Sometimes, a conversation takes you to places you never would’ve expected. Matt Wall and I struck up a chat about brain-scanning technology early this year, and he mentioned that he’d like to do an interview for The Connectome. Since he’s got 5+ years of published brain research under his belt, I jumped at the chance. [...]
Posts Tagged ‘fMRI’
Brain Scans and Bold Plans: Our Interview with Matt Wall
October 28th, 2012 
The Connectome 
Posted in Feature Stories, Featured 
Tags: drugs, emotions, fMRI, imaging, neuroanatomy, technology, therapy 
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Forget Me Not
March 2nd, 2012 The Connectome Having trouble remembering where you left your keys? You can improve with a little practice, says a new study. It’s an idea that had never occurred to me before, but one that seems weirdly obvious once you think about it: people who train their brains to recall the locations of objects for a few minutes [...]
Posted in Brain News, Featured Tags: aging, fMRI, imaging, learning, memory, neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, senses, vision No Comments »
Learning Expectations
February 7th, 2012 The Connectome Researchers have isolated a specific pathway our brains use when learning new beliefs about others’ motivations, a new study says. Though this type of learning, like many others, depends heavily on the neurotransmitter chemical dopamine‘s influence in a set of ancient brain structures called the basal ganglia, it’s also influenced by the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) – a structure [...]
Sacred Values
January 25th, 2012 The Connectome Principles on which we refuse to change our stance are processed via separate neural pathways from those we’re more flexible on, says a new study. Our minds process many decisions in moral “gray areas” by weighing the risks and rewards involved – so if the risk is lessened or the reward increased, we’re sometimes willing [...]
Posted in Brain News Tags: emotions, ethics, fMRI, imaging, morality, neurophysiology, psychology, science to the rescue! 4 Comments »I Know Kung Fu
December 12th, 2011 The Connectome New technology may soon enable us download knowledge directly into our brains, says a new study. By decoding activation patterns from fMRI scans and then reproducing them as direct input to a precise area of the brain, the new system may be able to “teach” neural networks by example – priming them to fire in [...]
The Brain Lab Tour
December 6th, 2011 The Connectome This past weekend, I got to visit one of the coolest places I’ve ever seen: the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging (LONI). So just for today, I’m gonna take a break from news reporting, and tell you a little about what goes on inside an actual cutting-edge neuroscience lab. Sound good? OK, let’s go! I’m [...]
Psychopathic Anatomy
November 30th, 2011 The Connectome The brains of psychopaths have a significant physical difference from those of non-psychopaths, says a new study. In a psychopath’s brain, white matter (connective neural tissue) links between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) and amygdala are unusually weak. This means a major brain area involved in anticipating risk (the vmPFC) is only weakly connected with an area [...]
Musical Matchups
November 28th, 2011 The Connectome Our brains process music via different sensory pathways depending on what we think its source is, a new study finds. As our brains organize information from our senses into a coherent representation of the world around us, they’re constantly hard at work associating data from one sense – say, sight – with data from another – say, hearing. A [...]
Posted in Brain News Tags: fMRI, hearing, music, neurophysiology, senses, touch, vision No Comments »Paying Awareness
November 11th, 2011 The Connectome Attention and awareness are actually two fundamentally different mental processes, and they often operate separately, says a new study. Certain parts of the brain – such as the primary visual cortex (V1) – are activated in response to attention but not to awareness; and for others, the reverse is the case. In short, the processes of [...]
Posted in Brain News Tags: attention, awareness, fMRI, neurophysiology, senses, vision No Comments »Brain Scans & Lucid Dreams
October 28th, 2011 The Connectome The brain activity of lucid dreamers – people who become aware that they’re in a dream state – shows some interesting similarities with that of people who are awake, says a new study. By studying the brain activity of lucid dreamers under electroencephalograms (EEGs) and fMRI scans, researchers have found that activity in the somatosensory [...]
Posted in Brain News Tags: consciousness, dreams, EEG, fMRI, neurophysiology, senses, sleep, technosophy 2 Comments »
