Posts Tagged ‘brains’
This is your brain on crank
Monday, July 9th, 2007Meditating on Mental Exercises
Sunday, May 13th, 2007Three months of intense training in a form of meditation known as “insight” in Sanskrit can sharpen a person’s brain enough to help them notice details they might otherwise miss.These new findings add to a growing body of research showing that millennia-old mental disciplines can help control and improve the mind, possibly to help treat conditions such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).
“Certain mental characteristics that were previously regarded as relatively fixed can actually be changed by mental training,” University of Wisconsin neuroscientist Richard Davidson said. “People know physical exercise can improve the body, but our research and that of others holds out the prospects that mental exercise can improve minds.”
Communal Music
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007Each tribe has its own music. The men stay up to ward off predators by singing around the campfire. Music is communal. It’s almost ironic that today technology and culture have taken us to where we all have our little ear-buds and we listen to music in private, given that for tens of thousands of years, the only way music was experienced by humanity was communally. Everyone played music with each other. There wasn’t a separate audience and performer. And dancing was always a part of music making. It was a big communal activity.I think our nature, as you were pointing out with the mirror neurons, is to move when we hear music. To move with people and to have it be part of a group experience.
The Stuff Daydreams are made of
Friday, January 19th, 2007Daydreaming seems to be the default setting of the human mind and certain brain regions are devoted to it, U.S. researchers reported on Friday.When people are given a specific task to do, they focus on that task but then other brain regions get busy during down time, the researchers report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.
‘There is this network of regions that always seems to be active when you don’t give people something to do,’ psychologist Malia Mason of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital said in a telephone interview.
When Mason asked people what was happening during this down time, the answer was clear.
‘It’s daydreaming,’ she said. ‘But I find that the vast majority of time, people aren’t having fanciful thoughts. People are thinking about what they have to do later today.’
Her team has chosen to call it stimulus-independent thought or mind wandering.
Envisioning the Future
Tuesday, January 2nd, 2007Human memory, the ability to recall vivid mental images of past experiences, has been studied extensively for more than a hundred years. But until recently, there’s been surprisingly little research into cognitive processes underlying another form of mental time travel — the ability to clearly imagine or ‘see’ oneself participating in a future event.Now, researchers from Washington University in St. Louis have used advanced brain imaging techniques to show that remembering the past and envisioning the future may go hand-in-hand, with each process sparking strikingly similar patterns of activity within precisely the same broad network of brain regions.
‘In our daily lives, we probably spend more time envisioning what we’re going to do tomorrow or later on in the day than we do remembering, but not much is known about how we go about forming these mental images of the future,’ says Karl Szpunar, lead author of the study and a psychology doctoral student in Arts & Sciences at Washington University.
‘Our findings provide compelling support for the idea that memory and future thought are highly interrelated and help explain why future thought may be impossible without memories.’
