Word: brained
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What are you doing when you aren't doing anything at all? If you said "nothing," then you have just passed a test in logic and flunked a test in neuroscience. When people perform mental tasks--adding numbers, comparing shapes, identifying faces--different areas of their brains become active, and brain scans show these active areas as brightly colored squares on an otherwise dull gray background. But researchers have recently discovered that when these areas of our brains light up, other areas go dark. This dark network (which comprises regions in the frontal, parietal and medial temporal lobes...
Perhaps the most startling fact about the dark network isn't what it does but how often it does it. Neuroscientists refer to it as the brain's default mode, which is to say that we spend more of our time away from the present than in it. People typically overestimate how often they are in the moment because they rarely take notice when they take leave. It is only when the environment demands our attention--a dog barks, a child cries, a telephone rings--that our mental time machines switch themselves off and deposit us with a bump...
...there's a much higher rate of PTSD in those with paraplegia (paralysis of the lower body) than in those who suffer quadriplegia (paralysis of all four limbs). "It doesn't make any psychological sense," says Pitman. But it makes physiological sense because quadriplegia severs the link between the brain and the adrenal glands...
...streamline the process. Indeed, says Davis, at least one study showed patients on D-cycloserine getting as much benefit in two sessions as would normally take about eight. "That's exactly what they're finding in obsessive-compulsive trials too," he says. There are, moreover, a number of other brain receptors and chemicals that show promise in accelerating the formation of new associations. Says Davis: "People are now working on different targets because we know so little about the process. What we have now could be the tip of the iceberg...
...that's hardly surprising. Even without anything approaching a complete understanding of the complexities of the human brain, neurologists and psychopharmacologists have come up with dozens of medications to treat schizophrenia, depression and other disorders. The next batch of psychoactive drugs could provide ammunition against the even more mysterious disorders of memory...