how brain works
10136950
Clearly a breakthrough for better understanding how brain works
Combining neuroscience and chemical engineering, researchers at Stanford have developed a process that renders a mouse brain transparent. The postmortem brain remains whole not sliced or sectioned in any way with its three dimensional complexity of fine wiring and molecular structures completely intact and able to be measured and probed at will with visible light and chemicals. The process, called CLARITY, ushers in an entirely new era of whole organ imaging that stands to fundamentally change our scientific understanding of the most important but least understood of organs, the brain, and potentially other organs, as well. The process See brAiN, page 4
Henrik Ahlenius said Josef Parvizi Mohammad Dastjerdi
18437730
The Brain Network Paradigm: Using Functional Imaging Data to Study How the Brain Works
Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is highly suited for studying patterns and relationships in whole brain activity. A network based paradigm for analyzing large volumes of fMRI data is a promising framework to understand brain function, but challenges in data analytics must be addressed to enable neuroscience breakthroughs.
Computer
Gowtham Atluri Angus W MacDonald Kelvin O Lim Vipin Kumar
9518888
Has brain imaging discovered anything new about how the brain works?
There have now been roughly 130,000 papers on fMRI. While these have clearly contributed to our understanding of the functional anatomy of the human brain, it is less clear that they have changed the way in which we think about the brain. The issue, in other words, is whether they have established new principles about how the brain works. In this paper we offer as an example one new principle, partly to lay down the criteria that are required for establishing a new principle, and partly to encourage others to offer other principles. Our example concerns the flexible flow of information through the cortex that must occur according to the demands of the task or current context. We suggest that this flexibility is achieved by feedback connections from the prefrontal and parietal cortex, and that these include connections to sensory and motor areas. However, the nature of the selective effect differs. The parietal cortex can select both within and across processing streams. By across streams we mean that it can have the same influence on different streams, for example the dorsal and ventral visual systems. However, only the prefrontal cortex can also select between processing streams. The difference between the prefrontal and parietal effects is due to their different positions within the processing hierarchy.
NeuroImage
Richard E Passingham James Benedict Rowe Katsuyuki Sakai
54883307
Improving Classroom Practices Using Our Knowledge of How the Brain Works.
During the last decade of the 20th century (the decade of the brain) large sums of money were spent in researching how the brain works in relation to our day to day activities. As a result, we now know to a much greater extent the roles played by various regions of the brain when we are carrying out various activities including learning. We also know that different types of rewards and instruments can stimulate specific parts of the brain which enable individuals to carry out their daily chores efficiently. These findings when applied to a classroom learning situation, which is a step forward from theory to practice, might make it possible for us to improve learning for all learners. Thus, in this presentation we plan to combine our knowledge of how the brain functions with those of the other scientific disciplines to provide teachers with the tools they may need to be more effective and efficient teachers. More specifically, this paper aims to lay a foundation for an interfaculty collaboration in UBD towards helping teachers improve their thinking skills which in our opinion are of great importance to fostering their classroom practices.
Oduola Abiola Hakirat S Dhindsa
53064989
Neurobiology Research Findings: How the Brain Works during Reading.
In the past, neurobiology for reading was identical with neuropathology. Today, however, the advancement of modern neuroimaging techniques has contributed to the understanding of the reading processes of normal individuals. Neurobiology findings today have uncovered and illuminated the fundamental neural mechanism of reading. The findings have helped researchers and educators in the field of reading expand their understanding of the different levels of the reading process for evidence based reading instruction. The aims of this paper are to provide a review of the results of neuroscience laboratory research for understanding the reading process. First, the subprocesses of reading and the activated areas of the brain at every stage of reading are discussed. Second, the paper indicates how reading involves both linguistic and non linguistic processing, and the interconnectivity of the cognitive and emotional networks, which takes place, from the visual recognition of letters to 126 PASAA Vol. 50 July December 2015 comprehension at the discourse level, and to articulation. An overview of research on the neurobiology of reading such as this will contribute to the understanding of the overall neural basis of reading and has the potential to be integrated into a model of automatic reading and reading comprehension.
Siusana Kweldju
145532057
Apraxia: the rise, fall and resurrection of diagrams to explain how the brain works
The purpose of brains is to make movement. A brain has to identify what is going on in the environment and in its attached body and generate movements to stay alive and procreate to keep the species going. Movements of a person, which includes speech, are all that other people know of another person. The repertoire of movements that people can make is very broad, and even most ordinary movements are complex. Eating and dressing, for example, involve multiple body parts making a series of coordinated multi joint movements. The movements of highly skilled athletes and musicians are so well tuned that most persons cannot match them. These complex movements that form the behaviour of everyday life are praxis movements. Their failure is apraxia. To call such a failure apraxia, of course, requires that the deficit cannot be explained by a more basic abnormality such as weakness, sensory loss, ataxia or aphasia. The range of capability of the brain to make movement is so large that there can be many types of failures. This has generated different classification schemes with a variety of different terms, sometimes with the same term meaning something else in a different classification. The book by Goldenberg on apraxia contains a comprehensive description of different manifestations of apraxia and addresses the different classifications. Chapters 6 through 14 deal with topics such as imitation, body part specificity, and use of single tools. Chapters 1 to 5 give the historical background and set the stage for the rest of the book. I found the historical part particularly interesting, both as relates to apraxia but also ideas as to how the brain works. While there were some historical precedents, the first well described cases of apraxia and pathological explanation were from Hugo Liepmann from 1900 to 1908 (Fig. 1) On
Mark Hallett
11087362
Advertising, brand and neuromarketing or how consumer brain works
The present paper explores the relationship between the explicit (consumer's preference) and implicit (EEG measurement) consumers' responses and the important role of the reward system. In particular we analyzed the impact of reward mechanisms to support cognitive and emotive processes in evaluating consumer goods. We measured the frequency bands (delta, theta, alpha, beta) at thirty four subjects while they saw five commercials. Finally, the subjects evaluated the goods and explained their preferences.
Michela Balconi Beniamino Stumpo Federica Leanza
15543690
How the Brain Works
This paper analyses the associative capabilities of the brain and takes the consequences of that capability.
Ir J A J van Leunen
7552865
How robots will teach us how the brain works
Judging by the frequency of media reports, the robot revolution is upon us. New developments, from running robots to rescue robots to robot companions for the elderly, are coming at us from industry, academia and the military. Indeed, several countries are now addressing the ethical implications of robot surgeons, soldiers and sex workers. This onslaught of new and practical robot technologies owes much of its success to the changing focus of artificial intelligence (AI) research from highly specialized and disembodied 'rational agents' (good old fashioned AI) to the behavior based robotics pioneered by Rodney Brooks a biologically inspired approach in which robots are designed to operate autonomously under real world constraints. Beyond their practical and ethical implications, can the construction and behavior of such robots tell us anything about biological cognition? Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard, computer scientists working in AI, seem to think so. In How the Body Shapes the Way We Think, they make a convincing argument that neuroscientists have much to learn from robotics. Their philosophy is that if we can understand how to design and build intelligent systems, then we will have a better understanding of the nature and mechanisms of behavior more generally. Typically, the problems facing researchers in biology have multiple possible solutions, but biases in our thinking make us more likely to choose certain kinds of solutions over others. This is where robots can aid us. Building a robot that can reproduce some aspect of an animal's behavior forces the researcher to reinterpret problems, see limitations in old solutions and find new solutions. One could say that an artificial agent not only acts to solve tasks in a physical environment, but also acts as a cognitive aid, helping us to see solutions to problems that we otherwise would have missed. Robots are a potential scaffold for neuroscientific thought. Pfeifer and Bongard present the insights gained by this approach by putting forth a set of design principles, the main points of which can be summarized as follows. First, keep in mind the ecological niche to be filled and desired behaviors as you design the agent. Second, given a certain task environment, the complexities of an agent's sensory, motor and neural systems must be appropriately matched. It makes little sense to have color vision if the organism's mode of life does not require it. Furthermore, there must be a task distribution between the morphology of the agent, its
Nature Neuroscience
Asif A Ghazanfar Hjalmar K Turesson
150793643
What we know about how the human brain works.
Geoffrey Beattie