My daughters can teach!
Here is what I am reading today:
“Society for Neuroscience archival interview with Mortimer Mishkin, former senior investigator at NIH and current chief of the section on cognitive neuroscience in the laboratory of neuropsychology at NIMH. The interview took place April 5-6, 2006. This video is part of the Society for Neuroscience’s autobiography series, “The History of Neuroscience in Autobiography,” detailing the lives and discoveries of eminent senior neuroscientists.”
“When people – and monkeys – look at faces, a special part of their brain that is about the size of a blueberry “lights up.” Now, the most detailed brain-mapping study of the area yet conducted has confirmed that it isn’t limited to processing faces, as some experts have maintained, but instead serves as a general center of expertise for visual recognition. Neuroscientists previously established that this region, which is called the fusiform face area (FFA) and is located in the temporal lobe, is responsible for a particularly effective form of visual recognition. But there has been an ongoing debate about whether this area is hard-wired to recognize faces because of their importance to us or if it is a more general mechanism that allows us to rapidly recognize objects that we work with extensively.”
“Can we learn when we sleep? Not only can the sleeping brain perceive sensory information, it can learn from this information, leading to changed behaviors the next day.”
“Bats may have more in common with the fictional Batman than previously believed, since both successfully combine work with courting sexy potential mates — a lot of them.
A new study, published in the latest Proceedings of the Royal Society B, reveals that bat echolocation calls, primarily used for orientation and foraging, also contain information about sex, which helps the flying mammals to acquire and keep mates.”
6 Comments
Lauren · October 4, 2012 at 1:06 pm
I think it is amazing that the brain can process information and learn while we are asleep. The way that our conscious and subconscious minds interact is incredible. Many of our dreams seem to be made up fantastical versions of sensory stimulation that we experience during the day, which makes sense. I believe it is more useful to know that information we perceive in our sleep can be brought forth to the conscious mind and can essentially be learned subconsciously. I think I may invest in hiring someone to read my textbooks to me while I am asleep!
mminor · October 4, 2012 at 2:07 pm
The link to the article about cars and facial recognition does not link to anything. 🙁
matthahn · October 6, 2012 at 1:04 pm
That Pinterest article is interesting. It’s too bad you have to pay to read some of the articles all the way through, but I think I got the gist of them through the excerpts.
“Learning in our sleep” was interesting in how it told that mind understands spatial perception while we sleep. It makes sense, knowing how in dreams, when one needs to use the bathroom, they can dream of flowing waterfalls. I wonder to what extent our mind is paying attention to the exterior world while it is trying to perform housekeeping duties in sleep and to what extent exterior perception takes away from the minds ability to perform those duties.
matthahn · October 6, 2012 at 1:04 pm
That Pinterest article is interesting. It’s too bad you have to pay to read some of the articles all the way through, but I think I got the gist of them through the excerpts.
“Learning in our sleep” was interesting in how it told that mind understands spatial perception while we sleep. It makes sense, knowing how in dreams, when one needs to use the bathroom, they can dream of flowing waterfalls. I wonder to what extent our mind is paying attention to the exterior world while it is trying to perform housekeeping duties in sleep and to what extent exterior perception takes away from the mind’s ability to perform those duties.
LauraGregorich · October 8, 2012 at 2:52 pm
I find this topic very interesting; it is incredible how some things are perceived in our dreams are so similar to real and everyday life. If we could learn in our sleep, it could maximize our time spent during the day to where we could experience what we learned or apply it in some type of interactive way. I’ve heard of parents playing classical music while their young child, some even babies, are sleeping- I think this was once said that their child would be “smarter” as they age. I don’t know if this is true, but if someone could really learn while they sleep, it could change learning techniques and how people gather and obtain various types of information. If so, I would be curious to see how much information is retained, and how accurate is it once the person is awake.
BenSimon · October 13, 2012 at 2:47 pm
I had no idea just how complex bats are until reading the final topic, though people tend to overlook any positive or intelligent aspects of undesirable animals, particularly rodents and even pachyderms. We also tend to either overlook or overanalyze dreams (I once read a book listing one thing that each aspect or object in a dream symbolizes, which reminded me in a negative way of Sibyl Trelawney, though some of the information was interesting). However, I am not surprised that dreams do carry information that we can learn, as I have experienced this before and have used it to my benefit at least once.
Comments are closed.