#memory-configurations

#memory-configurations

"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.

Your brain is like a muscle that only gets stronger when challenged with variety. Feed it the same mental diet every day, and it atrophies. The sharp elderly people in her studies had one thing in common—they deliberately sought intellectual discomfort. This doesn't mean forcing yourself through content you hate. It means breaking patterns.

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.

If you're going to prioritize one thing for your brain health, make it this: regular aerobic exercise. Multiple large-scale studies show that aerobic exercise doesn't just keep your heart healthy-it directly impacts your brain structure. One year of aerobic exercise in older adults led to significantly larger hippocampal volumes and better spatial memory. Other trials documented that exercise actually slows age-related gray matter volume loss.

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.

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.

Dementia is linked to changes in the brain. Health professionals used to assume that brain damage and dementia symptoms always went hand in hand. More recent research, however, shows that some people have significant brain damage yet never develop dementia. How can that be? In a previous post, I shared that dementia is defined by the inability to function in everyday life, such as getting lost in familiar places, having difficulty managing finances, forgetting to turn off the stove, or struggling with basic tasks.

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.

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.

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 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.