Monday: May 10, 2010
- Scientist verifies that the human brain contains a master switch.
Shin believes his discovery may be useful in understanding brain malfunctions such as autism, epilepsy and others. While researching brain function, Shin has previously shown that taking statin drugs to lower cholesterol may actually inhibit some brain function.
Wednesday: February 17, 2010
- A hundred and one reasons why you should play more Sudoku.
36. Experts say that solving Sudoku game is based on the neural pathways and even the computers that are most powerful cannot replicate.
Thursday: February 4, 2010
- Fifty brain facts that you may not have previously known about.
One study looked at students in New York and showed that those who ate lunches that did not include artificial flavors, preservatives, and dyes did 14% better on IQ tests than the students who ate lunches with these additives.
Monday: February 1, 2010
- A writeup on how to defrag your mind in just five easy steps.
This article is appealing to me because I always liken a good clearing of the head to the act of defragmenting a hard drive. The processes are apparently quite similar. With that in mind, good luck and happy defragmenting.
Monday: January 25, 2010
- Your brain just might be to blame for your bad video gaming skills.
The researchers recruited 39 healthy adults (10 men, 29 women) who had played fewer than three hours of video games each week during the previous two years. They then examined their brains with the aid of an MRI machine.
Monday: December 28, 2009
- Seventeen interesting tricks of the body you may not have previously known about.
“Since the nerves in the roof of your mouth get extremely cold, your body thinks your brain is freezing, too,” says Abo. “In compensating, it overheats, causing an ice-cream headache.” The more pressure you apply to the roof of your mouth, the faster your headache will subside.
Monday: November 9, 2009
- Want to know just how much power your brain needs in order to function?
In a nutshell, a robot with a processor as intelligent as the human brain would require at least ten megawatts to operate. By contrast, a dimly lit light bulb takes about just twenty watts and Doc Brown was able to send Marty back to the future via 1.21 gigawatts (1210 megawatts).
Tuesday: October 27, 2009
- Effects of sleep deprivation might be reversible via something other than sleep.
...the team believes that the cognitive deficits caused by sleep deprivation, such as an inability to focus, learn or memorize, may be reversible by reducing the concentration of a specific enzyme that builds up in the hippocampus of the brain.
Wednesday: September 30, 2009
- New study suggests that gamers are more aggresive towards strangers.
After the Onslaught matches, Geary and Oxford found that testosterone levels of the winning team members spiked immediately after the tournament, particularly among players who had contributed most to their team's victory.
Wednesday: September 16, 2009
- Turns out that sleep plays a pivotal role in memory formations. Who knew?
These sharp, ‘loud’ transient events occur hundreds to thousands of times during sleep and ‘teach’ the neocortex to form a long-term form of the memory, a process referred to as memory consolidation.
Wednesday: September 2, 2009
- New study discovers that playing Tetris might be good for your brain.
...the brain used less energy when it worked on familiar processing patterns. The girls who played Tetris also had a thicker cortex, meaning the game play triggered a structural change in the brain beyond the areas that became more efficient.
Thursday: August 27, 2009
- Turns out that our brains learn more from success rather than failure.
The researchers found that monkeys that were rewarded for the right response to a cue learned quickly how to respond the next time they saw the cue, but monkeys that responded incorrectly weren't any better equipped to deal with the same cue the next time they saw it.
Thursday: July 30, 2009
- Turns out that the adult brain can change in a matter of seconds.
The volunteers perceived the rectangles elongating just two seconds after their eye was covered — much quicker than expected. When the eye patch was removed, the distortions vanished just as fast as they had appeared.
Wednesday: July 29, 2009
- The top seven places to watch great minds in action.
...there are a number of other conferences held each year around the world that also bring together visionaries, intellectuals, and luminaries from a wide variety of disciplines to discuss innovative ideas.
Tuesday: July 28, 2009
- Have a peek at some of the potential interface changes coming to Firefox 4.0.
These are just draft ideas for brainstorming but some of these concepts seem to be awfully familiar.
Thursday: July 9, 2009
- A neat tutorial on how to create diorama illusions in Photoshop.
Bonus: tutorial also doubles as a fun lesson on how your brain can interpret these types of images.
Wednesday: July 1, 2009
- Upcoming Star Wars toy lets you move an object with your mind (aka The Force).
Put this one on the Christmas list this year.
Wednesday: June 24, 2009
- Turns out that morning people and night owls have different brain functions.
They found that morning people's brains were most excitable at 9 a.m. This slowly decreased through the day. It was the polar opposite for evening people, whose brains were most excitable at 9 p.m.
- New study suggests that requests to right ear are more successful than to the left ear.
It’s the latest in a series of studies that show that sound from both human ears is processed differently within the brain. Researchers have noted that humans tend to have a preference for listening to verbal input with their right ears and that given stimulus in both ears, they’ll privilege the syllables that went into the right ear.
Monday: June 22, 2009
- Turns out that your brain can detect happiness quicker than sadness.
The results show that the right hemisphere performs better in processing emotions. 'However, this advantage appears to be more evident when it comes to processing happy and surprised faces than sad or frightened ones', the researcher points out.
