Tag: NEUROSCIENCE

Wired's Jonah Lehrer recently spoke to neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene, who explained that our brain uses two processes to interpret the written word: the "ventral route" for fast reads, and the "dorsal stream" for difficult verbiage. Cohort Tim Carmody then weighed in, wondering about Lehrer's analysis and why ventral-oriented e-readers won't be mediums for avant garde texts. What will the ...

There's a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can't cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. What was that media truism about everything that's fringe eventually moving toward the center? Perhaps we're too baked to remember. Which reminds us, there's now a ...

This week, an attorney from Brooklyn will attempt to make U.S. legal history by using a lie-detection brain scan to prove that an important witness is telling the truth. Attorney David Levin is currently representing Cynette Wilson, who claims that her temp agency employer, CoreStaff Services, gave her less desirable assignments after she complained about sexual harassment at her job site. Another ...

Wired reports that scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have created an ultrathin brain implant made from silk that could revolutionize brain-computer interface (BCI) design. BCI implants are used to record paralyzed patients' brain signals, which can be translated into computer or robotic movements. By printing electrodes onto a thin and flexible silk film, doctors could monitor parts of ...

Advertising pundits love to focus on the suggestive power and subliminal symbolism inherent to corporate icons and logos. People tend to overlook, however, the significant influence that instantly recognizable sounds can have on the human subconscious. Elias Arts, a company that focuses on auditory studies, recently partnered with Buyology, Inc. to investigate the addictive power of sound and, ...

There's a load of great tech news happening out there every day, and, unfortunately, we just can't cover it all. Here are a few of the other noteworthy things we saw today on our never-ending journey through the wild, wild Web. In celebration of 'Dante's Inferno,' Wired reimagines other literary classics as 'Grand Theft Auto,' 'Modern Warfare,' and 'Sims'-style games as video games. [From: ...

The subtle complexity of Mona Lisa's sly smirk has captivated generations of casual art enthusiasts, academics, and even scientists. In reality, it is a fine sliver of paint, but in the realm of art, it acts as a monument to the indefinable. But it's time to end the infernal debate: is it a smile or not? According to a study conducted at the Institute of Neuroscience in Alicante, Spain, the ...

Neuroscientists have made significant advances in the field of brain-mapping in recent years, but studying the actions of individual neurons has been almost impossible, particularly for moving subjects. According to Wired, a recent study published in Nature indicates that scientists, who previously could only study the simultaneous actions of millions of neurons, can actually monitor individual ...

'Tetris' has always been crazy addictive. It just may, however, make you smarter, too. A study by the Mind Research Network reveals that playing 'Tetris' on a regular basis can improve critical thinking, planning skills, reasoning, and even language. Adolescent girls who played the game improved brain performance and efficiency, and also developed thicker cortexes. (We're told that's a good ...

Most people view mind reading as nothing more than a cheap parlor trick, but a group of scientists hope to make the notion a reality. According to Wired, some neuroscientists from the University of California at Berkeley tracked the neural activity of test subjects who looked at an image, and then they studied the emerging patterns. Again, testers showed subjects more images, studied the results, ...

If your idea of fun is letting people see what you dream and picture in your head, you might want to sign up for this study. A group of Japanese researchers successfully displayed an image using electrical signals from the brain, a revolutionary feat they hope will let them visualize dreams. The scientists from ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories are the first people to ever visualize ...

Further hope that victims of paralysis or amputation could one day reclaim some form of motion came this week in the form of a robotically-enhanced, tobacco-chewing moth. The Society for Neuroscience's yearly gathering in San Diego saw a presentation on research in which a tobacco hornworm moth's brain was connected to electrodes and amplifiers at the base of a fairly common kit of robotic ...