Free Republic

A nice phenomenon of the past few years is the diminishing influence of I.Q. For a time, I.Q. was the most reliable method we had to capture mental aptitude. People had the impression that we are born with these information-processing engines in our heads and that smart people have more horsepower than dumb people. And in fact, there’s something to that. There is such a thing as general intelligence; people who are good at one mental skill tend to be good at others. This intelligence is partly hereditary. A meta-analysis by Bernie Devlin of the University of Pittsburgh found that...

Baroness Greenfield, the well known neuroscientist and director of the Royal Institution, has joined the likes of Nicole Kidman and Chris Tarrant by putting her name to a computer game designed to train the brain. ** Train your brain: Take the MindFit test At the House of Lords she helped to launch a new fitness routine to play on the insecurities of the masses - the brain workout - and described the results of a trial that suggests that it could help arrest the ageing of the body's most complex organ. "You are your brain and it is vital your...

Gary Lynch has spent decades trying to understand how the brain processes new information so that we can recall it later. The first time I spoke with the neuroscientist Gary Lynch, the conversation went something like this: Me: I'm interested in spending time in a laboratory like yours, where the principal focus is the study of memory. I'd like to explain how memory functions and fails, and why, and use the work in the lab as a means to illustrate how we know what we know. Lynch: You'd be welcome to come here. This would actually be a propitious time...

Deep-brain stimulation offers hope for minimally conscious patients.CLEVELAND CLINIC Deep-brain stimulation might help trauma patients regain consciousness. Brain function has been improved in a patient who was in a minimally conscious state, by electrically stimulating a specific brain region with implanted electrodes. The achievement raises questions about the treatment of other patients who have been in this condition for years, the researchers say. Patients in a minimally conscious state, often the result of severe brain trauma, show only intermittent evidence of awareness of the world around them. Typically, they are assumed to have little chance of further recovery if they...

The brain cranks out memories near its center, in a looped wishbone of tissue called the hippocampus. But a new study suggests only a small chunk of it, called the dentate gyrus, is responsible for “episodic” memories—information that allows us to tell similar places and situations apart. The finding helps explain where déjà vu originates in the brain, and why it happens more frequently with increasing age and with brain-disease patients, said MIT neuroscientist Susumu Tonegawa. The study is detailed today in the online version of the journal Science.

Neuroscientists Martha Farah and Andrea Heberlein, in the January issue of the American Journal of Bioethics (subscription link), wonder if empirical insights from their discipline can naturalize personhood. In other words, they explore the notion that a person is a "natural kind" and "seeks objective and clear-cut biological criteria that correspond reasonably well with most peoples' intuitions about personhood. These criteria could then be substituted for intuition in those cases where intuitions fail to agree." This is an important issue, because trying to determine who is and is not a person figures in our ethical and policy debates over the...

I. Mr. Weinstein’s Cyst When historians of the future try to identify the moment that neuroscience began to transform the American legal system, they may point to a little-noticed case from the early 1990s. The case involved Herbert Weinstein, a 65-year-old ad executive who was charged with strangling his wife, Barbara, to death and then, in an effort to make the murder look like a suicide, throwing her body out the window of their 12th-floor apartment on East 72nd Street in Manhattan. Before the trial began, Weinstein’s lawyer suggested that his client should not be held responsible for his actions...

A team of world-leading neuroscientists has developed a powerful technique that allows them to look deep inside a person's brain and read their intentions before they act. The team used high-resolution brain scans to identify patterns of activity before translating them into meaningful thoughts, revealing what a person planned to do in the near future. It is the first time scientists have succeeded in reading intentions in this way. ~snip~ The use of brain scanners to judge whether people are likely to commit crimes is a contentious issue that society should tackle now, according to Prof Haynes. "We see the...

Interview: Why we help others By CHRISTINE DELL'AMORE WASHINGTON, Jan. 29 (UPI) -- Why some of us help our fellow man while others stay selfish has long been a riddle to scientists. Now, Scott Huettel, an associate professor of psychiatry at Duke University and colleagues are beginning to form a picture of how our brains drive altruism. In the Jan. 21 issue of Nature Neuroscience, Huettel and colleagues report a novel discovery: Altruism may be linked to the perception of a person's actions, in addition to the potential for reward. United Press International talked to Huettel about his research. Q....

DURHAM, N.C. -- Duke University Medical Center researchers have discovered that activation of a particular brain region predicts whether people tend to be selfish or altruistic. "Although understanding the function of this brain region may not necessarily identify what drives people like Mother Theresa, it may give clues to the origins of important social behaviors like altruism," said study investigator Scott A. Huettel, Ph.D., a neuroscientist at the Brain Imaging and Analysis Center. Results of the study appear Sunday, Jan. 21, in the advance online edition of Nature Neuroscience and will be published in the February 2007 print issue of...

They are eerie sensations, more common than one might think: A man describes feeling a shadowy figure standing behind him, then turning around to find no one there. A woman feels herself leaving her body and floating in space, looking down on her corporeal self. Such experiences are often attributed by those who have them to paranormal forces. But according to recent work by neuroscientists, they can be induced by delivering mild electric current to specific spots in the brain. In one woman, for example, a zap to a brain region called the angular gyrus resulted in a sensation that...

Like linemen stringing an electric cable over a gorge, a research team co-directed by a Cleveland scientist has devised a way to coax nerve fibers to grow a "bridge" across gaps in rats' damaged spinal cords. The new technique, reported today in the Journal of Neuroscience, successfully re-established some neural connections and restored a "considerable" amount of movement in five of seven partially paralyzed rats, according to the researchers. After treatment, animals that had been dragging their forelimbs were able to plant their front feet, bear weight and bend their arms to touch their faces. "I think it's a real...

Associated Press CHARLESTON, S.C. — Picture this: Your boss is threatening to fire you because he thinks you stole company property. He doesn't believe your denials. Your lawyer suggests you deny it one more time, in a brain scanner that will show you're telling the truth. Wacky? Science fiction? It might happen this summer. Just the other day I lay flat on my back as a scanner probed the tiniest crevices of my brain and a computer screen asked, "Did you take the watch?" And two outfits, Cephos and No Lie MRI, say they'll start offering brain scans for lie...

CHARLESTON, S.C. - Picture this: Your boss is threatening to fire you because he thinks you stole company property. He doesn't believe your denials. Your lawyer suggests you deny it one more time — in a brain scanner that will show you're telling the truth. Wacky? Science fiction? It might happen this summer. Just the other day I lay flat on my back as a scanner probed the tiniest crevices of my brain and a computer screen asked, "Did you take the watch?" The lab I was visiting recently reported catching lies with 90 percent accuracy. And an entrepreneur in...

THE uncanny ability of blind people to "sense" unseen objects has been demonstrated for the first time in sighted volunteers whose vision was blanked out by scientists. The findings suggest "blindsight", which has been observed in blind people whose eyes function normally but who have suffered damage to the brain's visual centre, is a real and not imagined phenomenon. In tests, the blind have been able to distinguish basic shapes of objects they cannot see, as well as their orientation and direction of motion. On other occasions a blind person has reported experiencing a "feeling" that an object is present,...

Is “the new neuromorality” a threat to traditional views of right and wrong?Will neuroscience revolutionize our understanding of law and morality? If so, can law and morality be saved? That was the question posed by a June conference at the American Enterprise Institute on “The New Neuromorality.” Despite being held under conservative auspices, the event had an entirely secular perspective. The only overt references to religion were tinged with irony, and the only theoconservatives on hand were in the audience. Yet some of the decidedly nonobscurantist speakers voiced support for concerns that in today’s public discourse are often seen as...

...The book begins with a discussion of the medical use of embryonic tissue and the debate over whether a blastocyst (which is a ball of a few hundred cells) is a person. This section is thoughtful, clearheaded and informed by developmental neuroscience. One fallacy Gazzaniga exposes depends on the common idea that graded differences block principled legal distinctions. In the version referred to as the fallacy of the beard, the logic goes like this: If we cannot say how long a man's whiskers must be to qualify as a beard, we cannot distinguish between a bearded man and a clean-shaven...

Scientists have been warned that their latest experiments may accidently produce monkeys with brains more human than animal. In cutting-edge experiments, scientists have injected human brain cells into monkey fetuses to study the effects. Critics argue that if these fetuses are allowed to develop into self-aware subjects, science will be thrown into an ethical nightmare. An eminent committee of American scientists will call for restrictions into the research, saying the outcome of such studies cannot be predicted and may in fact produce subjects with a 'super-animal' intelligence. The high-powered committee of animal behaviourists, lawyers, philosophers, bio-ethicists and neuro-scientists was established...

Empathy allows us to feel the emotions of others, to identify and understand their feelings and motives and see things from their perspective. How we generate empathy remains a subject of intense debate in cognitive science. Some scientists now believe they may have finally discovered its root. We're all essentially mind readers, they say. The idea has been slow to gain acceptance, but evidence is mounting. Mirror neurons In 1996, three neuroscientists were probing the brain of a macaque monkey when they stumbled across a curious cluster of cells in the premotor cortex, an area of the brain responsible for...

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. - The boys were halfway across a snowfield when the German airplane appeared. Their rifles, clumsily camouflaged, were sticking out of their backpacks. They stood frozen as the plane buzzed in tighter and tighter circles around them, wondering if they should run for the only possible shelter, a large boulder in the middle of the field. It might finally have been curtains for the Kavli boys, Fred and Aslak. "If we'd run, we would have been done for," Fred Kavli, 77, recalled recently, his head thrown back as he communed with memories of an adventurous youth in...