Exercise
fromPsychology Today
7 hours agoRunning Toward a Better Brain
Aerobic fitness and lifestyle choices can slow age-related brain changes and improve brain health across the adult lifespan.
Galen Buckwalter, a 69-year-old research psychologist and quadriplegic, participated in a brain implant study to contribute to science that aids those with paralysis. The six chips in his brain decode movement intention, allowing him to operate a computer and feel sensations in his fingers again.
Body agency is a power returned after an incident took it away from the user's physical form, and some wearable devices and technologies have this exact goal in mind.
Dr. Conor Boland explained that red-light timing can erase small speed advantages, allowing a slower car to catch up again and again. He noted, 'You pass a car, and then a few minutes later, it ends up beside you again.' This phenomenon is partly psychological, as we remember surprising moments when the same car shows up again, but it is also built into how traffic works.
Social foraging strategies illustrate the balance between competition and cooperation, where individuals either produce resources or exploit the efforts of others, navigating ecological and social constraints.
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.
Attention is the brain's filtering mechanism; what passes through that filter is what gets encoded. What gets encoded becomes memory. And memory is the raw material of identity. So in the architecture of your identity, attention is the doorway.
Skilled fiction-writers can guide the imagination, cuing readers to use their senses so that they fantasize more richly than they could alone (Scarry 1999, 3-9). If it serves a storyteller's artistic aims, a writer can prompt readers to imagine a scene from several perspectives at once. Creative writers can accomplish this goal by blending appeals to readers' visual and somatosensory (bodily) senses.
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).
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.
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.
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.