Hot answers tagged neurobiology
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I think you are succumbing to the homunculus argument, the fallacy that there is some sort of image in the brain for someone to view. There is no magical theater in your head where what is incident on your retina is projected. All you have in your brain is complicated patterns of neural activity, there are no images and nothing to view. However, these ...
11
Modern homunculus arguments don't assert that there is physically a little man in your head. This would be a completely vacuous argument, and nobody would make it in the present day. When people make the homunculus fallacy today, they usually do it in the same fashion as you do: all the sensory information is assembled 'somewhere' and then 'some brain ...
10
First - you might want to redefine you search. Are you looking for happiness or rather positive affect? Happiness is fairly ambigious term, and it's much more associated with positive psychology studies on well-being. If you are interested in more global definition of happiness, check the work of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
On the other hand, there is a ...
9
It's a local rule. All that it means is that the connection between two neurons gets stronger if you use that specific connection more. The specific connection (the synapse) must be used though; it doesn't apply to two random neurons that aren't connected that happen to fire at the same time.
Hebbian learning is generic term for outcome; there are ...
8
I'd like to add to Chuck's excellent answer; the computational approach is very well-represented in neuroscience, and actually involves a large number of very heterogeneous methods. Thus, a very different set of neuroscientists and examples have sprung to mind for me.
To my mind, the best single example of the utility of a computational approach to ...
8
There are many neuroscientists who use the techniques of advanced mathematics and statistics to analyze actual neural data for patterns.
George Gerstein, who is now retired, has been a pioneer in applying "particle" methods in analyzing neuronal interactions. The originator of the Gravity transform, he used this tool to untangle some of the stochastic ...
8
If we stick them in an MRI, the activation will not be very fine-grained. There are roughly 630,000 neurons in a 3x3x3 mm voxel recorded during fMRI. However even this coarse detail is sufficient to perform many impressive mind-reading tasks (e.g. Mitchell et al., 2008)
But what if we were able to record every single neuron in the brain simultaneously, ...
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The major neural models of consciousness at the moment roughly fall into two camps: cognitive and phenomenological. They are defined by controversy surrounding what types of experience qualify as concious.
Cognitive models
On the one hand there are strong cognitive models of consciousness, such as the one proposed by Stanislas Dehaene, where consciousness ...
8
I'm glad you asked! The two fields are really quite different, but I think people get them confused since the terms both make reference to physics and something vaguely mental.
Psychophysics is basically the measurement of subjective percepts corresponding to physical stimuli (e.g. measuring pain thresholds or visual acuity). So here the 'physics' refers ...
7
There are a few factors which confound an effort to find such an upper bound for grid size. Since these experiments normally require the rat to be attached to the recording apparatus to ensure the quality of the recorded data, the first obstacle would be perfecting the ability to record from the entorhinal cortex while the rat is untethered, through ...
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Researchers at Boston Children's Hospital compared raw EEG data from 430 children with autism to data collected from 554 control subjects, all ages 2 to 12. They found that children with autism displayed consistent EEG patterns which indicate altered connectivity between brain regions. They found evidence of altered connectivity throughout the brains of ...
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Just to add to Jens answer, opinion is still divided regarding whether memory is subserved by distinct systems, or is a distributed, emergent property of perceptual, navigational and semantic systems. Whereas patient data has always strongly implicated distinct memory systems (e.g., declarative vs non-declarative), multivariate fMRI studies have provided ...
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Warmer temperature are shown to raise aggression level (Anderson, et al, 1995). Citing this study, DeWall, 2009 found a similar correlation between words associated with high temperatures and hostile behavior. This could be perceived as a threat to clear thinking.
Moss, 1996 shows oxygen administration increases memory. However, intermittent hypoxia on ...
7
Yes and no. Source estimation has been utilized in electrical engineering for decades, but is becoming more and more prevalent in the EEG realm, especially in light of efforts to register EEG readings with concurrent fMRI studies.
Basically, given a set of EEG (or even MEG, magnetoencephalographic) measurements, can we "invert" them to find the individual ...
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First, it is not only your intuition - there are many experimental results showing that we first perceive the gist of scenes (for example, is it outdoors or indoors?), then the major parts of it (was there an animal, or a human figure in it?) then more and more details (is that figure male of female? what is her expression?) [1] [2]. Note, however, that it ...
7
Yes. The idea that the fusiform face area (FFA) is domain-selective for faces is the dominant hypothesis, but a competing hypothesis is that the FFA is recruited for fine discrimination in visual stimuli of any type in which we are experts.
In a famous study, Gauthier et al. (1999) taught participants to categorize fictitious Greebles (see image below). ...
6
I would first like to discuss the concept of lateralization and clear up a common misconception about hemispheric dominance.
"A brain is considered to be asymmetrical (or lateralized) if one side (hemisphere or other brain region) is structurally different from the other and/or performs a different set of functions." (Bisazza et al., 1998).
A good ...
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The nervous system, especially the cortex, is a distributed system. Asking "where" is not always a sensible question. In reality, different properties of the visual scene are assembled in different areas of cortex. There is no one area where everything is reassembled. All the information we know about a scene is stored all over the visual system. In ...
6
The easiest way to work forward from a well-cited article is to do a forward Google Search. My answer is almost completely based on such a search and concentrates on three brain regions: amygdala, insula cortex, and the anterior cingulate cortex; note that all three regions are linked to emotion.
Keep in mind: when you take any two groups of people that ...
6
For an introduction to neurotransmitters (and the field of neuroscience) a good book to start with is Principles of Neural Science (Kandel, Schwartz, and Jessel, 2000). It is a standard reference used by many undergraduate and graduate courses in neuroscience/related fields. The next edition is due for publication in October. During development ...
6
Not only can brain activation be controlled though consciousness (which is expected under most reductionist accounts of the mind-brain problem) and measured in the lab (as @Jeff's answer showed) but it can actually be used as an interface!
Erik Ramsey is locked-in syndrome patient and is incapable of movement apart from his eyes. However, he has control of ...
6
nrz is on the right track with the epilepsy example. One of the limiting factors in the use of our brain is the amount of free molecules of the neurotransmitter glutamate. Having too much free glutamate can cause a phenomenon known as excitotoxicity. This phenomenon is also seen in conditions such as stroke, where damaged cells release their entire load ...
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Intensive stimuli may trigger epileptic shocks in some individuals. At least prolonged epileptic shocks may damage neurons, I'm not sure about short epileptic shocks. So the answer is yes, using your brain eg. your extended visual system to process excessively intensive visual stimuli may cause epileptic shocks and thus be detrimental to the brain.
However, ...
6
It seems that there is not much research concerning the anatomical localization of primitive reflexes. For instance, Schott & Rossor (2003) state in the conclusion of their review
The complexity of
many of these responses makes it perhaps unsurprising that
detailed anatomical localisation, despite the availability of
structural and functional ...
6
It's obvious that people will move more when awake or doing exercise compared to being asleep or resting, however actigraphy provides a quantitative way to measure that. Therefore actigraphy is useful for studying sleep-wake cycles, activity-rest cycles and circadian rhythms. They have been shown to be reliable in determining when a subject is awake or ...
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There are several such models in the field of auditory perception. For example Patterson 1996 [1] suggests a model that starts with a simulation of the cochlea and the neural activity and reaches up to perception; Winkler 2006 [2] reviews the process of auditory perception, again from the cochlea up to perception.
Somewhat old and does not mention a ...
6
There is no better way to describe brain activity than brain waves! :)
There are newer ways to analyze and think about brain waves, though. Usually you will find these under literature on neuronal oscillations.
Good aspects of thinking about brain activity using brain waves:
Brain waves are directly related to neural activity. They are an electric or ...
5
One of Koch's collaborators, Francis Crick (yes, that Francis Crick, much later in his career), put forth an interesting theory with Koch that while perhaps is a bit far fetched, it's worth mentioning for sake of a slightly different perspective.
Crick and Koch posited the claustrum (see diagram below) as one of the seats of consciousness in the brain.
As ...
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As you mentioned in your question, Jung was less than perfectly consistent in his definition of archetype throughout his career. This ambiguity reflects the continuing debate about semantic representation in the brain.
His early work stressed the emergence of archetypes as fundamental dichotomies of self experience- whose Enantiodromaic character was the ...
5
psychological sequelae might be a word you're looking for if you forgive that it's somehow still neurobiological; it is however, not genetic or developmental or something somebody was born with:
Chronic kidney disease, for example, is sometimes a sequela of diabetes,
and neck pain is a common sequela of whiplash or other trauma to the cervical
vertebrae. ...
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