Word: cortexes
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Sophisticated brain-scan studies by Jay Giedd at the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) have shown dramatic changes throughout the teenage years as excess gray matter is pruned from the prefrontal cortex - the seat of higher-order thinking and making judgments (like not smoking weed right before your chemistry exam). Meanwhile, behavioral studies have shown what every parent already knows: teens have poor control over impulses and a tendency toward risk taking. Still, relatively little is known about how such changes affect learning or what happens at a biochemical level in the brain as teens go through their addled...
...that pay a price. Lindstrom admits to being mystified by TV ads that give viewers close-up food-porn shots of meat on a grill but accompany that with generic jangly guitar music. One of his earlier brain studies showed that numerous regions, including the insula and orbital frontal cortex, jump into action when such discordance occurs, trying to make sense...
...understand that you've had your brain scanned with an MRI and it has an unusual structure that reflects all this visual activity. A. I have this great, big, huge Internet trunkline into the visual cortex that's twice the size of the [normal] controls. But I want to emphasize that not everyone on the autism spectrum is a visual thinker. Some are mathematic-patterns kinds of thinkers. Some are word people. People on the spectrum tend to be specialist thinkers - good at one thing and bad at others. (See six tips for traveling with an autistic child...
...reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2009, Corbetta's team found that spontaneous brain activity in two separate regions of the cerebral cortex appeared to be correlated after the participants had learned the visual task, but were not linked beforehand. The brain activity in those who were best at finding the hidden pattern onscreen was most strongly related. "Our test was like a video game. What this research shows is that we have a very dynamic landscape of ongoing activity [in the brain] even when we are at rest," notes Corbetta...
...viewed landscapes, but was much lower after they looked at faces. People tend to be much better at remembering landscapes than faces, so it makes sense that those differences would be mirrored in the brain-activity levels during rest periods, says Stevens, whose paper was published online in Cerebral Cortex in December...