Word: cortexes
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...When a hungry person is hit with such multisensory stimuli, it's no surprise that the brain starts screaming chow time, and the PET scan showed that it was screaming loudly. Appetite and hunger are processed in a lot of regions - most notably the orbital frontal cortex, which is linked to self-control; the striatum, which is linked to motivation; the hippocampus, which is linked to memory; and the amygdala, which is linked to powerful emotions. In Wang's subjects, all these regions were ringing the dinner bell...
Happily, the brain's other defining characteristic is that it is flexible. Once we know our weaknesses, we can compensate for them. The part of your brain associated with conscious thought, called the prefrontal cortex, has a direct line into the amygdala and can quiet it down. This requires effort - and creativity. "The most productive thing is to recognize that it's natural to feel anxiety in the context of unpredictability. A rat would be going through the same stuff," says Forsyth, and he means that in a reassuring way. "And then sit with it. Do not let your feelings...
...studies showing that when blacks and whites are flashed pictures of faces from the other race so quickly that the subjects weren't consciously aware of seeing them, their amygdalae reacted predictably. When the images were flashed more slowly so that subjects could process them consciously, the anterior cingulate cortex and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex--regions that temper automatic responses--kicked...
...hard to get a teenager off the couch and working on that all important college essay? You might blame it on their immature nucleus accumbens, a region in the frontal cortex that directs motivation to seek rewards. James Bjork at the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism has been using fMRI to study motivation in a challenging gambling game. He found that teenagers have less activity in this region than adults do. "If adolescents have a motivational deficit, it may mean that they are prone to engaging in behaviors that have either a really high excitement factor...
Schizophrenia, on the other hand, makes its appearance at about the time the prefrontal cortex is getting pruned. "Many people have speculated that schizophrenia may be due to an abnormality in the pruning process," says Teicher. "Another hypothesis is that schizophrenia has a much earlier, prenatal origin, but as the brain prunes, it gets unmasked." MRI studies have shown that while the average teenager loses about 15% of his cortical gray matter, those who develop schizophrenia lose as much...