Word: brained
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Marketers already seem to know a lot about how we think, but what if they could actually watch our brains work as they test their products? A recent experiment by Read Montague, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, may be laying the groundwork for just that. In an experiment last year, he scanned volunteers' brains as they drank samples of Coke and Pepsi. When the colas were not identified, the tasters showed no particular preference for either. But when they were shown the iconic red-and-white label, they expressed a huge preference for Coke, irrespective of which cola...
...ready for an Era of the Brain. New scanning techniques are making it easier to determine how our minds work and creating hopes in the corporate world that companies can make new connections with customers--and duplicate the Coke effect. The breakthrough behind all that is the development of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the latest in neuroimaging technology, which displays not only the structure of the brain but also how it actually functions, by measuring its blood flow. In the scans, specific areas of the brain light up as various mental processes occur. Although the technology is still...
What's creating the most excitement is a project called the International Consortium for Brain Mapping, a 12-year collaborative effort to create an atlas of the human brain, based on scans of 7,000 brains from three continents. Coordinated by John Mazziotta, who runs the Ahmanson-Lovelace Brain Mapping Center at UCLA, the brain atlas is due to be released online next year. Data are being stored and analyzed on a supercomputer at UCLA with 1 petabyte of capacity--equivalent to a book with 250 billion pages. "They are laying the groundwork for all other brain studies to come...
...menstruating. But as data presented in San Diego recently at the annual meeting of the North American Menopause Society make clear, when you go on hormone therapy?if you choose to do so?can make a big difference in the effects on the body and in particular on the brain...
...There is, says Dr. Declan Murphy of King's College London, "substantial evidence that if you use estrogens around menopause, it can have a beneficial effect on your brain age." Several (but not all) studies show significant improvements in memory and cognition. If you start taking estrogen in your 60s, however, the brain seems to suffer a bit. As always, you have to balance the risks and the benefits. But these findings show how little, even now, researchers truly understand about the role estrogen plays in women's bodies...