Word: braine
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Using several different types of brain scans, Pruessner has shown that people who test below average on self-esteem also tend to have smaller-than-average hippocampi. The differences become clear only when you compare groups of people, Pruessner notes, so you can't look at any single person's brain scan and determine whether he or she has low self-esteem. But when you look at overall results, they suggest that a smaller hippocampus simply has more trouble persuading the rest of the brain to turn off the stress response...
...exercise that would seem trivial, even silly, were McColl not lying on her back inside a brain-scanning machine. She's one of the first participants in a research project designed by Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, a neuroscientist at U.S.C.'s Brain and Creativity Institute, to test an intriguing question at the heart of a new field of brain research: Do areas of gray matter respond to the emotional contours of speech produced by others in the same way they do when we ourselves are speaking...
...question is one few researchers would have thought of asking a decade ago. But that was before University of Parma neuroscientist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues began publishing the eyebrow-raising results of experiments they had been conducting with macaques. The Italian scientists were monitoring the monkeys' brain activity--observing how neurons in the premotor cortex buzzed with activity as the animals grasped a piece of food--when something strange kept happening. The monkeys would be sitting still, doing nothing in particular, and one of the researchers would pick up some raisins or sunflower seeds in order to place them...
...Brain scans have now indirectly established the presence of similar monkey-see-monkey-do neurological activity in human subjects, and mirror neurons, to use the term the University of Parma team coined, have emerged as a compelling biological explanation for a broad range of brain activity, from a newborn's instant response to a mother's smile to a movie audience's gasps during a particularly effective chase scene...
...neural networks with mirror properties may be responsible for the empathetic response that forms the root of social behavior. They may also help explain how human language emerged from the more primitive communication systems of monkeys and apes. Almost seven years ago, Vilayanur Ramachandran, head of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California at San Diego, went so far as to declare that "mirror neurons will do for psychology what DNA did for biology: they will provide a unifying framework and help explain a host of mental abilities...