0000

Cognitive neuroscience arena, the Science news of cognitive neuroscience–or maybe it’s more like Popular science. It’s brightly colored with short paragraphs. Actually it’s a book promotional site, but the flow of new titles is one way to keep up with the field.