Category: Brain
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A mind anticipating everything… A human mind… God’s mind.
Scientists have shown how the brain anticipates all of the new situations that it may encounter in a lifetime by creating a special kind of neural network that is 'pre-adapted' to face any eventuality. A study shows that a seemingly miraculous pre-adaptation comes from connections between neurons that form recurrent loops where inputs can rebound…
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Brain, Bayesian reasoning, hallucinations, schizophrenia, obstacles…
By weaving together expectations and information gleaned from the senses, the brain creates a story about the outside world. “The brain is a guessing machine, trying at each moment of time to guess what is out there,” says computational neuroscientist Peggy Seriès. Guesses just slightly off — like mistaking a smile for a smirk —…
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Zero. Unknown. And yet, so familiar…
When seeing a number of dots, a weird process takes place in our brain. According to a new research, the parietal lobe registers the lack of any dots as a missing visual stimulus, without quantitative significance and therefore fundamentally different from numbers. But at the next level at which processing takes place, the frontal lobe,…
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Learning abstract concepts. Being humans.
The human brain was initially used for basic survival tasks, such as staying safe and hunting and gathering. Yet, 200,000 years later, the same human brain is able to learn abstract concepts, like momentum, energy and gravity, which have only been formally defined in the last few centuries. New research from Carnegie Mellon University has…
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Reading… Believing in parallel lines…
Neuroscientists at UC Davis have come up with a way to observe brain activity during natural reading. It's the first time researchers have been able to study the brain while reading actual texts, instead of individual words, and it's already helping settle some ideas about just how we read. The team has applied the technology…
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