Michel Roland's Library tagged brain → View Popular

12 Mar 09

is the ocean of short writing the web has generated due to our minds are getting dumber and incapable of paying attention to long articles, as Carr worries, or is it because we finally have a new vehicle and market place for loads of short things, whereas in the past it short was unprofitable to produce in such quantity? I doubt the former and suspect the latter is the better explanation.

Carr begins his piece describing how smarter he is while using Google. What if Carr is right? What if we were getting dumber when we are off Google, but we were getting loads smarter while we were on Google? That doesn't seem improbable, and in fact seems pretty likely.

UCLA scientists have found that for computer-savvy middle-aged and older adults, searching the Internet triggers key centers in the brain that control decision-making and complex reasoning. The findings demonstrate that Web search activity may help stimulate and possibly improve brain function.
"A simple, everyday task like searching the Web appears to enhance brain circuitry in older adults, demonstrating that our brains are sensitive and can continue to learn as we grow older," Small said.

Small added that the minimal brain activation found in the less experienced Internet group may be due to participants not quite grasping the strategies needed to successfully engage in an Internet search, which is common while learning a new activity.

"With more time on the Internet, they may demonstrate the same brain activation patterns as the more experienced group," he said.

"The study results are encouraging, that emerging computerized technologies may have physiological effects and potential benefits for middle-aged and older adults," Small told the UCLA news service. "Internet searching engages complicated brain activity, which may help exercise and improve brain function."

13 Feb 09

We receive a lot of our speech information via visual cues, such as lip-reading, and this type of visual speech occurs throughout all cultures. And it is not just information from lips- when someone is speaking to us, we will also note movements of the teeth, tongue and other non-mouth facial features. It's likely that human speech perception has evolved to integrate many senses together. Put in another way, speech is not meant to be just heard, but also to be seen.
Recent studies indicate that this integration occurs very early in the speech process, even before phonemes (the basic units of speech) are established. Rosenblum suggests that physical movement of speech (that is, our mouths and lips moving) create acoustic and visual signals which have a similar form. He argues that as far as the speech brain is concerned, the auditory and visual information are never really separate. This could explain why we integrate speech so readily and in such a way that the audio and visual speech signals become indistinguishable from one another.

13 Nov 07

THE Right Brain vs Left Brain test ... do you see the dancer turning clockwise or anti-clockwise?

If clockwise, then you use more of the right side of the brain and vice versa.

Most of us would see the dancer turning anti-clockwise though you can try to focus and change the direction; see if you can do it.