The Strange Powers of the Placebo Effect
It’s a short video, and well worth your time. It’s amazing the number of different phenomena that can be ascribed to the placebo effect.
Tracks
Where we learn I’m terrible at growing plants, but pretty awesome at growing birds.
With high hopes, I hung this
dried outdead plant to get a little sun, and in about two days, a robin made a tidy little nest. Within two weeks, four birds hatched. Since I’m coming fresh off of a avian brain project, I’m especially interested in these little guys. What’s amazing in general are the simarlarities (both structural/functional noted in the vision and speech areas) of the avian and human brains, for instance the “…many behavioural and neural parallels between birdsongs and human speech”. Via However, unlike humans, songbirds go from babbling to song using independent, but overlapping pathways that work together (or not -for experimental purposes) during different life stages. Notice the avian brain lacks a corpus callosum connecting the left & right hemispsheres, so the neural pathways go contralateral and vertical. (That’s amazing.)
For most of the 20th century, “bird brain” has been used as an insult. Noting the stark structural differences between human and bird brains, anatomists concluded that birds are essentially flying reptiles. Their minds were too tiny for thought. But in recent years, scientists have discovered that the bird brain doesn’t deserve its reputation. Via
The first aspect of bird intelligence scientists studied was birdsong. Charles Darwin compared the early vocalizations of young songbirds with the babbling of human infants, noting that both species went through a period of intense vocal learning. In the early 1970s, Fernando Nottebohm, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University, wanted to understand how certain songbirds managed to learn new melodies every year. As Nottebohm notes, birds are the only other species that “attempts vocally to do anything like what we do.” Perhaps, he wondered, the impressive learning abilities of songbirds could be used to understand aspects of the human mind.
Nottebohm’s search for the source of birdsong led him to discover something entirely unexpected. In order for birds to learn new songs, they have to generate new brain cells. At the time, this was a radical idea. Neuroscientists believed that virtually all animal brains - and certainly the human brain - stopped creating new brain cells shortly after birth. But Nottebohm showed that up to 1 percent of the neurons in the song center of their brains were created anew, every day. Via
So, in a crucial time crunch, these little guys will have a burst of song learning and crystallization (either inducing neurogenesis, or being a product of it). Some of the experiments over the last year I’ve worked on surround this question, highlighting factors that effect neural counts within certain nuclei in the brain. It’s really amazing what these little guys do.
How memories are stored and retrieved - Blanks For the Memories | WSJ
What’s Your Earliest Childhood Recollection? Scientists Delve Into Brain Circuitry for Answers
Why we remember some scenes from early childhood and forget others has long intrigued scientists—as well as parents striving to create happy memories for their kids. One of the biggest mysteries: why most people can’t seem to recall anything before age 3 or 4.
Now, researchers in Canada have demonstrated that some young children can remember events from even before age 2—but those memories are fragile, with many vanishing by about age 10, according to a study in the journal Child Development this month.
An Asteroid Missed Earth this Week -What are the Odds that We’ll Always be Lucky?
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An asteroid the size of a truck zoomed near Earth this week (June 1), coming closer to us than the moon ever does. The 23-foot-long (7-meter) space rock, named 2009 BD, came within 215,000 miles (346,000 kilometers) of Earth at around 8:51 p.m. EDT (0051 GMT on June 2). The moon’s average distance from us is about 239,000 miles (385,000 km).
Stephen Hawking believes that one of the major factors in the possible scarcity of intelligent life in our galaxy is the high probability of an asteroid or comet colliding with inhabited planets.
We have observed, Hawking points out in Life in the Universe, the collision of a comet, Schumacher-Levi, with Jupiter, which produced a series of enormous fireballs, plumes many thousands of kilometers high, hot “bubbles” of gas in the atmosphere, and large dark “scars” on the atmosphere which had lifetimes on the order of weeks.
(via dailygalaxy)
'Time' not necessarily deeply rooted in our brains
Hidden away in the Amazonian rainforest a small tribe have successfully managed what so many dream of being able to do – to ignore the pressures of time so successfully that they don’t even have a word for it.
It is the first time scientists have been able to prove ‘time’ is not a deeply entrenched human universal concept as previously thought.
Researchers, led by Professor Chris Sinha from the University of Portsmouth Department of Psychology, studied the way in which time was talked about and thought about by the Amondawa people of Brazil. Their research is published in the journal Language and Cognition.
Professor Sinha said: “For the Amondawa, time does not exist in the same way as it does for us. We can now say without doubt that there is at least one language and culture which does not have a concept of time as something that can be measured, counted, or talked about in the abstract. This doesn’t mean that the Amondawa are ‘people outside time’, but they live in a world of events, rather than seeing events as being embedded in time.”
Scientists explore why we never forget how to ride a bicycle
You never forget how to ride a bicycle — and now a University of Aberdeen led team of neuroscientists could explain why.
Their research, published this month in Nature Neuroscience, has identified a key nerve cell in the brain that controls the formation of memories for motor skills such as riding a bicycle, skiing or eating with chop sticks.
When one acquires a new skill like riding a bicycle, the cerebellum is the part of the brain needed to learn the co-ordinated movement.
The research team, which includes scientists from the Universities of Aberdeen, Rotterdam, London, Turin and New York, has been working to understand the connections between nerve cells in the cerebellum that enable learning.
Original research here: Synaptic inhibition of Purkinje cells mediates consolidation of vestibulo-cerebellar motor learning (Wulff et al., 2009).
As you wake up each morning, hazy and disoriented, you gradually become aware of the rustling of the sheets, sense their texture and squint at the light. One aspect of your self has reassembled: the first-person observer of reality, inhabiting a human body.
As wakefulness grows, so does your sense of having a past, a personality and motivations. Your self is complete, as both witness of the world and bearer of your consciousness and identity. You.
This intuitive sense of self is an effortless and fundamental human experience. But it is nothing more than an elaborate illusion. Under scrutiny, many common-sense beliefs about selfhood begin to unravel. Some thinkers even go as far as claiming that there is no such thing as the self. (via The great illusion of the self - New Scientist)
Neglected Deceivers
To most invaders of our bodies, the sight of white blood cells (WBC) – the soldiers of our immune system – is bad news. However, despite having no limbs, the parasitic worm that causes the tropical disease, schistosomiasis, welcomes them with open arms. This is because only by piggy-backing on the immune response can the worm’s eggs pass from the host’s blood into the gut. From there they can be excreted and go on to infect other victims. Scientists have discovered that to get close to immune system activity, eggs gather in regions containing tubular pathways along which WBCs travel. In fact, eight weeks after infection (right image), these vessels (shown in red) are actually larger and more numerous than in animals naïve to the disease. By tricking the host’s own body to lend a hand to the worm, schistosomiasis, which damages internal organs, has already infected over 200 million people worldwide.
Written by Jan Piotrowski
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- Adrian Mountford
- University of York, UK
- Originally published under a Creative Commons Attribution license
- Published in PLOS Pathogens 8(12): e1003063
Just a reminder:
When Prophet Muhammad (sallahu alayhi wa sallam) was travelling on the road with his cousin, Al-Fadl ibn Abbas, a woman stopped him to ask him a question. The woman was very beautiful, and Al-Fadl couldn’t help but stare at her.
Seeing this, Prophet Muhammad reached out his hand and turned his cousin’s face away.
He didn’t tell the woman to cover her face.
He didn’t tell her to change her clothing.
He didn’t tell her that her appearance was too tempting or indecent.
He averted his cousin’s impolite stare.
HELP I’M REALLY SCARED
D: OMG…those dragons must be so awesome to ride!!
