Word: braine
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...found that gene therapy had restored partial vision to five children and seven adults with a congenital eye disease that causes blindness. And a paper published earlier this month in Science reported the successful treatment of two children with ALD, or adrenoleukodystrophy - a neurological disorder that leads to progressive brain damage and death in two to five years...
That knowledge also helps the brain figure out how much pleasure it can expect from future experiences and, therefore, influences virtually any decision you make about what you might like or not like: whether you should buy the red shirt or black one, whether you'll enjoy watching Top Chef over Mad Men, whether you should leave your job or whether you should move in with your boyfriend...
...paper in the journal Current Biology shows for the first time that by tinkering with levels of dopamine in the brain, researchers were be able to influence people's future decisions in a reliable, predictable way. Led by Tali Sharot and Tamara Shiner of the the Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging at University College London, scientists presented 61 healthy volunteers with 80 different vacation locations, such as Brazil, Thailand and Greece, and asked the volunteers to rate how happy they thought they would be visiting each place. Later, 29 of the participants were given 100 mg of levodopa...
...years trying to understand the morality (or amorality) of seeking pleasure. Most of philosophy begins with the question of what defines the (or a) good life. But what if the answer to what makes us happy comes down to how much of a particular chemical is circulating in our brain at any particular moment...
...neurotransmitter dopamine isn't quite that powerful, but evidence has been mounting for the past 40 years that its activity is key to helping the brain recognize experiences that cause pleasure. The more dopamine a certain event (having sex or eating ice cream, say) triggers, the more strongly that event gets hard-wired in the brain, and the more intensely your brain drives you to revisit it. (See the best inventions...