Word: neuroscientists
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...Stanford neuroscientist Brian Knutson has zeroed in on a more primitive aspect of making choices. "We come equipped to assess potentially good things and potentially bad things," he says. "There should be stuff in your brain that promotes your survival, whether you have learned those things or not--such as being scared of the dark or the unknown." Knutson calls these anticipatory emotions, and he believes that even before the cognitive areas of the brain are brought in to assess options, these more intuitive and emotional regions are already priming the decision-making process and can foreshadow the outcome. Such...
...Neuroscientists usually scan people's brains looking for tumors or aneurysms or to localize the extent of physical trauma. But in a series of experiments performed at New York University a few years ago, scientists went looking for racism. When they showed subjects pictures of unfamiliar white and black faces and scanned their brains with functional MRI machines, they could see heightened activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain that corresponds with emotional arousal. Moreover, the brain activity matched up with psychological tests designed to measure unconscious racism. "This technology is probably not ready for prime time...
Monkeys experience binocular rivalry. They can learn to press a button every time their perception flips, while their brains are impaled with electrodes that record any change in activity. Neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis found that the earliest way stations for visual input in the back of the brain barely budged as the monkeys' consciousness flipped from one state to another. Instead, it was a region that sits further down the information stream and that registers coherent shapes and objects that tracks the monkeys' awareness. Now this doesn't mean that this place on the underside of the brain...
...exercise that would seem trivial, even silly, were McColl not lying on her back inside a brain-scanning machine. She's one of the first participants in a research project designed by Lisa Aziz-Zadeh, a neuroscientist at U.S.C.'s Brain and Creativity Institute, to test an intriguing question at the heart of a new field of brain research: Do areas of gray matter respond to the emotional contours of speech produced by others in the same way they do when we ourselves are speaking...
...treatment given to Parkinson's patients who don't respond to medication. A neurosurgeon implants a set ofelectrodes deep into the victim's brain, where they give off little jolts of electricity to disrupt the involuntary tremors and other symptoms of the disease. But according to Martha Farah, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, at least one patient routinely chooses which electrical contact to activate depending on how she wants to feel: calm for every day, more "revved up" for a party...