There's An Elephant In The Room - It's Called "Essential Hypertension"
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During sleep, our perception of the environment decreases. However the extent to which the human brain responds to surrounding noises during sleep remains unclear. In a study published this week in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers from University of Liège (Belgium) used brain imaging to study responses to sounds during sleep. In this study, the research team led by Dr Thanh Dang-Vu and Prof. Pierre Maquet (Cyclotron Research Center, University of Liège) shows that brain activity induced by sounds during sleep closely depends on brain waves that constitute our sleep.
German researchers have used drivers’ brain signals, for the first time, to assist in braking, providing much quicker reaction times and a potential solution to the thousands of car accidents that are caused by human error. Using electroencephalography (EEG) – a technique that attaches electrodes to the scalp – the researchers demonstrated that the mind-reading system, accompanied with modern traffic sensors, could detect a driver’s intention to break 130 milliseconds faster than a normal brake pedal response. The publishers made the original article available for free for 30 days (registration required; check the end of this report for a download link). Included in this report is a really cool video demonstration of an actual participant hooked up to the brainwave monitoring system and driving simulator.
“Brain cap” technology being developed at the University of Maryland allows users to turn their thoughts into motion. Associate Professor of Kinesiology José ‘Pepe’ L. Contreras-Vidal and his team have created a non-invasive, sensor-lined cap with neural interface software that soon could be used to control computers, robotic prosthetic limbs, motorized wheelchairs and even digital avatars. Included in this report is a video interview with several of the researchers involved in this interesting line of research.
A random-assignment controlled study published today in Mind & Brain, The Journal of Psychiatry found improved brain functioning and decreased symptoms of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, ADHD, in students practicing the Transcendental Meditation® (TM) technique. The paper, “ADHD, Brain Functioning, and Transcendental Meditation Practice,” is the second published study demonstrating Transcendental Meditation’s ability to help students with attention-related difficulties. Included in this report is a link to a free digital version of this journal that includes the referenced study.
Every day we have to make decisions that involve evaluating or choosing between options, often without much information to go on. So how we do it? How do we prevent analysis paralysis? Psychological theory suggests that we often rely on the recognition heuristic, choosing the option that we recognize over the one we do not. So, as psychological scientist Christian Frings points out, if we have to predict whether Roger Federer or Michael Berrer will win a tennis match, we will probably stick with Federer because he is a well-known name.
The assumption that we human beings can control and intentionally forget unwanted memories has been controversial ever since Freud asserted it at the beginning of the 20th century. Now, psychology researcher Gerd Thomas Waldhauser has shown in neuroimaging studies that Freud was correct in his assumptions: in the same way as we can control our motor impulses (we can, for example, rapidly instruct the brain not to catch a cactus which is falling from a table), we can control our memory.
In the late 1990s, Jane Anderson was working as a landscape architect. That meant she did not work much in the winter, and she struggled with seasonal affective disorder in the dreary Minnesota winter months. She decided to try meditation and noticed a change within a month. Her experience inspired a new study which will be published in an upcoming issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, which finds changes in brain activity after only five weeks of meditation training.
Researchers are now discovering that children as young as 3 years of age can meet the clinical criteria for major depressive disorder (MDD). What is more, they demonstrate patterns of brain activation very similar to those seen in adults diagnosed with the disorder. Take for instance, Callie. From a distance, she appears to be a normal if quiet 5-year-old girl. But when faced with a toy that blows large soap bubbles — an activity that makes the vast majority of kindergarteners squeal and leap with delight — she is uninterested in popping the bubbles or taking a turn with the gun herself. When offered dolls or other toys, she is equally unmoved.
The International Society For Neurofeedback And Research (ISNR) will hold its 2011 annual conference in Phoenix, Arizona. ISNR conferences are the premier international meetings for healthcare professionals, students, teachers, and researchers who are interested in psychophysiology, particularly peripheral biofeedback, neurofeedback, and quantitative EEG (QEEG).
There is a significant need for objective tests that could improve clinical prediction of future psychosis. In this new study, the researchers followed a group of people clinically at high risk for developing psychosis. They found that the individuals who went on to develop schizophrenia had smaller MMN than the subgroup who did not. This finding suggests that MMN might be useful in predicting the later development of schizophrenia.
