Brain




A patient undergoing brain surgery at UCLA medical centre in California is filmed playing guitar during his procedure. Brad Carter, 39, had a brain pacemaker implanted to help treat his involuntary shaking. The procedure became a public event, with medical staff posting updates on Twitter during surgery.

Blueprint for the brain

Episode 1: Blueprint for the Brain from Science Bytes on Vimeo.

The brain is composed of billions of cells called neurons. One neuron receives inputs from thousands of other neurons and sends out its signals to thousands more. We believe that if we understood the precise pattern with which neurons connect to each other, i.e. which neuron is connected with which other, we would understand how the brain works and how thoughts come about within the brain’s circuitry.

Blueprint for the Brain – 6-minute film by PBS and the Public Library of Science explores how the three-pound lump of jelly inside our skulls enables us to do everything that makes us human, and how scientists are now beginning to decipher the architecture of the brain and its secret lives.
( Atlantic Maria Popova)

How Trauma Affects a Childs Brain

Trauma affects the brain at any age, but when a child endures trauma, the result is profoundly tragic — it sets in motion a pattern of changes in the brain that can be devastating in adult life.

Ruth Lanius, MD, PhD who is a part of the Trauma Therapy Training Program offered by NICABM. takes a look at the four ways early life trauma can effect people later in life

@LisaKiftTherapy

Inside the Brains of Jurors

diverse jury

Image: iStockphoto

When jurors sentencing convicted criminals are instructed to weigh not only facts but also tricky emotional factors, they rely on parts of the brain associated with sympathy and making moral judgments, according to a new paper by a team of neuroscientists. Using brain-imaging techniques, the researchers, including Caltech’s Colin Camerer, found that the most lenient jurors show heightened levels of activity in the insula, a brain region associated with discomfort and pain and with imagining the pain that others feel.

The findings provide insight into the role that emotion plays in jurors’ decision-making processes, indicating a close relationship between sympathy and mitigation.

In the study, the researchers, led by Makiko Yamada of National Institute of Radiological Sciences in Japan, considered cases where juries were given the option to lessen the sentences for convicted murderers. In such cases with “mitigating circumstances,” jurors are instructed to consider factors, sometimes including emotional elements, that might cause them to have sympathy for the criminal and, therefore, shorten the sentence. An example would be a case in which a man killed his wife to spare her from a more painful death, say, from a terminal illness.

“Finding out if jurors are weighing sympathy reasonably is difficult to do, objectively,” says Colin Camerer, the Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Finance and Economics at Caltech. “Instead of asking the jurors, we asked their brains.” [continue reading…]