Back in 2009, two of my daughter met me in Greece for a presentation we were doing! Since it was our first trip here, we enjoyed Athens and the sites! Here we are atop the area hosting the Parthenon and overlooking their beautiful city! #Greece #Athens
Here is what we are reading today:
“…Neuro-physiological methods were adopted to measure subcortical and cortical responses to speech in the brains of two groups of adolescents in a high school in the Chicago area. One group took part in group musical training and one group took part in a Junior Reserve Officer Training Corps programme. Enrolment on to one of these two programmes was part of the curriculum of the schools with which the lead researcher, Adam Tierney of Northwestern University, worked….”
“… Other studies that compare monkeys and humans have revealed differences in the brain’s anatomy, for example, but not differences that could explain where humans’ abstract abilities come from, say neuroscientists.
“This gives us a powerful clue about what is special about our minds,” says psychologist Gary Marcus at New York University. “Nothing is more important than understanding how we got to be how we are.”…”
“…in a new Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School study published in Cell Reports, researchers found that when the hormone glucagon like peptide-1 (GLP-1) was reduced in the central nervous system of laboratory mice, they overate and consumed more high fat food.
“The mice in which the GLP-1 deficiency was induced ate beyond the need for calories and showed an increase preference for high fat food,” says Vincent Mirabella, a medical school and doctoral student who co-authored the study. “Conversely when we enhanced GLP-1 signaling in the brains of mice we were able to block the preference of high fat foods.”…”
“… Nicolas Dumay of the University of Exeter explains: “Sleep almost doubles our chances of remembering previously unrecalled material. The post-sleep boost in memory accessibility may indicate that some memories are sharpened overnight. This supports the notion that, while asleep, we actively rehearse information flagged as important. More research is needed into the functional significance of this rehearsal and whether, for instance, it allows memories to be accessible in a wider range of contexts, hence making them more useful.”…”
“While working on her doctoral thesis in Stern’s work group, Daniela Nussbaumer also found evidence of this effect for the first time in a group of people possessing above-average intelligence for tasks involving what is referred to as working memory. “We measured the electrical activity in the brains of university students, enabling us to identify differences in brain activity between people with slightly above-average and considerably above-average IQs,” explained Nussbaumer. Past studies conducted to identify the effect of neural efficiency have generally used groups of people that exhibit extreme variations in intelligence.”
“…When people listen to speech, neural activity is correlated with each word’s “sound envelope”—the fluctuation of the audio signal over time corresponds to the fluctuation of neural activity over time. In the new study, Lorenzo Magrassi, a neurosurgeon at the University of Pavia in Italy, and his colleagues made electrocorticographic (ECoG) recordings from 16 individuals. The researchers measured neural activity directly from the surface of the language-generating structure known as Broca’s area as subjects read text silently or aloud. (This measurement was made possible by the fact that participants were undergoing brain surgery while awake.)…”
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