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ScienceDaily (Dec. 12, 2011) — New research published December 8 in the journal Science suggests it may be possible to use brain technology to learn to play a piano, reduce mental stress or hit a curve ball with little or no conscious effort. It's the kind of thing seen in Hollywood's "Matrix" franchise. Experiments conducted at Boston University (BU) and ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan, recently demonstrated that through a person's visual cortex, researchers could use decoded functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to induce brain activity patterns to match a previously known target state and thereby improve performance...

WINSTON-SALEM, N.C... Smoking marijuana affects peoples’ impulsivity, attention, memory, cognition and decision-making abilities. That’s been scientifically proven. Recent research from Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center draws on the findings of previously published studies to further understanding about how marijuana affects the brains of chronic users, with specific focus on how the drug affects the decision-making process. These findings are important because they demonstrate a potential, negative side effect of chronic marijuana use. “Understanding how marijuana influences the perception of what is ‘negative’ may help explain continued marijuana use and aid in the development of effective strategies for treatment therapies,” said...

Actively recalling information from memory beats elaborate study methodsPut down those science text books and work at recalling information from memory. That's the shorthand take away message of new research from Purdue University that says practicing memory retrieval boosts science learning far better than elaborate study methods. "Our view is that learning is not about studying or getting knowledge 'in memory,'" said Purdue psychology professor Jeffrey Karpicke, the lead investigator for the study that appears today in the journal Science. "Learning is about retrieving. So it is important to make retrieval practice an integral part of the learning process." Educators...

Have you ever considered your dog as an extra child? You may not be that far off. New research shows dogs are similar to 2-year-olds in their capacity to understand simple pointing gestures, Discovery News reported.

SAN FRANCISCO — Maybe it’s time to retire the “senior moment.” These lapses of memory during everyday life — losing your keys or your train of thought — are thought to be more common in older people. Not so, researchers from the University of Waterloo in Canada report March 21 at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. Researcher Amanda Clark and her colleagues surveyed 30 adults younger than 25 and 24 people ages 60 to 80 to find out how many slips they make each day. The researchers also devised two lab tests to study attention. One involved...

Mental powers start to dwindle at 27 after peaking at 22, marking the start of old age, US research suggests. Professor Timothy Salthouse of Virginia University found reasoning, speed of thought and spatial visualisation all decline in our late 20s. Therapies designed to stall or reverse the ageing process may need to start much earlier, he said. His seven-year study of 2,000 healthy people aged 18-60 is published in the journal Neurobiology of Aging. To test mental agility, the study participants had to solve puzzles, recall words and story details and spot patterns in letters and symbols. The same tests...

Enlarge ImageColorblind? Researchers found white subjects shrink from using relevant racial descriptors when looking at cards like these.Credit: Flickr.com After Barack Obama's landmark speech on race on 18 March, it was hard to tell what got more media attention: What the Democratic presidential candidate said or that he had said it at all. Regardless, many pundits agreed that as an African-American, Obama could discuss race in ways few white people would dare. That's because most white Americans today have learned not to talk about race for fear of seeming racist, says Samuel Sommers, a social psychologist at Tufts University...

THIS drug is peddled on every street corner in America, and is found in every country in the world. It is psychoactive, a stimulant and addictive. Users say that it increases alertness and focus, and reduces fatigue. But the high does not last and addicts must keep consuming it in increasing quantities. Put this way, sipping coffee sounds more like an abomination than the world's most accepted form of drug abuse. But centuries of familiarity have put people at their ease. In the coming years science is likely to create many novel drugs that boost memory, concentration and planning. These...

A new study has found that it may be possible to train people to be more intelligent, increasing the brainpower they had at birth. Until now, it had been widely assumed that the kind of mental ability that allows us to solve new problems without having any relevant previous experience — what psychologists call fluid intelligence — is innate and cannot be taught (though people can raise their grades on tests of it by practicing). But in the new study, researchers describe a method for improving this skill, along with experiments to prove it works. The key, researchers found, was...

04/09/2008 01:57 AM ID: 69863 Wikileaks Leaks Scientology Secrets Wikileaks has "leaked" some of Scientology's top secret bibles and is not backing down from threats coming from lawyers. Instead of taking down the documents, they instead told the world that it has been verified. Some of the drills L Ron Hubbard says will reach OT1 is: 2) Note several large and small female bodies until you have a cognition. Note it down. 3) Note several large and several small male bodies until you have a cognition. Note it down. Scientology attorneys are claiming that the works are copyrighted while Wikileaks...

Science Daily — The human and chimpanzee genomes vary by just 1.2 percent, yet there is a considerable difference in the mental and linguistic capabilities between the two species. A new study showed that a certain form of neuropsin, a protein that plays a role in learning and memory, is expressed only in the central nervous systems of humans and that it originated less than 5 million years ago. The study, which also demonstrated the molecular mechanism that creates this novel protein, will be published online in Human Mutation, the official journal of the Human Genome Variation Society. Led by...

SPRINGS, South Africa, May 23, 2006 (LifeSiteNews.com) – South African researchers have discovered a medication that temporarily arouses patients from a permanent vegetative state.Scientists Ralf Clauss, now practicing nuclear medicine in the UK, and Wally Nel, in family practice in South Africa, found that Zolpidem, an insomnia drug, effectively restored consciousness to three individuals who were all in permanent vegetative states for at least three years before commencing the trial. After administering the drug, which the doctors have been doing every morning for three years, the three individuals all “wake up” to varying degrees, answer simple questions and engage...

Amazonian hunter-gatherers who lack written language and who have never seen a math book score highly on basic tests of geometric concepts, researchers said on Thursday in a study that suggests geometry may be hard-wired into the brain. Adults and children alike showed a clear grasp of concepts such as where the center of a circle is and the logical extension of a straight line, the researchers report in this week's issue of the journal Science. Stanislas Dehaene of the College de France in Paris and colleagues tested 14 children and 30 adults of an Amazonian group called the Munduruku,...

n new studies, scientists find that the maternal instinct is as much biological as it is social and that early socialization through maternal bonding is critical to offsprings' later adjustment. Among new findings: Motherhood helps learning and memory, which in turn helps mothers better care for their offspring. Mothers respond better to cries of their own infants than do fathers. The earlier the stress caused by maternal separation, the greater the offspring's later social difficulties. Nurturing through touch can lessen some of the negative effects of early stress. “Understanding the mechanisms at work in parenting and the effects of disruptions...

Back to Press Releases MEDIA CONTACT: Jonathan Sherwood (585) 273-4726 October 6, 2004 Under the Surface, the Brain Seethes With Undiscovered Activity There’s an old myth that we only use 10 percent of our brains, but researchers at the University of Rochester have found in reality that roughly 80 percent of our cognitive power may be cranking away on tasks completely unknown to us. Curiously, this clandestine activity does not exist in the youngest brains, leading scientists to believe that the mysterious goings-on that absorb the majority of our minds are dedicated to subconsciously reprocessing our initial thoughts and experiences....

A few months before retiring from public office in 2002, the House majority leader Dick Armey caused a mini-scandal when he announced during a speech in Florida, ''Liberals are, in my estimation, just not bright people.'' The former economics professor went on to clarify that liberals were drawn to ''occupations of the heart,'' while conservatives favored ''occupations of the brain,'' like economics or engineering. The odd thing about Armey's statement was that it displayed a fuzzy, unscientific understanding of the brain itself: our most compassionate (or cowardly) feelings are as much a product of the brain as ''rational choice'' economic...

I. PHYSICAL DIMENSIONS OF THE HUMAN MIND... "...The conscious brain wherein reside reason, judgment, and memory...plus all other parts of brain, occupy the space of a quart container and weigh a total of about three pounds. Though the three pounds represent a mere 2 percent of the body weight.., the quartful of brain is so metabolically active that it uses 20 percent of the oxygen we take in through our lungs...Of the total of about 50,000 to 100,000 genes in Homo sapiens, some 30,000 code for one or another aspect of the brain.''5 "...The brain is different and immeasurably more...

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Enjoying a cocktail now and then is not associated with declining mental function over time and may even make women sharper, according to a new report. "Findings from this...study suggest that long-term social and habitual consumption of alcohol is not associated with an increased risk of cognitive decline in men and may even protect against cognitive decline in women," Constantine G. Lyketsos and colleagues from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, write. Nearly 1,500 adults 18 and older were divided into five groups based on their self-reported alcohol consumption at three points during the nearly...