Part of the Research Team on their own time in Europe!
Here is what I am reading today:
“Their findings have implications for individuals suffering from insomnia related to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and other anxiety disorders who are prescribed zolpidem (Ambien) to help them sleep.
The study—”Pharmacologically Increasing Sleep Spindles Enhances Recognition for Negative and High-arousal Memories”—appears in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. It was funded by a National Institutes of Health career award to Sara C. Mednick, assistant professor of psychology at UC Riverside, of $651,999 over five years.”
“”This study may have solved one of those mysteries by showing how certain stem cells play a role in the brain’s ability to heal itself to differing degrees after stroke or other trauma,” says study author Michael Chopp, Ph.D., scientific director of the Henry Ford Neuroscience Institute and vice chairman of the department of Neurology at Henry Ford Hospital.”
“Hot? Or not? The lightning-quick spark that triggers desire when you see an attractive face is kindled within a deep brain region called the ventral midbrain, associated with processing reward. Now, researchers have discovered a way to stoke that fire with 2 milliamps of electrical current. Using a technique called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which passes current through the brain between two electrodes on the scalp, the team asked 19 volunteers to rate the attractiveness of two sets of computer-generated male and female Caucasian faces with neutral expressions (examples above) before and after the activity in their ventral midbrains ramped up.”
“Now, a team of researchers led by Tracy L. Bale, PhD, associate professor of neuroscience in the Perelman School of Medicine Department of Psychiatry and the School of Veterinary Medicine Department of Animal Biology have shown that stress on preadolescent and adult male mice induced an epigenetic mark in their sperm that reprogrammed their offspring’s hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, a region of the brain that governs responses to stress. Surprisingly, both male and female offspring had abnormally low reactivity to stress.”
“It was a summer evening when Tony Cornell tried to make the residents of Cambridge, England see a ghost. He got dressed up in a sheet and walked through a public park waving his arms about. Meanwhile his assistants observed the bystanders for any hint that they noticed something strange. No, this wasn’t Candid Camera. Cornell was a researcher interested in the paranormal. The idea was first to get people to notice the spectacle, and then see how they understood what their eyes were telling them. Would they see the apparition as a genuine ghost or as something more mundane, like a bloke in a bed sheet?
The plan was foiled when not a single bystander so much as raised an eye brow. Several cows did notice, however, and they followed Cornell on his ghostly rambles. Was it just a fluke, or did people “not want to see” the besheeted man, as Cornell concluded in his 1959 report?
Okay, that stunt was not a very good experiment, but twenty years later the eminent psychologist Ulric Neisser did a better job.”
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