One of the most striking features of those suffering from anorexia nervosa is their perception of their bodies. You can put them in front of a mirror and they will still tell you they're to fat when in fact they're skinny. A recent publication in Nature Proceedings has an explanation. This explanation is based on the fact that our spatial experience is based on the integration of two different kinds of input, two different sensory inputs within two reference frames. These two reference frames are the egocentric frame and the allocentric frame. With the allocentric frame you can "see yourself engaged .....read more »

During a wedding the oxytocine of those involved in the wedding party rises, the testosterone level of only the groom rises, naughty, naughty. Watch this video and find out why people like to have a wedding. No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. ..read more »

The forty-ninth edition of Brain Blogging is up. In this round, we try to undercover the neuroanatomy of depression, breakdown emotion into a binary process, take a history lesson on learning theories, and discuss other topics. No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. ..read more »

Pawan Sinha details his groundbreaking research into how the brain's visual system develops. Sinha and his team provide free vision-restoring treatment to children born blind, and then study how their brains learn to interpret visual data. The work offers insights into neuroscience, engineering and even autism. In India many young people are blind. This is a disaster because the brain will not learn to see when older, young age is critical for the brain to be able to see. Impressive lecture about blindness and neuroscience. If the brain is older than 4 to 5 years of age it looses it's .....read more »

Time management is often necessary to complete tasks in a give period or sequence. For this you have to weigh the importance of your tasks, which is the most important or urgent. You'll mostly use some way to organize and remind your tasks (to-do lists), in order to reduce the cognitive load by having to think about your tasks all the time. Another important topic is dividing your time and estimating the time needed to complete tasks. I mostly use "Getting Things Done" or GTD for time management, follow the link for a post on this blog about GTD. Memory .....read more »

Meditation is different from rest or sleep. It's a wakeful hypometabolic state with lowered sympathetic activity as opposed to the fight and flight reactions which requires an active sympathetic system. Parasympathetic activity is increased which is important for relaxation and rest. This increase of parasympathetic state is characterized by reduced heart rate, lower systolic blood pressure, lower oxygen metabolism, and an increase of skin resistance. So it's not only a rest state but also physiological relaxation related to to stress relief. But what is the effect of meditation on the brain? During meditation not only general relaxation is experienced but also .....read more »

This video is about mirror neurons. These mirror neurons are the key to many aspects of social interaction. It allows us to understand the actions, feelings of others. In a way to "read their minds". Possibly mirror neurons play an important role in empathy , an important asset for physicians. But were do they come from these motor neurons? One explanation could be that mirror neurons are an adaptation: an adaptation for action understanding concerns the origins, rather than the current utility, of mirror neurons. It asserts that a certain process – genetic evolution – produced mirror neurons, and that they were .....read more »

Bluebrain | Year One from Couple 3 Films on Vimeo. The Blue Brain Project is the first comprehensive attempt to reverse-engineer the mammalian brain, in order to understand brain function and dysfunction through detailed simulations. More on the Bleu Brain Project here.... Thanks Boing Boing No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. ..read more »

Improvisation is the main feature of Jazz that distinguishes it from other forms of music making. Improvisation is the spontaneous musical performance within a relevant musical context. It consists of novel melodic, harmonic and rhythmic musical elements. This unique feature of jazz offers the opportunity for neurobiological research or even creativity. What they did was do a functional MRI brain scan on 6 highly skilled professional jazz musicians. These jazz musicians had to play a simple musical tune and an improvisation on this tune with the restriction to the use of C major scale quarter notes within the same octave of .....read more »

This is all about Loss Aversion or why losses hurt more than gains feel good. To answer the question when to buy or sell stock you need to understand this meta cognitive process. Well Lehrer here can tell you all about it. Lehrer, a critically acclaimed science writer and the popular blogger behind "The Frontal Cortex," explains what the latest in cutting-edge research can tell us about how our minds work. How do we make decisions? And how can we make decisions...better? No related posts. Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin. ..read more »