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Post by auntym on Apr 11, 2012 12:44:56 GMT -6
www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/04/pinpointing-intelligence-in-the-human-brain.htmlApril 11, 2012 Locating Intelligence in the Human Brain --New DiscoveriesUniversity of Illinois scientists, led by neuroscience professor Aron Barbey of the Decision Neuroscience Laboratory, have mapped the physical architecture of intelligence in the brain in one of the largest and most comprehensive analyses so far of the brain structures vital to general intelligence and to specific aspects of intellectual functioning, such as verbal comprehension and working memory. “We found that general intelligence depends on a remarkably circumscribed neural system,” said Barbey. “Several brain regions, and the connections between them, were most important for general intelligence. “These structures are located primarily within the left prefrontal cortex (behind the forehead), left temporal cortex (behind the ear) and left parietal cortex (at the top rear of the head) and in “white matter association tracts” that connect them. Working with individuals with brain damage, the researchers also found that brain regions for planning, self-control and other aspects of executive function overlap to a significant extent with regions vital to general intelligence. The researchers took CT scans of the participants’ brains and administered an extensive battery of cognitive tests. They pooled the CT data to produce a collective map of the cortex, which they divided into more than 3,000 three-dimensional units called voxels. By analyzing multiple patients with damage to a particular voxel or cluster of voxels and comparing their cognitive abilities with those of patients in whom the same structures were intact, the researchers were able to identify brain regions essential to specific cognitive functions, and those structures that contribute significantly to intelligence.
CONTINUE READING: www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2012/04/pinpointing-intelligence-in-the-human-brain.html
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Post by auntym on May 15, 2013 12:49:17 GMT -6
www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/05/more-complex-than-a-galaxy-new-insights-into-the-human-brain.htmlMay 15, 2013 "More Complex than a Galaxy" --New Insights into the Human BrainThe Daily Galaxy via The Leverhulme Trust, EPFL, and Allen Institute for Brain Science Image Credit: www.ucl.ac.uk"Consider the human brain," says the physicist Sir Roger Penrose. "If you look at the entire physical cosmos, our brains are a tiny, tiny part of it. But they're the most perfectly organized part. Compared to the complexity of a brain, a galaxy is just an inert lump." In a new study, scientists argue that many of our high-level abilities are carried out by more extensive brain networks linking many different areas of the brain. They suggest it may be the structure of these extended networks more than the size of any isolated brain region that is critical for cognitive functioning. The frontal lobes in humans vs. other species are not — as previously thought — disproportionately enlarged relative to other areas of the brain, according to a study by Durham and Reading universities. It concludes that the size of our frontal lobes — an area in the brain of mammals located at the front of each cerebral hemisphere — cannot solely account for humans’ superior cognitive abilities. The study also suggest that supposedly more “primitive” areas, such as the cerebellum, were equally important in the expansion of the human brain. These areas may therefore play unexpectedly important roles in human cognition and its disorders, such as autism and dyslexia, say the researchers. CONTINUE READING: www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/05/more-complex-than-a-galaxy-new-insights-into-the-human-brain.html[/color]
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Post by auntym on May 22, 2013 12:40:36 GMT -6
www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/05/the-google-brain-are-humans-entering-a-new-epoch-of-evolution-3.htmlMay 21, 2013 "The Google Brain" --Are Humans Entering a New Epoch of Evolution?[/color] In June of 2012, The New York Times reported that inside Google's high-tech R&D "X" laboratory the search giant has been creating a simulation of the human brain. And rather than teaching it programs, Google's staff have been exposing it to information from the Net so that it learns organically, a little like the way we humans do. It's built by hooking together 16,000 processor cores with over one billion interconnections, in a model of the around 86 billion neurons in a typical adult human brain. In the past decade, we’ve examined our Solar System’s orbit through the Milky Way to ask whether there may be clues to periodic mass extinctions on our planet. We've launched missions seeking out habitable "Alien Earths" and the existence of dark energy and have migrated from wondering if there's life on Mars to searching out and studying myriads of exo planets in the Milky Way and infinite galaxies beyond. Our incredible advances have also underscored own, very human limitations — our eyes, notes astronomer James Kaler see wavelengths between 0.00004 and 0.00008 of a centimeter. Kaler calls our visual spectrum “…but one octave on an imaginary electromagnetic piano with a keyboard hundreds of kilometers long.” In The Star Thrower evolutionary biologist, Loren Eiseley, writes that "We are rag dolls made out of many ages and skins, changelings, who have slept in wood nests or hissed in the uncouth guise of waddling amphibians. We have played such roles for infinitely longer ages than we have been men." Physicist Stephen Hawking believes that we have entered a new phase of evolution. "At first, evolution proceeded by natural selection, from random mutations. This Darwinian phase, lasted about three and a half billion years, and produced us, beings who developed language, to exchange information." But what distinguishes us from our cave man ancestors is the knowledge that we have accumulated over the last ten thousand years, and particularly, Hawking points out, over the last three hundred. "I think it is legitimate to take a broader view, and include externally transmitted information, as well as DNA, in the evolution of the human race," Hawking said. CONTINUE READING: www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2013/05/the-google-brain-are-humans-entering-a-new-epoch-of-evolution-3.html
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CitizenK
Full Member
I'm Back Guys!!! I've missed you so much!!!
Posts: 562
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Post by CitizenK on May 22, 2013 19:25:19 GMT -6
Fascinating read, I wish they would have elaborated more on the project though rather than Hawkings theories of evolution...
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Post by auntym on Apr 27, 2018 18:05:04 GMT -6
blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/you-can-increase-your-intelligence-5-ways-to-maximize-your-cognitive-potential/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sa-editorial-social&utm_content=&utm_term=mind_news_text_evergreen&sf187985963=1 You Can Increase Your Intelligence: 5 Ways to Maximize Your Cognitive Potential By Andrea Kuszewski / www.scientificamerican.com/author/andrea-kuszewski/ March 7, 2011 "One should not pursue goals that are easily achieved. One must develop an instinct for what one can just barely achieve through one's greatest efforts." —Albert EinsteinWhile Einstein was not a neuroscientist, he sure knew what he was talking about in regards to the human capacity to achieve. He knew intuitively what we can now show with data—what it takes to function at your cognitive best. In essence: What doesn’t kill you makes you smarter. Not so many years ago, I was told by a professor of mine that you didn't have much control over your intelligence. It was genetic—determined at birth. He explained that efforts made to raise the intelligence of children (through programs like Head Start, for example) had limited success while they were in practice, and furthermore, once the "training" stopped, they went right back to their previously low cognitive levels. Indeed, the data did show that [pdf], and he (along with many other intelligence researchers) concluded that intelligence could not be improved—at least not to create a lasting change. Well, I disagreed. You see, before that point in my studies, I had begun working as a Behavior Therapist, training young children on the autism spectrum. These kids had a range of cognitive disabilities—my job was to train them in any and all areas that were deficient, to get them as close to functioning at the same level of their peers as possible. Therapy utilized a variety of methods, or Multimodal Teaching (using as many modes of input as possible), in order to make this happen. One of my first clients was a little boy w/ PDD-NOS (Pervasive Developmental Delays-Not Otherwise Specified), a mild form of autism. When we began therapy, his IQ was tested and scored in the low 80s—which is considered borderline mental retardation. After I worked with him for about three years— one on one, teaching in areas such as communication, reading, math, social functioning, play skills, leisure activities—using multimodal techniques [pdf] —he was retested. His IQ score was well over 100 (with 100 considered "average", as compared to the general population). That's a 20 point increase, more than one standard deviation improvement, by a child with an autism spectrum disorder! He wasn't the only child I saw make vast improvements in the years I've been a therapist, either. I've been fortunate enough to see many children grow by leaps and bounds—not by magic, and not even by taking medication, and there's data to show proof of their gains. I thought—if these kids with severe learning impediments could make such amazing progress, with that progress carrying over into every aspect of their cognitive functioning—why can’t an average person make those kinds of gains as well? Or even more gains, considering they don’t have the additional challenge of an autism spectrum disorder? Although the data from those early studies showed dismal results, I wasn’t discouraged. I still believed it was possible to significantly increase your cognitive functioning, given the proper training—since I had seen it with my own eyes through my work as a therapist. Then in 2008, a very exciting study was published, Improving Fluid Intelligence with Training on Working Memory, by Jaeggi, Buschkuehl, Jonides, and Perrig. This study was pretty much a game-changer for those doing research on this topic. They showed for the first time, that it might actually be possible to increase your intelligence to a significant degree through training. What did they do different? The subjects in Jaeggi’s study were trained on an intensive, multimodal (visual and auditory input) working memory task (the dual-n-back) [1] for variable lengths of time, for either one or two weeks, depending on the group. Following this training, they were tested to see how much they improved. As one would expect, after training, their scores on that task got better. But they went a step further. They wanted to see if those gains on the training task could transfer to an increase in skill on a completely different test of cognitive ability, which would indicate an increase in overall cognitive ability. What did they find? Following training of working memory using the dual n-back test, the subjects were indeed able to transfer those gains to a significant improvement in their score on a completely unrelated cognitive task. This was a super-big deal. Here’s the graph of their results, and you can read about the entire study here. www.pnas.org/content/early/2008/04/25/0801268105CONTINUE READING: blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/you-can-increase-your-intelligence-5-ways-to-maximize-your-cognitive-potential/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sa-editorial-social&utm_content=&utm_term=mind_news_text_evergreen&sf187985963=1
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Post by auntym on Feb 20, 2019 14:08:02 GMT -6
mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/02/scientists-discover-mysterious-new-form-of-wireless-communication-in-the-brain/ Scientists Discover Mysterious New Form of “Wireless” Communication in the Brainby Sequoyah Kennedy / mysteriousuniverse.org/author/skennedy/February 20, 2019 It’s pretty absurd that we can sent robots to other planets yet our own brains still remain one of the great mysteries. We’re getting closer to understanding what consciousness is (in the same way that throwing a stone off a pier in New York brings it closer to London), but scientists are still finding surprising and mysterious aspects of how the brain functions and communicates. Recently scientists discovered a “jaw-dropping” way that the regions of the brain communicate with each other without touching. According to a study published in the Journal of Physiology by Case Western University, the mysterious new form of communication is due to electric coupling. If you’ve ever used a wireless charging pad for your phone, it’s sort of like that. Our brains create low-level electrical fields called “brain waves,” that can be measured and recorded, but were thought to be too weak to actually do anything. The new research found that brain waves can excite, or “turn on,” other brain cells, which then generate an electric field of their own. This turns the brain wave into a self-propagating wave that can jump across gaps. Researchers discovered this after they observed a brain wave jumping across a cut they had made in brain tissue. This was demonstrated multiple times, the brain wave jumping across a small gap where there is no brain tissue. Brain wavesResearchers said they were incredulous when they observed the phenomenon, and the review committee for the Journal of Physiology made them repeat the experiments multiple times before they would publish their findings. This really is a discovery that no one saw coming. According to lead researcher Dominique Durand: “It was a jaw-dropping moment, for us and for every scientist we told about this so far.” “We’ve known about these waves for a long time, but no one knows their exact function and no one believed they could spontaneously propagate. I’ve been studying the hippocampus, itself just one small part of the brain, for 40 years and it keeps surprising me.” You might be thinking, this is at least proof-of-concept of telepathy right? It sure does sound like that, but it’s far too soon to tell and sounding like something and being something are very different things. Telepathy Someday a scientist is going to actually murder me, I just know it. Brain waves are extremely low level electrical fields, and that head of yours is pretty dense. No offense intended. The researchers themselves don’t know what to make of this yet. According to Durand: “We don’t know yet the ‘So what?’ part of this discovery entirely. But we do know that this seems to be an entirely new form of communication in the brain, so we are very excited about this.” It’s incredible that there are still discoveries to be made, completely out-of-the-blue, inside our own bodies. Although, maybe this is one of those things that’s been known about for a very long time, just called by a different name. Things just keep getting weirder, don’t they? mysteriousuniverse.org/2019/02/scientists-discover-mysterious-new-form-of-wireless-communication-in-the-brain/
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