Seminar Papers
Matthew Lieberman, a UCLA professor, showed the human brain is preparing to focus on the other people, during resting. The experiment is occurred with three tasks. First task is pairs of 40 pictures, with person’s mental state captions. Second task is identical images with the first task, and it also shows the behavior captions of the person in the picture. The last third task was the images with simple mathematical equations. The result was, the same region of the brain activates when the subject is watching the first task figure, and when the subject is resting. However the region wasn’t activated during second and third task. Also the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex of the participants was activated right before the task, during resting. In this case, the participants judge the figure faster, and it occurs only in the the first task. The last finding in this study was, the subjects who have special features of autism spectrum disorder, there are less activity in dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and they judge slower in first task. Finally, from this study, researcher could find that the brain works during resting for preparing to concentrate on the other people.
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http://medicalxpress.com/news/2015-05-resting-brains-social.html
In spoken language and structure of human speech, speech timing is important elements. To understand speech, brain need to interpret the phonemes, syllables and words. Therefore the brain need to take shortcuts in processing the sounds.
The “speech quilts”, which making a new sound by cutting and reassembling 30-960-millisecond chunks of the recorded sounds, was used in the study. The researchers also used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine to check the brain activation during giving the new sounds to subjects. Before this study, superior temporal sulcus (STS) was known as the region that integrates auditory and other sensory information. However, from the experiment, the researchers found the brain region, the STS, highly activated. It shows that STS is concerning with time structure in speech. For the future study, researchers plan to study whether the activation of STS in familiar speech is similar to unfamiliar speech.
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University of Michigan Medical School and Depression Center and their colleagues studied women whom had depression or bipolar disorder with healthy women. They were tested cognitive control task, which certain letters show up briefly on a screen in random series. The result was the group with depression or bipolar disorder shows poor performance on the test. By brain scanning, the researcher found the different activation level in the right posterior parietal cortex, which help controlling execution function, in each groups; healthy group, depression group, and bipolar disorder group. The depression group shows higher level than the healthy group, and the bipolar disorder group shows lower level than healthy group. From this research, Kelly Rayn, the lead author of the study, said that they showed mood disorders are shared with cognitive dysfunction, and they hope that this study will help other researchers for further study.
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Figure description from the news: Todd Richards demonstrates the fiber-optic pen used in the study while inside the fMRI scanner.
University of Washington researcher studied about whether dyslexia and dysgraphia disabilities are different. They used a fiber-optic pen, which records the writing of participant in real time while taking functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. For the study, there were three groups of participants, 17 children with dyslexia, 14 children with dysgraphia, and 9 children of typical language learners. The task was writing the next alphabet after the showing letter, writing missing letter, resting, and planing a text about astronauts. The result showed the different connections and patterns of white matter and gray matter, between dyslexia group and the dysgraphia group.
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Babies were considered that they don’t feel pain. However in 1987, there was an experiment concerning with the pain of baby, which changed clinical practice. For pain, the experiment compared the outcome of the two groups of baby. One group received a muscle relaxants, and the other group didn’t receive a muscle relaxants. The result was the group, which got muscle relaxants, showed a better outcome. After this study, currently Slater and her colleagues studied of the babies pain by using MRI. They compared pain region of the brain of adults and babies. From MRI scans, they found that the region of pain activation of brain in adults and babies was similar.
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You can see the activation of anterior insula and the anterior cingulate cortex, when the brain experience suffering from physical or social. However, there are no localized center of pain, but it spreads to multiple regions. Some study regards the region of the pain as blanketing effect, and takes it to further research concerned with positive emotion. Based on the evidence of acetaminophen, which wipe out either negative feelings and emotional sensitivity, Way and his colleagues did two experiments. First is showing a set of images for two group; one group took a Tylenol pill, and the other group took a placebo. The participant has to rate the photos. The score was related to negative and positive emotional reaction. The result of this experiment was, the group of acetaminophen shows weaker emotional reaction than the other placebo group.
The researchers thought that the result wasn’t from the overlapping the brain which governing pain, so they managed another experiment. They proceeded the experiment same as previous one, except the response how the figure seemed blue. In this test, there are no effect concerned blue. Therefore, for the final result they found, “acetaminophen reduced neural responses to social rejection in brain regions previously associated with distress caused by social pain and the affective component of physical pain” they said.
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http://www.medicaldaily.com/acetaminophen-tylenol-also-dulls-emotions-better-or-worse-329178
Brett Foster (a postdoctoral research fellow at Stanford University, told FoxNews.com) and colleagues studied about the activating area of the brain, when doing a cognitive task. The brain region they studied, were angular gyrus and the posterior cingulate cortex, which comprise default mode network (which the Stanford researchers call). It is difficult to study the space by using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans. Therefore, the researchers used intracranial electrophysiology to study.
The researchers recruited three patients. The patients have frequent epileptic seizures, and they are required to record their brain activity. Also the location of recording was default mode network. Researchers asked them some questions of personal and non-personal.
The result of the brain activation order was, the vision centers, the angular gyrus and posterior cingulate cortex, the decision centers of the brans, and the motor area. From this result, the authors said that the network they found, could be interesting to investigate some other research.
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Brain-Wide Association Analysis(BWAS) is the method developed by researchers at the University of Warwick. It shows panoramic views of the brain, and it can help researchers to study with 3D model. By using BWAS, we can compare all the connectivity between whole brain voxels. Using BWAS method and fMRI data, the researchers analyzed autistic and non-autistic brain. They checked the part of the voxel in the autistic brain, whether it shows stronger or weaker than the non-autistic brain. For the result, they found some key systems. One is the temporal lobe visual cortex with reduced cortical functional connectivity, and the other one is related to reduced cortical functional connectivity.
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http://www.science20.com/news_articles/autistic_and_nonautistic_brain_differences_isolated-154156
By scanning people’s brain when they make decisions, scientist discovered that stress or emotion involved in in brain can cause thinking pattern change. In calm state, frontal lobes of our brains guide slow, rational thinking; “cold cognition”. On the other hand, people get stress or anger, even love, impulsive “hot cognition” decisions are made by the emotionally-driven limbic system and amygdala, which hijacks information before it’s processed the more logical frontal lobes.
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http://blogs.wsj.com/experts/2015/03/23/the-neuroscience-behind-hot-headed-emails/
There are two theories of consciousness: focal and global. Focal theories argue that there are specific areas of the brain for generating consciousness. However global theories contend that there are large-scale brain changes in activity. To adjudicate between those theories, the research used graph theory analysis.
In this research, researchers recruited 24 members of the university community for a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) experiment. They checked the participant’s respond of the trials and their confidence of the answer. The trials was treated as “aware” and “unaware”.
From the research, ’no one area or network of areas of the brain stood out as particularly more connected during awareness of the target; the whole brain appeared to become functionally more connected following reports of awareness'.
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