Word: frontal
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Most folks probably couldn't locate their parietal lobe with a map and a compass. For the record, it's at the top of your head - aft of the frontal lobe, fore of the occipital lobe, north of the temporal lobe. What makes the parietal lobe special is not where it lives but what it does - particularly concerning matters of faith...
...processing preference. Infrared imaging is typically used to detect heat, which is just what the researchers were looking for. The volunteers were shown pictures of different pairs of drinks from their original list and asked to mentally decide which one they liked better while Chau and Luu monitored their frontal-lobe activity...
...have to be trained to use them and must rehearse a random, energy-intensive brain task like mentally singing a song in order to light up a pattern of brain activity that sends a signal to the researchers. The new technique extracts information much more directly by targeting the frontal lobe's preference functions. What's more, while other studies have required the subjects to activate their brains over and over again so that researchers could average the subtle changes in their scans across many trials, Chau and Luu's technique is precise enough that they needed to look only...
...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...
...guided Julia Roberts to a statuette of her own (for Erin Brockovich) and launched an action-movie franchise (the Ocean's films). More important, he's let his interests range far and wide, across different genres and different kinds of movies: intellectual science fiction (Solaris), quirky ensemble comedy (Full Frontal) and defiantly obscurantist conundrum (Schizopolis). His films can toady to an audience's prejudices (Erin Brockovich) or virtually say, "Don't watch me" (Bubble, which, to be fair, was very worth watching...