A Head Injury Turns A Man Into A Musical Savant

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Less than six years ago, Derek Amato had only mediocre guitar skills. But after suffering a concussion – and never having a lesson – he became a piano-playing sensation. NBC's John Yang reports.

Head Injury Turns Man Into Musical Savant -- MSNBC

When Derek Amato crashed headfirst into the hard bottom of a pool, he was scared about what he might have done to his brain. But amazingly the fallout from that accident wasn’t all bad. Along with the headaches and other post-concussion symptoms, the accident brought Amato an unexpected gift: it turned him into a musical savant.

Although Amato had always loved music, he’d never been serious about playing any instrument before the head injury. Amato dabbled a bit with guitar before the accident but described his musical ability to TODAY as “on a scale of 1 to 10 . . . like a 2.5, close to 3.”

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My Comment: Truly incredible.

It's Good To Think - But Not Too Much, Scientists Say

Image: People who think more about their decisions have more brain cells in their frontal lobes

From The BBC:

People who think more about whether they are right have more cells in an area of the brain known as the frontal lobes.

UK scientists, writing in Science, looked at how brain size varied depending on how much people thought about decisions.

But a nationwide survey recently found that some people think too much about life.

These people have poorer memories, and they may also be depressed.

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You Won't Find Consciousness In The Brain

Consciousness in action? It is tempting to think that's what is going on - but wrong
(Image: Hans Neleman/Getty)

From New Scientist:

MOST neuroscientists, philosophers of the mind and science journalists feel the time is near when we will be able to explain the mystery of human consciousness in terms of the activity of the brain. There is, however, a vocal minority of neurosceptics who contest this orthodoxy. Among them are those who focus on claims neuroscience makes about the preciseness of correlations between indirectly observed neural activity and different mental functions, states or experiences.

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Modern Life Causes Brain Overload, Study Finds

People are bombarded with the equivalent of 34 gigabytes of information a day.

From the Telegraph:

The wealth of media in modern life means the average person is bombarded with enough information every day to overload a laptop computer, a study has found.

Through email, the internet, television and other media, people are deluged with around 100,500 words a day – equivalent to 23 words per second, researchers claim.

Scientists from the University of San Diego, California, who conducted the research, believe that the information overload may be having a detrimental effect on our brains.

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Time Travel Through The Brain

From Technology Review:

Over the last 100 years, the way we visualize and understand the complexity of the brain has evolved.

Over the 100-year history of modern neuroscience, the way we think about the brain has evolved with the sophistication of the techniques available to study it. Improvements in microscope design and manufacture, together with the development of cell-staining techniques, afforded neuroscientists their first glimpse at the specialized cells that make up the nervous system. Microscopes with more magnifying power enabled them to probe nerve cells in greater detail, revealing distinct compartments. Newer techniques expose the connections between nerve cells, revealing the complex organization of the brain.

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How Does the Brain Use So Much Energy? Not in Electrical Signals

From Discover Magazine:

Experiments conducted on squid brains in the early days of neuroscience created misunderstandings about the workings of the human brain that have persisted for 70 years, according to a new study. While the squid experiments did shed light on how messages are transmitted between brain cells with electrochemical signals (and led to a Nobel Prize for the experimenters), researchers are just now realizing that the results gave scientists a confused idea about the efficiency of neurons.

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Earlier Model of Human Brain's Energy Usage Underestimated Its Efficiency

A MODEL OF EFFICIENCY?: That mammals' brains appear to conserve energy on the front end of synapse communication leads researchers to believe the advance helped allow bigger brains to develop. ISTOCKPHOTO/KTSIMAGE

From Scientific American:

A long-held model of the brain's efficiency crumbles as researchers find that one function of mammals' brains consumes a lot less energy than previously assumed. Now, basic measurements of neural activity--from brain energy budgets to fMRI results--may have to be reassessed.

The human brain is an incredible energy drain. Taking up only about 2 percent of the body's mass, the organ uses more than a fifth of bodily energy. Ever more accurate calculations of its energy budget at the level of the neuron (nerve cell) are important to researchers ranging from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) analysts to evolutionary biologists.

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Brain Cells Slicker Than We Thought

From New Scientist:

Rat brain cells waste little energy when talking to one another. That finding might not sound unusual, but it challenges the long-standing view that brain cells are extremely inefficient at sending signals.

In 1939, Alan Hodgkin of the University of Cambridge and Andrew Huxley of University College London experimented on nerve cells from the giant squid. They concluded that the energy of electrical signals sent along axons – the cells' "cables", each 1 millimetre in diameter in the giant squid – was four times the theoretical minimum.

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Where Does Sex Live In The Brain? From Top To Bottom.

Image: iStockphoto

From Discover Magazine:

Neuroscientists explore the mind's sexual side and discover that desire is not quite what we thought it was.

On April 11, 1944, a doctor named T. C. Erickson addressed the Chicago Neurological Society about a patient he called Mrs. C. W. At age 43 she had started to wake up many nights feeling as if she were having sex—or as she put it to Erickson, feeling “hot all over.” As the years passed her hot spells struck more often, even in the daytime, and began to be followed by seizures that left her unable to speak. Erickson examined Mrs. C. W. when she was 54 and diagnosed her with nymphomania. He prescribed a treatment that was shockingly common at the time: He blasted her ovaries with X-rays.

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Your Brain Is Organized Like a City

Brains and cities, as they get bigger, do so based on similar mathematical rules. Image credit: Credit: Rensselaer/Mark Changizi

From Live Science:

A big city might seem chaotic, but somehow everything gets where it needs to go and the whole thing manages to function on most days, even if it all seems a little worse for the wear at the end of the day. Sound a bit like your brain?

Neurobiologist Mark Changizi sees strikingly real similarities between the two.

Changizi and colleagues propose that cities and brains are organized similarly, and that the invisible hand of evolution has shaped the brain just as people have indirectly shaped cities. It's all driven by the need for organization and efficiency, the researchers say.

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Babies' Brains Churning With Activity

Electrodes recorded brain activity while infants grabbed for toys. The same brain area showed activity whether infants grabbed for a toy themselves or watched an adult do the same. Credit: Michael Crabtree.

From Live Science:

The look of amazement in the eyes of an infant suggests the wheels are churning away inside that noggin. New research confirms they are. Scientists have shown that when 9-month-olds watch people reach for objects, the motor region in their brains gets activated, as if the babies were doing the reaching themselves.

The brain ability is likely due to so-called mirror neurons, which fire both when we do an action ourselves, and when we watch others do a similar action. While such neurons have only been directly measured in monkeys, scientists think they exist in adult humans, and now in infants.

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Traffic Jam In Brain Causes Schizophrenia Symptoms; First Mouse To Develop Disease As Teenager, Just Like Humans

There are fewer pathways (green strands) for information to flow between neurons in the brain of a mouse bred to exhibit symptoms of schizophrenia compared to a normal mouse. Fewer pathways make it hard for information to flow between neurons and results in the symptoms of schizophrenia. (Credit: Peter Penzes, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (Aug. 11, 2009) — Schizophrenia waits silently until a seemingly normal child becomes a teenager or young adult. Then it swoops down and derails a young life.

Scientists have not understood what causes the severe mental disorder, which affects up to 1 percent of the population and results in hallucinations, memory loss and social withdrawal.

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Adult Brain Can Change Within Seconds

The human brain can adapt to changing demands even in adulthood, but MIT neuroscientists have now found evidence of it changing with unsuspected speed. Their findings suggest that the brain has a network of silent connections that underlie its plasticity. (Credit: iStockphoto/Sebastian Kaulitzki)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (July 30, 2009) — The human brain can adapt to changing demands even in adulthood, but MIT neuroscientists have now found evidence of it changing with unsuspected speed. Their findings suggest that the brain has a network of silent connections that underlie its plasticity.

The brain’s tendency to call upon these connections could help explain the curious phenomenon of “referred sensations,” in which a person with an amputated arm “feels” sensations in the missing limb when he or she is touched on the face. Scientists believe this happens because the part of the brain that normally receives input from the arm begins “referring” to signals coming from a nearby brain region that receives information from the face.

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Brain's Organization Switches As Children Become Adults

The organizational structures in the human brain undergo a major shift during the transition from childhood to adulthood. Brain regions are represented by circles, with the outer color of the circle symbolizing where in the brain each region is physically located while the inner color represents the region's function. (Credit: Image courtesy of Washington University School of Medicine)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 17, 2009) — Any child confronting an outraged parent demanding to know "What were you thinking?" now has a new response: "Scientists have discovered that my brain is organized differently from yours."

But all is not well for errant kids. The same new study also provides parents with a rejoinder: While the overarching organization scheme differs, one of the most important core principals of adult brain organization is present in the brains of children as young as 7.

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Brain's Problem-solving Function At Work When We Daydream

These are fMRI brain scans from UBC Mind Wandering Study.
(Credit: Courtesy of Kalina Christoff)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 12, 2009) — A new University of British Columbia study finds that our brains are much more active when we daydream than previously thought.

The study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds that activity in numerous brain regions increases when our minds wander. It also finds that brain areas associated with complex problem-solving – previously thought to go dormant when we daydream – are in fact highly active during these episodes.

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Brain's Willpower Spot Found

From Live Science:

When healthy eaters choose broccoli over a Butterfinger, they use a small region in their brains that indulgers don't use.

That bundle of cells is a clue to the biology of willpower, a new study finds. Like a wagging finger in our heads, the region admonishes us to consider long-term benefits over instant rewards when we make decisions.

"This is the first time people have looked at the mechanism of self-control in people who are making real-life decisions," said Todd Hare, a Caltech neuroscientist who led the study.

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Brain Has "Moving" Parts

From Scientific American:

A study in the journal Science reveals that the brain region responsible for the intention to move the body also experiences the movement--but a distinct brain region controls the actual movement. Karen Hopkin reports.

[The following is an exact transcript of this podcast.]

For every action, there’s a reaction. And for many movements we make, there’s an intention: we think about moving, and we move. Now a study published in the May 8th issue of the journal Science suggests that the experience of moving is all in your mind. Because the part of the brain that’s active when you intend to move is the same part that lets you feel like you did.

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Mechanisms Of Self-Control Pinpointed In Brain

This 3-D projection of a transparent brain shows the regions of activation: the ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) is in red, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is in green. Activity in the vmPFC reflects the value assigned to foods during decision-making. When self-control is exercised, DLPFC activity increases and appears to interact with the activity in the vmPFC to increase the influence of health considerations. (Credit: Caltech/Todd Hare)

From Science Daily:

ScienceDaily (May 1, 2009) — When you're on a diet, deciding to skip your favorite calorie-laden foods and eat something healthier takes a whole lot of self-control--an ability that seems to come easier to some of us than others. Now, scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) have uncovered differences in the brains of people who are able to exercise self-control versus those who find it almost impossible.

The key? While everyone uses the same single area of the brain to make these sorts of value-laden decisions, a second brain region modulates the activity of the first region in people with good self-control, allowing them to weigh more abstract factors--healthiness, for example--in addition to basic desires such as taste to make a better overall choice.

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Magic And The Brain: Teller Reveals The Neuroscience Of Illusion

From Wired News:

One of the first tricks in Penn and Teller's Las Vegas show begins when Teller—the short, quiet one—strolls onstage with a lit cigarette, inhales, drops it to the floor, and stamps it out. Then he takes another cigarette from his suit pocket and lights it.

No magic there, right? But then Teller pivots so the audience can see him from the other side. He goes through the same set of motions, except this time everything is different: Much of what just transpired, the audience now perceives, was a charade, a carefully orchestrated stack of lies. He doesn't stamp out the first cigarette—he palms it, then puts it in his ear. There is no second cigarette; it's a pencil stub. The smoke from the first butt is real, but the lighter used on the pencil is actually a flashlight. Yet the illusion is executed so perfectly that every step looks real, even when you're shown that it is not.

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How To Wake Up Slumbering Minds

From The Wall Street Journal:

Will the discoveries of neuroscientists help us to think, learn and remember?

We are in the midst of an explosion of knowledge about how the human mind and brain work -- how memory comes in many different types, each stored in a different part of the brain; how our minds constantly process information outside our conscious awareness; how differences in brain function help to define differences in our personalities. A lot of this new knowledge raises provocative questions, not least about human nature.

But as disgruntled students have been saying for ages: How are we ever going to use this stuff? Chemistry can boast of miracle drugs, and genetics has done wonders for our food supply and for medical diagnosis. What about psychology and neuroscience? Shouldn't research on learning and memory and thinking help us to learn, remember and think better?

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