Neuroscience In The News On May 16

These are articles that I found of interest relating to news about Neuroscience.  In this issue, I have highlighted articles about free will and the brain, identifying your brain print, and Neuroscience and visual stereotyping.

Please check out the article links below and feel free to comment with other information related to these subjects.  I enjoy learning as much as I can about the brain and passing this information on to everyone else that shares these passions.

This is for the week beginning May 16, 2016.

Please come back each week and hopefully I will have some more highlights.  Feel free to share with me ones that you have found and I may highlight those as well.

Feel free to check out the highlighted articles from May 9, 2016

Free Will And The Brain

In a classic paper published almost 20 years ago, the psychologists Dan Wegner and Thalia Wheatley made a revolutionary proposal: The experience of intentionally willing an action, they suggested, is often nothing more than a post hoc causal inference that our thoughts caused some behavior. The feeling itself, however, plays no causal role in producing that behavior. This could sometimes lead us to think we made a choice when we actually didn’t or think we made a different choice than we actually did.

In a study just published in Psychological Science, Paul Bloom and I explore a radical—but non-magical—solution to this puzzle. Perhaps in the very moments that we experience a choice, our minds are rewriting history, fooling us into thinking that this choice—that was actually completed after its consequences were subconsciously perceived—was a choice that we had made all along.

Article Link:

• What Neuroscience Says About Free Will
• Source:  blogs.scientificamerican.com
• Author:  Adam Bear

Identify Your Brain Print

The team, headed by Dr. Sarah Laszlo of the Binghamton University’s Department of Biomedical Engineering, recorded the brain activity of 50 people wearing an electroencephalogram (EEG) headset while they looked at a series of images designed to elicit unique responses from person to person.

The scientists found that participants’ brains reacted differently to each image, enough that a computer system was able to identify each volunteer’s ‘brainprint’ with 100% accuracy.

Article Link:

• Neuroscientists Can Identify You By Your Brainprint With 100% Accuracy
• Source:  www.sci-news.com
• Dr. Sarah Laszlo, Binghamton University

Neuroscience and Visual Stereotyping

The stereotypes we hold can influence our brain's visual system, prompting us to see others' faces in ways that conform to these stereotypes, neuroscientists at New York University have found.

"Our findings provide evidence that the stereotypes we hold can systematically alter the brain's visual representation of a face, distorting what we see to be more in line with our biased expectations," explains Jonathan Freeman, an assistant professor in NYU's Department of Psychology and the senior author of the paper, which appears in the journal Nature Neuroscience.

Article Link:

• Neuroscientists find evidence for visual stereotyping
• Source:  www.ScienceDaily.com
• Ryan Stolier, New York University