British scientists develop ‘brain to brain communication’

 

A system that creates “brain to brain communication” has been developed by British scientists, it has been claimed.

 

By Andrew Hough

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/6331511/British-scientists-develop-brain-to-brain-communication.html

 

The system, developed by a team at the University of Southampton, is said to be the first technology that would allow people to send thoughts, words and images directly to the minds of others, particularly people with a disability.

 

It has also been hailed as the future of the internet, which would provide a new way to communicate without the need for keyboards and telephones.

 

 

 “This could be useful for those people who are locked into their bodies, who can’t speak, can’t even blink,” said the lead scientist Dr Christopher James.

 

The scientists claimed the research proved it could eventually be possible to create a system where people sent messages through their thoughts alone, although they conceded it was many years away.

 

Scientists used “brain-computer interfacing”, a technique that allows computers to analyse brain signals, that enabled them to send messages formed by a person’s brain signals though an internet connection to another person’s brain miles away.

 

According to Dr James, during transmission two people were connected to electrodes that measure activity in specific parts of the brain.

 

The first person generated a series of zeros and ones, where they imagined moving their left arm for zero and right arm for one.

 

After the first person’s computer recognises the binary thoughts, it sends them to the internet and then to the other person’s PC.

 

A lamp is then flashed at two different frequencies for one and zero, the Times reported.

 

The second person’s brain signals are analysed after staring at this lamp and the number sequence is picked up by a computer.

 

“It’s not telepathy,” Dr James told the paper.

 

“There’s no conscious thought forming in one person’s head and another conscious thought appearing in another person’s mind.

 

“The next experiments are to get that second person to be aware of the information that is being sent to them. For that, I need to get my thinking cap on, so to speak.”

 Dr. Ryles Main Site

Surrealism can boost your mind power

Washington, Sept 23 (ANI): Being exposed to surrealism can improve learning by compelling the brain to seek out structure, says a study.

Psychologists at UC Santa Barbara and the University of British Columbia revealed that exposure to the surrealism in, say, Franz Kafka”s “The Country Doctor” or director David Lynch”s “Blue Velvet” enhances the cognitive mechanisms that oversee implicit learning functions.
“The idea is that when you’re exposed to a meaning threat — something that fundamentally does not make sense-your brain is going to respond by looking for some other kind of structure within your environment,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at UCSB and co-author of the article.

“And, it turns out, that structure can be completely unrelated to the meaning threat,” Proulx added.

During the study, Proulx and Steven J. Heine, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia asked that participants to read an abridged and slightly edited version of Kafka”s “The Country Doctor,” which involves a nonsensical — and in some ways disturbing-series of events.

And second group read a different version of the same short story, one that had been rewritten so that the plot and literary elements made sense.

The subjects were then put through an artificial-grammar learning task in which they were exposed to hidden patterns in letter strings.

They were asked to copy the individual letter strings and then to put a mark next to those that followed a similar pattern.

“People who read the nonsensical story checked off more letter strings — clearly they were motivated to find structure,” said Proulx.

“But what”s more important is that they were actually more accurate than those who read the more normal version of the story. They really did learn the pattern better than the other participants did.

“People feel uncomfortable when their expected associations are violated, and that creates an unconscious desire to make sense of their surroundings.

“That feeling of discomfort may come from a surreal story, or from contemplating their own contradictory behaviors, but either way, people want to get rid of it. So they’re motivated to learn new patterns,” the expert added.

The findings appear in journal Psychological Science. (ANI)

Source : http://trak.in/news/dabbling-in-surrealism-can-boost-your-brain-power/7267/

Overcome Negative Thinking

“Positive thinking” isn’t always easy. Negative thoughts can creep into our mind-and jump out our mouths-when we least expect them. The trick isn’t to fight them, but to manage them so they don’t paralyze you.

 

Identify the triggers. When you have a negative thought (“This will never work . . . I’m a total failure”) stop and ask yourself what’s bringing it on. You may be tired or stressed out, or you may be affected by someone else’s perspective. If you can locate the cause, the thought itself won’t have as much power over you.

 

Focus on the now. You don’t have to be a Zen philosopher to realize that worrying about the past or the future isn’t very productive. When you start chastising yourself for past mistakes, or seeing disaster around every corner, stop and take a breath and ask yourself what you can do right now to succeed. Giving yourself something to do will distract you from destructive thoughts.

 

Replace the negative. If you find yourself plagued by a recurrent worry, train yourself to think of something else. Memorize a short poem, phrase, or meditation, and when you catch yourself in a negative thought, say it or think it to yourself. Your conscious mind can concentrate on only one thought at a time, and driving the negativity away will free you up to move forward again.

Amazing Telekinetic Mind Feats From China

This is an amazing (if true) example of incredible telekinetic feats . I have heard of buddhist monks who after many years, or decades, of practice can perform feats such as this…and this may be a case such as that.

Best wishes,

Donald Ryles PhD

The Human Brain Is On The Edge Of Chaos

Source :ScienceDaily

 

 — Cambridge-based researchers provide new evidence that the human brain lives “on the edge of chaos”, at a critical transition point between randomness and order. The study provides experimental data on an idea previously fraught with theoretical speculation.

Self-organized criticality (where systems spontaneously organize themselves to operate at a critical point between order and randomness), can emerge from complex interactions in many different physical systems, including avalanches, forest fires, earthquakes, and heartbeat rhythms.

 

According to this study, conducted by a team from the University of Cambridge, the Medical Research Council Cognition & Brain Sciences Unit, and the GlaxoSmithKline Clinical Unit Cambridge, the dynamics of human brain networks have something important in common with some superficially very different systems in nature. Computational networks showing these characteristics have also been shown to have optimal memory (data storage) and information-processing capacity. In particular, critical systems are able to respond very rapidly and extensively to minor changes in their inputs.

 

“Due to these characteristics, self-organized criticality is intuitively attractive as a model for brain functions such as perception and action, because it would allow us to switch quickly between mental states in order to respond to changing environmental conditions,” says co-author Manfred Kitzbichler.

 

The researchers used state-of-the-art brain imaging techniques to measure dynamic changes in the synchronization of activity between different regions of the functional network in the human brain. Their results suggest that the brain operates in a self-organized critical state. To support this conclusion, they also investigated the synchronization of activity in computational models, and demonstrated that the dynamic profile they had found in the brain was exactly reflected in the models. Collectively, these results amount to strong evidence in favour of the idea that human brain dynamics exist at a critical point on the edge of chaos.

 

According to Kitzbichler, this new evidence is only a starting point. “A natural next question we plan to address in future research will be: How do measures of critical dynamics relate to cognitive performance or neuropsychiatric disorders and their treatments?”

 

 

——————————————————————————–

 

Journal reference:

 

1.Kitzbichler et al. Broadband Criticality of Human Brain Network Synchronization. PLoS Computational Biology, March 20, 2009; 5 (3): e1000314 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1000314

Adapted from materials provided by Public Library of Science, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Meditation increases brain gray matter

Source : http://www.physorg.com/news161355537.html

Push-ups, crunches, gyms, personal trainers — people have many strategies for building bigger muscles and stronger bones. But what can one do to build a bigger brain? Meditate.

 

 

 

 

That’s the finding from a group of researchers at UCLA who used high-resolution magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to scan the brains of people who meditate. In a study published in the journal NeuroImage and currently available online (by subscription), the researchers report that certain regions in the brains of long-term meditators were larger than in a similar control group.

 

Specifically, meditators showed significantly larger volumes of the hippocampus and areas within the orbito-frontal cortex, the thalamus and the inferior temporal gyrus — all regions known for regulating emotions.

 

“We know that people who consistently meditate have a singular ability to cultivate positive emotions, retain emotional stability and engage in mindful behavior,” said Eileen Luders, lead author and a postdoctoral research fellow at the UCLA Laboratory of Neuro Imaging. “The observed differences in brain anatomy might give us a clue why meditators have these exceptional abilities.”

 

Research has confirmed the beneficial aspects of meditation. In addition to having better focus and control over their emotions, many people who meditate regularly have reduced levels of stress and bolstered immune systems. But less is known about the link between meditation and brain structure.

 

In the study, Luders and her colleagues examined 44 people — 22 control subjects and 22 who had practiced various forms of meditation, including Zazen, Samatha and Vipassana, among others. The amount of time they had practiced ranged from five to 46 years, with an average of 24 years.

 

More than half of all the meditators said that deep concentration was an essential part of their practice, and most meditated between 10 and 90 minutes every day.

 

The researchers used a high-resolution, three-dimensional form of MRI and two different approaches to measure differences in brain structure. One approach automatically divides the brain into several regions of interest, allowing researchers to compare the size of certain brain structures. The other segments the brain into different tissue types, allowing researchers to compare the amount of gray matter within specific regions of the brain.

 

 

The researchers found significantly larger cerebral measurements in meditators compared with controls, including larger volumes of the right hippocampus and increased gray matter in the right orbito-frontal cortex, the right thalamus and the left inferior temporal lobe. There were no regions where controls had significantly larger volumes or more gray matter than meditators.

 

Because these areas of the brain are closely linked to emotion, Luders said, “these might be the neuronal underpinnings that give meditators’ the outstanding ability to regulate their emotions and allow for well-adjusted responses to whatever life throws their way.”

 

What’s not known, she said, and will require further study, are what the specific correlates are on a microscopic level — that is, whether it’s an increased number of neurons, the larger size of the neurons or a particular “wiring” pattern meditators may develop that other people don’t.

 

Because this was not a longitudinal study — which would have tracked meditators from the time they began meditating onward — it’s possible that the meditators already had more regional gray matter and volume in specific areas; that may have attracted them to meditation in the first place, Luders said.

 

However, she also noted that numerous previous studies have pointed to the brain’s remarkable plasticity and how environmental enrichment has been shown to change brain structure.

 

Source: University of California – Los Angeles

Doctors confirm woman’s imaginary third arm

Source :  www.swissinfo.ch/eng/front/Doctors_confirm_woman_s_imaginary_third_arm.html?siteSect=105&sid=10522330&rss=true&ty=st&ref=ti_spa

 

The brain of the 64-year-old patient reacts as if she had a third arm

 

The arm appeared to the woman a few days after suffering a stroke, doctors said.

 

But this case of what is known as a supernumerary phantom limb (SPL) is a genuine head-scratcher.

 

The upshot is that the woman can use the apparitional extremity to relieve very real itches on the cheek. It cannot penetrate solid objects.

 

She does not always perceive the arm but “retrieves” it when needed, doctors told the Swiss news agency.

 

It is nevertheless the first case known to doctors of a person being able to feel, see and deliberately move a limb that doesn’t exist. The findings are published in the Annals of Neurology.

 

Pinpointing

Khateb and his colleagues examined the patient’s brain using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a tool that allows doctors to see whether the brain is truly stimulated, and to pinpoint where. In this case, the investigations revealed that the woman actually experienced what she described.

 

Researchers instructed the woman to move her right hand. As expected, the motor cortex and visual processing areas in the left side of her brain became mobilised.

 

The same effects were observed to a lesser extent when the woman simply imagined moving her right hand. Imaginary movements of the woman’s paralysed left hand prompted the same activity in the brain, but on the right side.

 

But when doctors asked her to move her phantom arm, her brain reacted as though the arm really existed and could be moved. In addition, the patient’s visual cortex was also activated, indicating the she actually saw the imaginary limb.

 

And when she was instructed to scratch her cheek, regions of the brain relating to touch were activated.

 

Mystery

Khateb said the exact cause of the imaginary arm remains a mystery. Supernumerary limbs are rare. There are only nine known cases of a patient both feeling and seeing an arm.

 

“Existing evidence from stroke-elicited SPLs convincingly implicates the mismatch between the subject’s well-established sensorimotor representations and a suddenly aberrant pattern of communication between the brain and the paralysed limb,” the authors wrote.

 

They said it could represent a missing link between classical phantom limbs and phenomena such as out-of-body experiences.

 

Phantom limbs are more commonly associated with people who have had an amputation – between 50 and 80 per cent of people who have had body parts removed suffer from it. In most cases it is painful, according to a 1984 article published in a scientific journal called the Clinical Journal of Pain.

 

“Ultimately however these conditions might offer a unique way to understand how the brain constructs a normal experience of bodily awareness and the self,” they concluded.

Yorkshire man wakes up Irish after brain surgery

By Joe Fay , http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/28/irish_yorkshire/

 

A Yorkshire man woke up from brain surgery to find he’d turned from a flat vowelled, thrifty dalesman into a blarney kissing, ‘Danny Boy’ singing, happy-go-lucky Dubliner.

 

The Daily Mail reports that 30 year old Chris Gregory spent three days on life support, after a blood vessel in his brain ruptured. While the staff were relieved to see him come round, they were non-plussed when he opened his mouth and began speaking in a broad Irish accent.

 

He then spent 30 minutes lilting away and bursting into a rendition of ‘Danny Boy’.

 

His wife-to-be walked into the ward, and heard a commotion including “someone singing ‘Danny Boy’ really loud. It sounded like a drunken Irishman, and all the racket seemed to coming from the direction of Chris’s bed.”

 

Mrs Gregory then realised the Ronan Keating-a-like was her future husband who had apparently been reset from tyke to jackeen. On spotting his wife, he apparently declared “It’s da broid.”

 

She added, “It’s not as if Chris has any Irish relatives. He’s no connection with the country and he’s never been there – that’s what makes it all so strange.”

 

There’s no indication whether Gregory was a Boyzone or Westlife fan or if he’d ever seen an episode of Father Ted or Ballykissangel.

 

The frightening possession apparently wore off after half an hour, leaving Gregory with no memory of the incident.

 

It seems that Gregory is just the latest victim of “foreign accent syndrome”, where a smack to the head or other trauma leaves the sufferer speaking in a foreign accent, or even a foreign language.

 

Back in 2007, a Czech speedway racer discovered his inner British toff after another rider ran over his head. Matej Kus, 18, a non-English speaker woke up having lost his memory, but having gained a BBC accent.

 

In 2004 a Bristol woman woke up speaking French and thinking she was living in Paris. She was subsequently diagnosed with Susac’s syndrome. But as she explained to the Daily Mail last year, “It might sound funny to others, but suddenly thinking you are French is terrifying.”

Let me sleep on it: Creative problem solving enhanced by REM sleep

The study by Sara Mednick, PhD, assistant professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego and the VA San Diego Healthcare System, and first author Denise Cai, graduate student in the UC San Diego Department of Psychology, shows that REM directly enhances creative processing more than any other sleep or wake state. Their findings will be published in the June 8th online edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

 

“We found that – for creative problems that you’ve already been working on – the passage of time is enough to find solutions,” said Mednick. “However, for new problems, only REM sleep enhances creativity.”

 

Mednick added that it appears REM sleep helps achieve such solutions by stimulating associative networks, allowing the brain to make new and useful associations between unrelated ideas. Importantly, the study showed that these improvements are not due to selective memory enhancements.

 

A critical issue in sleep and cognition is whether improvements in behavioral performance are the result of sleep-specific enhancement or simply reduction of interference – since experiences while awake have been shown to interfere with memory consolidation. The researchers controlled for such interference effects by comparing sleep periods to quiet rest periods without any verbal input.

 

While evidence for the role of sleep in creative problem-solving has been looked at by prior research, underlying mechanisms such as different stages of sleep had not been explored. Using a creativity task called a Remote Associates Test (RAT), study participants were shown multiple groups of three words (for example: cookie, heart, sixteen) and asked to find a fourth word that can be associated to all three words (sweet, in this instance). Participants were tested in the morning, and again in the afternoon, after either a nap with REM sleep, one without REM or a quiet rest period. The researchers manipulated various conditions of prior exposure to elements of the creative problem, and controlled for memory.

 

“Participants grouped by REM sleep, non-REM sleep and quiet rest were indistinguishable on measures of memory,” said Cai. “Although the quiet rest and non-REM sleep groups received the same prior exposure to the task, they displayed no improvement on the RAT test. Strikingly, however, the REM sleep group improved by almost 40 percent over their morning performances.”

 

The authors hypothesize that the formation of associative networks from previously unassociated information in the brain, leading to creative problem-solving, is facilitated by changes to neurotransmitter systems during REM sleep.

 

Source: University of California – San Diego

Twin Sisters Get the Same Exam Scores: Telepathy or Not?

www.chinaview.cn  2009-06-26 10:55:51       

 

    BEIJING, June 26 — Do twins have telepathy? When twin sisters got the same scores on this year’s national college entrance examination, villagers in Shaoxing, east China’s Zhejiang Province started to wonder if the girls read one another’s minds, according to a story on Zjol.com.

 

    The twin sisters, Zang Jiahuan and Zang Jiale, took the annual college entrance exams at the beginning of this June. When they received the results showing they both scored 644 points, they were shocked.

 

    “We never expected it,” the girls said in unison, telling a reporter who asked if anything like this had ever happened before, “this is the only case.”

 

    The reporter became even more curious when he found the pair repeatedly finished one another’s sentences.

 

Wondering if the twins could have telepathy, the reporter conducted an experiment on them. When asked questions about their lives, the sisters always answered in one voice, which stunned the onlookers and made the reporter conclude that telepathy did exist between the sisters.

 

    However, Xu Yi, a doctor in Zhejiang No. 1 Hospital denied the conjecture. He said it was not unusual for twins to get the same or similar scores on tests because identical twins are born with the same genes, which decide their personality, intelligence and ways of thinking.

 

    Xu added that the twins also have the same family and education background; therefore, they would find the same solutions to solve problems in the exams.

 

    (Source: CRIENGLISH.com)  Editor: Mo Honge