Professor Richard Davidson describes the brain activity of a monk.
Showing posts with label Health. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Health. Show all posts
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
How Chaos Drives the Brain
Brain neuron constantly fire in response to the internal and external stimulus. Most of the time Brain is stable but there are times when it operates as a chaotic system. The video shows the animation of the brain's behavior
Neuroscientists have long suspected as much. Only recently, however, have they come up with proof that brains work this way. Now they are trying to work out why. Some believe that near-chaotic states may be crucial to memory, and could explain why some people are smarter than others.The complete article is here.
In technical terms, systems on the edge of chaos are said to be in a state of "self-organised criticality". These systems are right on the boundary between stable, orderly behaviour - such as a swinging pendulum - and the unpredictable world of chaos, as exemplified by turbulence.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Brain Economic and Moral Choices
There were many old models those divided the decision making mainly into two separate processes. The rational goal oriented decision making process and the irrational emotion based decision making process sometimes referred to as "Animal Spirits". All the attempts that are made to civilize humans were to suppress the irrational decision making and promote rational decision making. The modernity was based upon the ascension of the rational decision making to the highest pedestal while our instinctual urges were considered bad and relegated to the bottom of the pyramid of the needs.
This two part division provided a satisfactory explanation for our behavior in the past. It also provided guidelines for developing suitable methods to train kids to become rational functioning adults. However, the recent advances in non invasive brain scanning techniques such as FMRI allow us to probe inside the brain while it is trying to make decisions. The technique still lacks fine spatial and temporal resolution but it is getting better with time and it provides a glimpse of inside working of human brain.
The neurons inside the brain are interconnected and we do not find a clear cut distinction between two types of decision making. In fact both of them are involved in all types of decision making. This invalidates the "Rational Actor" model of humans used in Economic theory. Human are not purely rational decision making computers.
We now have new disciplines like Neuro-economics and Behavioral Finance. These disciplines have shown that our decisions differ sometimes considerably from a pure rational actor. All decision are value based decisions including the decisions involving money and morality.
Here is a fascinating video that shows some of the experiments in the field of Neuro-economics showing human decision making and a neuroscience based explanation
We can not find a moral center within the brain making moral decisions. Also, we can not find 'Homo Economus nuclei " within the brain making rational informed decisions on money matters purely out of self interest. This conclusion is fairly obvious to common people but the religious authorities and the big name economists so far are not willing to accept these findings in Neuro-economics despite the mounting evidence supporting the idea that brain is an organic unit and it acts as a single unit to perform calculations leading to making decisions.
Thursday, October 09, 2008
Stressful Life
Robert Sapolsky author of the book "Why Zebra's don't Get Ulcers" and a professor at Stanford University studies baboons in Africa. He has researched the stress response within pack of baboons for many years in the natural habitat of baboons.
Another video with more details on how to cope with Stress
Additional Information from Stanford University Web site on Stress
Another video with more details on how to cope with Stress
Additional Information from Stanford University Web site on Stress
Sunday, July 27, 2008
Inspiring Last Talk by Randy Pausch
Image by moominsean via FlickrRandy Pausch, a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University died from pancreatic cancer. He gave an inspiring talk titled Achieving your Childhood Dreams. The talk found its way as a video on Youtube. The video has been watched by millions of people. In the video he is has shown extreme courage in facing his upcoming death.A talk like this forces us to rethink our priorities. We can go to the moon. We can create all kinds of the technological marvels but we still have not gained much control over life and death. None of us really know why we were born or how or when or why we will die. We can create all kind of explanation to answer these questions but the truth of the matter is that answer to these questions is unknowable.
There was an old Indian Movie titled "Anand" in which the lead character played by Rajesh Khanna, was dying of cancer. He also showed a playful side facing his death while everybody around him was sad and upset. However, he was just a fictional movie character. In Randy Paush we have a real human being who faced his death with courage and he will inspire us all to do the same
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
Right Brain Left Brain Functions
Image via WikipediaThe brain consists of two halves connected through the nerve bundles called Corpus Callosum. Both sides of brain work together to help us in creating a comprehensive picture of the world we experience. The brain works through modules that are specialized to perform specific functions. The right side of the brain is holistic and works through the entire pattern. The left side of the brain is analytic and acts as an interpreter of the experience.The strong evidence to support this came from the studies of split brain patients. These patients were suffering from acute seizures and to stop the seizure from spreading to the entire brain the best course was to split the two halves of the brain through brain surgery.
The surgery was successful as anticipated in reducing the brain seizures but had some side effects. These patients were subjected to many scientific studies to see the effect of the surgery on their brain functioning by pioneering neuroscientist Dr. Michael Gazzaniga. Here is a video where Dr. Gazzaniga is interviewing a split brain patient:
The video clearly shows that the patient despite appearing completely normal has lost some of his ability to relate and interpret external items. Also, it shows how the left side brain acts as a interpreter and creates a story even if the story does not support the facts.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Brain's reward System and Addiction
Image via WikipediaNueroscience is discovering the relationship between addiction and brain's reward system. In general human's are very susceptible to the anticipation of rewards. There is lot more in common between gambling,sex, good food, chocolate and other pleasurable activities then we thought originally. They all stimulate the pleasure center of the human brain. Excessive indulgence into pleasurable activities is the leading cause of addiction.Here is a complete article on Behavioral' Addictions:Do They Exist?
A small excerpts from the article:
Aided by brain imaging advances, scientists are looking for evidence that compulsive nondrug behaviors lead to long-term changes in reward circuitry
People toss around the term "addiction" to describe someone's relationship to a job, a boyfriend, or a computer. But scientists have traditionally confined their use of the term to substances--namely alcohol and other drugs--that clearly foster physical dependence in the user.
That's changing, however. New knowledge about the brain's reward system, much gained by superrefined brain scan technology, suggests that as far as the brain is concerned, a reward's a reward, regardless of whether it comes from a chemical or an experience. And where there's a reward, there's the risk of the vulnerable brain getting trapped in a compulsion.
"Over the past 6 months, more and more people have been thinking that, contrary to earlier views,there is commonality between substance addictions and other compulsions," says Alan Leshner, head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) and incoming executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, publisher of Science.
Just where to draw the line is not yet clear. The unsettled state of definitions is reflected in psychiatry's bible, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV. Addictions, obsessions, and compulsions--all related to loss of voluntary control and getting trapped in repetitious, self- defeating behavior--are scattered around under "substance-related disorders," "eating disorders," "sexual and gender identity disorders," "anxiety disorders," and "impulse- control disorders not elsewhere classified." In that last grab-bag are compulsive gambling, kleptomania, fire-setting, hair-pulling, and "intermittent explosive disorder."
Addiction used to be defined as dependence on a drug as evidenced by craving, increased tolerance, and withdrawal. But even some seemingly classical addictions don't follow that pattern. Cocaine, for example, is highly addictive but causes little withdrawal. And a person who gets hooked on morphine while in the hospital may stop taking the drug without developing an obsession with it.
Now many researchers are moving toward a definition of addiction based more on behavior, and they are starting to look at whether brain activity and biochemistry are affected the same way in "behavioral" addictions as they are by substance abuse. One who endorses this perspective is psychologist Howard Shaffer, who heads the Division on Addictions at Harvard. "I had great difficulty with my own colleagues when I suggested that a lot of addiction is the result of experience ... repetitive, high-emotion, high-frequency experience," he says. But it's become clear that neuroadaptation--that is, changes in neural circuitry that help perpetuate the behavior--occurs even in the absence of drug-taking, he says.
The experts are fond of saying that addiction occurs when a habit "hijacks" brain circuits that evolved to reward survival- enhancing behavior such as eating and sex. "It stands to reason if you can derange these circuits with pharmacology, you can do it with natural rewards too," observes Stanford University psychologist Brian Knutson. Thus, drugs are no longer at the heart of the matter. "What is coming up fast as being the central core issue ... is continued engagement in self-destructive behavior despite adverse consequences," says Steven Grant of NIDA.
Not everybody is on board with this open-ended definition. For one thing, says longtime addiction researcher Roy Wise of NIDA, drugs are far more powerful than any "natural" pleasure when it comes to the amounts of dopamine released. Nonetheless, behavioral resemblances to addiction are getting increasing notice.
The complete articel is at
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~span/Press/bk1101press.html
Finally the part of the brain that is most active in this is called hypothalamus that sits right below neocortex within the brain. Here is a short movie that describes the role of Hypothalamus and its realtionship with the brains'reward center.
What about learning? It has its own rewards that means it also affects the brain's reward system. It could be addictive.
Does that mean teachers are encouraging an addictive activity??
Friday, March 14, 2008
Jeff Hawkins: Brain science is about to fundamentally change computing
To date, there hasn't been an overarching theory of how the human brain really works, Jeff Hawkins argues in this compelling talk. That's because we still haven't defined intelligence accurately. But one thing's for sure, he says: The brain isn't like a powerful computer processor. It's more like a memory system that records everything we experience and helps us predict, intelligently, what will happen next. Bringing this new brain science to computer devices will enable powerful new applications -- and it will happen sooner than you think.
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