May 07
It seems that not everyone who claims to detect your aura is a fraud or a flake. Some of them may have synesthesia. (But a lot of them are probably frauds or flakes. Or hitting on you.) Synesthesia is a brain condition that allows people to taste shapes, hear colours and that sort of thing. It’s …
Mar 29
Using a beam of light, MIT researchers have turned on a memory in a mouse. Researchers chose to test a simple kind of memory — a fear memory. In one experiment, mice were put in a chamber, allowed to explore, and given a foot shock. The next time the mice were put in the same …
Mar 08
ME NO LIKE THIS: A new analysis of the number of neurons, those brain cells that transmit thoughts, in the human brain has come back with a staggeringly lower number than thought — 14 billion brain cells fewer, about the size of the babboon brain. LOLZ!!! BABOON!!!
Feb 08
![SyNAPSE2[1]](http://thegrumpyowl.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/SyNAPSE21-150x150.jpg "SyNAPSE2[1]")
Here’s something that’s pretty old –from April– but I haven’t seen much mention of it around. DARPA has announced that it is working to build electronic neural architectures that can learn, adapt and respond to situations on the battlefield. DARPA’s Systems of Neuromorphic Adaptive Plastic Scalable Electronics (aptly shortened to SyNAPSE) program aims to develop …
Jan 15
Female tears of grief reduce arousal in men. And not just because of the smeared makeup. Apparently, lady tears smell icky. Just a slight whiff turns men off. According to the study’s director, Noam Sobel: “We know that women tend to cry more during menstruation, when it’s not an effective time to conceive.” So ladies, …
Sep 06
pic nicked from here According to a study published in Psychological Science, daydreaming has an amnesiac effect. And the greater the difference between the daydream’s time, place and circumstance from the actual time, place and circumstance of the daydreamer, the greater the forgetfulness. So if you want to forget something, just imagine that you are very far away, doing something very …
Feb 01
Victims of Body Dysmorphic Disorder look in the mirror and see a monster looking back at them. And, when some women hear about BDD, they figure they have it. Why wouldn’t they? After all, they don’t look like the people they spend the most time with. That is, the people on television. Thinking you have …
Nov 18
IBM announced today that they have created BlueMatter — a near real-time simulation of a cat’s cerebral cortex. AP says: “The simulation, which runs 100 times slower than an actual cat’s brain, is more about watching how thoughts are formed in the brain and how the roughly 1 billion neurons and 10 trillion synapses in …
Aug 28
pic nicked from here Ever think about how you just did something and wish you could have done it differently? Well, so do rats. Scientists at MIT have discovered that rats have a mental instant replay. Furthermore, they imagine different actions, their outcomes and then act upon those thoughts. So rats must feel regret. Their …
