Yes! Though perhaps not how you might imagine. You can’t put more of your brain to work. Your whole brain is working all the time, even when you think you’re just being lazy. What you can do is make it work more productively.
Posts tagged "brain"
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Is it possible to use more of our brain? →
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New high definition fiber tracking reveals damage caused by traumatic brain injury →
A powerful new imaging technique called High Definition Fiber Tracking (HDFT) will allow doctors to clearly see for the first time neural connections broken by traumatic brain injury (TBI) and other neurological disorders, much like X-rays show a fractured bone, according to researchers from the University of Pittsburgh in a report published online in the Journal of Neurosurgery.
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Conformity linked to the size of a brain region →
Every generation has its James Dean: the rebel who refuses to follow the path beaten by their peers. Now, a new study in ‘Current Biology’ has found a link between the amount of grey matter in one specific brain region and an individual’s likelihood of conforming to social pressures.
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I, Robopsychologist, Part 1: Why Robots Need Psychologists →
“My brain is not like a computer.”
The day those words were spoken to me marked a significant milestone for both me and the 6-year-old who uttered them. The words themselves may not seem that profound (and some may actually disagree), but that simple sentence represented months of therapy, hours upon hours of teaching, all for the hope that someday, a phrase like that would be spoken at precisely the right time. When he said that to me, he was showing me that the light had been turned on, the fire ignited. And he was letting me know that he realized this fact himself. Why was this a big deal?
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Researchers make living model of brain tumor →
Brown University scientists have created the first three-dimensional living tissue model, complete with surrounding blood vessels, to analyze the effectiveness of therapeutics to combat brain tumors. The 3-D model gives medical researchers more and better information than Petri dish tissue cultures.
The researchers created a glioma, or brain tumor, and the network of blood vessels that surrounds it. In a series of experiments, the team showed that iron-oxide nanoparticles ferrying the chemical tumstatin penetrated the blood vessels that sustain the tumor with oxygen and nutrients. The iron-oxide nanoparticles are important, because they are readily taken up by endothelial cells and can be tracked by magnetic resonance imaging.
Previous experiments have shown that tumstatin was effective at blocking endothelial cell growth in gliomas. The tests by the Brown researchers took it to another level by confirming, in a 3-D, living environment, the iron-oxide nanoparticles’ ability to reach blood vessels surrounding a glioma as well as tumstatin’s ability to penetrate endothelial cells.
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To tame chronic pain, erase brain’s memory →
Researchers have discovered that it may be possible to ease chronic pain by erasing memories stored in the brain.
It has long been known that the central nervous system “remembers” painful experiences, that they leave a memory trace of pain. And when there is new sensory input, the pain memory trace in the brain magnifies the feeling so that even a gentle touch can be excruciating.
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Smart Phones Improve Memory →
A few decades ago, TV got a bad rap for turning brains into mush, and now smart phones are getting the same blame. But a new study published in the journal Neuropsychological Rehabilitation has found evidence that, for the latter device anyway, this may not be true. Researchers found that a smart phone training program specifically designed for people with memory loss can result in great improvements of day-to-day mental function.
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Cutting-edge MRI techniques for studying communication within the brain →
Researchers from the University of Wisconsin, Madison have presented innovative magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) techniques that can measure changes in the microstructure of the white matter likely to affect brain function and the ability of different regions of the brain to communicate.
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How to map the 100 billion neurons in the brain →
MIT neuroscientist Sebastian Seung believes mapping of of the human brain’s 100 billion neurons can be done — one cubic millimeter of brain tissue at a time.
Even more than our genome, our connectome shapes who we are, says Seung, who outlines his vision for connectome research in a new book, Connectome. “Clearly genes are very important, but because they don’t change after the moment of conception, they can’t really account for the effects of experience,” he says
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Probing the Brain's Mysteries →
Researchers for the first time are documenting the basic wiring of the brain, the complex relationships among billions of neurons that are responsible for reason, memory and emotion. The work eventually could lead to better understanding of schizophrenia, autism, multiple sclerosis and other disorders.
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Startup Makes 'Wireless Router for the Brain' →
Optogenetics has been hailed as a breakthrough in biomedical science—it promises to use light to precisely control cells in the brain to manipulate behavior, model disease processes, or even someday to deliver treatments.
But so far, optogenetic studies have been hampered by physical constraints. The technology requires expensive, bulky lasers for light sources, and a fiber-optic cable attached to an animal—an encumbrance that makes it difficult to study how manipulating cells affects an animal’s normal behavior.
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Mind Over Motor: Controlling Robots With Your Thoughts →
Over recent months, in José del R. Millán’s computer science lab in Switzerland, a little round robot, similar to a Roomba with a laptop mounted on it (right), bumped its way through an office space filled with furniture and people. Nothing special, except the robot was being controlled from a clinic more than 60 miles away—and not with a joystick or keyboard, but with the brain waves of a paralyzed patient.
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Scientists learn how stem cell implants help heal traumatic brain injury →
For years, researchers seeking new therapies for traumatic brain injury have been tantalized by the results of animal experiments with stem cells. In numerous studies, stem cell implantation has substantially improved brain function in experimental animals with brain trauma. But just how these improvements occur has remained a mystery.
Now, an important part of this puzzle has been pieced together by researchers at the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. In experiments with both laboratory rats and an apparatus that enabled them to simulate the impact of trauma on human neurons, they identified key molecular mechanisms by which implanted human neural stem cells — stem cells that are in the process of developing into neurons but have not yet taken their final form — aid recovery from traumatic axonal injury.
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Should the Government Be Alllowed to Search Our Brains? →
In this brave new world of invasive technology, one of the easiest way to understand the relevance of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution is to understand it through the prism of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
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Magnetic ‘blueprints’ show brain at work →
Neuroscientists are limited to external sensing when studying live brains, unless they undertake invasive techniques. One key method researchers use is magnetoencephalography (MEG), in which sensors measure the tiny magnetic fields outside the head that are generated as our brains think.
