Music Improves Auditory Processing in Children

These initial study results, published recently in the journal Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, provide evidence of the benefits of music education at a time when many schools around the nation have either eliminated or reduced music and arts programs. The study shows music instruction speeds up the maturation of the auditory pathway in the brain and increases its efficiency.

"Emotional Fever" of "Loser Fish" Demonstrates Consciousness

The stress and depression experienced by confined and farmed fish has prompted the first glimmer of awareness in their farmers that our dinner has feelings too.  We can only hope that humanity's farmers will reach the same conclusion.

Parsing Partisan Psychology

Political discussion among like-minded people polarises political opinion and retroactively alters biases.  Political psychology is so pernicious as to invisibly intensify upon exposure to consensus!

Believers are Dumb; Non-Believers are Evil

In the battle between conflicting paradigms of existence, two modes of experiencing truth are forced into competition by the efficient arrangement of human neural architecture.  Social and analytic thinking require different parts of the brain, a brain that will suppress the neuronal networks not useful for the problem at hand.

Empathy for others predicts spiritual beliefs, while also entailing low scores on critical thinking and mechanical reasoning.  Those more disposed to analytical thought are less likely to be religious, but more likely to express traits in common with psychopathy.  While religiosity correlates with empathic concern, non-religiosity correlates with self-centred impulsivity and coldheartedness.

It could be possible to engage both mental modules in tandem, but the percipients would have to be aware of the differing functions of the brain, and the manner in which cognition and emotion act at odds with one another in the interest of simplicity.

Kindness, charitable behavior influenced by amygdala

"Generally our actor monkeys prefer to reward the other monkey rather than let it go unclaimed," Platt said. Relationship status matters, too. "They are more likely to give to those they're more familiar with," he added, "and also to monkeys subordinate to them. The social relationships shape how prosocial the actor monkeys are."

Your Attitude About Aging May Impact How You Age

“Positive age stereotypes seem protective of not experiencing these biomarkers,” she says—so if we can find a way to promote positive age stereotypes on a societal level, our brains may be better off once we reach old age.

A Learning Advance in Artificial Intelligence Rivals Human Abilities

The improvements are noteworthy because so-called machine-vision systems are becoming commonplace in many aspects of life, including car-safety systems that detect pedestrians and bicyclists, as well as in video game controls, Internet search and factory robots.

We do have a 'grammar' in our head

This is a controversial conclusion from the perspective of current research, the researchers note, because the notion of abstract, hierarchical, grammar-based structure building is rather unpopular.

Physical activity may leave the brain more open to change

"Our study suggests that physical activity, which is also beneficial for the general health of the patient, could be used to increase the efficiency of the treatment in adult patients," Lunghi says. "So, if you have a lazy eye, don't be lazy yourself!"

Seeing Green: The Importance of Nature for Our Health

World Health Organization projections indicate that in fewer than 20 years, 75 percent of the world’s population will live in urban settings, compared with the current distribution of about 54 percent city dwellers. The potential ability of a single factor — time in nature — to counteract a cascade of stress hormones will have enormous implications for us and future generations.

How You're Born May Affect Your Brain Development

Looking at the behavior of baby mice, the researchers found that cesarean-born mice made softer cries when separated from their mothers at 9 days old than mice born vaginally. This could be meaningful for a little mouse's life and survival, Forger said, because other research has found that moms pay more attention to the mouse babies when they're louder.

Brain structure may be root of apathy

As far as we know, this is the first time that anyone has found a biological basis for apathy in healthy people. It doesn’t account for apathy in everyone but by giving us more information about the brain processes underlying normal motivation, it helps us understand better how we might find a treatment for those pathological conditions of extreme apathy.

Metaphysics Is Prior to Science

The difficulty with using raw scientific evidence, untethered from a valid metaphysical framework, is that it gives free reign to ideological bias. In that sense our metaphysical framework -- whether explicit or implicit -- is analogous to train tracks, where the trains are our scientific investigations, and the destination is the truth. Our scientific investigations are restricted to the tracks that the trains run on, and if we are to understand the truth of our science we must understand the tracks that constrain our work. If our metaphysical framework is materialistic, the destination of our inquiries will always be materialistic -- we can do no other.

Real-Life Paranormal Experiences Are Nothing Like the Movies

“If you ring a bell, that frequency will set off another, but it’s not going to set off anything unless you ring it," he said. "A classic example of this would be telling ghost stories. People may be sitting at a campfire having fun, but once they shift into the frequency of telling the story, it becomes scary. The mind shifts, and the veil thins. They have created a frequency that attracts that energy. It’s synergistic.”

Portland State course aims to 'make whiteness strange'

The University of Southern California also gave students the chance to study whiteness this semester. “Critical Studies in Whiteness,” offered by USC’s graduate school, focuses “on how whiteness operates within specific racial regimes to perpetuate inequality.”

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“Thousand are just too many”, resident Dirk Hammer told the meeting. His family has lived for 400 years in the village. He wants as many as a “reasonable solution” would allow to “minimize disruption” but ultimately the feelings expressed were that residents were not consulted.

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"These findings are very striking, and consistent with the idea that brain mechanisms that evolved for relatively basic threat-response functions are re-purposed to also produce ideological reactions."

Neuroscience's New Consciousness Theory Is Spiritual

Pondering questions previously deemed appropriate only for pot smoking college dorm-dwellers is now a task for the best and brightest scientific minds. Most rational thinkers will agree that the idea of a personal god who gets angry when we masturbate and routinely disrupts the laws of physics upon prayer is utterly ridiculous. This theory doesn't give credence to anything of the sort. It simply reveals an underlying harmony in nature, and a sweeping mental presence that isn't confined to biological systems.

How emotions influence learning and memory processes in the brain

"It seems that when the emotion is social and positive, the brain tells the different areas to work according to one communication protocol. When a different emotion is involved, such a negative emotion of fear as in our experiment, the brain tells the same areas to use a different communication protocol. We will need to conduct additional studies, including studies on humans, in the future in order to understand the precise ramifications of each emotion on memory."

Pennsylvania to Become First State to Use “Precrime” Statistics in Criminal Sentencing

"We are discussing whether or not to use statistics on 'potential future crimes' in determining how much time a person will remain involuntarily locked in a cage. Obviously there will be errors, and any error that leads to someone spending more time in prison based on a flawed prediction is ethically indefensible. If you want to use such statistics to only reduce punishment I could be in favor of it, but to use it to justify harsher sentencing seems like a horrible idea."

Poverty's most insidious damage is to a child's brain

"'In developmental science and medicine, it is not often that the cause and solution of a public health problem become so clearly elucidated,' Luby wrote in the editorial. 'It is even less common that feasible and cost-effective solutions to such problems are discovered and within reach.'"

Depression damages parts of the brain, research concludes

"'Your whole sense of self depends on continuously understanding who you are in the world – your state of memory is not about just knowing how to do Sudoku or remembering your password – it’s the whole concept we hold of ourselves,' he said."