You've just finished doing some research using fMRI to measure brain activity. You designed the study, recruited the volunteers, and did all the scans. Phew. Is that it? Can you publish the findings yet?Unfortunately, no. You still need to do the analysis, and this is often the most trickiest stage. The raw data produced during an fMRI experiment are meaningless - in most cases, each scan will gi
15 Vote(s)
January 23, 2010
Brain Scanning Software Showdown
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January 16, 2010
Patients with no skull are a window on brain activity
I've just clocked a stunning experiment, shortly to be published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, that recorded brain activity from patients who had part of their skull surgically removed for several months and had only flaps of skin between their brain and the outside world.The operation is called a hemicraniectomy and is often used when the brain swells or the pressure builds up inside
8 Vote(s)
8 Vote(s)
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January 10, 2010
Brain activity levels affect self-perception: ‘Rose-colored glasses’ correlate with less frontal lobe use
The less you use your brain's frontal lobes, the more you see yourself through rose-colored glasses, researchers have found.
12 Vote(s)
12 Vote(s)
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January 7, 2010
Silencing brain cells with yellow and blue light
Neuroscientists have developed a powerful new class of tools to reversibly shut down brain activity using different colors of light. When targeted to specific neurons, they could potentially lead to new treatments for abnormal brain activity associated with disorders including chronic pain, epilepsy, brain injury and Parkinson's disease.
13 Vote(s)
13 Vote(s)
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December 16, 2009
No More Drama
No more pain (no more pain)No more pain (no more pain)No drama (no more drama in my life, no ones gonna make me hurt again)No more in my lifeNo More Drama-----Mary J. BligeWomen who are victims of intimate partner violence (IPV) can suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), cognitive impairments (Twamley et al., 2009), and alterations in brain activity when anticipating aversive or thre
15 Vote(s)
15 Vote(s)
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December 10, 2009
Brain activity exposes those who break promises
Scientists in Switzerland have discovered the physiological mechanisms in the brain that underlie broken promises. Patterns of brain activity even enable predicting whether someone will break a promise.
14 Vote(s)
14 Vote(s)
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October 15, 2009
The latest verdict on using brain imaging for lie detection
Excitable tabloids, technophile lawyers and gullible entrepreneurs have all spent the last few years salivating over the prospect of functional brain imaging delivering us the first form of truly scientific, objective lie detection. Not so fast. Most research that's tested the potential of functional brain scanning for lie detection has compared brain activity between lying and honest conditions
14 Vote(s)
14 Vote(s)
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October 9, 2009
Scans Show Learning ‘Sculpts’ The Brain’s Connections
Spontaneous brain activity formerly thought to be "white noise" measurably changes after a person learns a new task, researchers have shown. Scientists also report that the degree of change reflects how well subjects have learned to perform the task.
15 Vote(s)
15 Vote(s)
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October 6, 2009
Children recruit higher-order brain mechanisms during a numerical comparison task
I've been endlessly scoring digit-symbol coding protocols (fun...), a subtest of the WAIS-IV, for the past few weeks at my new neuropsych externship so the following article seems particularly relevant. In a recent study by Cantlon and colleagues published in the latest Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, they decided to measure the brain activity of 6-7 year-old children during numerical comparis
9 Vote(s)
9 Vote(s)
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September 27, 2009
optimizing your coffee consumption
We live in an era where students, shift workers, and scientists increasingly consume drugs that modify brain activity in order to enhance cognition. Ethicists are right to fret about this as the number of addictive substances with some ill effects proliferates (DeJong et al. 2008). People will use these things regardless whether or not some [...]... DEJONGH, R., BOLT, I., SCHERMER, M., &
8 Vote(s)
8 Vote(s)
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