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

Body Memories Wake Me Up At Night

It happened again and boy was it intense.  Yep, the pain in my neck and shoulders was so great, I was crying "uncle", but it would not stop.  It was yet another night of body memories.  It isn't the first time and probably won't be the last.

I don't even recall the hour of the night, but I'm guessing somewhere in the 3am to 4am time frame.  All of the sudden, I was awake and my neck was hurting with excruciating pain.  I got up and went into the bathroom and could feel my shoulder muscles and my neck muscles as tight as could be.

The muscles were so tense that I think a steel rod would not have been as strong.  Any movement just exacerbated the situation.  The pain was excruciatingly tense.  It seemed like no end was in sight.

I tried to do some relaxation things that I know are helpful, but they didn't really work.  I tried to focus and visualize letting go of tension and pain, but it still was there.  Finally I just went back to bed and laid down feeling the intense pain with every movement.  I almost took an aleve but fought against doing that.

After I laid back down, I must have finally drifted off to sleep because I did not wake up until 9:30 in the morning.  My neck was not feeling as bad as it was in the middle of the night, just a few hours earlier.  However after a little movement, I could feel the residual tension and pain that was still there.

I got up and the more my body woke up, the more I felt the pain and tension.  It was one of those moments that you just feel grumpy and growly from the pain. It was a feeling of exhaustion.  It feels draining.

As the day went, the pain and tension was still there.  I continued to do relaxation things to help let go of it.  I continued to try and shift my focus.  Laying in the hammock felt good as I watched the trees sway in the wind.

Writing this, the pain and tension has subsided a lot more or maybe I've just numbed out to it and I don't feel it much at this point.  I have resisted taking an aleve because I hate taking any type of medication.  It just keeps you from dealing with what is at hand.  Yes, sometimes I do take something because the pain gets too much for me to bear.

What this is all about, I don't know.  I just know that it started from a moment of anxiety yesterday when I smelled onions cooking as food was being rewarmed.  There is something behind all of this, but right now its a mystery.  It is just another body memory that wakes me up at night.

After all, it wasn't but a couple of weeks ago when my back did the very same thing.  It was so painful that I could barely move in bed or get up.  The pain grew with such intensity and then disappeared by the time I woke up.

A story to be continued...

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2016 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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Finding Fault In Others

It is so easy to do this and it seems in these days that most of the people on this planet are experts at it.  Finding fault in others seems to be the go-to-device for most occupants of this planet when maybe it should not be so.

If you turn on the news or read Facebook and Twitter, you can see that much of what is posted is finding fault with others.  It isn't that anyone tries to understand what another person is saying.  It isn't that anyone tries to listen to and hear what others are saying.  It is more that we are finding fault in others far too much.

Everyone thinks they have the answers and are smarter than the next person. Everyone thinks they understand the issues of the day more than the next person.  Everyone thinks they would have made a better decision than the one that did even though they were not privy to all the facts that went into the decision.

We fight and scream at one another.  We shout and tell the world how much we know that others don't.  We act as if our opinion matters most because everyone else out there is so stupid and just doesn't understand.

Hey, I've been guilty of this too.  I know we're all human but it doesn't excuse our behavior.  We should be working to right the ship and listen to one another.  We should be working to see the good in one another and open our minds up to their ideas to see how they might help us as a civilization.

If instead of finding fault in others, why not try listening?  Why would we not try showing love to one another?  I don't mean speaking words of love and then finding fault in someone because that isn't love.  You can try all you want to make it into love, but its like trying to make dirt into water.  It just is not so!

Finding fault with one another makes us less than human.  It shows how much we lack personally in our understanding and evolution and awareness, than all others.  When we show others love and stop finding fault in them, it is then that we are beginning to discover what it means to be human.

I'm sure that if we could somehow take an MRI of the brains when we activate finding fault with others, it might give us evidence we are not who we think we are in that moment.  Let us find a way to find the good in one another, rather than the faults.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2016 by Don Shetterly

• Permission required before any part of this blog post is reprinted, reworded or used in any form. 
• You are welcomed to share the LINK to this blog post.  

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