October 2011
1 post
Optimal brain frequency for learning & memory
We may be familiar with the concept of electrical/chemical signals relating to neural communication. So, now imagine of every synapse branching out from every neuron - like an antenna, is tuned to a different frequency signal with a specific optimal point and this optimum frequency point depends on the location of the synapse on a neuron. The farther away the synapse is from the neuron’s cell...
June 2011
1 post
You too can enter to win this trip to Paris! →
May 2011
4 posts
Growing a brain
That doughnut shape decorated with bright green spots, some connected by red pathways, amidst sky blue neighbors could be an artist’s creation, but is the result of a creative scientific attempt to grow an active brain in a dish, complete with memories. Really. Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh published this stunning study in the journal Lab on a Chip {the full paper can...
Humble curiosity
“If you can approach the world’s complexities, both its glories and its horrors, with an attitude of humble curiosity, acknowledging that however deeply you have seen, you have only scratched the surface, you will find worlds within worlds, beauties you could not heretofore imagine, and your own mundane preoccupations will shrink to proper size, not all that important in the greater...
Psychological self vs. no-self
The self in Western psychology is viewed as that function of the mind that helps us to organize our experiences. It takes raw sense data, memories, and other cognitive functions and turns them into recognizable narratives. It is critical for everything that we do. Without a strong sense of self, we literally could not make sense of anything that happens to us. What is fascinating is that in the...
Self-directed neuroplasticity
One of the enduring changes in the brain of those who routinely meditate is that the brain becomes thicker. In other words, those who routinely meditate build synapses, synaptic networks, and layers of capillaries (the tiny blood vessels that bring metabolic supplies such as glucose or oxygen to busy regions), which an MRI shows is measurably thicker in two major regions of the brain. One is in...
April 2011
7 posts
People control thoughts better when they see their...
The study is the world’s first investigation of how real-time functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) feedback from the brain region responsible for higher-order thoughts, including introspection, affects our ability to control these thoughts. The researchers find that real-time brain feedback significantly improves people’s ability to control their thoughts and effectively ‘train their...
Are you my brain double?
This is FASCINATING. Robert kicks things off with a beautiful re-telling of a 2400-year-old love story from Plato, by way of Aristophanes, about the longing many of us feel for another half to make us whole. This ancient yearning gets us wondering whether the world around us is deeply and fundamentally symmetric, or…not. Zoe Keating’s looping, lyrical cello scoring spurs us...
The free will illusion
Threaded through everything
“Time isn’t like the other senses, Eagleman says. Sight, smell, touch, taste, and hearing are relatively easy to isolate in the brain. They have discrete functions that rarely overlap: it’s hard to describe the taste of a sound, the color of a smell, or the scent of a feeling. (Unless, of course, you have synesthesia—another of Eagleman’s obsessions.) But a sense of time is threaded through...
Killing the Buddha
“In many respects, Buddhism is very much like science. One starts with the hypothesis that using attention in the prescribed way (meditation), and engaging in or avoiding certain behaviors (ethics), will bear the promised result (wisdom and psychological well-being). This spirit of empiricism animates Buddhism to a unique degree. For this reason, the methodology of Buddhism, if shorn of its...
What mind feels like
Conscious awareness is what a certain complexity of neuronal firings feels like in much the same way that temperature is the subejctive experience of molecular motion. - Patricia Churchland, contemporary philosopher on the mind.
A journey to the center of your mind
I’m not sure what to think about V. Ramachandran’s hypothesis on mirror neurons, but this TED talk is absolutely brilliant.
March 2011
12 posts
Jon jumps
JONDEATHOF.AVI Watch on Posterous I refrained from setting this to “Eye of the Tiger”.
Ode to the Brain! A Song.
Buddhism and the brain
“Neuroscience tells us the thing we take as our unified mind is an illusion, that our mind is not unified and can barely be said to “exist” at all. Our feeling of unity and control is a post-hoc confabulation and is easily fractured into separate parts. As revealed by scientific inquiry, what we call a mind (or a self, or a soul) is actually something that changes so much and is...
Action and feeling go together
“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.” - William James
Individuality is founded in feeling
“Individuality is founded in feeling; and the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making, and directly perceive how events happen, and how work is actually done.” - William James
Untitled
This is a terribly fantastic video of mapping neural networks, emphasizing about 100 billion cells that make us who we are, our actions, our thoughts.
Social neuroeconomics
“Combining the methods of neuroscience and economics generates powerful tools for studying the brain processes behind human social interaction. We argue that hedonic interpretations of theories of social preferences provide a useful framework that generates interesting predictions and helps interpret brain activations involved in altruistic, fair and trusting behaviors. These behaviors are...
1 tag
I'm Losing Myself (Feat. Ed Droste)
01_I’m_Losing_Myself_(Feat._Ed_Droste).mp3 Listen on Posterous Beautiful song from Robin Pecknold from Fleet Foxes & featuring Ed Droste from Grizzly Bear.
Untitled
This amount of detail/resolution is incredible.Just think about this for a bit. Many little groupings/bundles of these feeding blood into your brain. “Photomicrograph of the microscopic blood vessels that carry nutrients to neurons in the brain, obtained with a scanning electron microscope. This sample, from Human cerebral cortex, shows a large blood vessel at the surface of the brain...
Why brain science is winning
“The scientists I’ve spent the last three years talking to are truth seekers, unlike people [in Washington]. They’re not technical materialists. They love Henry and William James. They’ve helped me see how the power of deep ideas changes the way you think. It was part of my idea to go down, down, down, to look at moral and spiritual creativity, the deepest issues. You learn the importance of...
1 tag
What can we do when life loses meaning?
“The harsh message of existentialism is that you can yearn as much as you like, but what you’re yearning for ain’t there. Life can have meaning solely in the here and now, but no one can guarantee that you’ll succeed in creating it. Meaninglessness is a constant threat for everyone, philosopher or not.” From What can we do when life loses meaning? By Antonia Macaro...
Untitled
“Neurology is gripping in proportion as it is foreign. It has all the fascination of a horror story—the Jekyll of the mind bound for life for the Hyde of the brain. All those exotic Latin names for the brain’s parts echo the strangeness of our predicament as brain-based conscious beings: the language of the brain is not the language of the mind, and only a shaky translation...
January 2011
5 posts
healingsakina:
bohemianarthouse:
Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi Jailed
Panahi, the director of “The White Balloon,” “Crimson Gold” and “Offside,” is also banned for 20 years from making any films, writing any scripts, traveling abroad and also forbidden from giving any interviews to foreign and domestic media outlets.
yeah, basically, banned from WRITING, from any kind of public...
December 2010
28 posts
“What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? I give private...”
– Julian Assange on SNL (via kateoplis)
The 9th: - Sen. Joe Lieberman says WikiLeaks “has... →
the9th:
- Sen. Joe Lieberman says WikiLeaks “has violated the Espionage Act.” - The New Yorker’s George Packer calls Assange ” super-secretive, thin-skinned, [and] megalomaniacal. “ - Sarah Palin claims he’s “an anti-American operative with blood on his hands ” whom we should pursue “with…
