Neuroscience

Is There Common Biology In Emotion?

Emotions tag our experiences and act as waypoints in how we steer our behavior, but they seem to be subjective. Avoiding danger and pursuing rewards is essential for successful navigation through a complex environment, and thus for survival, but why are so ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 17 2012 - 10:14am

Neurofeedback: Brain Monitoring During Study Boosts Learning

You have heard of biofeedback, controlling bodily responses using audio or visual cues to map performance.  It may be possible to do that with learning, a kind of neurofeedback, according to research at Sandia National Laboratories. They show that it' ...

Article - News Staff - Sep 19 2012 - 9:38am

Loss Of Npas4 In Mice Mirrors Schizophrenia In Humans

The human brain is made up of billions of neurons, specialized cells which form vast, intricate networks among themselves to process and sort through the barrage of sensory and internal stimuli we are constantly bombarded with and mediate the appropriate r ...

Article - Eve Hardy - Oct 1 2012 - 5:06am

How Bumblebees Solve The Traveling Salesman Problem

Scientists have tracked bumblebees to see how they select the optimal route to collect nectar from multiple flowers and return to their nest. They were able to use radar tracking to show how bumblebees discover flowers, learn their location and use trial a ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 1 2012 - 8:30pm

Logarithm Versus Linear Thinking: Why In Our Brains The Midpoint Of 1 And 9 Might Be 3

If you ask an adult for the midpoint between 1 and 9 they say 5. Mentally, they put 9 points on a ine and add 1 and then split that in half. But if you ask a child or someone from a culture not trained in maths, the answer could be different; perhaps 3. It ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 5 2012 - 1:07pm

Fish Version Of Oxytocin Drives Their Social Behavior, Says Study

Researchers say that a form of oxytocin — the hormone correlated with human love — has a similar effect on fish, suggesting it is a key regulator of social behavior that has evolved and endured since ancient times. The findings may help answer an evolution ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 10 2012 - 12:30pm

Amygdala Modulation- Why Fingernails On Blackboards Make Us Crazy

Recently, some people subjected themselves to perhaps the most annoying study of 2012; they had to sample and pick the most irritating noises in the world, and they did it for science.  Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to exami ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 19 2012 - 11:14pm

Q: What Are You Doing? A: Depends, What Are You Hearing?

Why, in difficult driving conditions or when lost, do people turn down the volume of their radio? Some new research links motor skills and perception, specifically as it relates to a second finding; a new understanding of what the left and right brain hemi ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 14 2012 - 4:19pm

How To Eliminate Fear- Create New Competitive Memory Traces

If suffer from arachnophobia, fear or spiders, you know that rationality does not enter into it. Imagining a huge and hairy tarantula crawling on your arm in a therapist’s office is not less scary than coming out of the shower and seeing a tiny spider. Why ...

Article - News Staff - Oct 18 2012 - 12:00pm

Teaching An Elephant To Speak Korean

An Asian elephant named Koshik can speak  exactly five words in Korean that can be readily understood by those who know the language. The elephant accomplishes this in a most unusual way: he vocalizes with his trunk in his mouth. The words include "a ...

Article - News Staff - Nov 1 2012 - 12:40pm