Exploring Life: Web Clips

“Music is a gateway to emotion and memory, pleasure and intellectual stimulation throughout our lives,” says writer and director Christina Pochmursky. “THE MUSICAL BRAIN follows Sting on his journey of discovery into his own musical brain, and also explores how music can define each stage of our lives.”

via Sting.com news.news.

Brain Facts.

What’s involved when a musician sits down at the piano and plays flurries of notes in a free fall, without a score, without knowing much about what will happen moment to moment? Is it possible to find the sources of a creative process? Is it possible to determine how improvisation occurs?

via The Improvising Brain | HarvardScience.

“Our results also show that social conformity is based on mechanisms that comply with reinforcement learning and is reinforced by the neural error-monitoring activity which signals what is probably the most fundamental social mistake-that of being too different from others.”

via Brain mechanisms of social conformity (1/19/2009).

“This finding is significant because it suggests that improving blood flow to the brain might be an effective therapeutic approach to prevent or treat Alzheimer’s,” said Vassar, a professor of cell and molecular biology at the Feinberg School.

A simple preventive strategy people can follow to improve blood flow to the brain is getting exercise, reducing cholesterol and managing hypertension.

“If people start early enough, maybe they can dodge the bullet,” Vassar said. For people who already have symptoms, vasodilators, which increase blood flow, may help the delivery of oxygen and glucose to the brain, he added.

via Brain starvation as we age appears to trigger Alzheimer’s (1/5/2009).

Blind man walking: With no visual awareness, man navigates obstacle course flawlessly (12/25/2008)

Researchers have demonstrated for the first time that people can successfully navigate an obstacle course even after brain damage has left them with no awareness of the ability to see and no activity in the visual cortex, a region of the brain’s cortex that is primarily responsible for processing visual inputs. The findings published in the December 23rd issue of Current Biology, a Cell Press publication, reveal the importance of alternative routes in the brain, which are active in both those who have suffered severe brain damage to the visual cortex and in all of our everyday lives, according to the researchers.

Earlier studies had shown a similar ability in monkeys with comparable brain lesions. The new study was possible only because of the participation of an unusual patient known as TN, who was left blind after selective damage to the visual cortex in both hemispheres of his brain following consecutive strokes.

“This is absolutely the first study of this ability in humans,” said Beatrice de Gelder of Tilburg University, The Netherlands and of the Martinos Center for Biomedical Imaging and Harvard Medical School. “We see what humans can do, even with no awareness of seeing or any intentional avoidance of obstacles. It shows us the importance of these evolutionarily ancient visual paths. They contribute more than we think they do for us to function in the real world.”

How Mirror Neurons Allow Us To Learn And Socialize By Going Through The Motions In The Head

ScienceDaily (Dec. 19, 2008) — The old adage that we can only learn how to do something by trying it ourselves may have to be revised in the light of recent discoveries in neuroscience. It turns out that humans, primates, some birds, and possibly other higher animals have mirror neurons that fire in the same pattern whether performing or just observing a task.

PsyBlog: Can Cognitive Neuroscience Tell Us Anything About the Mind?

“No amount of knowledge about the hardware of a computer will tell you anything serious about the nature of the software that the computer runs. In the same way, no facts about the activity of the brain could be used to confirm or refute some information-processing model of cognition.” (Coltheart, 2004, p.22)

I personally don’t know enough about cognitive neuroscience to argue whether or not this statement is true, but it certainly has intuitive appeal. Considering the enormous quantity of money going into cognitive neuroscience right now, it seems unlikely this would be a majority view amongst psychologists. Not that scientist are slaves to money, of course…Ahem…

Mind & Life Institute

The Mind & Life Institute is an independent, not-for-profit organization devoted to establishing a mutually respectful working collaboration and research partnerships between modern science and Buddhism – two of the world’s most fruitful traditions for understanding the nature of reality and promoting human well-being.