Word: neuroscientists
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...called procedural memory, which is needed for any task that requires repetition and practice. Remembering a fact, like the name of the first U.S. President, is an example of declarative memory, a different kind of capability that apparently is not affected by REM sleep. Says Robert Stickgold, a cognitive neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School: "We were basically naive about memory...
...doesn't take a neuroscientist to figure out where that leads. After a few days, the number of new synapses in the brain would require more energy than the body could possibly supply. So some of those connections must be weakened--and the best guess is that it happens during slow-wave sleep...
Other researchers have taken the science in a different direction, looking not for the genes that code for spirituality but for how that spirituality plays out in the brain. Neuroscientist Andrew Newberg of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine has used several types of imaging systems to watch the brains of subjects as they meditate or pray. By measuring blood flow, he determines which regions are responsible for the feelings the volunteers experience. The deeper that people descend into meditation or prayer, Newberg found, the more active the frontal lobe and the limbic system become. The frontal lobe...
After a conversation with a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, I developed a scheme. I would collect data on brain activity while love-smitten subjects performed two separate tasks: looking at a photograph of his or her beloved and looking at a "neutral" photograph of an acquaintance who generated no positive or negative romantic feelings. Meanwhile, I would use a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to take pictures of the subject's brain. The fMRI machine records blood flow in the brain. It is based in part on a simple principle: brain cells that are active...
...that it suggests that the extra girth can actually have a calming effect on the brain. Something in the abdominal fat--the researchers aren't sure what--seems to lower the rats' production of cortisol and other stress hormones. "This is absolutely a working hypothesis," says Mary Dallman, the neuroscientist who led the UCSF experiments. "But everything we see says there's a feedback from the belly fat to the brain...