Michelangelo - Anatomist and Painter

R. Douglas Fields, PhD, is Chief of the Nervous System Development and Plasticity Section at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. He is also Editor-in-Chief of the journal Neuron Glia Biology and author of "The Other Brain," about glial cells in the brain that do not communicate using electricity but that support neurons. In the Scientific American (May 27, 2010) an article by Fields is entitled, "Michelangelo's secret message in the Sistine Chapel: A juxtaposition of God and the human brain." You may enjoy reading about Michelangelo and "his hidden anatomical illustrations" that have been found—painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (notably, sketches of brain anatomy.)

http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=michelangelos-secret-message-in-the-2010-05-26&sc=MND_20100628

Images from "Concealed Neuroanatomy in Michelangelo’s Separation of Light From Darkness in the Sistine Chapel," by Ian Suk and Rafael J. Tamargo in Neurosurgery, Vol. 66, No. 5, pp. 851-861.

Plasticity of Human Brain

Research University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) of commercial brain fitness program from Posit Science Corporation: practising simple visual tasks can improve the accuracy of short-term, or “working” visual memory. Folowing 10 hours of training, participants improved their perceptual abilities significantly (e.g., increased the accuracy of visual working memory by about 10 %) bringing them up to the level of younger adults. psychiatry at UCSF. Findings help to confirm that perceptual improvements with simple discrimination training can transfer to improved working memory in older adults, and that this increase in memory accuracy is linked to changes at the neural level. That is very good news!

http://www.kurzweilai.net/brain-fitness-program-study-reveals-visual-memory-improvement-in-older-adults?utm_source=KurzweilAI+Weekly+Newsletter&utm_campaign=33d0f9f11f-UA-946742-1&utm_medium=email

Your Brain and Neuromarketing

Neuromarketing is a new field of marketing that uses neuroscience, psychology, and other cognitive science techniques to study consumer responses to marketing stimuli. Some of the responses measured include eye tracking, heart rate, electroencephalography (e.g., EEG, functional magnetic resonance imaging – fMRI, galvonic skin responses). Will you purchase more Campbell's Soup because of this? The company hopes so! An artible by Ilian Brat entitled "The Emotional Quotient of Soup Shopping" outlines some of the neuromarketing techniques that the Campbell Soup Company has employed to warm up customer responses to shelf displays. And here I thought my "thoughts" of Campbell's soup were pretty much based on childhood memories! (smile)

http://online.wsj.com/article/NA_WSJ_PUB:SB10001424052748704804204575069562743700340.html

Sleep for "Surge"

Journal of Neuroscience report of rat studies: In the initial stages of sleep, energy levels increase dramatically in brain regions found to be active during waking hours. Adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy currency of cells, was found to surge during non-REM sleep. This surge of cellular energy may replenish brain processes needed to function normally while awake. Sleep appears to be necessary for this energy surge to occur. So, are you making sure your brain receives enough sleep?

http://www.kurzweilai.net/brains-energy-restored-during-sleep-suggests-animal-study

Snowball, Music, and the Brain

Several years ago, Aniruddh D. Patel, a 44-year-old senior fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, wrote “Music, Language, and the Brain.” Oliver Sacks described this book as “a major synthesis that will be indispensable to neuroscientists.” Recently, Patel was in New York City and was interviewed. A condensed and edited version of that interview was published in the NY Times: "A Conversation With Aniruddh D. Patel - Exploring Music’s Hold on the Mind." Patel talked about "Snowball," for example, the sulfur-crested Cockatoo that can keep time to music (previously believed to be an ability found only in humans). Patel also commented about a neurologist in Boston who has stroke victims learn simple phrases by singing them (which has proved more effective than having them repeat spoken phrases, the traditional therapy). When the language part of the brain has been damaged, you can sometimes recruit the part that processes music to take over. Fascinating!

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/science/01conv.html?_r=1&ref=science

The Singing "Sun"

On July 4th I took my Canadian Cousins to the Chabot Science Center up in the Berkeley hills. We were able to view the sun through one of the telescopes and actually saw one of the sun spots and some of the bursts of gasses and whatever else shoots out from the surface. We also "heard" the sun singing and my brain found that intriguing. "The Sun is playing a secret melody, hidden inside itself, that produces a widespread throbbing motion of its surface. The sounds are coursing through the Sun's interior, causing the entire globe, or parts of it, to move in and out, slowly and rhythmically like the regular rise and fall of tides in a bay or of a beating heart." (Kenneth R. Lang) Thanks to Stanford University, you can hear the sun singing. Evidently, the Sun's sound waves are normally at frequencies too low for the human ear to hear. To be able to hear them, the scientists sped up the waves 42,000 times -- and compressed 40 days of vibrations into a few seconds.

http://solar-center.stanford.edu/singing/

Extraversion and the Brain

Colin DeYoung and colleagues at the University of Minnesota completed brain-imaging studies on 116 volunteers. They found that the medial orbitofrontal cortex – a part of the brain involved with considering rewards that is just above and behind the eyes – was significantly larger in study subjects who exhibited a lot of extraversion. The study also was able to correlate larger brain regions for a number of other traits: conscientiousness, which is associated with planning; neuroticism, a tendency to experience negative emotions that is associated with sensitivity to threat and punishment; and agreeableness, which relates to parts of the brain that allow us to understand each other's emotions, intentions, and mental states. Only openness/intellect didn't associate clearly with any of the predicted brain structures.

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2010-06/afps-bsc062210.php