Word: activationism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Recent developments in dream research won't make sense without first touching on the academic thunderbolt of 1977, when a paper by two Harvard neurophysiologists, Allan Hobson and Robert McCarley, ran in the American Journal of Psychiatry. At the time, Sigmund Freud's theory of dreams (which holds, in part...
While hugely influential, Hobson and McCarley's Activation-Synthesis model attracted hordes of critics, who protested that many dreams aren't merely cognitive fragments nor a succession of chaotic images, but so story-like, sequential and dramatic that the thinking brain must surely have played a more substantial role in...
The pair knew from their previous research that, presented with certain stimuli, depressed bipolar patients don't use the prefrontal (or higher thinking) part of their brain as much as healthy subjects do, instead recruiting other (more hardwired) parts to compensate. And they found a similar pattern of activation in...
Shown faces expressing fear, the healthy brains lit up predictably in the lozenge-shaped amygdala, an emotional center involved in recognizing expressions and tones of voice. But with the patients, the same images caused less activation of the amygdala and more of several other areas including the hippocampus, which encodes...
Spring break is right around the corner, which means figuring out the best way to make an escape to our vacation destination of choice. For the fortunate, this will mean a tropical destination far enough away from Cambridge’s winter wasteland that it requires air travel, and thus...