The indri is a lemur, a primate with opposable thumbs; a short tail; and round, tufted, teddy-bear-like ears. They share a branch of the evolutionary tree with humans, but our paths diverged some 60 million years ago. Still, one very striking similarity has [...]
Tag: Science / Psychology and Neuroscience
A Gene-Tweaked Jellyfish Offers a Glimpse of Other Minds
We owe much of our understanding of how memory works in the brain to an unassuming sea slug called Aplysia californicus. It’s about a foot long, reddish brown, and has been favored by scientists since the 1960s because its neurons are big enough to jam an electrode into.
That wasn’t [...]
Researchers Want to Restore ‘Good Noise’ in Older Brains
To eavesdrop on a brain, one of the best tools neuroscientists have is the fMRI scan, which helps map blood flow, and therefore the spikes in oxygen that occur whenever a particular brain region is being used. It reveals a noisy world. Blood oxygen levels [...]
Sponge Genes Hint at the Origins of Neurons and Other Cells
In fact, many multifunctional cells in sponges express modules of genes usually associated with specialized cells in more complex animals like vertebrates. For example, sponge neuroid cells not only express some of the presynaptic machinery of neurons, but also express immune genes. [...]
Neuron Bursts Can Mimic a Famous AI Learning Strategy
But for this teaching signal to solve the credit assignment problem without hitting “pause” on sensory processing, their model required another key piece. Naud and Richards’ team proposed that neurons have separate compartments at their top and bottom that process the neural [...]
To Learn More Quickly, Brain Cells Break Their DNA
Faced with a threat, the brain has to act fast, its neurons making new connections to learn what might spell the difference between life and death. But in its response, the brain also raises the stakes: As an unsettling recent discovery shows, to express learning [...]
They Watched a YouTuber With Tourette’s—Then Adopted His Tics
Kirsten Müller-Vahl had a major mystery on her hands. It was June 2019 and Müller-Vahl, a psychiatrist at Hannover Medical School in Germany and head of its Tourette’s outpatient department, was being inundated by patients with tics unlike anything she had seen before.
Not [...]
You’re Not Alone: Monkeys Choke Under Pressure Too
The team designed their cursor game to be challenging for the monkeys but still simple to analyze. Motion-capture cameras tracked the monkeys’ arm motion, which controlled the dot on the screen. The game itself was the same each time. Any differences in speed, position, and accuracy, [...]
Why Humans See Faces in Everyday Objects
Human beings are champions at spotting patterns, especially faces, in inanimate objects—think of the famous “face on Mars” in images taken by the Viking 1 orbiter in 1976, which is essentially a trick of light and shadow. And people are [...]
The Pandemic Changed Sleep Habits. Maybe That’s a Good Thing
A person’s genetic sleep traits combine to create a chronotype. An “early chronotype” is essentially a morning person, eager to wake up with the sun and head to bed early, while a “late chronotype” wants to stay up into the night and wake up later. People’s sleep hours [...]