#lateral-cortex

#lateral-cortex

You know, I feel sharper now than I did ten years ago, and all I'm doing is asking questions about stuff.

"I can look at an object in the world around me, but I can also close my eyes and imagine the object," says Varun Wadia, highlighting the dual capability of visual perception and imagination.

To characterize CREs and TFs for neocortical ExNs, we used Arpp21-Gfp or Fezf2-Gfp transgenic mice and enriched GFP-expressing neocortical upper layer (L2-4) intratelencephalic (IT) neurons or deep layer (L5-6) predominantly extratelencephalic (ET) neurons, respectively, from neonatal mice (postnatal day (PD) 0), an age at which neocortical ExN identity and connectivity are established.

People are increasingly concerned about focus, memory, mental stamina, and feeling cognitively flat in everyday life, not just long-term dementia risk,

The fighting hypothesis proposes that there is a so-called frequency-dependent maintenance of left-handedness. The main idea is that over the tens of thousands of years of human evolution, left-handers did have an advantage in fights due to a surprise effect. This gives them an evolutionary survival benefit since they win more fights.

For Plato, psyche meant something like what we'd now call mind -understood as a complex system requiring governance. The psyche had distinct parts: a reasoning part that deliberates, a spirited part that feels emotion and courage, and an appetitive part that desires. Each part has its own function and its own form of excellence. And crucially, these parts need to be governed-integrated under what Plato called constitutional self-rule.

They created an artificial 'mental map', with pleasantness along one axis and bodily reactions along the other, and charted how the brain responded while watching clips from films. The results revealed clear groupings in the way that our brains represent emotion - with guilt, anger and disgust in one corner and happiness, satisfaction and pride in the other.

The human brain is engineered to ignore most of what it sees and hears, according to the neuroscientists I interviewed for the audio original Viral Voices. If that's the case, how are you supposed to make a memorable impression? The empowering news is that if you understand how the brain works, what it discards, and what it pays attention to, you'll be far more persuasive than you've ever imagined. Persuasive people have influence in their personal and professional lives.

Artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning is making a difference in assistive technology to help restore movement for the paralyzed. A new study in the American Institute of Physics journal APL Bioengineering shows how AI has the potential to restore lower-limb functions in those with severe spinal cord injuries (SCIs) by identifying patterns in brain signals captured noninvasively via electroencephalography (EEG).

There are lots of reasons why relationships fall apart; all kinds of incompatibilities can doom romance. Some are trivial, but occasionally there might be something more profound at the root of an estrangement. Recently, the concept of the "frontal lobe breakup" appeared in popular culture. The idea is that the final stage of development in the executive regions of the brain-the frontal lobes-changes someone's perspective about their relationship. The onset of advanced cognitive skills in one partner creates a gap in maturity too big to bridge.

The team, which is being led by Jülich neurophysics professor Markus Diesmann, will leverage the Joint Undertaking Pioneer for Innovative and Transformative Exascale Research (JUPITER) supercomputer for their simulation. JUPITER is currently the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the world according to the TOP500 list, and features thousands of graphical processing units. The team demonstrated last month that a " spiking neural network " could be scaled up and run on JUPITER, effectively matching the cerebral cortex's 20 billion neurons and 100 trillion connections.

Neuroscientists have a name for the brain network that fires up when you're not focused on an external task: the default mode network, or DMN. It's the constellation of regions - the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and angular gyrus among them - that hums to life when you daydream, reflect on yourself, or think about other people's mental states.

I am a worrier, and have been for most of my life. At some point, someone dear and smart teased me that I worry about the wrong things. The things that hit me, she noted, were never the things I worried about. For a while that left me feeling like an incompetent worrier-until my research caught up. I realized that the things I worry about often don't end up hurting me precisely because worrying helps me diffuse them ahead of time.

There was a group of neurons that predicted the wrong answer, yet they kept getting stronger as the model learned. So we went back to the original macaque data, and the same signal was there, hiding in plain sight. It wasn't a quirk of the model - the monkeys' brains were doing it too. Even as their performance improved, both the real and simulated brains maintained a reserve of neurons that continued to predict the incorrect answer.

It might come as a surprise to learn that the brain responds to training in much the same way as our muscles, even though most of us never think about it that way. Clear thinking, focus, creativity, and good judgment are built through challenge, when the brain is asked to stretch beyond routine rather than run on autopilot. That slight mental discomfort is often the sign that the brain is actually being trained, a lot like that good workout burn in your muscles.